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Best Famous Satisfactory Poems

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Written by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot | Create an image from this poem

Four Quartets 2: East Coker

 I

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

 In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.

 In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

 Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.


II

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

 That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

 The houses are all gone under the sea.

 The dancers are all gone under the hill.


III

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing façade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

 You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
 You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
 You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
 You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
 You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.


IV

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

 Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

 The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

 The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

 The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.


V

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

 Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.


Written by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot | Create an image from this poem

Journey Of The Magi

 'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, 
 refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the 
 terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and 
 grumbling
And running away, and wanting their
 liquor and women, 
And the night-fires going out, and the 
 lack of shelters, 
And the cities hostile and the towns 
 unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high
 prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all 
 night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, 
 saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a 
 temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of 
 vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill
 beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped in 
 away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with 
 vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for 
 pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no imformation, and so
 we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment
 too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say)
 satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I 
 remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, 
 certainly, 
We had evidence and no doubt. I had 
 seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; 
 this Birth was 
Hard and bitter agony for us, like 
 Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these
 Kingdoms, 
But no longer at ease here, in the old 
 dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their 
 gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Written by Stephen Dunn | Create an image from this poem

Essay On The Personal

 Because finally the personal
is all that matters,
we spend years describing stones,
chairs, abandoned farmhouses—
until we're ready. Always
it's a matter of precision,
what it feels like
to kiss someone or to walk
out the door. How good it was
to practice on stones
which were things we could love
without weeping over. How good
someone else abandoned the farmhouse,
bankrupt and desperate.
Now we can bring a fine edge
to our parents. We can hold hurt
up to the sun for examination.
But just when we think we have it,
the personal goes the way of
belief. What seemed so deep
begins to seem naive, something
that could be trusted
because we hadn't read Plato
or held two contradictory ideas
or women in the same day.
Love, then, becomes an old movie.
Loss seems so common
it belongs to the air,
to breath itself, anyone's.
We're left with style, a particular
way of standing and saying,
the idiosyncratic look
at the frown which means nothing
until we say it does. Years later,
long after we believed it peculiar
to ourselves, we return to love.
We return to everything
strange, inchoate, like living
with someone, like living alone,
settling for the partial, the almost
satisfactory sense of it.
Written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Create an image from this poem

Original Preface

 I feel no small reluctance in venturing to give to the public a 
work of the character of that indicated by the title-page to the 
present volume; for, difficult as it must always be to render satisfactorily 
into one's own tongue the writings of the bards of other lands, 
the responsibility assumed by the translator is immeasurably increased 
when he attempts to transfer the thoughts of those great men, who 
have lived for all the world and for all ages, from the language 
in which they were originally clothed, to one to which they may 
as yet have been strangers. Preeminently is this the case with Goethe, 
the most masterly of all the master minds of modern times, whose 
name is already inscribed on the tablets of immortality, and whose 
fame already extends over the earth, although as yet only in its 
infancy. Scarcely have two decades passed away since he ceased to 
dwell among men, yet he now stands before us, not as a mere individual, 
like those whom the world is wont to call great, but as a type, 
as an emblem--the recognised emblem and representative of the human 
mind in its present stage of culture and advancement.

Among the infinitely varied effusions of Goethe's pen, perhaps 
there are none which are of as general interest as his Poems, which 
breathe the very spirit of Nature, and embody the real music of 
the feelings. In Germany, they are universally known, and are considered 
as the most delightful of his works. Yet in this country, this kindred 
country, sprung from the same stem, and so strongly resembling her 
sister in so many points, they are nearly unknown. Almost the only 
poetical work of the greatest Poet that the world has seen for ages, 
that is really and generally read in England, is Faust, the translations 
of which are almost endless; while no single person has as yet appeared 
to attempt to give, in an English dress, in any collective or systematic 
manner, those smaller productions of the genius of Goethe which 
it is the object of the present volume to lay before the reader, 
whose indulgence is requested for its many imperfections. In addition 
to the beauty of the language in which the Poet has given utterance 
to his thoughts, there is a depth of meaning in those thoughts which 
is not easily discoverable at first sight, and the translator incurs 
great risk of overlooking it, and of giving a prosaic effect to 
that which in the original contains the very essence of poetry. 
It is probably this difficulty that has deterred others from undertaking 
the task I have set myself, and in which I do not pretend to do 
more than attempt to give an idea of the minstrelsy of one so unrivalled, 
by as truthful an interpretation of it as lies in my power.

The principles which have guided me on the present occasion are 
the same as those followed in the translation of Schiller's complete 
Poems that was published by me in 1851, namely, as literal a rendering 
of the original as is consistent with good English, and also a very 
strict adherence to the metre of the original. Although translators 
usually allow themselves great license in both these points, it 
appears to me that by so doing they of necessity destroy the very 
soul of the work they profess to translate. In fact, it is not a 
translation, but a paraphrase that they give. It may perhaps be 
thought that the present translations go almost to the other extreme, 
and that a rendering of metre, line for line, and word for word, 
makes it impossible to preserve the poetry of the original both 
in substance and in sound. But experience has convinced me that 
it is not so, and that great fidelity is even the most essential 
element of success, whether in translating poetry or prose. It was 
therefore very satisfactory to me to find that the principle laid 
down by me to myself in translating Schiller met with the very general, 
if not universal, approval of the reader. At the same time, I have 
endeavoured to profit in the case of this, the younger born of the 
two attempts made by me to transplant the muse of Germany to the 
shores of Britain, by the criticisms, whether friendly or hostile, 
that have been evoked or provoked by the appearance of its elder 
brother.

As already mentioned, the latter contained the whole of the Poems 
of Schiller. It is impossible, in anything like the same compass, 
to give all the writings of Goethe comprised under the general title 
of Gedichte, or poems. They contain between 30,000 and 40,000 verses, 
exclusive of his plays. and similar works. Very many of these would 
be absolutely without interest to the English reader,--such as those 
having only a local application, those addressed to individuals, 
and so on. Others again, from their extreme length, could only be 
published in separate volumes. But the impossibility of giving all 
need form no obstacle to giving as much as possible; and it so happens 
that the real interest of Goethe's Poems centres in those classes 
of them which are not too diffuse to run any risk when translated 
of offending the reader by their too great number. Those by far 
the more generally admired are the Songs and Ballads, which are 
about 150 in number, and the whole of which are contained in this 
volume (with the exception of one or two of the former, which have 
been, on consideration, left out by me owing to their trifling and 
uninteresting nature). The same may be said of the Odes, Sonnets, 
Miscellaneous Poems, &c.

In addition to those portions of Goethe's poetical works which 
are given in this complete form, specimens of the different other 
classes of them, such as the Epigrams, Elegies, &c., are added, 
as well as a collection of the various Songs found in his Plays, 
making a total number of about 400 Poems, embraced in the present 
volume.

A sketch of the life of Goethe is prefixed, in order that the 
reader may have before him both the Poet himself and the Poet's 
offspring, and that he may see that the two are but one--that Goethe 
lives in his works, that his works lived in him.

The dates of the different Poems are appended throughout, that 
of the first publication being given, when that of the composition 
is unknown. The order of arrangement adopted is that of the authorized 
German editions. As Goethe would never arrange them himself in the 
chronological order of their composition, it has become impossible 
to do so, now that he is dead. The plan adopted in the present volume 
would therefore seem to be the best, as it facilitates reference 
to the original. The circumstances attending or giving rise to the 
production of any of the Poems will be found specified in those 
cases in which they have been ascertained by me.

Having said thus much by way of explanation, I now leave the book 
to speak for itself, and to testify to its own character. Whether 
viewed with a charitable eye by the kindly reader, who will make 
due allowance for the difficulties attending its execution, or received 
by the critic, who will judge of it only by its own merits, with 
the unfriendly welcome which it very probably deserves, I trust 
that I shall at least be pardoned for making an attempt, a failure 
in which does not necessarily imply disgrace, and which, by leading 
the way, may perhaps become the means of inducing some abler and 
more worthy (but not more earnest) labourer to enter upon the same 
field, the riches of which will remain unaltered and undiminished 
in value, even although they may be for the moment tarnished by 
the hands of the less skilful workman who first endeavours to transplant 
them to a foreign soil.
Written by Ezra Pound | Create an image from this poem

The Bath-Tub

 As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, 
When the hot water gives out or goes tepid, 
So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, 
O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.


Written by Ellis Parker Butler | Create an image from this poem

A Satisfactory Reform

 A merry burgomaster
 In a burgh upon the Rhine
Said, “Our burghers all are
 Far too fond of drinking wine.”
So the merry burgomaster,
 When the burgomasters met,
Bade them look into the matter
 Ere the thing went farther yet.

And the merry burgomasters
 Did decide the only way
To alleviate the evil
 Without worry or delay
Would be just to call a meeting
 Of the burghers, great and small,
And then open every wine cask
 And proceed to drink it all.

“For,” they said, “when we have swallowed
 Every drop that’s in the land,
There can be no more of drinking,
 It is plain to understand.”
So they called a monster meeting,
 And the burghers, small and great,
Drank and drank until they were too
 Tipsy to perambulate.

But there still was wine in plenty,
 So, in sooth, the only way
Was to call another meeting;
 So they called it for next day.
Thus from day to day the burghers
 Met and swallowed seas of wine,
And they vowed the reformation
 Was a mission quite divine.

And today the worthy burghers
 In that burgh upon the Rhine
Still continue their great mission,
 And still swallow seas of wine.
And they vow they will not falter
 In their great reforming task
Till the last drop has been emptied
 From the very last wine cask.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry