Saw the connection to Ecclesiastes. Elliot, so erudite. Learned that faeces is another spelling for feces. How horrified Elliot would have been to see shit in so many modern poems. He casts a spell.
The poem feels like someone trying to understand how life keeps looping back on itself how beginnings already carry their endings, and endings quietly open into something new. Eliot moves through time the way memory does, slipping between seasons, rituals, and losses that feel strangely familiar. There’s a tired honesty in his frustration with “wisdom,” as if age hasn’t brought clarity so much as a deeper humility. The darkness he writes about doesn’t feel threatening; it feels like a place where you finally stop pretending to know everything. And when he says humility is the only real wisdom, it lands with a quiet truth. By the end, the poem feels like someone admitting they’re still learning how to live, still trying, still beginning again and somehow that makes it comforting.
T.S. Eliot is the greatest to ever do it.
Hard to quarrel with a chunk of Eliot as the Only Poems Daily offerring. It's more interesting, though, when you present something less well-trod.
One could spend a lifetime in study of just this poem.
Section III reminds me very much of the Heart Sutra:
"Listen Sariputra,
all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness;
their true nature is the nature of
no Birth no Death,
no Being no Non-being,
no Defilement no Purity,
no Increasing no Decreasing..."
I was also thinking how inspired it is by the Bhagavad-Gita as well!
I guess when something is True it's True everywhere
Saw the connection to Ecclesiastes. Elliot, so erudite. Learned that faeces is another spelling for feces. How horrified Elliot would have been to see shit in so many modern poems. He casts a spell.
"For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."
It’s Eliot. ‘Nuff said….. Thx for this today.
The poem feels like someone trying to understand how life keeps looping back on itself how beginnings already carry their endings, and endings quietly open into something new. Eliot moves through time the way memory does, slipping between seasons, rituals, and losses that feel strangely familiar. There’s a tired honesty in his frustration with “wisdom,” as if age hasn’t brought clarity so much as a deeper humility. The darkness he writes about doesn’t feel threatening; it feels like a place where you finally stop pretending to know everything. And when he says humility is the only real wisdom, it lands with a quiet truth. By the end, the poem feels like someone admitting they’re still learning how to live, still trying, still beginning again and somehow that makes it comforting.
How I love to read your comments. Nothing has brought this work to me as clearly. Best, Rochelle