East Coker Lyrics

Song	East Coker
Artist	Robert Speaight
Album	The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock ; T.S.Eliot Favourites
Download	Image LRC TXT

[00:00.000]	作曲 : Eliot
[00:02.375]	East Coker
[00:04.983]	In my beginning is my end.
[00:08.237]	In succession，houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
[00:12.425]	Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
[00:16.692]	Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
[00:20.047]	Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
[00:24.405]	Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
[00:28.640]	Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
[00:32.779]	Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
[00:36.080]	Houses live and die: there is a time for building
[00:41.094]	And a time for living and for generation
[00:43.562]	And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
[00:47.187]	And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
[00:50.952]	And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
[00:56.732]	In my beginning is my end.
[01:00.581]	Now the light falls
[01:02.141]	Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
[01:04.936]	Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
[01:08.157]	Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
[01:11.350]	And the deep lane insists on the direction
[01:14.156]	Into the village, in the electric heat
[01:17.041]	Hypnotised.
[01:18.928]	In a warm haze the sultry light
[01:21.399]	Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
[01:25.194]	The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
[01:28.400]	Wait for the early owl.
[01:32.612]	In that open field
[01:34.778]	If you do not come too close,
[01:36.429]	If you do not come too close,
[01:38.199]	On a summer midnight,
[01:39.859]	you can hear the music of the weak pipe and the little drum
[01:43.111]	And see them dancing around the bonfire
[01:45.339]	The association of man and woman
[01:48.361]	In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
[01:51.554]	A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
[01:54.229]	Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
[01:57.494]	Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
[02:00.072]	Whiche betokeneth concorde.
[02:02.054]	Round and round the fire
[02:04.607]	Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
[02:07.231]	Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
[02:10.084]	Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
[02:13.241]	Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
[02:17.346]	Mirth of those long since under earth
[02:20.209]	Nourishing the corn.
[02:22.132]	Keeping time,
[02:24.116]	Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
[02:26.241]	As in their living in the living seasons
[02:28.847]	The time of the seasons and the constellations
[02:32.040]	The time of milking and the time of harvest
[02:34.744]	The time of the coupling of man and woman
[02:37.453]	And that of beasts.
[02:39.963]	Feet rising and falling.
[02:42.521]	Eating and drinking.
[02:43.980]	Dung and death.
[02:48.307]	Dawn points, and another day
[02:51.811]	Prepares for heat and silence.
[02:54.573]	Out at sea the dawn wind
[02:57.592]	Wrinkles and slides.
[03:00.409]	I am here,or there, or elsewhere.
[03:04.200]	In my beginning.
[03:06.812]	What is the late November doing with the disturbance of the spring
[03:15.802]	And creatures of the summer heat,
[03:17.600]	And snowdrops writhing under feet
[03:19.908]	And hollyhocks that aim too high
[03:21.803]	Red into grey and tumble down
[03:24.134]	Late roses filled with early snow?
[03:27.691]	Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
[03:30.111]	Simulates triumphal cars
[03:32.253]	Deployed in constellated wars
[03:34.401]	Scorpion fights against the Sun
[03:36.899]	Until the Sun and Moon go down
[03:38.589]	Comets weep and Leonids fly
[03:41.030]	Hunt the heavens and the plains
[03:43.136]	Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
[03:45.434]	The world to that destructive fire
[03:47.728]	Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.
[03:51.848]	That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
[03:55.118]	A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
[03:59.668]	Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
[04:01.937]	With words and meanings.
[04:03.745]	The poetry does not matter.
[04:05.510]	It was not to start again what one had expected.
[04:08.735]	What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
[04:12.386]	Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
[04:16.060]	And the wisdom of age?
[04:17.730]	Had they deceived us
[04:19.849]	Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
[04:22.851]	Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
[04:26.352]	The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
[04:29.715]	The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
[04:32.871]	Useless in the darkness into which they peered
[04:35.246]	Or from which they turned their eyes.
[04:38.371]	There is, it seems to us,
[04:40.542]	At best, only a limited value
[04:42.467]	In the knowledge derived from experience.
[04:44.356]	The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
[04:48.240]	For the pattern is new in every moment
[04:51.040]	And every moment is a new and shocking valuation of all we have been.
[04:55.948]	We are only undeceived
[04:57.908]	Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
[05:01.400]	In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
[05:04.348]	But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
[05:07.232]	On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
[05:11.327]	And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
[05:13.820]	Risking enchantment.
[05:15.582]	Do not let me hear
[05:17.949]	Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
[05:21.325]	Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
[05:26.416]	Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
[05:31.070]	The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
[05:34.257]	Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
[05:38.883]	The houses are all gone under the sea.
[05:43.558]	The dancers are all gone under the hill.
[05:47.182]	O dark dark dark.
[05:54.390]	They all go into the dark,
[05:56.313]	The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
[06:00.268]	The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
[06:03.930]	The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
[06:07.236]	Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
[06:10.165]	Industrial lords and petty contractors,
[06:12.996]	All go into the dark,
[06:15.413]	And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
[06:19.820]	And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
[06:23.134]	And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
[06:27.508]	And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
[06:31.554]	Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
[06:35.198]	I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
[06:41.649]	Which shall be the darkness of God.
[06:43.727]	As, in a theatre,
[06:45.647]	The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
[06:47.730]	With a hollow rumble of wings,
[06:49.603]	With a movement of darkness on darkness,
[06:52.752]	And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
[06:57.213]	And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
[07:00.765]	Or as, when an underground train,
[07:03.756]	In the tube,
[07:04.945]	Stops too long between stations
[07:07.447]	And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
[07:11.429]	And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
[07:15.662]	Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
[07:19.350]	Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
[07:25.417]	I said to my soul, be still,
[07:29.026]	And wait without hope
[07:31.634]	For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
[07:34.444]	Wait without love,
[07:36.727]	For love would be love of the wrong thing;
[07:39.496]	There is yet faith
[07:41.505]	But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
[07:46.388]	Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
[07:50.677]	So the darkness shall be the light,
[07:53.208]	And the stillness the dancing.
[07:56.002]	Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
[08:00.207]	The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
[08:03.665]	The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
[08:06.945]	Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
[08:11.857]	Of death and birth.
[08:14.572]	You say I am repeating
[08:17.105]	Something I have said before.
[08:18.604]	I shall say it again.
[08:20.352]	Shall I say it again?
[08:23.184]	In order to arrive there,
[08:25.905]	To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
[08:29.592]	You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
[08:33.555]	In order to arrive at what you do not know
[08:37.047]	You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
[08:40.936]	In order to possess what you do not possess
[08:44.196]	You must go by the way of dispossession.
[08:47.200]	In order to arrive at what you are not
[08:49.618]	You must go through the way in which you are not.
[08:53.510]	And what you do not know is the only thing you know
[08:57.422]	And what you own is what you do not own
[09:00.868]	And where you are is where you are not.
[09:04.602]	The wounded surgeon plies the steel
[09:12.388]	That questions the distempered part;
[09:14.447]	Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
[09:17.133]	The sharp compassion of the healer's art
[09:19.449]	Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
[09:22.259]	Our only health is the disease
[09:25.070]	If we obey the dying nurse
[09:27.141]	Whose constant care is not to please
[09:29.969]	But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
[09:33.325]	And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
[09:37.105]	The whole earth is our hospital
[09:40.634]	Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
[09:43.032]	Wherein, if we do well, we shall
[09:45.919]	Die of the absolute paternal care
[09:48.541]	That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
[09:52.358]	The chill ascends from feet to knees,
[09:55.852]	The fever sings in mental wires.
[09:58.825]	If to be warmed, then I must freeze
[10:02.011]	And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
[10:04.563]	Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.
[10:09.920]	The dripping blood our only drink,
[10:13.310]	The bloody flesh our only food:
[10:16.473]	In spite of which we like to think
[10:19.059]	That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
[10:21.901]	Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
[10:28.478]	So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
[10:38.762]	Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
[10:44.008]	Trying to use words,
[10:45.638]	And every attempt is a wholly new start,
[10:48.386]	And a different kind of failure
[10:51.153]	Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
[10:53.669]	For the thing one no longer has to say,
[10:56.094]	Or the way in which one is no longer disposed to say it.
[10:59.697]	And so each venture is a new beginning,
[11:02.979]	A raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating
[11:07.572]	In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
[11:10.739]	Undisciplined squads of emotion.
[11:13.560]	And what there is to conquer
[11:15.761]	By strength and submission, has already been discovered
[11:19.201]	Once or twice, or several times,
[11:21.541]	By men whom one cannot hope to emulate
[11:24.683]	But there is no competition
[11:26.283]	There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
[11:30.320]	And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
[11:35.886]	That seem unpropitious.
[11:37.862]	But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
[11:41.165]	For us, there is only the trying.
[11:44.210]	The rest is not our business.
[11:47.653]	Home is where one starts from.
[11:50.917]	As we grow older
[11:52.997]	The world becomes stranger,
[11:54.778]	The pattern more complicated of dead and living.
[11:57.512]	Not the intense moment isolated,
[12:00.211]	With no before and after,
[12:01.945]	But a lifetime burning in every moment
[12:04.936]	And not the lifetime of one man only
[12:07.281]	But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
[12:10.323]	There is a time for the evening under starlight,
[12:14.213]	A time for the evening under lamplight
[12:16.686]	The evening with the photograph album
[12:18.950]	Love is most nearly itself
[12:22.038]	When here and now cease to matter.
[12:24.227]	Old men ought to be explorers
[12:27.041]	Here or there does not matter
[12:30.465]	We must be still and still moving
[12:33.511]	Into another intensity
[12:35.091]	For a further union, a deeper communion
[12:38.869]	Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
[12:42.103]	The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
[12:47.614]	Of the petrel and the porpoise.
[12:50.015]	In my end is my beginning.

[00:00.000]	zuo qu : Eliot
[00:02.375]	East Coker
[00:04.983]	In my beginning is my end.
[00:08.237]	In succession, houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
[00:12.425]	Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
[00:16.692]	Is an open field, or a factory, or a bypass.
[00:20.047]	Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
[00:24.405]	Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
[00:28.640]	Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
[00:32.779]	Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
[00:36.080]	Houses live and die: there is a time for building
[00:41.094]	And a time for living and for generation
[00:43.562]	And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
[00:47.187]	And to shake the wainscot where the fieldmouse trots
[00:50.952]	And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
[00:56.732]	In my beginning is my end.
[01:00.581]	Now the light falls
[01:02.141]	Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
[01:04.936]	Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
[01:08.157]	Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
[01:11.350]	And the deep lane insists on the direction
[01:14.156]	Into the village, in the electric heat
[01:17.041]	Hypnotised.
[01:18.928]	In a warm haze the sultry light
[01:21.399]	Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
[01:25.194]	The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
[01:28.400]	Wait for the early owl.
[01:32.612]	In that open field
[01:34.778]	If you do not come too close,
[01:36.429]	If you do not come too close,
[01:38.199]	On a summer midnight,
[01:39.859]	you can hear the music of the weak pipe and the little drum
[01:43.111]	And see them dancing around the bonfire
[01:45.339]	The association of man and woman
[01:48.361]	In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie
[01:51.554]	A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
[01:54.229]	Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
[01:57.494]	Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
[02:00.072]	Whiche betokeneth concorde.
[02:02.054]	Round and round the fire
[02:04.607]	Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
[02:07.231]	Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
[02:10.084]	Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
[02:13.241]	Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
[02:17.346]	Mirth of those long since under earth
[02:20.209]	Nourishing the corn.
[02:22.132]	Keeping time,
[02:24.116]	Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
[02:26.241]	As in their living in the living seasons
[02:28.847]	The time of the seasons and the constellations
[02:32.040]	The time of milking and the time of harvest
[02:34.744]	The time of the coupling of man and woman
[02:37.453]	And that of beasts.
[02:39.963]	Feet rising and falling.
[02:42.521]	Eating and drinking.
[02:43.980]	Dung and death.
[02:48.307]	Dawn points, and another day
[02:51.811]	Prepares for heat and silence.
[02:54.573]	Out at sea the dawn wind
[02:57.592]	Wrinkles and slides.
[03:00.409]	I am here, or there, or elsewhere.
[03:04.200]	In my beginning.
[03:06.812]	What is the late November doing with the disturbance of the spring
[03:15.802]	And creatures of the summer heat,
[03:17.600]	And snowdrops writhing under feet
[03:19.908]	And hollyhocks that aim too high
[03:21.803]	Red into grey and tumble down
[03:24.134]	Late roses filled with early snow?
[03:27.691]	Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
[03:30.111]	Simulates triumphal cars
[03:32.253]	Deployed in constellated wars
[03:34.401]	Scorpion fights against the Sun
[03:36.899]	Until the Sun and Moon go down
[03:38.589]	Comets weep and Leonids fly
[03:41.030]	Hunt the heavens and the plains
[03:43.136]	Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
[03:45.434]	The world to that destructive fire
[03:47.728]	Which burns before the icecap reigns.
[03:51.848]	That was a way of putting it not very satisfactory:
[03:55.118]	A periphrastic study in a wornout poetical fashion,
[03:59.668]	Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
[04:01.937]	With words and meanings.
[04:03.745]	The poetry does not matter.
[04:05.510]	It was not to start again what one had expected.
[04:08.735]	What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
[04:12.386]	Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
[04:16.060]	And the wisdom of age?
[04:17.730]	Had they deceived us
[04:19.849]	Or deceived themselves, the quietvoiced elders,
[04:22.851]	Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
[04:26.352]	The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
[04:29.715]	The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
[04:32.871]	Useless in the darkness into which they peered
[04:35.246]	Or from which they turned their eyes.
[04:38.371]	There is, it seems to us,
[04:40.542]	At best, only a limited value
[04:42.467]	In the knowledge derived from experience.
[04:44.356]	The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
[04:48.240]	For the pattern is new in every moment
[04:51.040]	And every moment is a new and shocking valuation of all we have been.
[04:55.948]	We are only undeceived
[04:57.908]	Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
[05:01.400]	In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
[05:04.348]	But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
[05:07.232]	On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
[05:11.327]	And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
[05:13.820]	Risking enchantment.
[05:15.582]	Do not let me hear
[05:17.949]	Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
[05:21.325]	Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
[05:26.416]	Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
[05:31.070]	The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
[05:34.257]	Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
[05:38.883]	The houses are all gone under the sea.
[05:43.558]	The dancers are all gone under the hill.
[05:47.182]	O dark dark dark.
[05:54.390]	They all go into the dark,
[05:56.313]	The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
[06:00.268]	The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
[06:03.930]	The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
[06:07.236]	Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
[06:10.165]	Industrial lords and petty contractors,
[06:12.996]	All go into the dark,
[06:15.413]	And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
[06:19.820]	And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
[06:23.134]	And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
[06:27.508]	And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
[06:31.554]	Nobody' s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
[06:35.198]	I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
[06:41.649]	Which shall be the darkness of God.
[06:43.727]	As, in a theatre,
[06:45.647]	The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
[06:47.730]	With a hollow rumble of wings,
[06:49.603]	With a movement of darkness on darkness,
[06:52.752]	And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
[06:57.213]	And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away
[07:00.765]	Or as, when an underground train,
[07:03.756]	In the tube,
[07:04.945]	Stops too long between stations
[07:07.447]	And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
[07:11.429]	And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
[07:15.662]	Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about
[07:19.350]	Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing
[07:25.417]	I said to my soul, be still,
[07:29.026]	And wait without hope
[07:31.634]	For hope would be hope for the wrong thing
[07:34.444]	Wait without love,
[07:36.727]	For love would be love of the wrong thing
[07:39.496]	There is yet faith
[07:41.505]	But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
[07:46.388]	Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
[07:50.677]	So the darkness shall be the light,
[07:53.208]	And the stillness the dancing.
[07:56.002]	Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
[08:00.207]	The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
[08:03.665]	The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
[08:06.945]	Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
[08:11.857]	Of death and birth.
[08:14.572]	You say I am repeating
[08:17.105]	Something I have said before.
[08:18.604]	I shall say it again.
[08:20.352]	Shall I say it again?
[08:23.184]	In order to arrive there,
[08:25.905]	To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
[08:29.592]	You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
[08:33.555]	In order to arrive at what you do not know
[08:37.047]	You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
[08:40.936]	In order to possess what you do not possess
[08:44.196]	You must go by the way of dispossession.
[08:47.200]	In order to arrive at what you are not
[08:49.618]	You must go through the way in which you are not.
[08:53.510]	And what you do not know is the only thing you know
[08:57.422]	And what you own is what you do not own
[09:00.868]	And where you are is where you are not.
[09:04.602]	The wounded surgeon plies the steel
[09:12.388]	That questions the distempered part
[09:14.447]	Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
[09:17.133]	The sharp compassion of the healer' s art
[09:19.449]	Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
[09:22.259]	Our only health is the disease
[09:25.070]	If we obey the dying nurse
[09:27.141]	Whose constant care is not to please
[09:29.969]	But to remind of our, and Adam' s curse,
[09:33.325]	And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
[09:37.105]	The whole earth is our hospital
[09:40.634]	Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
[09:43.032]	Wherein, if we do well, we shall
[09:45.919]	Die of the absolute paternal care
[09:48.541]	That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
[09:52.358]	The chill ascends from feet to knees,
[09:55.852]	The fever sings in mental wires.
[09:58.825]	If to be warmed, then I must freeze
[10:02.011]	And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
[10:04.563]	Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.
[10:09.920]	The dripping blood our only drink,
[10:13.310]	The bloody flesh our only food:
[10:16.473]	In spite of which we like to think
[10:19.059]	That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood
[10:21.901]	Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
[10:28.478]	So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years
[10:38.762]	Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l' entre deux guerres
[10:44.008]	Trying to use words,
[10:45.638]	And every attempt is a wholly new start,
[10:48.386]	And a different kind of failure
[10:51.153]	Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
[10:53.669]	For the thing one no longer has to say,
[10:56.094]	Or the way in which one is no longer disposed to say it.
[10:59.697]	And so each venture is a new beginning,
[11:02.979]	A raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating
[11:07.572]	In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
[11:10.739]	Undisciplined squads of emotion.
[11:13.560]	And what there is to conquer
[11:15.761]	By strength and submission, has already been discovered
[11:19.201]	Once or twice, or several times,
[11:21.541]	By men whom one cannot hope to emulate
[11:24.683]	But there is no competition
[11:26.283]	There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
[11:30.320]	And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
[11:35.886]	That seem unpropitious.
[11:37.862]	But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
[11:41.165]	For us, there is only the trying.
[11:44.210]	The rest is not our business.
[11:47.653]	Home is where one starts from.
[11:50.917]	As we grow older
[11:52.997]	The world becomes stranger,
[11:54.778]	The pattern more complicated of dead and living.
[11:57.512]	Not the intense moment isolated,
[12:00.211]	With no before and after,
[12:01.945]	But a lifetime burning in every moment
[12:04.936]	And not the lifetime of one man only
[12:07.281]	But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
[12:10.323]	There is a time for the evening under starlight,
[12:14.213]	A time for the evening under lamplight
[12:16.686]	The evening with the photograph album
[12:18.950]	Love is most nearly itself
[12:22.038]	When here and now cease to matter.
[12:24.227]	Old men ought to be explorers
[12:27.041]	Here or there does not matter
[12:30.465]	We must be still and still moving
[12:33.511]	Into another intensity
[12:35.091]	For a further union, a deeper communion
[12:38.869]	Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
[12:42.103]	The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
[12:47.614]	Of the petrel and the porpoise.
[12:50.015]	In my end is my beginning.

[00:00.000]	zuò qǔ : Eliot
[00:02.375]	East Coker
[00:04.983]	In my beginning is my end.
[00:08.237]	In succession, houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
[00:12.425]	Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
[00:16.692]	Is an open field, or a factory, or a bypass.
[00:20.047]	Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
[00:24.405]	Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
[00:28.640]	Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
[00:32.779]	Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
[00:36.080]	Houses live and die: there is a time for building
[00:41.094]	And a time for living and for generation
[00:43.562]	And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
[00:47.187]	And to shake the wainscot where the fieldmouse trots
[00:50.952]	And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
[00:56.732]	In my beginning is my end.
[01:00.581]	Now the light falls
[01:02.141]	Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
[01:04.936]	Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
[01:08.157]	Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
[01:11.350]	And the deep lane insists on the direction
[01:14.156]	Into the village, in the electric heat
[01:17.041]	Hypnotised.
[01:18.928]	In a warm haze the sultry light
[01:21.399]	Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
[01:25.194]	The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
[01:28.400]	Wait for the early owl.
[01:32.612]	In that open field
[01:34.778]	If you do not come too close,
[01:36.429]	If you do not come too close,
[01:38.199]	On a summer midnight,
[01:39.859]	you can hear the music of the weak pipe and the little drum
[01:43.111]	And see them dancing around the bonfire
[01:45.339]	The association of man and woman
[01:48.361]	In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie
[01:51.554]	A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
[01:54.229]	Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
[01:57.494]	Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
[02:00.072]	Whiche betokeneth concorde.
[02:02.054]	Round and round the fire
[02:04.607]	Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
[02:07.231]	Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
[02:10.084]	Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
[02:13.241]	Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
[02:17.346]	Mirth of those long since under earth
[02:20.209]	Nourishing the corn.
[02:22.132]	Keeping time,
[02:24.116]	Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
[02:26.241]	As in their living in the living seasons
[02:28.847]	The time of the seasons and the constellations
[02:32.040]	The time of milking and the time of harvest
[02:34.744]	The time of the coupling of man and woman
[02:37.453]	And that of beasts.
[02:39.963]	Feet rising and falling.
[02:42.521]	Eating and drinking.
[02:43.980]	Dung and death.
[02:48.307]	Dawn points, and another day
[02:51.811]	Prepares for heat and silence.
[02:54.573]	Out at sea the dawn wind
[02:57.592]	Wrinkles and slides.
[03:00.409]	I am here, or there, or elsewhere.
[03:04.200]	In my beginning.
[03:06.812]	What is the late November doing with the disturbance of the spring
[03:15.802]	And creatures of the summer heat,
[03:17.600]	And snowdrops writhing under feet
[03:19.908]	And hollyhocks that aim too high
[03:21.803]	Red into grey and tumble down
[03:24.134]	Late roses filled with early snow?
[03:27.691]	Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
[03:30.111]	Simulates triumphal cars
[03:32.253]	Deployed in constellated wars
[03:34.401]	Scorpion fights against the Sun
[03:36.899]	Until the Sun and Moon go down
[03:38.589]	Comets weep and Leonids fly
[03:41.030]	Hunt the heavens and the plains
[03:43.136]	Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
[03:45.434]	The world to that destructive fire
[03:47.728]	Which burns before the icecap reigns.
[03:51.848]	That was a way of putting it not very satisfactory:
[03:55.118]	A periphrastic study in a wornout poetical fashion,
[03:59.668]	Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
[04:01.937]	With words and meanings.
[04:03.745]	The poetry does not matter.
[04:05.510]	It was not to start again what one had expected.
[04:08.735]	What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
[04:12.386]	Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
[04:16.060]	And the wisdom of age?
[04:17.730]	Had they deceived us
[04:19.849]	Or deceived themselves, the quietvoiced elders,
[04:22.851]	Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
[04:26.352]	The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
[04:29.715]	The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
[04:32.871]	Useless in the darkness into which they peered
[04:35.246]	Or from which they turned their eyes.
[04:38.371]	There is, it seems to us,
[04:40.542]	At best, only a limited value
[04:42.467]	In the knowledge derived from experience.
[04:44.356]	The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
[04:48.240]	For the pattern is new in every moment
[04:51.040]	And every moment is a new and shocking valuation of all we have been.
[04:55.948]	We are only undeceived
[04:57.908]	Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
[05:01.400]	In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
[05:04.348]	But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
[05:07.232]	On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
[05:11.327]	And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
[05:13.820]	Risking enchantment.
[05:15.582]	Do not let me hear
[05:17.949]	Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
[05:21.325]	Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
[05:26.416]	Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
[05:31.070]	The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
[05:34.257]	Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
[05:38.883]	The houses are all gone under the sea.
[05:43.558]	The dancers are all gone under the hill.
[05:47.182]	O dark dark dark.
[05:54.390]	They all go into the dark,
[05:56.313]	The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
[06:00.268]	The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
[06:03.930]	The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
[06:07.236]	Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
[06:10.165]	Industrial lords and petty contractors,
[06:12.996]	All go into the dark,
[06:15.413]	And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
[06:19.820]	And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
[06:23.134]	And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
[06:27.508]	And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
[06:31.554]	Nobody' s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
[06:35.198]	I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
[06:41.649]	Which shall be the darkness of God.
[06:43.727]	As, in a theatre,
[06:45.647]	The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
[06:47.730]	With a hollow rumble of wings,
[06:49.603]	With a movement of darkness on darkness,
[06:52.752]	And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
[06:57.213]	And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away
[07:00.765]	Or as, when an underground train,
[07:03.756]	In the tube,
[07:04.945]	Stops too long between stations
[07:07.447]	And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
[07:11.429]	And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
[07:15.662]	Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about
[07:19.350]	Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing
[07:25.417]	I said to my soul, be still,
[07:29.026]	And wait without hope
[07:31.634]	For hope would be hope for the wrong thing
[07:34.444]	Wait without love,
[07:36.727]	For love would be love of the wrong thing
[07:39.496]	There is yet faith
[07:41.505]	But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
[07:46.388]	Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
[07:50.677]	So the darkness shall be the light,
[07:53.208]	And the stillness the dancing.
[07:56.002]	Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
[08:00.207]	The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
[08:03.665]	The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
[08:06.945]	Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
[08:11.857]	Of death and birth.
[08:14.572]	You say I am repeating
[08:17.105]	Something I have said before.
[08:18.604]	I shall say it again.
[08:20.352]	Shall I say it again?
[08:23.184]	In order to arrive there,
[08:25.905]	To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
[08:29.592]	You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
[08:33.555]	In order to arrive at what you do not know
[08:37.047]	You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
[08:40.936]	In order to possess what you do not possess
[08:44.196]	You must go by the way of dispossession.
[08:47.200]	In order to arrive at what you are not
[08:49.618]	You must go through the way in which you are not.
[08:53.510]	And what you do not know is the only thing you know
[08:57.422]	And what you own is what you do not own
[09:00.868]	And where you are is where you are not.
[09:04.602]	The wounded surgeon plies the steel
[09:12.388]	That questions the distempered part
[09:14.447]	Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
[09:17.133]	The sharp compassion of the healer' s art
[09:19.449]	Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
[09:22.259]	Our only health is the disease
[09:25.070]	If we obey the dying nurse
[09:27.141]	Whose constant care is not to please
[09:29.969]	But to remind of our, and Adam' s curse,
[09:33.325]	And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
[09:37.105]	The whole earth is our hospital
[09:40.634]	Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
[09:43.032]	Wherein, if we do well, we shall
[09:45.919]	Die of the absolute paternal care
[09:48.541]	That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
[09:52.358]	The chill ascends from feet to knees,
[09:55.852]	The fever sings in mental wires.
[09:58.825]	If to be warmed, then I must freeze
[10:02.011]	And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
[10:04.563]	Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.
[10:09.920]	The dripping blood our only drink,
[10:13.310]	The bloody flesh our only food:
[10:16.473]	In spite of which we like to think
[10:19.059]	That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood
[10:21.901]	Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
[10:28.478]	So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years
[10:38.762]	Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l' entre deux guerres
[10:44.008]	Trying to use words,
[10:45.638]	And every attempt is a wholly new start,
[10:48.386]	And a different kind of failure
[10:51.153]	Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
[10:53.669]	For the thing one no longer has to say,
[10:56.094]	Or the way in which one is no longer disposed to say it.
[10:59.697]	And so each venture is a new beginning,
[11:02.979]	A raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating
[11:07.572]	In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
[11:10.739]	Undisciplined squads of emotion.
[11:13.560]	And what there is to conquer
[11:15.761]	By strength and submission, has already been discovered
[11:19.201]	Once or twice, or several times,
[11:21.541]	By men whom one cannot hope to emulate
[11:24.683]	But there is no competition
[11:26.283]	There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
[11:30.320]	And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
[11:35.886]	That seem unpropitious.
[11:37.862]	But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
[11:41.165]	For us, there is only the trying.
[11:44.210]	The rest is not our business.
[11:47.653]	Home is where one starts from.
[11:50.917]	As we grow older
[11:52.997]	The world becomes stranger,
[11:54.778]	The pattern more complicated of dead and living.
[11:57.512]	Not the intense moment isolated,
[12:00.211]	With no before and after,
[12:01.945]	But a lifetime burning in every moment
[12:04.936]	And not the lifetime of one man only
[12:07.281]	But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
[12:10.323]	There is a time for the evening under starlight,
[12:14.213]	A time for the evening under lamplight
[12:16.686]	The evening with the photograph album
[12:18.950]	Love is most nearly itself
[12:22.038]	When here and now cease to matter.
[12:24.227]	Old men ought to be explorers
[12:27.041]	Here or there does not matter
[12:30.465]	We must be still and still moving
[12:33.511]	Into another intensity
[12:35.091]	For a further union, a deeper communion
[12:38.869]	Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
[12:42.103]	The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
[12:47.614]	Of the petrel and the porpoise.
[12:50.015]	In my end is my beginning.

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