A Conversation

The people hold themselves as unaccountable:
Their inner souls are theirs (and theirs) alone
To be revealed but never to be known.
They build their walls and shields of insurmountable
Disclosure, every bit (of it) discountable
With very (very) little substance shown
Beyond the names and faces they would own,
Convenient tags and masks of empty countenance.

It’s funny how you never (really) see
Someone until the day she isn’t looking,
Never hear her (un)til she’s finished talking,
Never know her (un)til she goes away
(And how, when asked to give her eulogy,
You find she’s left you something good to say).

You people claim to have your own identity
And you pretend to bare (and share) your soul
With every handshake touch and every cold
Embrace, as if you gripped me with intensity,
But who (the hell) are you with this propensity
To speak in (cryptic) poetry, to hold
Me with a stranger’s words, to seek control
Beyond a time that’s silent, dark and meant to be?

Yet as I stare you (deeply) in the eye
I will admit to liking how you look at me
But never (truly) see me, how you talk to me
But never (really) have too much to say
(And even as I offer a reply
You didn’t seek, you get it anyway).


from Calendrums

Dans le Restaurant, Stanza 3, by T.S. Eliot (a new translation)

Phlebas the Phoenician, fifteen days dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls and the swell of Cornwall
And the profits and losses and the cargo of tin:
A current under sea took him far away,
Past the stages of his former life.
You have to consider, it was a painful exit;
All the same, he was a man who once was
handsome and tall.


from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)

Translating the Water Section

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 312-321 

          IV. Death by Water

                    This is the water section, the fourth of five sections of The Waste Land that 
                    adopt the themes of the CLASSICAL ELEMENTS of earth, air, fire, water and 
                    wind. Eliot would later repeat this structure with the first four elements and the 
                    quintessential wind in Four Quartets (1943).  Designation of these classical
                    elements can be found in early Babylonian, Indian, Greek and Chinese
                    philosophies.

                    See Anon., Enuma Elis (ca. 1800 BC, tr. as The Seven Tablets of Creation
                    by E. A. Wallis Budge, 1921), a Babylonian cuneiform text which describes 
                    creation through personifications of water, earth, sky and fire.

                    See also Upanishads, Shvetashvatara Upanishad 2:12 (ca 400-200 BC, tr. 
                    Robert Ernest Hume, 1921):

                    When the fivefold quality of Yoga has been produced,
                    Arising from earth, water, fire, air and space,
                    No sickness, no old age, no death has he
                    Who has obtained a body made out of the fire of Yoga.

                    See also Plato, Timaeus 48b, (ca. 360 BC, tr. W.R.M. Lamb, 1925):

                    We must gain a view of the real nature of fire and water, air and earth, 
                    as it was before the birth of Heaven.

                    Finally, see Anon., Mawangdui Silk Texts (ca. 168 BC), presenting the Chinese 
                    philosophy of Wu Xing and the five phases of wood, fire, earth, metal and water.

                    Eliot foreshadowed the title and theme of this section pages earlier when Madame 
                    Sosostris generally warned her patron to “Fear death by water” (TWL 55). Like
                    the previous sections, this section is full of allusions, but the primary source of the 
                    text is now Eliot’s own voice, loosely translated from a poem he first wrote in 
                    French.  See Eliot, Dans le Restaurant (1920), stanza 3; here is my translation 
                    of In the Restaurant, prompted by Eliot’s restatement and adding my own take of 
                    the “Dans” variations:

                    Phlebas the Phoenician, fifteen days dead,
                    Forgot the cry of gulls and the swell of Cornwall
                    And the profits and losses and the cargo of tin:
                    A current under sea took him far away,
                    Past the stages of his former life.
                    You have to consider, it was a painful exit;
                    All the same, he was a man who once was
                    handsome and tall.

          Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

                    PHLEBAS THE PHOENICIAN reflects the drowned Phoenician Sailor, whose 
                    death by water Madame Sosostris portended (see above) and whose eyes are
                    now pearls (see below). 

          Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
          And the profit and loss.

                    By his association with profit and loss and by Eliot’s own explanations (see his 
                    note at TWL 218), Phlebas is related to Mr. Eugenides, the one eyed Smyrna 
                    merchant (TWL 52, 208); 

                                                 A current under sea
          Picked his bones in whispers.  As he rose and fell
          He passed the stages of his age and youth

                    Phlebas is also related to the pearly eyed Prince Ferdinand (see TWL 48 and
                    Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.2.376-402); and to the hyacinth girl (see Eliot's
                    note at TWL 126).  

          Entering the whirlpool.

                                                  Gentile or Jew

                    The speaker now turns ambivalently to the Gentile or Jew i.e., one without
                    distinction whether one is in the faith or out of it; compare TWL 365 (“I do not know
                    whether a man or a woman”). See also Romans 3: 9-10: 

                    What then? are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we have before 
                    proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin; As it is written, 
                    There is none righteous, no, not one.

          O you who turn the wheel and look windward,

                    Speaking directly to “YOU” THE READER, the poet appears to once again break
                    the fourth wall. He could just as easily be talking to himself, and an earlier instance 
                    also suggests that he is addressing his editor as “hypocrite lecteur” (see TWL 69,
                    76), but this passage and several others (see especially TWL 21, 76, 320 and 360 
                    but also TWL 17, 113, 122, 126 and 432) seem to be directed more to the “you,” 
                    whether poet or fellow pilgrim, who would seek answers through the figurative 
                    reading of the cards and the various surrounding elements of earth, water, etc. 

                    The wheel in this section, which recalls the Tarot card and the change of seasons,
                    also reflects the whirlpool now being entered by “you” who look windward; thus, in 
                    this sense “you” are the reader who would turn with the poet towards the wind. The 
                    wind, or spirit, is the fifth classical element about to be introduced in Section 5.

          Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

                    The name Phlebas alludes to Plato’s Philebas, one who held pleasure to be
                    superior to intellect, in contrast to Socrates, who valued knowledge.  See 
                    Plato, Philebus (360 BC), tr. Harold N. Fowler (1925), 48e: 

                    SOCRATES

                    And there are still more who think they are taller and handsomer than they are...

                    The Socratic evaluation begins with DECONSTRUCTION, and here the reader is 
                    told to separately consider what the water has done. Compare this to how each of 
                    the classical elements is deconstructed in turn, beginning at the end of Section 1, 
                    just before the “lecteur” passage, when the reader is asked to consider what 
                    happens to a body planted in the earth (TWL 71-72); then near the end of Section
                    2, when the poet asks what “we” can ever do in the empty air (TWL 131-138); and 
                    finally in the consumption of fire at the end of Section 3 (TWL 308- 311) with the 
                    suggested allusion to the Sermon on the Mount, addressed very much to “you.” 
                    See Matthew 6:23:

                    If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! 

                    Time indeed to turn toward the wind.


from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)

The Farmer

I

There was once a farmer who with a smile endured
The test of memory and in time inspired
The stuff of legend: once a man became
The hero and the villain and the dream
Behind the smile became the memory
Of someone else.  There was once a farmer, and he
Worked hard to plow his thousand acre field
Each spring, preparing someone else’s food
With modern tools.  Allow this tale to start
With shares of metal dragging through dirt
And give the man a toil hardened grin
And a severed hand; then let this truth be told
Of every farmer whose every smile reveals
Defiance, grit, survival, victory,
But leave it there: a hundred stories end
Where one begins and all of history
Breathes the air of every once upon a time.

II

There was once a time when smiles disappeared
Throughout the county, turning to a hard
Reality: the cruelest of crimes
Came to their world and crushed the quiet dreams
Of an adolescent girl and of the whole
Community.  There was once a time when all
Work stopped to hear the echoes of a gun,
And it felt like everyone who heard the sound
Had pulled the trigger.  Oh dear audience
Expecting simple songs and sweet romance
Imagine you were there holding the gun
That fateful Friday night; and picture this,
A steadfast smile suddenly replaced
With emptiness, then guilt, then rage and blame,
And there you were, the gun still in your hand
Above your victim, for the rest of time
The final breath of a thirteen year old girl.

III

She was once a summer smile that never feared
Forever, thought forever was a word
That didn’t end: she smiled like it was summer
All the time, and by persistent dreams
And distant memories her ghost pretends
That nothing’s changed.  There was once, and there remains
Worked in the weave of our surviving souls
The strand of innocence of teenaged smiles
On summer nights.  Forgive us, farmer, for the blood
We can’t unspill, collect the tears we’ve shed
But let us smile that she may live again
To find forever; let this be her truth,
The ultimate discovery of youth:
Not liberty, not passion, not abandon
But innocence: accept this first and final
Plea, the strand of our salvation and
The breath that gives us immortality.

from Calendrums

One Summer : A Song

She rode on a beautiful horse, rode up the hill and across my lawn.  Roxanne!  She smiled bold and shy, beaming the bold-shy age of thirteen years.  Roxanne, 1979: there was a Top 40 hit that year, but she was a different tune.  Beyond the pure, but in the days before mature, she was not so grown up as a red light song, and none of us were as old as we pretended.
We used to laugh at her: she had what Matt used to call a “cute duck butt,” and what Jim called a “ski-jump nose.”  We drank beer in the dark —she never drank, but she stayed out late with us; she teased us all, and she smoked Salem cigarettes and she swore.
And one day she rode that beautiful horse up the hill of my lawn and smiled, and said, “Hey, Sol, want to go for a ride?”  I looked up at her on her big beautiful horse and smiled back, and Sugar took the opportunity to munch on my lawn.
“Ro-o-0-OX! Anne! —that was another tune, by the Police, and Sting sounded like a reggae rooster on the radio.  We crowed that song all summer, thinking we liked it before we knew what it was about, knowing only that we too knew a girl named Roxanne.  Then we learned, learned to understand every word, and for a while that summer we sang it louder, and then in the fall we didn’t sing it anymore.
She rode Sugar up to me —bold and shy —and asked if I wanted to ride with her.  And I smiled, not ready to answer, giving Sugar time to chew the grass.  Nights later, in the fall, I’d try to write a better song for her: “Roxanne, sweet thirteen, before she knew the world was mean...”    “Those days are over,” I might have added.  Nights later, we would turn the radio off.
She smiled bold and shy.  Sure, I said.  Great, she said, jump on.  We rode down the street and into a field, Roxanne and Sugar and I —we broke from a trot to a gallop, and I, sitting in back, clung on to Roxanne, held her near me, felt her warm and sweaty against me and felt safe in the saddle.  We were still closer to pure than mature, and I still remember Sugar munching quietly on the grass.  But then we were both well aware of where we were, on this beautiful horse galloping swiftly across the field.
Another tune began playing on the radio, and we turned the volume higher.
One night we all went to a party at Adam’s.  His parents weren’t home.  We drank beer in the dark, but Roxy still wouldn’t drink.  “Ro-o-0-OX! Anne,” squawked Adam.  She never did like that song.  Adam took out a gun and started playing with it, as if it were a Saturday afternoon and he was shooting at beer cans on fence posts.  Wait, said Matt, let me set them up again.
Sugar munched quietly on the grass —a big horse, with a big saddle.  Come on, said Roxanne, there’s room for both of us.  And I jumped on, fitting snugly into the saddle behind her, and we trotted off my lawn and down the hill, down a country road and across a field.
She lit up a cigarette, while Adam started playing with his shotgun, shooting it into the air.   Come on, said Adam, Come on, bitch, or I’ll kill you.  He laughed.  We drank more beer.  She never did like that song.  And Adam started fooling around with his shotgun, holding it up to her throat.  Wait, said Matt, let me check the chamber.
We used to laugh at her, and she teased us all, and she swore.  And she rode on a beautiful horse, up the hill and across the lawn, and she asked if I wanted to go for a ride.
I held her near me.  She was warm and sweaty, and I clung to her.
And we turned the radio off.
Adam started playing with his shotgun, pulling the trigger, and the shot went into her head.
   Wait, said Matt, it was supposed to be empty.  Someone called the police, and we turned the radio off.
We had been singing another tune, beyond the pure, before the mature.  And Sugar broke to a gallop from a trot.


from March to December

Moleskin 4.6

Don’s sister, his only sibling, lived with her husband halfway between our old townhome and our old apartment. Their daughter, an only child, was the apple of her uncle’s eye. The balance of his attention was sure to change in the years ahead, but I wasn’t sensing it that summer. All I saw was an old habit-worn bachelor stubbornly set in his ways, and whatever care he had for kids and family was obscured by caricature. He kept stacks of Playboys in a basement file cabinet. He had regular poker nights with the guys. He brandished a heavy sassage accent and gave my mother a monosyllabic nickname. He showed a humorous type-A charm to everyone in the rooms he entered —everyone, that is, except for kids. As if to prove the point, he kept a W. C. Fields poster on one of the walls of his house long after stepsons intruded, telling us in the clearest terms: “I never met a kid I liked.” Our new cousin, it seems, had been an exception, but we were given the rule.

One Summer : An Aspersion

“You guys killed her,” she said.
“What are you talking about,” Sol said quietly.
“You had the party, you knew he was playing with guns.”
Our accuser was my father’s age, and a friend of his.  She had silver-blond hair and a pleasantly trim figure; her skin was smooth and unwrinkled and her smile and the warm humor that accompanied it gave her the appearance of youth.  But on this day she did not smile and wasn’t warm, and suddenly and permanently to me she was as old and cold as a cackling, bony-nosed witch.  For the first time I noticed the wart on her neck, and it would stand out every time after that.  I noticed the way her dishwater gray hair was never combed.  Her humor, I began to realize, was full of secret sarcasm and based largely on hate.
It was two days after my friend Adam accidentally killed my friend Roxanne.  Al was messing around with a shotgun at a party.  He had forgotten to check the chamber, and when he playfully grabbed Roxanne and put the gun to her temple, when he jokingly pulled the trigger, ready to say “bang” in verbal mime, the noise was suddenly real and there was real, red blood, and she really collapsed to the ground in a slow motion you never see in the movies.  We were all there to see it, and for a long time it was a very traumatic memory.


from March to December

One Summer : A True Story

Sol didn’t cry, all through the night, but he was very quiet.  And the next day, Sunday, when his friends got together and talked about it, he still didn’t say much, even when they found out that Roxanne was actually dead.
Everyone reacted differently.  Curtis wanted most to get the details straight.  Chad felt bad for Adam: “I wonder what’s going to happen to him,” he said.  Lenny cried, a whole lot, and he wasn’t ashamed.  And Al was a complete contrast: it was spooky how he just stared blankly into space and at the ground with a cold face.  But they were all quiet to some degree.
There wasn’t much else to say.  One of their friends was dead, shot in the head by another friend, Adam.  Except for Sol, they had all witnessed it.  An ambulance rushed her to the hospital, but she took six hours to die, and the fact that she was dead was the news the morning brought.
Around noon they all decided to go out to Adam’s house to see how he was doing.  They took Chad’s car.  Chad put the key in the ignition and suddenly Black Sabbath blared where it had left off; he reached forward and ejected the tape.  “Not today,” he said quietly, smiling.  He started the car and they drove back to the scene of their party the night before.
Sol had left early, before the third keg was cracked, but he had known the basic details of the shooting almost as soon as it had happened.  He hadn’t been home fifteen minutes when his father, the town pastor, got a midnight call, and when he came home he told Sol, who had stayed up waiting, what had happened.
For the benefit of Sol, before they went up the steps to Adam’s doorway they all stopped together and pointed to the place on the front lawn where Roxanne’s head had fallen.  The blood was dried to the color of dirt on the grass.  A couple of rains, maybe even the dew, would make it go away.
Inside, Adam sat on the couch in his living room, his eyes red from crying.  Two of his cousins were there with him.  One of them got up to answer the door, and he immediately ushered everyone into the kitchen and offered them beer.  He said the police had come and gone and would be back later; apparently they had been convinced that Adam wasn’t going to go anywhere.

They all went into the next room and sat with Adam.  They each made a few lame attempts at encouragement, then Chad got up and turned on the television.  A football game was on, and they watched it for a while without talking.  When it was halftime, Chad got up again and turned the television off.
“I guess we should go,” he said, but they didn’t stand up right away.
“Thanks for coming out here, guys,” Adam said finally, and they each went over to him and one at a time put a hand on his shoulder.
“We’ll stick with you on this,” they all said, and Sol said it too, but at the same time it hurt for each of them to say this, because they knew that their next stop was to go visit Roxanne’s boyfriend, Bobby, who had been out of town the night before. 
The same odd silence was at Bobby’s house, even though Bobby’s position was hardly the same as Adam’s. He offered them all sodas and they watched the rest of the football game, and they all got up to leave after that, saying few words.  Sol decided that he would come out here later, alone.


from March to December

The Fire Sermon, by Siddhartha Gautama Buddha (a new translation)

Everything is burning, holy ones.
And what is everything?
The eye, holy ones, is on fire;
the forms that pass it by are on fire;
the eye’s own awareness is on fire;
the impressions it receives are on fire,
and every sensation spawned 
by the need for those impressions: 
all pleasure, pain and numbness is on fire.


And how does the fire burn?
With the fires of passion:
passion burns the eye, holy ones,
with fires of hate and lust
and fires of delusion, 
fires of birth and age, death and sorrow,
fires of crying and suffering,
grieving and despairing: 
the eye with all its passions is on fire.

And not only the eye, holy ones, 
but the ear is on fire and all that can be heard 
is burning;
the nose is on fire and all that can be smelled 
is burning;
the tongue is on fire and all that can be tasted 
is burning;
the body is on fire and all that can be touched 
is burning.

And sensing this, holy ones,
the wise and honorable disciple
learns to turn away:
he turns away from the eye
turns away from the forms,
turns away from awareness,
from impressions 
and from every sensation spawned 
by the need for those impressions,
turns away from all that is 
pleasant, painful or numb;

he learns to turn away 
from the ear and from what it hears,
from the nose and from what it smells,
from the tongue and from what it tastes,
from the body and from all that it can touch;

he learns to turn away from the mind 
and from ideas,
from the mind’s awareness,
from impressions 
and from the sensations spawned
by the need for those impressions;
he turns away from all that is 
pleasant, painful or numb.

And by turning away, holy ones,
the disciple gives up all passions,
and when he leaves the fires of passion he is free:
and being free he knows that he is free:
he knows his birth is finally exhausted,
his holy life lived, his duty done,
and finally, holy ones,
he is no more for this world.


from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with Annotations (and other explanations)

Augustine, Buddha and Jesus

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 307-311:






          To Carthage then I came

                    See Augustine, Confessions 3: 1.1 (398 AD):

                    ...to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears.

                    Compare Aeneas’ visit to Carthage at Virgil, Aeneid 1 (19 BC, tr. John Dryden 1697).
                    After leaving Troy and Italy, Aeneas, in search of a new home, came to Carthage, home
                    of Juno, goddess of marriage. To welcome him, Carthaginian Queen Dido had prepared
                    a lavish banquet, but the night went instead to his brother Cupid after their mother
                    Venus intervened.  Intending to protect Aeneas from Juno, Venus caused him to fall
                    asleep and then had Cupid take his place. This would prove fateful for both Dido and
                    Carthage. Dido had fallen in love with Aeneas, but they would never marry, and Aeneas
                    would eventually leave Carthage without her, ultimately finding his own place as the
                    founder of Rome.  Dido, left behind, would kill herself, and later Carthage would be
                    defeated and destroyed by the Romans in the Battle of Mylae.

                    and see Confessions 10: 16, 25:

                    For thus do I remember Carthage, thus all places where I have been, thus men's faces
                    whom I have seen, and things reported by the other senses; thus the health or 
                    sickness of the body. For when these things were present, my memory received from 
                    them images, which being present with me, I might look on and bring back in my 
                    mind, when I remembered them in their absence.

                    See also Confessions 10: 6, 9, reflecting this poem’s attention to each of the
                    classical elements in turn:

                    And what is this [God]? I asked the earth, and it answered me, ‘I am not He’; and
                    whatsoever are in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps, and the living 
                    creeping things, and they answered, ‘We are not thy God, seek above us.’ I asked the 
                    moving air; and the whole air with his inhabitants answered, ‘Anaximenes was 
                    deceived, I am not God.’  I asked the heavens, sun, moon, stars, ‘Nor (say they) are
                    we the God whom thou seekest.’ And I replied unto all the things which encompass 
                    the door of my flesh: ‘Ye have told me of my God, that ye are not He; tell me 
                    something of Him.’ And they cried out with a loud voice, ‘He made us.’

          Burning   burning   burning   burning

                    Eliot’s note: “The complete text of the Buddha's Fire Sermon, (which corresponds in
                    importance to the Sermon on the Mount) from which these words are taken, will be
                    found translated in the late Henry Clarke Warren's Buddhism in Translation (Harvard
                    Oriental Series). Mr. Warren was one of the great pioneers of Buddhist studies in the
                    Occident.” See THE FIRE SERMON (Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, Adittapariyaya 
                    Sutta, Samyutta Nikaya 35.28 (483 BC, tr. Warren, 1896)):

                    The eye, O priests, is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire; 
                    impressions received by the eye are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, 
                    unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by 
                    the eye, that also is on fire. And with what are these on fire? With the fire of 
                    passions, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation, with birth, old 
                    age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire. 
                    ...Perceiving this, O priests, the learned and noble disciple conceives an aversion 
                    for the eye, conceives an aversion for forms, an aversion for eye-consciousness, 
                    an aversion for the impressions received by the eye; and whatever sensation, 
                    pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions 
                    received by the eye...  And in conceiving this aversion, he becomes divested of 
                    passion, and by the absence of passion he becomes free, and when he is free he
                    becomes aware that he is free; and he knows that rebirth is exhausted, that he 
                    has lived the holy life, that he has done what it behooved him to do, and that he 
                    is no more for this world. 

                    Throughout this poem, THE EYE is veiled or averted: it fails (TWL 39), is forbidden
                    (TWL 54), fixes on the feet (TWL 65), hides behind wings (TWL 81), presses lidless
                    (TWL 138), weeps (TWL 182), turns upward from the desk (line 216) and is covered,
                    then opened (TWL 360-363).  And compare THE PERCEPTIVENESS of the blind
                    Tiresias (see TWL 218) with that of the unseeing Madame Sosostris (TWL 54); the
                    one-eyed merchant with his allusion to the one-eyed Odin (TWL 52, 54); and the
                    pearly-eyed sailor (TWL 48).

                    Eliot reserved his discussion of the Fire Sermon, the source of the title to Section 3,
                    until the section’s last lines, and he immediately commingled this Buddhist lesson with
                    the teachings of Jesus and the reflections of St Augustine. With these pillars, the fire
                    section contemplates healing by a purging of emotions.  Some have speculated at what
                    the poet wanted to personally purge, but revealing this was probably not his intent. See
                    Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919):

                    Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the 
                    expression of personality, but an escape from personality. ...There are many people 
                    who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, ...But very few know 
                    when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the 
                    poem and not in the history of the poet.  The emotion of art is impersonal. And the 
                    poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the 
                    work to be done.

         O Lord Thou pluckest me out
         O Lord Thou pluckest

         burning

                    Eliot’s note: “From St. Augustine's Confessions again. The collocation of these two
                    representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the
                    poem, is not an accident.”  See Confessions 10: 34, 53 (tr. E. B. Pusey, 1838):

                    And I, though I speak and see this, entangle my steps with these outward beauties; 
                    but Thou pluckest me out, O Lord, Thou pluckest me out; because Thy loving-
                    kindness is before my eyes. For I am taken miserably, and Thou pluckest me out
                    mercifully; sometimes not perceiving it, when I had but lightly lighted upon them; 
                    otherwhiles with pain, because I had stuck fast in them.

                    The reference to being plucked out mercifully comes from Psalm 25:15:

                    Mine eyes are ever toward the LORD; for he shall pluck my feet out of the net.

                    For a harsher plucking out, see Matthew 5:29 from THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT:

                    And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable 
                    for thee that one of thy members should perish , and not that thy whole body should 
                    be cast into hell. 

                    At Eliot’s own prompting, compare Jesus's Sermon on the Mount with the Buddha’s
                    Fire Sermon and St. Augustine’s Confessions. Jesus’s Sermon was delivered at the
                    beginning of his ministry, not long after he had been tested in the wilderness. It includes
                    many well known lessons, such as the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer and the salt and
                    light metaphors; see Matthew 5: 13, 14:

                    Ye are the salt of the earth... Ye are the light of the world

                    but also some harsh morality checks, as in the “eye” passages on how to respond to
                    one’s own adultery (see above) and how to react to the evil of others. See
                    Matthew 5: 38-39:

                    ...Ye have heard that it hath been said , An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:  
                    But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy 
                    right cheek, turn to him the other also.

                    The morality check passages in the Sermon on the Mount are comparable to the
                    austerity measures of the Fire Sermon and Augustine’s Confessions, but see also a
                    continuation of the light metaphor at Matthew 6: 22-23:

                    The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body 
                    shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. 
                    If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

                    This inner light concept is elusive, though; see Francis Beaumont and John 
                    Fletcher, Philaster 3.2 (1620):

                    Preach to birds and beasts
                    What woman is, and help to save them from you;
                    How heaven is in your eyes, but in your hearts
                    More hell than hell has; how your tongues, like scorpions,
                    Both heal and poison; how your thoughts are woven
                    With thousand changes in one subtle web,
                    And worn so by you;
                    ...How all the good you have is but a shadow,
                    I' the morning with you, and at night behind you
                    Past and forgotten.

                    This refers back to TWL 27-29:

                    And I will show you something different from either
                    Your shadow at morning striding behind you
                    Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you

                    See also TWL 41:

                    looking into the heart of light, the silence.

from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)