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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1459 ***
+
+PRUFROCK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS
+
+By T. S. Eliot
+
+
+
+
+                  To Jean Verdenal 1889-1915
+
+
+Certain of these poems appeared first in “Poetry” and “Others”
+
+
+Contents
+
+     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
+     La Figlia Che Piange
+
+
+
+
+The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
+
+
+  _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._
+
+
+
+ Let us go then, you and I,
+ When the evening is spread out against the sky
+ Like a patient etherized 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,
+ Would it have been worth while,
+ To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
+ To have squeezed the universe into a ball
+ To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
+ To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
+ Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”--
+ If one, settling a pillow by her head,
+   Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
+   That is not it, at all.”
+
+ And would it have been worth it, after all,
+ Would it have been worth while,
+ After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
+ After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the
+     floor--
+ And this, and so much more?--
+ It is impossible to say just what I mean!
+ But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
+ Would it have been worth while
+ If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
+ And turning toward the window, should say:
+   “That is not it at all,
+   That is not what I meant, at all.”
+
+           *         *         *         *
+
+ No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
+ Am an attendant lord, one that will do
+ To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
+ Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
+ Deferential, glad to be of use,
+ Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
+ Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
+ At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
+ Almost, at times, the Fool.
+
+ I grow old ... I grow old ...
+ I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
+
+ Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
+ I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
+ I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
+
+ I do not think that they will sing to me.
+
+ I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
+ Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
+ When the wind blows the water white and black.
+ We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
+ By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
+ Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
+
+
+
+
+Portrait of a Lady
+
+           Thou hast committed--
+           Fornication: but that was in another country,
+           And besides, the wench is dead.
+                                 The Jew Of Malta
+
+
+ I
+
+ Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon
+ You have the scene arrange itself--as it will seem to do--
+ With “I have saved this afternoon for you”;
+ And four wax candles in the darkened room,
+ Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,
+ An atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb
+ Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid.
+ We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole
+ Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger tips.
+ “So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul
+ Should be resurrected only among friends
+ Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom
+ That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.”
+ --And so the conversation slips
+ Among velleities and carefully caught regrets
+ Through attenuated tones of violins
+ Mingled with remote cornets
+ And begins.
+
+ “You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,
+ And how, how rare and strange it is, to find
+ In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,
+ (For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind!
+ How keen you are!)
+ To find a friend who has these qualities,
+ Who has, and gives
+ Those qualities upon which friendship lives.
+ How much it means that I say this to you--
+ Without these friendships--life, what cauchemar!”
+ Among the windings of the violins
+ And the ariettes
+ Of cracked cornets
+ Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins
+ Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,
+ Capricious monotone
+ That is at least one definite “false note.”
+ --Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,
+ Admire the monuments
+ Discuss the late events,
+ Correct our watches by the public clocks.
+ Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks.
+
+
+ II
+
+ Now that lilacs are in bloom
+ She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
+ And twists one in her fingers while she talks.
+ “Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
+ What life is, you who hold it in your hands”;
+ (Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
+ “You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
+ And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
+ And smiles at situations which it cannot see.”
+ I smile, of course,
+ And go on drinking tea.
+ “Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall
+ My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,
+ I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world
+ To be wonderful and youthful, after all.”
+
+ The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune
+ Of a broken violin on an August afternoon:
+ “I am always sure that you understand
+ My feelings, always sure that you feel,
+ Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.
+
+ You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles’ heel.
+ You will go on, and when you have prevailed
+ You can say: at this point many a one has failed.
+
+ But what have I, but what have I, my friend,
+ To give you, what can you receive from me?
+ Only the friendship and the sympathy
+ Of one about to reach her journey’s end.
+
+ I shall sit here, serving tea to friends....”
+
+ I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends
+ For what she has said to me?
+ You will see me any morning in the park
+ Reading the comics and the sporting page.
+ Particularly I remark
+ An English countess goes upon the stage.
+ A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance,
+ Another bank defaulter has confessed.
+ I keep my countenance,
+ I remain self-possessed
+ Except when a street piano, mechanical and tired
+ Reiterates some worn-out common song
+ With the smell of hyacinths across the garden
+ Recalling things that other people have desired.
+ Are these ideas right or wrong?
+
+
+ III
+
+ The October night comes down; returning as before
+ Except for a slight sensation of being ill at ease
+ I mount the stairs and turn the handle of the door
+ And feel as if I had mounted on my hands and knees.
+
+ “And so you are going abroad; and when do you return?
+ But that’s a useless question.
+ You hardly know when you are coming back,
+ You will find so much to learn.”
+ My smile falls heavily among the bric-à-brac.
+
+ “Perhaps you can write to me.”
+ My self-possession flares up for a second;
+ This is as I had reckoned.
+ “I have been wondering frequently of late
+ (But our beginnings never know our ends!)
+ Why we have not developed into friends.”
+ I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark
+ Suddenly, his expression in a glass.
+ My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.
+
+ “For everybody said so, all our friends,
+ They all were sure our feelings would relate
+ So closely! I myself can hardly understand.
+ We must leave it now to fate.
+ You will write, at any rate.
+ Perhaps it is not too late,
+ I shall sit here, serving tea to friends.”
+
+ And I must borrow every changing
+ find expression ... dance, dance
+ Like a dancing bear,
+ Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.
+ Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance--
+
+ Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,
+ Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose;
+ Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand
+ With the smoke coming down above the housetops;
+ Doubtful, for quite a while
+ Not knowing what to feel or if I understand
+ Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon ...
+ Would she not have the advantage, after all?
+ This music is successful with a “dying fall”
+ Now that we talk of dying--
+ And should I have the right to smile?
+
+
+
+
+Preludes
+
+ I
+
+ The winter evening settles down
+ With smell of steaks in passageways.
+ Six o’clock.
+ The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
+ And now a gusty shower wraps
+ The grimy scraps
+ Of withered leaves about your feet
+ And newspapers from vacant lots;
+ The showers beat
+ On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
+ And at the corner of the street
+ A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
+ And then the lighting of the lamps.
+
+
+ II
+
+ The morning comes to consciousness
+ Of faint stale smells of beer
+ From the sawdust-trampled street
+ With all its muddy feet that press
+ To early coffee-stands.
+ With the other masquerades
+ That time resumes,
+ One thinks of all the hands
+ That are raising dingy shades
+ In a thousand furnished rooms.
+
+
+ III
+
+ You tossed a blanket from the bed,
+ You lay upon your back, and waited;
+ You dozed, and watched the night revealing
+ The thousand sordid images
+ Of which your soul was constituted;
+ They flickered against the ceiling.
+ And when all the world came back
+ And the light crept up between the shutters,
+ And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
+ You had such a vision of the street
+ As the street hardly understands;
+ Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
+ You curled the papers from your hair,
+ Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
+ In the palms of both soiled hands.
+
+
+ IV
+
+ His soul stretched tight across the skies
+ That fade behind a city block,
+ Or trampled by insistent feet
+ At four and five and six o’clock
+ And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
+ And evening newspapers, and eyes
+ Assured of certain certainties,
+ The conscience of a blackened street
+ Impatient to assume the world.
+ I am moved by fancies that are curled
+ Around these images, and cling:
+ The notion of some infinitely gentle
+ Infinitely suffering thing.
+ Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
+ The worlds revolve like ancient women
+ Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
+
+
+
+
+Rhapsody on a Windy Night
+
+ Twelve o’clock.
+ Along the reaches of the street
+ Held in a lunar synthesis,
+ Whispering lunar incantations
+ Dissolve the floors of the memory
+ And all its clear relations,
+ Its divisions and precisions,
+ Every street lamp that I pass
+ Beats like a fatalistic drum,
+ And through the spaces of the dark
+ Midnight shakes the memory
+ As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
+
+ Half-past one,
+ The street lamp sputtered,
+ The street lamp muttered,
+ The street lamp said,
+ “Regard that woman
+ Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
+ Which opens on her like a grin.
+ You see the border of her dress
+ Is torn and stained with sand,
+ And you see the corner of her eye
+ Twists like a crooked pin.”
+
+ The memory throws up high and dry
+ A crowd of twisted things;
+ A twisted branch upon the beach
+ Eaten smooth, and polished
+ As if the world gave up
+ The secret of its skeleton,
+ Stiff and white.
+ A broken spring in a factory yard,
+ Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
+ Hard and curled and ready to snap.
+
+ Half-past two,
+ The street lamp said,
+ “Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
+ Slips out its tongue
+ And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”
+ So the hand of a child, automatic
+ Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
+ I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.
+ I have seen eyes in the street
+ Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
+ And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
+ An old crab with barnacles on his back,
+ Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
+
+ Half-past three,
+ The lamp sputtered,
+ The lamp muttered in the dark.
+
+ The lamp hummed:
+ “Regard the moon,
+ La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
+ She winks a feeble eye,
+ She smiles into corners.
+ She smoothes the hair of the grass.
+ The moon has lost her memory.
+ A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
+ Her hand twists a paper rose,
+ That smells of dust and old Cologne,
+ She is alone
+ With all the old nocturnal smells
+ That cross and cross across her brain.
+ The reminiscence comes
+ Of sunless dry geraniums
+ And dust in crevices,
+ Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
+ And female smells in shuttered rooms,
+ And cigarettes in corridors
+ And cocktail smells in bars.”
+
+ The lamp said,
+ “Four o’clock,
+ Here is the number on the door.
+ Memory!
+ You have the key,
+ The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
+ Mount.
+ The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall
+ Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”
+
+ The last twist of the knife.
+
+
+
+
+Morning at the Window
+
+ They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
+ And along the trampled edges of the street
+ I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
+ Sprouting despondently at area gates.
+
+ The brown waves of fog toss up to me
+ Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
+ And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
+ An aimless smile that hovers in the air
+ And vanishes along the level of the roofs.
+
+
+
+
+The Boston Evening Transcript
+
+ The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript
+ Sway in the blind like a field of ripe corn.
+ When evening quickens faintly in the street,
+ Wakening the appetites of life in some
+ And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,
+ I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
+ Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld
+ If the street were time and he at the end of the street,
+ And I say, “Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript.”
+
+
+
+
+Aunt Helen
+
+ Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt,
+ And lived in a small house near a fashionable square
+ Cared for by servants to the number of four.
+ Now when she died there was silence in heaven
+ And silence at her end of the street.
+ The shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped his feet--
+ He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred before.
+ The dogs were handsomely provided for,
+ But shortly afterwards the parrot died too.
+ The Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece,
+ And the footman sat upon the dining-table
+ Holding the second housemaid on his knees--
+ Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.
+
+
+
+
+Cousin Nancy
+
+ Miss Nancy Ellicot
+ Strode across the hills and broke them
+ Rode across the hills and broke them--
+ The barren New England hills
+ Riding to hounds
+ Over the cow-pasture.
+
+ Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
+ And danced all the modern dances;
+ And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
+ But they knew that it was modern.
+
+ Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
+ Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
+ The army of unalterable law.
+
+
+
+
+Mr. Apollinax
+
+ When Mr. Apollinax visited the United States
+ His laughter tinkled among the teacups.
+ I thought of Fragilion, that shy figure among the birch-trees,
+ And of Priapus in the shrubbery
+ Gaping at the lady in the swing.
+ In the palace of Mrs. Phlaccus, at Professor Channing-Cheetah’s
+ He laughed like an irresponsible foetus.
+ His laughter was submarine and profound
+ Like the old man of the seats
+ Hidden under coral islands
+ Where worried bodies of drowned men drift down in the green silence,
+ Dropping from fingers of surf.
+ I looked for the head of Mr. Apollinax rolling under a chair,
+ Or grinning over a screen
+ With seaweed in its hair.
+ I heard the beat of centaurs’ hoofs over the hard turf
+ As his dry and passionate talk devoured the afternoon.
+ “He is a charming man”--“But after all what did he mean?”--
+ “He has pointed ears ... he must be unbalanced,”--
+ “There was something he said that I might have challenged.”
+ Of dowager Mrs. Phlaccus, and Professor and Mrs. Cheetah
+ I remember a slice of lemon and a bitten macaroon.
+
+
+
+
+Hysteria
+
+ As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and
+ being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a
+ talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at
+ each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her
+ throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter
+ with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked
+ cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: “If the lady and
+ gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and
+ gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden ...” I decided that
+ if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments
+ of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention
+ with careful subtlety to this end.
+
+
+
+
+Conversation Galante
+
+ I observe: “Our sentimental friend the moon
+ Or possibly (fantastic, I confess)
+ It may be Prester John’s balloon
+ Or an old battered lantern hung aloft
+ To light poor travellers to their distress.”
+   She then: “How you digress!”
+
+ And I then: “Some one frames upon the keys
+ That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain
+ The night and moonshine; music which we seize
+ To body forth our own vacuity.”
+   She then: “Does this refer to me?”
+   “Oh no, it is I who am inane.”
+
+ “You, madam, are the eternal humorist
+ The eternal enemy of the absolute,
+ Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist
+ With your air indifferent and imperious
+ At a stroke our mad poetics to confute--”
+   And--“Are we then so serious?”
+
+
+
+
+La Figlia Che Piange
+
+ Stand on the highest pavement of the stair--
+ Lean on a garden urn--
+ Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair--
+ Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise--
+ Fling them to the ground and turn
+ With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
+ But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.
+
+ So I would have had him leave,
+ So I would have had her stand and grieve,
+ So he would have left
+ As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised
+ As the mind deserts the body it has used.
+ I should find
+ Some way incomparably light and deft,
+ Some way we both should understand,
+ Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.
+
+ She turned away, but with the autumn weather
+ Compelled my imagination many days,
+ Many days and many hours:
+ Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
+ And I wonder how they should have been together!
+ I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
+ Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
+ The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1459 ***