by Eliot · Cluster: Grief and Loss · Elegy · Clothing and Costume
Abstract
WWII elegy for Indian soldiers who died fighting in Africa; meditates on death, home, exile and the fruit of action known only after the judgment.
Connections
Motifs: Death, Dust Themes & Concepts: War and its Cost, Exile, Heroism Forms & Genres: Elegy Historical References: First World War
Testo integrale / Full text
To the Indians who Died in Africa
To the Indians who Died in Africa was written at the request of Miss Cornelia Sorabji for Queen Mary’s Book for India (Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1943). I dedicate it now to Bonamy Dobree, because he liked it and urged me to preserve it.
A man’s destination is his own village,
His own fire, and his wife’s cooking;
To sit in front of his own door at sunset
And see his grandson, and his neighbour’s grandson
Playing in the dust together.
Scarred but secure, he has many memories
Which return at the hour of conversation,
(The warm or the cool hour, according to the climate)
Of foreign men, who fought in foreign places,
Foreign to each other.
A man’s destination is not his destiny
Every country is home to one man
And exile to another. Where a man dies bravely
At one with his destiny, that soil is his.
Let his village remember.
This was not your land, or ours: but a village in the Midlands,
And one in the Five Rivers, may have the same graveyard.
Let those who go home tell the same story of you:
Of action with a common purpose, action
None the less fruitful if neither you nor we
Know, until the judgment after death,
What is the fruit of action.
To Walter de la Mare
To Walter de la Mare was written for inclusion in Tribute to Walter de la Mare (Faber & Faber Ltd., 1948), a book presented to him on his seventy-fifth birthday.
The children who explored the brook and found
A desert island with a sandy cove
(A hiding place, but very dangerous ground,
For here the water buffalo may rove,
The kinkajou, the mangabey, abound
In the dark jungle of a mango grove‚
And shadowy lemurs glide from tree to tree —
The guardians of some long-lost treasure-trove)
Recount their exploits at the nursery tea
And when the lamps are lit and curtains drawn
Demand some poetry, please. Whose shall it be,
At not quite time for bed? …
Or when the lawn
Is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return
Gently at twilight, gently go at dawn,
The sad intangible who grieve and yearn;
When the familiar scene is suddenly strange
Or the well known is what we have yet to learn,
And two worlds meet, and intersect, and change;
When cats are maddened in the moonlight dance,
Dogs cower, flitter bats, and owls range
At witches’ sabbath of the maiden aunts;
When the nocturnal traveller can arouse
No sleeper by his call; or when by chance
An empty face peers from an empty house;
By whom, and by what means, was this designed?
The whispered incantation which allows
Free passage to the phantoms of the mind?
By you; by those deceptive cadences
Wherewith the common measure is refined;
By conscious art practised with natural ease;
By the delicate, invisible web you wove —
The inexplicable mystery of sound.