 Rhaid fawr, a chyfnodd ymlaen i'r ffordd. Sineid Cusack. Sineid? Sineid? Felly wnaeth i mi. Eileen Atkins, Jeremy Irons, Attwa Ando, Elizabeth Fogolffan, all y ffmwys yw'r ffawr yn fawr i'r ffodol. Mae hefyd i chi yn ei bod yn roi'r ffodol gyda'r ysgol ag yn yr awr i gynhwynt hwnnw, yn tai iawn i'r hoffa yn Darganfynchol, yw Ileith Gwmwyren Cwyrgsryt. Ar erbyn y gallu'r hoffa, ychydig yn flynyddoedd y ffodol ar y Sydney, ac yn hyn y mae Ileid Gwmwywyr i'r Athganfynchol. Felly'r hoffa ar hyn gyda'r hoffaMynd, bydd y gallwn gwir o'r hoffa' i gael sicr o ffodol i'r hoffa, ac mae fel ei haf ganddo iawn i'r hoffa yn cymdeithasio'r poeitriad, ac yn 2004 byddwch yn y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell, ac yn rhaid i'r hanfodd y bydwch yn bwysig, oes i'r cyffredinol y chef o'r bobl yn cael eu cyfaint ac ymddangosol, a John Ffossydd, y head o'r hyn cyfaint ac yn ei ddweud yn gweithio'r bobl yn bwysig i'r bobl yma, oherwydd y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell yma, ac oherwydd yma, oherwydd y bwysig i'r bobl yn bwysig i'r bobl i'r bobl i'r bobl i'r bobl i'r bobl i'r yng Nghymru, George V, o gael y cyfnodd. Mae'r cyfnodd, os ymddych chi'n gael, yn gweithio'r cyfnodd a'u cyfnodd yn cyfnodd, ac yn fwyaf i'r llwyaf o'r ffordd. Felly mae'r cyfnodd i'r cyfnodd yma ymddych chi'n gweithio'r cyfnodd ac mae'r llwyddoedd yma'r llwyddoedd ar yr ystyried yma, ymddych chi'n gweithio'r cyfnodd. Mae'r cyfnodd i'r cyfnodd yn gweithio'r cyfnodd y Josephine Hart poetry hour. Josephine Hart herself described it in the speech she had written for the opening night of the Josephine Hart poetry week at the Donmar 10 years ago, and we are also marking Josephine's anniversary, her 10th anniversary this evening. And on that night she had written, for that night rather, public performance of the great poetry of the dead poets read by great actors should be the norm in London. So over to our great actors. What riches American poetry affords us? Bishop, Berryman, Hart, Crane, Dickinson, Elliot, Frost, Longfellow, Lowell, Millay, Moore, Plas, Pound, Po, Wallace Stevens, Carlos, Williams, Whitman, and that's just the dead poets to whom we give voice. Since this is a qualification, I find that live poets, however eminent, are wholly relaxed about non-inclusion. We have everything in common with America except language. Clever Oscar, so generous, so amusing, and so right is on this occasion not quite right. For the English language befriends the grand American expression. It is brawny enough and limber and full enough as Walt Whitman. It is a unifying force. Poetry is a trinity of sound, sense, and sensibility. And the sound of sense, Robert Frost's phrase, and the sense of sound is lost. Unless we hear it. Language caught alive. Few poets ever caught life in language with as much defiant passion as did Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass, of which Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, It tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of gentile and ethical illusion, and having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again on a strong foundation. But this was not the initial response. It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards. And that was Thomas Wentworth Higginson. It's egotism. I celebrate myself and sing myself. It's exaltation of the body, particularly sexually, as equal to the soul in I Sing the Body Electric, horrified many. Indeed, he was sacked by his shocked employer. However, Walt Whitman persevered and over 33 years added 400 poems to the original 12 published in 1885, though poor at his own expense, in response to Emerson's famous challenge to America to produce its own new unique voice. Though Emerson praised the work in a private letter which Walt without permission published, sales were for many years abysmal. Whitman, however, believed his work unkillable, and he was right. The last line of the incandescent song of myself, from which we've taken an excerpt, is sublimely confident. I stop somewhere waiting for you. Indeed he does. We follow with the only poem anthologised in his lifetime, O Captain My Captain, mourning the death of Lincoln, who had steered his ship of state in stormy waters. And now to Song of Myself and O Captain My Captain. Song of myself. I celebrate myself and sing myself. And what I assume, you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loaf and invite my soul. I lean and loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air. Born here of parents, born here from parents the same, and their parents the same. I, now 37 years old, in perfect health, begin, hoping to cease not till death. Creeds and schools in abeyance, retiring back a while, sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbour for good or bad. I permit to speak at every hazard, nature without check, with original energy. I am of old and young, of the foolish, as much as the wise, regardless of others ever regarded full of others. Maternal, as well as paternal. A child, as well as a man, stuffed with the stuff that is coarse and stuffed with the stuff that is fine. One of the nation of many nations, the smallest, the same, and the largest, the same. A southerner, soon as a northerner, a planter, nonchalant and hospitable, down by the oakeny I live. A Yankee, bound my own way ready for trade, my joints, the limberest joints on earth, and the sternest joints on earth. A Kentuckian, walking the veil of the Elkhorn in my dearskin leggings, a Louisiana'n or Georgian. A boatman, over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye. At home on Canadian snowshoes or up in the bush or with the fishermen off Newfoundland. At home in the fleet of ice boats sailing with the rest and tacking. At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine or the Texan Ranch. Comrade of Californians, comrade of free north-westerners loving their big proportions. Comrade of raftsmen and Coleman, comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meet. A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfulest. A novice beginning, yet experience of myriads of seasons. Of every hue and cast am I. Of every rank and religion. A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker, prisoner, fancy man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest. I resist anything better than my own diversity. Breathe the air but leave plenty after me. And I'm not stuck up and I'm in my place. The moth and the fish eggs are in their place. The bright sun's I see and the dark sun's I cannot see are in their place. The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place. And as to you death and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me. To his work without flinching the acashure comes, I see the elder hand pressing, receiving, supporting. I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors and mark the outlet and mark the relief and escape. And as to you corpse, I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me. I smell the white roses, sweet scented and growing. I've reached to the leafy lips, I reached to the polished breasts of melons. And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths. No doubt I have died myself 10,000 times before. There is that in me, I do not know what it is, but I know it is in me. Wrenched and sweaty, calm and cool then my body becomes. I sleep, I sleep long. I do not know it, it is without name. It is a word unsaid. It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol. Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on. To it, the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me. I might tell more, outlines. I plead for my brothers and sisters. Do you see, oh my brothers and sisters, it is not chaos or death. It is form, union, plan, it is eternal life. It is happiness. The past and present wilt. I have filled them, emptied them and proceed to fill my next fold of the future. Listener up there, what have you to confide to me? Look in my face while I snuff the saddle of evening. Talk honestly, no one hears you and I stay only a minute longer. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door slab. Who has done his day's work? Who will soonest be through with his supper? Who wishes to walk with me? Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already too late? The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me. He complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yaws over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me. It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed wilds. It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air. I shake my white locks at the runaway sun. I effuse my flesh in eddys and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt and grow from the grass I love. If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, but I shall be good health to you nevertheless and filter and fiber your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you. O captain, my captain. O captain, my captain, our fearful trip is done. The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won. The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, while follow eyes the steady keel, grin and daring. But oh heart, heart, heart, oh the bleeding drops of red where on the deck my captain lies, fallen cold and dead. O captain, my captain, rise up and hear the bells. Rise up for you the flag is flung, for you the bugle trills, for you bouquets and ribboned wreaths, for you the shores are crowding, for you they call the swaying mass their eager faces turning. Hear captain, dear father, this arm beneath your head. It is some dream that on the deck you've fallen cold and dead. My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still. My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will. The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done. From fearful trip the victor's ship comes in with object one. Exult, oh shores and ring, oh bells, but I with mournful tread walk the deck my captain lies, fallen cold and dead. In March 1959 a dinner was held in New York to honour on his 85th birthday Robert Frost, winner of four Pulitzer prizes, a record which has never been equalled. Lionel Trilling rose to speak. I have to say that my Frost is not the Frost I seem to perceive in the minds of so many of his admirers. Frost's best poems represent the terrible actualities of life. In some he is a terrifying poet. The audience was disconcerted as was Frost, but Trilling was right. Frost's poem Out Out is a tragic masterpiece about an accident in a sawmill when the saw leaped out at the boy's hand and neither refused the meeting and the last line among the most brutal in literature. Frost's first collection was published in his 40s in England where he'd come to farm in Buckinghamshire. Within a year he'd produced North of Boston and returned to America after which there was no stopping him. He spoke at President Kennedy's inauguration and the president ended many of his speeches with lines from stopping by Woods on a snowy evening. Indeed, Kennedy asked Frost to visit Khrushcheff in Moscow to plead against the building of the Berlin Wall with considerable cunning. Frost recited Mending Wall at a dinner. The question about walls is what are you walling in and what are you walling out? Never again would Bird's Song be the same is a haunting love poem. On his deathbed he would say, Love is all. Romantic love, I tremble with it. He'd trembled as a young man with an obsessive love for the woman he pursued to the point almost of insanity, his wife Eleanor White. They suffered much tragedy. Illness robbed them of three children and a fourth car committed suicide. I feel as though I am laid out upon a cross that a man who had suffered so much asked to have on his gravestone I had a lover's quarrel with the world. He testifies to his character and grace to Mending Wall. Something there is that doesn't love a wall that sends the frozen ground swell under it and spills the upper boulders in the sun and makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing. I have come after them and made repair and left not one stone on stone but they would have the rabbit out of hiding to please the helping dogs. The gaps I mean. Not one has seen them made or heard them made but at spring Mending Time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill and on a day we meet to walk the line and set the wall between us once again. Keep the wall between us as we go to each the boulders that have fallen to each and some are loaves and some so nearly walls we have to use a spell to make them balance. Stay where you are until our backs are turned. We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh just another kind of outdoor game one on a side. It comes to little more. There where it is we do not need the wall. He is all pine and I am all apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines I tell him. He says good fences make good neighbors. Spring is the mischief in me and I wonder if I could put a notion in his head. Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it where there are cows but here there are no cows? Before I built a wall I'd asked to know what I was walling in or walling out and to whom I was like to give a fence something there is that doesn't love a wall that wants it down. I could say elves to him but it's not elves exactly and I'd rather he said it for himself. I see him there bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top in each hand like an old stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me not of woods only in the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying and he likes having thought of it so well he says again good fences make good neighbors. Out, out. The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard and made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it and from there those that lifted eyes could count five mountain ranges one behind the other under the sunset far into Vermont and the saw snarled and rattled snarled and rattled as it ran light or had to bear a load and nothing happened. Day was all but done. Call it a day I wish they might have said to please the boy by giving him the half hour that a boy counts so much when saved from work. His sisters stood beside them in her apron supper. At the word the saw as if to prove saws knew what supplement lept out at the boy's hand or seemed to leap he must have given the hand however it was neither refused the meeting but the hand. The boy's first outcry was a rueful laugh as he swung toward them holding up the hand half an appeal but half as if to keep the life from spilling then the boy saw all since he was old enough to know big boy doing a man's work though a child at heart he saw all spilled don't let him cut my hand off the doctor when he comes don't let him sister so but the hand was gone already the doctor put him in the dark of ether he lay and puffed his lips out with his breath and then the watcher at his pulse took fright no one believed they listened at his heart little less nothing and that ended it no more to build on there and they since they were not the one dead turned to their affairs never again would birds song be the same he would declare and could himself believe that the birds there and all the garden round from having heard the day long voice of Eve had added to their own an over sound her tone of meaning but without the words admittedly an eloquence so soft could only have had an influence on birds when call or laughter carried it aloft be that as it may she was in their song moreover her voice upon their voices crust had now persisted in the woods so long that probably it never would be lost never again would birds song be the same and to do that to birds was why she came stopping by woods on a snowy evening whose woods of these are I think I know his house is in the village though he will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fall up with snow my little horse must think it queer not without a farmhouse near between the woods and frozen lake the darkest evening of the year he gives his harness bells a shake to ask if there is some mistake the only other sounds the sweep of easy wind and downy flake the woods are lovely dark and deep but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep miles to go before I sleep Emily Dickinson wrote short short does not mean sweet when she died in 1886 age 56 she didn't have a single book of poetry to her name she is now regarded as one of the greatest poets in the American canon Harold Bloom considers her as individual a thinker as Dante well how did this happen well after Emily's death her sister Levinia opened her bureau and found neatly copied and sewn together in groups over 900 poems Lyndall Gordon's brilliant biography traces her remarkable story remember Thomas Wentworth Higginson who advised Whitman to burn his work well he declined to publish Miss Dickinson twice the poems though he recognised their brilliance were he said extreme they were indeed extreme works of an ecstatic genius death obsessed my life had stood a loaded gun because I could not stop for death I heard a fly buzz when I died titles always the opening line well death is the distinguished thing that's Henry James Dickinson lived through the Civil War her house overlooked a graveyard and she was often ill but after Wentworth's second rejection she wrote him one of the most elegant exits in literary history I smile when you suggest that I delay to publish if fame belonged to me I could not escape her my barefoot rank is better you think me uncontrolled I have no tribunal the sailor cannot see the north but knows the needle can brilliant she withdrew to her genius this nun of Amherst Bloom believes hers is a drama of erotic loss rather than a religious obsession perhaps in Ted Hughes's haunting phrase Emily Dickinson knew her unusual endowment of love was not going to be asked for and now to my life had stood a loaded gun my life had stood a loaded gun in corners till the day the owner passed identified and carried me away and now we roam in sovereign woods and now we hunt the doe and every time I speak for him the mountain straight reply and do I smile such cordial light upon the valley glow it is as if a Suvian face had let its pleasure through and when at night our good day done I guard my master's head it is better than the Ida duck's deep pillow to have shared to foe of his I'm deadly foe non-ster the second time on whom I lay a yellow eye or an emphatic thumb though I than he may longer live he longer must than I for I have but the power to kill without the power to die I close twice before its close my life close twice before its close it yet remains to see if immortality unveil a third event to me so huge, so hopeless to conceive as these that twice befell parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell because I could not stop for death because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me the courage hell but just ourselves and immortality we slowly drove he knew no haste and I had put away my labour and my leisure too for his civility we passed the school where children strove at recess in the ring we passed the fields of gazing grain we passed the setting sun or rather he passed us the dews grew quivering and chill for only gossamer my garn my tippit, only two we paused before a house that seemed a swelling of the ground the roof was scarcely visible the cornice but a mound since then to centuries and yet each feels shorter than the day I first surmised the horse's heads were toward eternity I heard a fly buzz when I died the stillness in the room was like the stillness in the air between the heaves of storm the eyes beside had wrung them dry and breaths were gathering firm for that last onset when the king be witnessed in the room I willed my keepsakes signed away what portion of me be assignable and then it was there interposed a fly with blue uncertain stumbling buzz between the light and me and then the windows failed and then I could not see to see a different sort of backward reflection comes from Margaret Walker Margaret was part of the Chicago Renaissance in the 1930s which numbered amongst others Florence Pride the first black woman to have her composition played by an orchestra she was featured at the proms this year she was fabulous Lineage by Margaret Walker My grandmothers were strong they followed plows and bent to toil they moved through fields sowing seed they touched earth and grain grew they were full of sturdiness and singing My grandmothers were strong My grandmothers are full of memories smelling of soap and onions and wet clay with veins rolling roughly over quick hands they have many clean words to say My grandmothers were strong Why am I not? Elizabeth Bishop she came, she saw she changed the view if, as CK Stead wrote Elliot followed his nerves in proofrock in Bishop's case the nerve is optic what Bishop saw was not what we see nor how we see it her declared intention in her ice writing was to combine the natural with the unnatural and to give us poetry as normal as sight as artificial as a glass eye it took some time to adjust five major publishers turned her down she went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award James Merrill commented on Bishop's instinctive, modest, lifelong impersonation of an ordinary woman perhaps she needed the disguise her beginnings were traumatic although I have a prize unhappy childhood please don't think I don't on it she didn't her father died in the year of her birth and when she was five her mentally fragile mother was admitted to a state institution and Bishop never saw her again much was lost and far too early the art of losing isn't hard to master her obsessive travelling her many simultaneous lesbian love affairs her alcoholism all seemed rooted in that early uprootedness her ironic note is gentle less so what she requested for her gravestone which was awful but cheerful and now to Love Lies Sleeping and the last poem one art this morning switching all the tracks that crossed the sky from Cynda star to star coupling the ends of streets to trains of light now draw us into daylight in our beds and clear away what presses on the brain put out the neon shapes that float and swell and glare down the grey avenue between the eyes in pinks and yellows letters and twitching signs hang over moons wane wane from the window I see an immense city carefully revealed made delicate by overworkmanship detail upon detail cornus upon façade reaching up so languidly up into a weak weak white sky it seems to waver there where it has slowly grown in skies of water glass from fused beads of iron and copper crystals the little chemical garden in a jar trembles and stands again pale blue blue green and brick this sparrows hurriedly begin their play then in the west boom and a cloud of smoke boom and the exploding ball of blossom blooms again and all the employees who work in plants where such a sound says danger will once said death turn in their sleep and feel the short hairs bristling on backs of necks the cloud of smoke moves off a shirt is taken off a thread like clothesline along the street below the water wagon comes throwing its hissing snowy fan across peelings and newspapers the water dries, light dry, dark wet the pattern of the cool watermelon I hear the day springs of the morning strike from stony walls and halls and iron beds scattered or grouped cascades alarms for the expected queer cupids of all peoples getting up whose evening meal they will prepare all day you will dine well on his heart on his and his so send them about your business affectionately dragging in the streets there unique loves scurge them with roses only be light as helium for always to one or several morning comes whose head has fallen over the edge of his bed whose face is turned so that the image of the city grows down into his open eyes inverted and distorted no, I mean distorted and revealed if he sees it at all one art the art of losing isn't hard to master so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster lose something every day except the fluster of lost door keys the hour badly spent the art of losing isn't hard to master then practice losing father losing faster places and names and where it was you meant to travel none of these will bring disaster I lost my mother's watch and look my last or next to last my three loved houses went the art of losing isn't hard to master I lost two cities, lovely ones and Vasta, some realms I owned two rivers and a continent I missed them but it wasn't a disaster even losing you a joking voice, a gesture, a love I shan't have lied it's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like write it like disaster another Renaissance poem this time from the Harlem Renaissance this is Langston Hughes let America be America again let America be America again let it be the dream it used to be let it be the pioneer on the plane seeking a home where he himself is free America never was America to me let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed let it be that great strong land of love where never kings connive nor tyrant scheme that any man be crushed by one above it never was America to me oh let my land be a land where liberty is crowned with no false patriotic wreath but opportunity is real and life is free equality is in the air we breathe there's never been equality for me freedom in this homeland of the free say who are you that mumbles in the dark and who are you that draws your veil across the stars I am the poor white fooled and pushed apart I am the negro bearing slavery scars I am the red man driven from the land I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek finding only the same old stupid plan of doggy dog of mighty crush the weak and the young man full of strength and hope tangled in that ancient endless chain of profit power gain of grab the land of grab the gold of grab the ways of satisfying need of work the man of take the pay of owning everything for one's own greed the farmer bondsman to the soil I am the worker sold to the machine I am the negro servant to you all I am the people humble hungry mean hungry yet today despite the dream beaten yet today oh pioneers I am the man who never got ahead the poorest worker bartered through the years yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream in the old world while still a surf of kings who dreamt a dream so strong so brave so true that even yet it's mighty daring sings in every brick and stone in every furrow turned that made America the land it has become oh I'm the man who sailed those early seas in search of what I meant to be my home for I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore and Poland's plain and England's grassy lee and torn from black Africa's strand I came to build a homeland of the free the free? who said the free? not me surely not me the millions on relief today the millions shot down when we strike the millions who have nothing for our pay for all the dreams we've dreamed and all the songs we've sung and all the hopes we've held and all the flags we've hung the millions who have nothing for our pay except the dream that's almost dead today oh let America be America again the land that never has been yet and yet must be the land where every man is free the land that's mine the poor man's, Indians, Negro's, me who made America who sweat and blood whose face and pain, whose hand at the foundry whose plough in the rain must bring back our mighty dream again sure call me any ugly name you choose the steel of freedom does not stain for those who live like leeches on the people's lives we must take back our land again America oh yes I say it plain America never was America to me and yet I swear this oath America will be out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death the rape and rot of graft and stealth and lies we the people must redeem the land the mines, the plants, the rivers the mountains and the endless plain all the stretch of these great green states and make America again there is a direct line which can be traced from Virgil to Dante from Dante to Milton from Milton to Elliot the greatest poet for 300 years that's Ted Hughes, right again his poetry cuts into our consciousness with the sharpness of a diamond that's the Nobel Academy it is one of literature's more daunting truths that T.S. Eliot was only 22 when he wrote the love song of J.L. for Prufrock it was written in fragments and according to the poet Conrad Akin Eliot was heartlessly indifferent to its fate Akin and Ezra Pound fought to have it published and it took four years why? Prufrock was an unfamiliar zone of consciousness an exemplar of Eliot's theory of the auditory imagination the feeling for sound and rhythm which exists far below the levels of consciousness of conscious thought one must surrender here's a vignette Virginia Woolf to T.S. Eliot we're not as good as Keats T.S. Eliot to Virginia Woolf oh yes we are we're trying something harder he certainly was in the history of poetry there is before and after the wasteland the original title was he do the police in different voices that was Betty Higdon's line in Dickens's our mutual friend Eliot do the wasteland in different voices a multiplicity of sound is from Dante mingled with Sanskrit jazz rhythms with Elizabethan language part two opens in the room heavy with her strange synthetic perfumes suddenly the voice of the hysterical woman believed to be that of his tragic first wife Vivienne Eggwood who declared this terrifying dialogue to be wonderful, wonderful and then were transported to a cocknick pub to listen to the tale of poor Albert out on leave who wants a good time and Lill who ought to be ashamed she looks so antique the poem then fades on an echo Ophelia's line good night sweet ladies the wasteland is one of the great triumphs of literature and life so now the love song of J.L. for proofwch let us go then you and I when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table let us go through certain half deserted streets the muttering retreats of restless nights in one night cheap hotels and sordast restaurants with oyster shells streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent and lead you to an overwhelming question oh do not ask what is it let us go and make our visit in the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo the yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes the yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window panes licked its tongue into the corners of the evening lingered upon the pools that stand in drains let it fall upon its back soot that falls from chimneys slipped by the terrace made a sudden leap and seeing that it was a soft October night curled once about the house and fell asleep and indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides upon the street rubbing its back upon the window panes there will be time there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet there will be time to murder and create and time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate time for you and time for me and time yet for a hundred indecisions and for a hundred visions and revisions before the taking of a toast and tea in the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo and indeed there will be time to wonder do I dare and do I dare time to turn back and descend the stair with a bald spot in the middle of my hair they will say how his hair is growing thin my morning coat my collar mounting firmly to the chin my neck tie rich and modest just asserted by a simple pin they will say but how his arms and legs are thin do I dare disturb the universe in a minute there is time for decisions and revisions rich a minute will reverse for I have known them all already have known them all, have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons have measured out my life in coffee spoons I know the voices dying with the dying fall beneath the music from a father room so how should I presume and I've known the eyes already known them all the eyes that fix you and a formulated phrase and when I am formulated sprawling on a pin when I am pinned and wriggling on the wall then how should I begin to spit out all the buttons of my days and ways and how should I presume and I've known the arms already known them all arms that are braceleted and white and bare but in the lamp light down with light brown hair is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress arms that lie along a table or wrap around a shawl and should I then presume how should I begin shall I say I have gone at dusk through narrow streets and watched the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men in shirt sleeves leaning out of windows I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas and the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully smoothed by long fingers asleep, tired or in the lingers stretched on the floor here beside you and me should I after tea and cakes and ices have the strength to force the moment to the crisis but though I have wept and fasted wept and prayed, though I have sinned my head grown slightly bald brought in upon a platter I am no prophet and here's no great matter I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker and I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker and in short I was afraid and would it have been worth it after all after the cups, the marmalade, the tea among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me would it have been worthwhile to have bitten off the matter with a smile, to have squeezed the universe into a ball to roll it towards some overwhelming question to say I am Lazarus, come from the dead come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all if one sitting on a pillow by her head should say that is not what I meant at all that is not it at all and would it have been worth it after all would it have been worthwhile after the sun sets and the door yards and the sprinkled streets after the novels after the tea cups, after the skirts and the veil along the floor and this and so much more it is impossible to say just what I mean but as if a magic lantern through the nerves in patterns on a screen would it have been worthwhile if one settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl and turning towards the window should say not it at all, that is not what I meant at all no, I am not Prince Hamlet nor is it meant to be I am an attendant lord one that will do to swell a progress start a scene or two, advise the prince no doubt an easy tool deferential, glad to be of use politic, cautious and meticulous full of high sentence but a bit obtuse the times indeed almost ridiculous almost at times the fool, I grow old I grow old I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled shall I part my hair behind do I dare to eat a peach I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach I have heard the mermaids singing each to each I do not think that they will sing to me I have seen them riding seaward on the waves combing the white hair of the waves blown back when the wind blows the water white and black we have lingered in the chambers of the sea by sea girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown till human voices wake us and we drown part two of the wasteland a game the chair she sat in like a burnished throne glowed on the marble where the glass held up by standards wrought with fruited vines from which a golden cupidod peeped out another hit his eyes behind his wing doubled the flames of seven branched candelabra reflecting light upon the table as the glitter of her jewels rose to meet it from satin cases poured in rich profusion in vials of ivory and coloured glass unstoppable lurked her strange synthetic perfumes ungrent, powdered or liquid troubled, confused and drowned the sense in odours stirred by the air that freshened from the window these ascended in fattening the prolonged candle flames flung their smoke into the laqueria stirring the pattern on the coppered ceiling huge seaward fed with copper burned green and orange framed by the coloured stone in which sad light a carbid dolphin swam above the antique mantle was displayed as though a window gave upon the silven scene the change of filamel by the barbarous king so rudely forced and there the nightingale filled all the desert with inviolable voice and still she cried and still the world pursues jug jug to dirty ears and other withered stumps of time were told upon the walls staring forms leaned out leaning hushing the room enclosed footsteps shuffled on the stair under the firelight, under the brush her hair spread out in fiery points glowed into words then would be savagely still my nerves are bad tonight yes, bad, stay with me speak to me why do you never speak? speak what are you thinking of? what thinking? what? I never know what you are thinking think I think we are in rats alley where the dead men lost their bones what is that noise? the wind under the door what is that noise now? what is the wind doing? nothing again, nothing do you know nothing? do you see nothing? do you remember nothing? I remember those are pearls that were his eyes are you alive or not? is there nothing in your head? oh, oh, oh, that jigspeary and rag so elegant, so intelligent what shall I do now? what shall I do? I shall rush out as I am and walk the street with my hair down so what shall we do tomorrow? what shall we ever do? the hot water at ten and if it rains a closed car at four I shall play a game of chess pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door when Lill's husband got demobbed I said I didn't mince my words I said to him myself now Albert's coming back make yourself a bit smart he'll want to know what you've done with that money he gave you to get yourself some teeth he did, I was there I'm all out Lill and get a nice set he said I swear I can't bear to look at you and no more can't I I said and think of poor Albert he's been in the army four years he wants a good time and if you don't give it to him there's others will I said oh, is there she said something about that I said then I'll know who to thank she said and gave me a straight look hurry up please it's time if you don't like it you can get on with it I said pick and choose if you can't but if Albert makes off it won't be for lack of telling you ought to be ashamed of yourself I said to look so antique and there are only 31 I can't help it she said pulling a long face it's them pills I took to bring it off she said well she's had five already and nearly died of young George the chemist said it would be alright but I've never been the same you are a proper fool I said well if Albert won't leave you alone there it is I said what you get married for if you don't want children hurry up please it's time well that Sunday Albert was home they had a hot gamon and they asked me into dinner to get the beauty of it hot hurry up please it's time hurry up please come on it's time good night Bill good night Lou good night ladies good night sweet ladies good night