sábado, 30 de abril de 2011

Eliot, again.



'The dry salvages'

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god - sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
The only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities - ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.
The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite,
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.
The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
The distant rote in the granite teeth,
And the wailing warning form the approaching headland
Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
Rounded homewards, and the seagull:
And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
Whem time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.
(...)

T. S. Eliot
(Four Quartets)

7 comentarios:

NáN dijo...

Difícil, no disfrutar de la música y los compases. Y encontrar (después) una tristeza que es el sentido.

Carmen dijo...

Cada vez nos lo pones más fácil...

T dijo...

Eliot es muy grande. Y suena como muy pocos. A mí me parece maravilloso.

Elena dijo...

Este mal no suena. Y tienes que estar muy enfollonada para no escribir sobre nada de todo lo que ha pasado en el fin de semana.

T dijo...

Lo estoy, lo estoy. Pero es posible que esta tarde encuentre un hueco. O declararé mayo como mes sin blog. Por lo menos hasta Santa Rita.

Lourdes dijo...

¡ Por fin un poeta!

T dijo...

¡Tampoco te pases! Este blog puede presumir de excelentes poetas.

;-)