Select Poems

T. S. Eliot

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781504050173
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

An essential collection of classic poems by the father of modernist poetry. In the masterly cadence of T. S. Eliot's verse, the twentieth century found its definitive poetic voice, an incredible "image of its accelerated grimace, " in the words of Eliot's friend and mentor Ezra Pound. This twenty-four-poem volume is a rich collection of Eliot's greatest works—including the classic "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"—all of which unveil the desires, grievances, failures, and heart of modern humanity. This collection includes "Gerontion, " "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar, " "Sweeney Erect, " "A Cooking Egg, " "Le Directeur, " "Mélange Adultère de Tout, " "Lune de Miel, " "The Hippopotamus, " "Dans le Restaurant, " "Whispers of Immortality, " "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service, " "Sweeney Among the Nightingales, " "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, " "Portrait of a Lady, " "Preludes, " "Rhapsody on a Windy Night, " "Morning at the Window, " "The Boston Evening Transcript, " "Aunt Helen, " "Cousin Nancy, " "Mr. Apollinax, " "Hysteria, " "Conversation Galante, " and "La Figlia Che Piange. " This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

Select Poems

T. S. Eliot

Gerontion

Thou hast nor youth nor age

But as it were an after dinner sleep

Dreaming of both.

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,

Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

I was neither at the hot gates

Nor fought in the warm rain

Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,

Bitten by flies, fought.

My house is a decayed house,

And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,

Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.

The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;

Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.

The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,

Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.

I an old man,

A dull head among windy spaces.

Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’

The word within a word, unable to speak a word,

Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year

Came Christ the tiger

In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering Judas,

To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk

Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero

With caressing hands, at Limoges

Who walked all night in the next room;

By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;

By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room

Shifting the candles; Fraulein von Kulp

Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door.

Vacant shuttles

Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,

An old man in a draughty house

Under a windy knob.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

Guides us by vanities. Think now

She gives when our attention is distracted

And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions

That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late

What’s not believed in, or if still believed,

In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon

Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with

Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think

Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices

Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues

Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

...

Table of contents

• Select Poems