This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends...
T.S. Eliot, 1925
http://poetry.poetryx.com/...
Eliot's paen to The Hollow Men, the corporate men...
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
Ah, the policy of The Hollow Men:
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
This is from Eliot's The Wasteland:
APRIL is the cruellest month...
Isn't it though? And isn't 20 April 2010 the cruellest day.
Also from The Wasteland:
IV. DEATH BY WATER
PHLEBAS the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Oh irony, oh T.S. Eliot:
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
And you, too, British Petroleum PLC?
But the world, how does it end?
not with a bang but a whimper.