......... if all time is eternally present,
All time is unredeemable........

        ........ be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion.........
 

Time present and time past 
Are both perhaps present in time future.
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of specualtion.
What might have been and what has been 
Point to one end, which is always present.

Life, like a  dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of Eternity
Until Death tramples it to fragments...
 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
 

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body, 
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.

                 ... Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London.
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning,
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy 
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony 
Of death and birth,
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
 
 

                            Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon...

Dawn points, and another day 
Prepares for heat and silence.

                              reminder
Of what men choose to forget,
The river is within us, the sea is all about us,
.... time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future....
There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours....
 

                            I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations...
 

To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pasttimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless 
With time, is an occupation for the saint -
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended 
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. Therse are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessd, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual.
 
 

And what the dead had no speech for, when living
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

     History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration.
 

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know that place for the first time.
 

In attaining such unity, and indeed in attaining a living style, whether in prose or in verse, the practice of conversation is invaluable. Indeed, I believe that to write well it is necessary to converse a great deal. I say "converse" instead of "talk"; because I believe that there are two types of good writers: those who talk a great deal to others, and those, perhaps less fortunate, who talk a great deal to themselves. It is two thousand and two hundred years since, that the theory was propounded that thought is conversation with oneself; all literary creation certainly springs from the habit of talking to oneself or from the habit of talking to others. Most people are unable to do either, and that is why they lead such active lives. But anyone who would write must let himslf go, in one way or the other, for there are only four ways of thinking: to talk to others, or to one other, or to talk to oneself, or to talk to God.

               Aesthetic sensibility must be extended into spiritual perception, and spiritual perception must be extened into aesthetic sensibility and disciplined taste before we are qualified to pass judgment upon decadence or diabolism or nihilism in art. To judge a work of art by artistic or by religious standards, to judge a religion by religious or artistic standards should come in the end to the same thing: though it is an end at  which no individual can arrive.
 
 

Oh yes, she will go far. And we know where she is going.
But what do we know of the terrors of the journey?
You and I don't know the process by which the human is
Transhumanised: what do we know 
Of the kind of suffering they must undergo
On the way of illumination?
 

Learn to avoid excessive expectation,
Become tolerant of themselves and others,
Giving and taking in the usual actions
What there is to give and take. They do not repine
And are contented with the morning that separates
And with the evening that brings together
For casual talk before the fire
Two people who know that they do not understand each other,
Breeding children whom they do not understand
And who will never understand them.
 

Poems are made by fools like me
But only god can make a tree?
 
 

The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
                               ...........the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of lining among the breakage....
                                 ......... the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers, 
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless...........
Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind's tail, where the fog cowers?

We cannot think of a time that is oceanless....
Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless....
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless...
 
 

Once again, Eliot has employed Whitman's material and manner in order to reject his philosophy. For Whitman, time stretches away in one infinite linear direction, towards a positive and perfect future, in which the possession of something actual. something better than the present, awaits the growing spirit of man. For Eliot, the sense of a direction is illusory; time is an eternal present which can never yield more than is now known, in which the only kind of possession conceivable is one alike in kind to dispossession from the demands of the self...........