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Songs for the Seasons  by losselen

Contrary to the title, each chapter is not necessarily of a particular season. Rather, their titles and their ordering are from Eliot's Four Quartets. In "The Kingfisher's Wing", there is a phrase that I lifted from Donald Hall's "Affirmation": "to grow old is to lose everything." Also I am taking some liberty with Elven cosmology in Aegnor, seeing that Elves probably do not perceive time as infinite or cyclic.

1) "the kingfisher's wing"

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?

    Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

- IV. of  "Burnt Norton"

2) "late November"

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?

- "East Coker"

3) "the tolling bell"

And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.

- "The Dry Salvages"

4) "Midwinter spring"

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic."

- "Little Gidding"







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