The Dover Anthology of American Literature Volume II (84 page)

                
Press lips to flesh

                
That shudders not nor breaks?

                
Is love's gift best?—

                
Shall I turn and slake

                
All the wild longing?

                
Oh, I am eager for you!

                
As the Pleiads shake

                
White light in whiter water,

                
So shall I take you?

                
My mind is quite divided;

                
My mind hesitates,

                
So perfect matched

                
I know not what to do.

                
Each strives with each:

                
As two white wrestlers,

                
Standing for a match,

                
Ready to turn and clutch,

                
Yet never shake

                
Muscle or nerve or tendon;

                
So
my mind waits

                
To grapple with my mind—

                
Yet I am quiet,

                
I would seem at rest.

                
I know not what to do.

                
Strain upon strain,

                
Sound surging upon sound,

                
Makes my brain blind;

                
As a wave line may wait to fall,

                
Yet waiting for its falling

                
Still the wind may take,

                
From off its crest,

                
White flake on flake of foam,

                
That rises

                
Seeming to dart and pulse

                
And rend the light,

                
So my mind hesitates

                
Above the passion

                
Quivering yet to break,

                
So my mind hesitates above my mind

                
Listening to song's delight.

                
I know not what to do.

                
Will the sound break,

                
Rending the night

                
With rift on rift of rose

                
And scattered light?

                
Will the sound break at last

                
As the wave hesitant,

                
Or will the whole night pass

                
And I lie listening awake?

S
OURCE:
Poetry
(October 1921).

Song
(1921)

                        
You are as gold

                        
As the half-ripe grain

                        
That merges to gold again,

                        
As
white as the white rain

                        
That beats through

                        
The half-opened flowers

                        
Of the great flower tufts

                        
Thick on the black limbs

                        
Of an Illyrian apple bough.

                        
Can honey distil such fragrance

                        
As your bright hair?—

                        
For your face is as fair as rain,

                        
Yet as rain that lies clear

                        
On white honey-comb

                        
Lends radiance to the white wax,

                        
So your hair on your brow

                        
Casts light for a shadow.

S
OURCE:
Poetry
(October 1921).

At
Baia
(1921)

                
I should have thought

                
In a dream you would have brought

                
Some lovely perilous thing:

                
Orchids piled in a great sheath,

                
As who would say, in a dream,

                
“I send you this,

                
Who left the blue veins

                
Of your throat unkissed.”

                
Why was it that your hands,

                
That never took mine—

                
Your hands that I could see

                
Drift over the orchid heads

                
So carefully;

                
Your hands, so fragile, sure to lift

                
So gently, the fragile flower stuff—

                
Ah, ah, how was it

                
You never sent, in a dream,

                
The very form, the very scent,

                
Not heavy, not sensuous,

                
But
perilous—perilous!—

                
Of orchids, piled in a great sheath,

                
And folded underneath on a bright scroll,

                
Some word:

                
Flower sent to flower;

                
For white hands the lesser white,

                
Less lovely, of flower leaf.

                
Or,

                
Lover to lover—no kiss,

                
No touch, but forever and ever this!

S
OURCE:
Poetry
(October 1921).

T.
S. ELIOT

The poet Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) was born in St. Louis and graduated from Harvard. A dozen years after he began working in London, first as a bank clerk, then, more fittingly, as an editor, he became a British citizen. His friend and mentor (for a time), Ezra Pound, helped him edit and shape the most famous American poem of the twentieth century, “The Waste Land.”

The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
(1915)

    
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.

Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo

Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,

Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
¹

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of
restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

    
In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

    
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

    
And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

    
In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

    
And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My
morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

    
For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

    
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

And how should I presume?

    
And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

And should I then presume?

And how should I begin?

* * * * *

    
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

    
I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

*
* * * *

    
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet—and here's no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

    
And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,