LITTLE GIDDING

III

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between The live and the dead nettle.
This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the future as well as the past.
Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent.
History may be servitude,
History may be freedom.
See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.

If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of no immediate kin or kindness,
But of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and quiet
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.

We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

IV

The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar
Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

Self-will, self-placation,
I want to do what I want to do,
I’ll do it right now,
I desire the soft and easy path,
Slothful, lazy, biding my time,
Downtime, feeding my appetites,
Staying nowhere, stagnate,
Spiritual dissipation, slowly,
Drifting away, inconsistency,
Allowing the world,
And demons to win,
Habituation arising from neglect,
Comfort and ease, lukewarm,
Pulling the covers up over my head,
Distraction, overworked and tired,
Hitting the snooze button,
Seeking a bit more sleep,
Surrendering to a subtle death.