by Eliot · Cluster: Melancholy · Suffering · Pain and Suffering
Abstract
A poem of urban Sunday ennui: the dull conspiracy of respectable faces, with Life personified as a bald, fastidious figure waiting on the doorstep of the Absolute — boredom and spiritual stasis.
Connections
Motifs: City Themes & Concepts: Melancholy, Spiritual Emptiness, Alienation, Satire of Society, Faith Forms & Genres: Lyric
Testo integrale / Full text
Spleen
Sunday: this satisfied procession
Of definite Sunday faces;
Bonnets, silk hats, and conscious graces
In repetition that displaces
Your mental self-possession
By this unwarranted digression.
Evening, lights, and tea!
Children and cats in the alley;
Dejection unable to rally
Against this dull conspiracy.
And Life, a little bald and gray,
Languid, fastidious, and bland,
Waits, hat and gloves in hand‚
Punctilious of tie and suit
(Somewhat impatient of delay)
On the doorstep of the Absolute.
Ode
THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT
For the hour that is left us, Fair Harvard, with thee,
Ere we face the importunate years,
In thy shadow we wait, while thy presence dispels
Our vain hesitations and fears.
And we turn as thy sons ever turn, in the strength
Of the hopes that thy blessings bestow,
From the hopes and ambitions that sprang at thy feet
To the thoughts of the past as we go.
Yet for all of these years that to-morrow has lost
We are still the less able to grieve,
With so much that of Harvard we carry away
In the place of the life that we leave.
And only the years that efface and destroy
Give us also the vision to see
What we owe for the future, the present, and past,
Fair Harvard, to thine and to thee.