We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats' feet over broken glass In our dry cellar Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Remember us—if at all—not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men. II Eyes I dare not meet in dreams In death's dream kingdom These do not appear: There, the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There, is a tree swinging And voices are In the wind's singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star. Let me be no nearer In death's dream kingdom Let me also wear Such deliberate disguises Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves In a field Behaving as the wind behaves No nearer— Not that final meeting In the twilight kingdom III This is the dead land This is cactus land Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man's hand Under the twinkle of a fading star. Is it like this In death's other kingdom Waking alone At the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness Lips that would kiss Form prayers to broken stone. IV The eyes are not here There are no eyes here In this valley of dying stars In this hollow valley This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on this beach of the tumid river Sightless, unless The eyes reappear As the perpetual star Multifoliate rose Of death's twilight kingdom The hope only Of empty men. V Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o'clock in the morning. Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow Life is very long Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom For Thine is Life is For Thine is the This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

Turned from the “eau-forte Par Jaquemart” To the strait head Of Messalina: “His True Penelope Was Flaubert,” And his tool The engraver's. Firmness, Not the full smile, His art, but an art In profile; Colourless Pier Francesca, Pisanello lacking the skill To forge Achaia. “Qu’est ce qu’ils savent de l’amour, et qu’est ce qu’ils peuvent comprendre? S’ils ne comprennent pas la poésie, s’ils ne sentent pas la musique, qu’est ce qu’ils peuvent comprendre de cette passion en comparaison avec laquelle la rose est grossière et le parfum des violettes un tonnerre?” For three years, diabolus in the scale, He drank ambrosia, All passes, ANANGKE prevails, Came end, at last, to that Arcadia. He had moved amid her phantasmagoria, Amid her galaxies, NUKTIS’AGALMA Drifted ... drifted precipitate Asking time to be rid of ... Of his bewilderment; to designate His new found orchid. ... To be certain ... certain ... (Amid ærial flowers) ... time for arrangements— Drifted on To the final estrangement; Unable in the supervening blankness To sift TO AGATHON from the chaff Until he found his sieve ... Ultimately, his seismograph: —Given that is his “fundamental passion,” This urge to convey the relation Of eye-lid and cheek-bone By verbal manifestations; To present the series Of curious heads in medallion— He had passed, inconscient, full gaze, The wide-banded irides And botticellian sprays implied In their diastasis; Which anæsthesis, noted a year late, And weighed, revealed his great affect, (Orchid), mandate Of Eros, a retrospect. Mouths biting empty air, The still stone dogs, Caught in metamorphosis, were Left him as epilogues. For this agility chance found Him of all men, unfit As the red-beaked steeds of The Cytheræan for a chain bit. The glow of porcelain Brought no reforming sense To his perception Of the social inconsequence. Thus, if her colour Came against his gaze, Tempered as if It were through a perfect glaze He made no immediate application Of this to relation of the state To the individual, the month was more temperate Because this beauty had been. The coral isle, the lion-coloured sand Burst in upon the porcelain revery: Impetuous troubling Of his imagery. Mildness, amid the neo-Nietzschean clatter, His sense of graduations, Quite out of place amid Resistance to current exacerbations, Invitation, mere invitation to perceptivity Gradually led him to the isolation Which these presents place Under a more tolerant, perhaps, examination. By constant elimination The manifest universe Yielded an armour Against utter consternation, A Minoan undulation, Seen, we admit, amid ambrosial circumstances Strengthened him against The discouraging doctrine of chances, And his desire for survival, Faint in the most strenuous moods, Became an Olympian apathein In the presence of selected perceptions. A pale gold, in the aforesaid pattern, The unexpected palms Destroying, certainly, the artist’s urge, Left him delighted with the imaginary Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge, Incapable of the least utterance or composition, Emendation, conservation of the “better tradition,” Refinement of medium, elimination of superfluities, August attraction or concentration. Nothing, in brief, but maudlin confession, Irresponse to human aggression, Amid the precipitation, down-float Of insubstantial manna, Lifting the faint susurrus Of his subjective hosannah. Ultimate affronts to human redundancies; Non-esteem of self-styled “his betters” Leading, as he well knew, To his final Exclusion from the world of letters. Scattered Moluccas Not knowing, day to day, The first day’s end, in the next noon; The placid water Unbroken by the Simoon; Thick foliage Placid beneath warm suns, Tawn fore-shores Washed in the cobalt of oblivions; Or through dawn-mist The grey and rose Of the juridical Flamingoes; A consciousness disjunct, Being but this overblotted Series Of intermittences; Coracle of Pacific voyages, The unforecasted beach; Then on an oar Read this: “I was And I no more exist; “Here drifted An hedonist.”

Les asiles d'aliénés sont des réceptacles de magie noire, conscients et prémédités, et ce n'est pas seulement que les médecins favorisent la magie par leurs thérapeutiques intempestives et hybrides , c'est qu'ils en font. S'il n'y avait pas eu de médecins il n'y aurait jamais eu de malades, pas de squelettes de morts malades à charcuter et dépiauter , car c'est par les médecins, et non par les malades que la société a commencé. 

Ceux qui vivent, vivent des morts. Et il faut aussi que la mort vive : Il n'y a rien comme un asile d'aliénés pour couver doucement la mort, et tenir en couveuse des morts.

When I was a windy boy and a bit And the black spit of the chapel fold, (Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women), I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood, The rude owl cried like a tell-tale tit, I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled Nine-pin down on donkey's common, And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed Whoever I would with my wicked eyes, The whole of the moon I could love and leave All the green leaved little weddings' wives In the coal black bush and let them grieve. When I was a gusty man and a half And the black beast of the beetles' pews (Sighed the old ram rod, dying of bitches), Not a boy and a bit in the wick- Dipping moon and drunk as a new dropped calf, I whistled all night in the twisted flues, Midwives grew in the midnight ditches, And the sizzling sheets of the town cried, Quick!- Whenever I dove in a breast high shoal, Wherever I ramped in the clover quilts, Whatsoever I did in the coal- Black night, I left my quivering prints. When I was a man you could call a man And the black cross of the holy house, (Sighed the old ram rod, dying of welcome), Brandy and ripe in my bright, bass prime, No springtailed tom in the red hot town With every simmering woman his mouse But a hillocky bull in the swelter Of summer come in his great good time To the sultry, biding herds, I said, Oh, time enough when the blood runs cold, And I lie down but to sleep in bed, For my sulking, skulking, coal black soul! When I was half the man I was And serve me right as the preachers warn, (Sighed the old ram rod, dying of downfall), No flailing calf or cat in a flame Or hickory bull in milky grass But a black sheep with a crumpled horn, At last the soul from its foul mousehole Slunk pouting out when the limp time came; And I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye, Gristle and rind, and a roarers' life, And I shoved it into the coal black sky To find a woman's soul for a wife. Now I am a man no more no more And a black reward for a roaring life, (Sighed the old ram rod, dying of strangers), Tidy and cursed in my dove cooed room I lie down thin and hear the good bells jaw-- For, oh, my soul found a sunday wife In the coal black sky and she bore angels! Harpies around me out of her womb! Chastity prays for me, piety sings, Innocence sweetens my last black breath, Modesty hides my thighs in her wings, And all the deadly virtues plague my death!