
Canto 4, "Hys Nouryture"
Phantasmagoria (1869)
Letter to Maria Gisborne (1820), l. 302
Canto 4, "Hys Nouryture"
Phantasmagoria (1869)
“Past is dead
Future is uncertain;
Present is all you have,
So eat, drink and live merry.”
“I don't drink coffee I take tea my dear
I like my toast done on one side…"
()”
Source: Nothing Like the Sun
If Only We Have Love (1957)
Context: If we only have love
We will never bow down
We'll be tall as the pines
Neither heroes nor clowns.
If we only have love
Then we'll only be men
And we'll drink from the Grail
To be born once again;
Then with nothing at all
But the little we are
We'll have conquered all time
All space, the sun, and the stars!
As closing scene in the 1968 musical Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris (1975 film version) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdSXpC8fbNA
Translations and adaptations, If We Only Have Love (1968)
Context: If we only have love
We will never bow down
We'll be tall as the pines
Neither heroes nor clowns.
If we only have love
Then we'll only be men
And we'll drink from the Grail
To be born once again
Then with nothing at all
But the little we are
We'll have conquered all time
All space, the sun, and the stars.
If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation.
Optimism (1903)
from Care and Disappointment, first published in Paradyse of Dainty Devices, 1576. Published by Grosart in Miscellanies of the Fuller Worthies' Library, Vol. IV (1872)
Poems
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
Context: There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands,
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.