April 30, 2005: A Song for Simeon, T.S. Eliot
A Song for Simeon
T.S. Eliot
Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.
Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have taken and given honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children’s children
When the time of sorrow is come?
They will take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s home,
Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.
Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation
Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel’s consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.
According to thy word,
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints’ stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.
(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,
Thine also).
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
Let thy servant depart,
Having seen thy salvation.
[This is another prayer poem, about the old man in the Temple in
Jerusalem who sees the infant Jesus being brought to be baptized,
shortly before his own death; it’s about duty and weariness and
longing for peace. And endings, which makes it appropriate for today,
the last day of National Poetry Month.]
IF YOU WOULD LIKE to attempt The Waste Land — my favorite poem of all
time — I have an awesome link for you, one of my most favorite
websites ever, Exploring The Waste Land. This is the way hypertext
SHOULD be used, to explain all the billions of
allusions, translate the foreign languages, connect
thematically similar passages and lend a great deal of depth and
explanation to the poem across the board. I actually hated the poem
the first time I tried to read it, because it’s so very wtf at first
glance, but it’s so rich and complex and variable and amazing. I think
the best way of approaching it at first is to think of it as a picture
of modern society, the current world, as complicated and full of
wildly different things as it is, all jumbled together getting louder
and louder until the end, where all the fragmentation of society and
the self has lead in a way to a clean break with sanity, and through
that, finally, peace.]
