and the worst, not only "full
of passionate intensity", are often
frighteningly well-intentioned.
The future is hallucination,
the past a costume-drama
and the present is the numbing
low-level pain of descriptive,
anecdotal consciousness.
Time and consciousness
have only the most accidental
of connections. Time is an eternal
abstract stretch, while consciousness
is the awareness, unawareness,
or murderous refutation of futility.
Knowledge is mere imagination,
childish, self-aggrandising, deceiving,
self-deceiving and only sometimes
undeceiving. There will be a time
when there is no time for generation.
2 comments:
Beautiful! Shame they don't make kids learn that in school, and spare us all a lot of hassle.
This poem was derived from scribblings I made while I listened to Eliot's very over-rated Four Quartets being read on BBC Radio 4. The quotations are, of course, from Yeats' magnificent poem The Second Coming - which itself could be read interestingly in conjunction with Eliot's Coming of the Magi...
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