In My Beginning is My End

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...

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…

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.

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.

T. S. Eliot