“… And I who am here dissembled / Proffer my deeds to oblivion…”

(T.S. Eliot, from “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree,” in Ash-Wednesday.)

“Dissembled” here seems to be intended to suggest “disassembled,” since the bones of the speaker lie strewn about the tree.

The message of the poem seems to be: the deeds of a mortal, once done, are done and finished. They are offered up for judgement, which decides the fate of the immortal soul, and then over time the deeds, and the mortal who did them, will be forgotten. It is foolish to seek immortality on earth. No deed will, ultimately, stand the test of time.

And yet the speaker speaks on. I think this might be the “dissembling” that is happening: the speaker speaks of forgetting, of being nothing, and yet continues to say “I”. The speaker is not quite committed to the idea of becoming nothing, and furtively continues to hope for a more mundane form of immortality than is promised by Christianity. Eliot can’t but hope that, by contributing to the literary tradition through his poems, he will earn a form of immortality on Earth.