Choruses from "The Rock" by T.S.Eliot

Choruses from "The Rock"

 I

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,

The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.

О perpetual revolution of configured stars,

О perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,

О world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!

The endless cycle of idea and action,

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries

Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

I journeyed to London, to the timekept City,

Where the River flows, with foreign flotations.

There I was told: we have too many churches,

And too few chop-houses. There I was told:

Let the vicars retire. Men do not need the Church

In the place where they work, but where they spend their

Sundays.

   In the City, we need no bells:

Let them waken the suburbs.

I journeyed to the suburbs, and there I was told:

We toil for six days, on the seventh we must motor

To Hindhead, or Maidenhead.

If the weather is foul we stay at home and read the papers.

In industrial districts, there I was told

Of economic laws.

In the pleasant countryside, there it seemed

That the country now is only fit for picnics.

And the Church does not seem to be wanted

In country or in suburbs; and in the town

Only for important weddings.

THE ROCK: The lot of man is ceaseless labour,

Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,

Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant.

I have trodden the winepress alone, and I know

That it is hard to be really useful, resigning

The things that men count for happiness, seeking

The good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting

With equal face those that bring ignominy,

The applause of all or the love of none.

All men are ready to invest their money

But most expect dividends.

I say to you: Make perfect your will.

I say: take no thought of the harvest,

But only of proper sowing.

The world turns and the world changes,

But one thing does not change.

In all of my years, one thing does not change.

However you disguise it, this thing does not change:

The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

Forgetful, you neglect your shrines and churches;

The men you are in these times deride

What has been done of good, you find explanations

To satisfy the rational and enlightened mind.

Second, you neglect and belittle the desert.

The desert is not remote in southern tropics,

The desert is not only around the corner,

The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you.

The desert is in the heart of your brother.

The good man is the builder, if he build what is good.

I will show you the things that are now being done,

And some of the things that were long ago done,

That you may take heart. Make perfect your will.

Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen.

The lights fade; in the semi-darkness the voices of Workmen are

heard chanting.

In the vacant places

We will build with new bricks

There are hands and machines

And clay for new brick

And lime for new mortar

Where the bricks are fallen

We will build with new stone

Where the beams are rotten

We will build with new timbers

Where the word is unspoken

We will build with new speech

There is work together

A Church for all

And a job for each

Every man to his work.

 Now а group of Workmen is silhouetted against the dim sky. From

farther away, they are answered by voices of the Unemployed.

No man has hired us

With pocketed hands

And lowered faces

We stand about in open places

And shiver in unlit rooms.

Only the wind moves

Over empty fields, untilled

Where the plough rests, at an angle

To the furrow. In this land

There shall be one cigarette to two men,

To two women one half pint of bitter

Ale. In this land

No man has hired us.

Our life is unwelcome, our death

Unmentioned in "The Times."

 II

Thus your fathers were made

Fellow citizens of the saints, of the household of God, being built

upon the foundation

Of apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself the chief corner­stone.

But you, have you built well, that you now sit helpless in a

ruined house?

Where many are born to idleness, to frittered lives and squalid

deaths, embittered scorn in honey-hives,

And those who would build and restore turn out the palms of

their hands, or look in vain towards foreign lands for alms to

be more or the urn to be filled.

Your building not fitly framed together, you sit ashamed and

wonder whether and how you may be builded together for a

habitation of God in the Spirit, the Spirit which moved on

the face of the waters like a lantern set on the back of a

tortoise.

And some say: "How can we love our neighbour? For love must

be made real in act, as desire unites with desired; we have only

our labour to give and our labour is not required.

We wait on corners, with nothing to bring but the songs we can

sing which nobody wants to hear sung;

Waiting to be flung in the end, on a heap less useful than dung."

You, have you built well, have you forgotten the cornerstone?

Talking of right relations of men, but not of relations of men

to God.

"Our citizenship is in Heaven"; yes, but that is the model and

type for your citizenship upon earth.

When your fathers fixed the place of God,

And settled all the inconvenient saints,

Apostles, martyrs, in a kind of Whipsnade,

Then they could set about imperial expansion

Accompanied by industrial development.

Exporting iron, coal and cotton goods 

And intellectual enlightenment

 And everything, including capital

And several versions of the Word of God:

The British race assured of a mission

Performed it, but left much at home unsure.

Of all that was done in the past, you eat the fruit, either rotten

or ripe.

And the Church must be forever building, and always decaying.

and always being restored.

For every ill deed in the past we suffer the consequence:

For sloth, for avarice, gluttony, neglect of the Word of God.

For pride, for lechery, treachery, for every act of sin.

And of all that was done that was good, you have the inheritance.

For good and ill deeds belong to a man alone, when he stands

alone on the other side of death,

But here upon earth you have the reward of the good and ill that

was done by those who have gone before you.

And all that is ill you may repair if you walk together in humble

repentance, expiating the sins of your fathers;

And all that was good you must fight to keep with hearts as

devoted as those of your fathers who fought to gain it.

The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying

within and attacked from without;

For this is the law of life; and you must remember that while

there is time of prosperity

The people will neglect the Temple, and in time of adversity

they will decry it.

What life have you if you have not life together?

There is no life that is not in community,

And no community not lived in praise of God.

Even the anchorite who meditates alone,

For whom the days and nights repeat the praise of God,

Prays for the Church, the Body of Christ incarnate.

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads.

And no man knows or cares who is his neighbour

              Unless his neighbour makes too much disturbance,

But all dash to and fro in motor cars,

 Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

Nor does the family even move about together.

But every son would have his motor cycle,

And daughters ride away on casual pillions.

           Much to cast down, much to build, much to restore;

Let the work not delay, time and the arm not waste;

Let the clay be dug from the pit, let the saw cut the stone.

Let the fire not be quenched in the forge.

                           

VII

In the beginning God created the world. Waste and void. Waste

  and void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep.

And when there were men, in their various ways, they struggled

  in torment towards God

Blindly and vainly, for man is a vain thing, and man without

  God is a seed upon the wind: driven this way and that, and

  finding no place of lodgement and germination.

They followed the light and the shadow, and the light led them

  forward to light and the shadow led them to darkness,

Worshipping snakes or trees, worshipping devils rather than

  nothing: crying for life beyond life, for ecstasy not of the flesh.

Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of

  the deep.

           And the Spirit moved upon the face of the water.

And men who turned towards the light and were known of the

  light

Invented the Higher Religions; and the Higher Religions were

  good

And led men from light to light, to knowledge of Good and Evil.

But their light was ever surrounded and shot with darkness

As the air of temperate seas is pierced by the still dead breath of

  the Arctic Current;

And they came to an end, a dead end stirred with a flicker of life.

And they came to the withered ancient look of a child that has

  died of starvation.

Prayer wheels, worship of the dead, denial of this world, affirma-

  tion of rites with forgotten meanings

In the restless wind-whipped sand, or the hills where the wind

  will not let the snow rest.

Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of

  the deep.

  

   Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time

      and of time,

A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history:

transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time

but not like a moment of time,

A moment in time but time was made through that moment:

for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment

of time gave the meaning.

 Then it seemed as if men must proceed from light to light, in the

  light of the Word,

Through the Passion and Sacrifice saved in spite of their negative

  being;

Bestial as always before, carnal, self-seeking as always before,

  selfish and purblind as ever before.

Yet always struggling, always reaffirming, always resuming their

  march on the way that was lit by the light;

Often halting, loitering, straying, delaying, returning, yet fol-

  lowing no other way.

But it seems that something has happened that has never hap-

  ­pened before: though we know not just when, or why, or

  how, or where.

Men have left God not for other gods, they say, but for no god;

  and this has never happened before

That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first

  Reason,

And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race,

   or Dialectic.

The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells up-

  turned, what have we to do

But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards

In an age which advances progressively backwards?

Voice of the Unemployed [afar off]:

                           In this land
There shall be one cigarette to two men,
To two women one half pint of bitter
Ale....

Chorus: What does the world say, does the whole world stray in

high-powered cars on a by-pass way?

Voice of the Unemployed [more faintly

                                    in this land

        No man has hired us  . . . .

Chorus: Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face

          of the deep.

Has the Church failed mankind, or has mankind failed the

  Church?