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| Blackout in Kyiv, October 2022 (via Reuters) |
For a few years, I’ve been wanting to write my own poems about hope, peace, love, and joy for Advent. It will, unfortunately, not be this year (my mind and creative energies have been focused on finishing my dissertation). But there are poems on those themes that resonate with me, and those I want to share during the next few weeks leading up to Christmas.
To start out the Advent season, I want to share part of T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker” to represent hope, even in the depths of despair. “East Coker” is part of Eliot’s Four Quartets, which are a series of meditations on time, God, history, loss, and renewal. “East Coker” is the second of these quartets, and was written near the beginning of World War II, and published during the Blitz. Within the poem, death and life, doubt and faith, despair and hope are woven together.
This year, the poem reminds me of Ukraine—especially as the country is plunged into darkness by Russian attacks. “East Coker” was a poem birthed in war, in a time of darkness, and of grief. It reminds me that loss and hope are not mutually exclusive, and that hope knows hard times. Hope is quiet, not garish; hope does not dole out platitudes, but rather lifts a sturdy, steadying hand to our shoulders as we sob for the dreams we have lost.
As Eliot writes, hope is in the waiting. And as choirs across the country sing “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” to welcome in the Advent season today, it is that waiting for deliverance which gives me courage.
From “East Coker,” by T.S. Eliot
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, and 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.
