The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
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3 Like a patient etherised: Gautier: “Comme une Aphrodite éthérée” [Like an ethereal Aphrodite], La Nue [The Cloud / The Sky / The Naked Woman] 7 (Ricks 1993). For Gautier’s poem, see note to 82. Use of ether for pain relief was pioneered in 1846 at Massachusetts General Hospital, in the operating theatre later called the Ether Dome. This breakthrough in anaesthesia is commemorated by the Ether Monument (1867) in Boston Public Gardens. TSE: “With chemicals and a knife · · · the sinking blackness of ether”, Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think? 18, 25. “Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing”, East Coker III 22. Moody 32: “aethereal may lie just beyond ‘etherised’”. In his Harvard index cards (1914), TSE noted, from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, that B. P. Blood had shown how ether might stimulate mystical consciousness (Crawford 80). To J. H. Oldham, 11 Feb 1943: “The term, ‘religious experience’ was done a good deal of damage by William James going to the dentist and having laughing gas.” Laforgue: “Morte? Se peut-il pas qu’elle dorme | Grise de cosmiques chloroformes?” [Dead? Can’t she be sleeping, drunk on cosmic chloroforms?], Jeux [Pastimes] 3–4 (Ricks 1993). etherised upon a table: operating tables were formerly known as “anesthetic tables” (Russell S. Fowler, The Operating Room and the Patient, 1906).
3–4 etherised · · · streets: William James on effects of “haschish”: “Objects comparatively near will recede to a vast distance, a short street assume to the eye an immeasurable perspective. Ether and chloroform occasionally produce not wholly dissimilar results · · · etherized” (TSE “etherised”), The Principles of Psychology (1890) II 142–3. In TSE’s copy of An Experimental Study of Sensation by Edwin B. Holt and Robert M. Yerkes [1903] 17, he noted to himself “Reading: James. Pr. Psy. Vol II pp. 134–44” (Houghton).
4 certain · · · streets: officialese (esp. US), as in payment “To R. D. Bennett, for sprinkling a certain street”, Acts and Resolutions of the 29th General Assembly of Iowa (1902) 217. Dickens: “he sought out a certain street and number”, Little Dorrit ch. XX. “certain · · · street”, Preludes IV 7–8.
[Poem I 5 · Textual History II 312]
4–5 half-deserted streets, | The muttering retreats: James Thomson: “along the silent streets · · · countless lanes and close retreats”, The City of Dreadful Night III 1, 3. TSE: “At sixteen I discovered (by reading a section of our history of English Literature which we were not required to read) Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night, and the poems of Ernest Dowson. Each was a new and vivid experience. But The City of Dreadful Night or Dowson’s Impenitentia Ultima would hardly, even today, be considered suitable for academic study at the age I have in mind”, On Teaching the Appreciation of Poetry (1960). “streets · · · retreats”, The Little Passion: From “An Agony in the Garret” 2–4.
4–7 certain half-deserted streets · · · one-night cheap hotels | And sawdust: William Acton: “even if some women are to be seen in certain streets in Paris in the early part of the evening, after half-past eleven the streets are quite deserted · · · In London a man has prostitution thrust upon him; in Paris he has to go out of his way to look for it”, Prostitution (1858, 2nd ed. 1870) 112. In Charles-Louis Philippe’s Bubu de Montparnasse ch. I, Pierre walks the sordid streets by night:
Et souvent ses désirs l’avaient mené. Certains soirs, ayant travaillé jusqu’à onze heures, il fermait ses livres et se sentait triste à côté de leur science. Tous les diplômes ne valaient pas le bonheur de vivre. Deux ou trois images des femmes rencontrées lui apparaissaient à l’imagination et ils les suivait, d’abord pour se délasser. Puis tout le feu de ses vingt ans s’animait, tous ses sens sentaient ce que contient une femme qui passe. Alors il se dressait, la gorge sèche et le coeur serré, éteignait sa lampe et descendait dans la rue.
Il marchait. Des prostituées pirouettaient à des coins de rue, avec de pauvres jupes et des yeux questionneurs: il ne les regardait même pas. Il marchait comme marche l’espérance.
[And often his desires swept him away. On certain nights, having studied until eleven, he closed his books and sat crushed with sadness before all their knowledge. All the diplomas in the world were not worth the joy of life. Two or three visions of women he had encountered came to his mind, and he followed them, at first merely to divert himself. Then all the fire of his twenty years flared to life, and his senses sensed the magic contained in a passing woman. He leapt up, his throat parched, his heart contracted. He blew out the lamp and went out into the street. He walked. Prostitutes pirouetted on the street-corners, with their threadbare skirts and their querying eyes. He did not even look at them. He walked as hope walks.]
[Poem I 5 · Textual History II 312–13]
Again: “Ils passèrent la nuit dans un hôtel meublé de la rue Saint-Sauveur et il lui donna quinze francs” [They spent the night in a cheap hotel in the rue Saint-Saveur and he gave her fifteen francs], Bubu ch. VII. (For TSE and Charles-Louis Philippe, see headnote to Preludes.) TSE, aged 26, to Aiken, 31 Dec 1914: “I have been going through one of those nervous sexual attacks which I suffer from when alone in a city. Why I had almost none last fall I don’t know—this is the worst since Paris · · · I am very dependent upon women (I mean female society); and feel the deprivation at Oxford—one reason why I should not care to remain longer—but there, with the exercise and routine, the deprivation takes the form of numbness only; while in the city it is more lively and acute. One walks about the street with one’s desires, and one’s refinement rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches. I should be better off, I sometimes think, if I had disposed of my virginity and shyness several years ago: and indeed I still think sometimes that it would be well to do so before marriage.” (Philippe: “Un homme qui marche porte toutes les choses de sa vie · · · nos désirs” [A man walks carrying with him all the properties of his life · · · our desires], Bubu ch. I. See note to The Waste Land [I] 2–3.) one-night: OED “one” 35, special combinations one-night: “lasting, residing, or used for a single night”; one-night stand: “transf. and fig., spec. a casual sexual encounter”, from 1963. W. R. Burnett’s High Sierra (1940) has “She was · · · a one-night stand type”. OED: “orig. U.S., a single performance of a play, show or the like”, from 1880; the sense in TSE’s letter to John Hayward, 10 Oct 1941, on an invitation to speak in Newcastle and Durham: “These one night stands are very tiring”. cheap hotels: Edward Winslow Martin: “There are over one hundred houses of assignation in New York, known to the police. Besides these, there are places, used as such · · · cheap hotels, where women hire rooms without meals, and receive visitors, with whom they make appointments on the streets · · · Some really good houses have been ruined in this way · · · Even the first-class hotels are kept busy in purging themselves of the evil”, The Secrets of the Great City (1868).
4–8 half-deserted streets · · · restless nights · · · sawdust · · · Streets that follow like a tedious argument: see note to Preludes II 1–4 for John Davidson’s A Woman and her Son.
6 Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels: “And heated nights in second story dance halls”, In the Department Store 6. restless nights: “restless on winter nights”, Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think? 13. “When restless nights distract her brain from sleep”, WLComposite 290.
6–10 Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels · · · Streets that follow like a tedious argument · · · to an overwhelming question: “I have questioned restless nights and torpid days, | And followed every by-way where it led”, Oh little voices of the throats of men 17–18. “through the evening air | A chain of reasoning whereof the thread was gone · · · I walked along”, So through the evening, through the violet air 10–12.
7 sawdust restaurants: OED “sawdust” 3b: “With reference to the use of sawdust for strewing the floor of a place of public entertainment” (now quoting this line). restaurants · · · oyster-shells: TSE’s London Baedeker, acquired 14 Oct 1910, indicated the social stan
ding of different establishments: “Restaurants. Dining Rooms. Oyster Shops” (10). restaurants: TSE sounds the final t in his recordings. OED also gives a pronunciation in which it is not sounded, and the spelling of its first citation, from Fenimore Cooper, 1827, points to the French derivation: “At the most renowned of the Parisian restaurans” (The Prairie II ii 28).
10 lead · · · question: “every man who thinks and lives by thought must have his own scepticism, that which stops at the question, that which ends in denial, or that which leads to faith”, The “Pensées” of Pascal (1931). overwhelming question: Fenimore Cooper: “The whole company were a good deal astounded with this overwhelming question”, The Pioneers ch. XXIII. question: Hamlet III i: “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” Perhaps also OED 6: “to pop the question (slang or colloq.), to propose marriage” (1725).
[Poem I 5 · Textual History II 312–13]
11–12, 27 “What is it?” · · · our visit · · · To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet: Emerson: “But the unit of the visit, | The encounter of the wise,—| Say, what other metre is it | Than the meeting of the eyes?” The Visit. TSE: “There, the eyes are”, The Hollow Men II 4. For “wearing a mask among people”, see note to Oh little voices of the throats of men 15, “Appearances appearances”.
13 In the room … come and go: James Thomson: “pacing to and fro”, In the Room 51. Valerie Eliot wrote to Christopher Ricks, 20 Apr 1995, that among Thomson’s poems, this was “another favourite”. Paul Elmer More had discussed it in Shelburne Essays fifth series (1908) (Crawford 40). See note to 126–31 and notes to The Waste Land [III] 215–18 and The Little Passion: From “An Agony in the Garret” ms1 21 variant. TSE’s extension lectures of 1917 included “Three Poets of Doubt—Matthew Arnold, Edward FitzGerald, James Thomson”, Syllabus: Victorian Literature (1917). “in the room alone”, On a Portrait 4.
13–14 In the room the women come and go | Talking of Michelangelo: an error in Southam has been often repeated: that TSE here is indebted to lines by Laforgue: “Dans la pièce les femmes vont et viennent | En parlant des maîtres de Sienne”. But this is the 1947 translation of TSE’s own lines by Pierre Leyris. Hugh Kenner inadvertently precipitated the error by quoting TSE’s couplet and then saying: “The lines scale down severely in French: ‘Dans la pièce …’”, with an equivocal mention of “the translator” (Kenner 6). “The ladies who are interested in Assyrian art”, Afternoon 1. women come and go: Christina G. Rossetti: “Love-music warbling in their throat | Young men and women come and go”, The Convent Threshold (Ricks 19). For TSE on Christina G. Rossetti, see note to The Hollow Men I 4–10. David Gascoyne claimed to have heard TSE give a reading of her poems at the Poetry Bookshop in the early 1930s (Gascoyne, Selected Poems, 1994, xi). Poe: “Mere puppets they, who come and go”, The Conqueror Worm 12. go | Talking of: “Going · · · Talking of trivial things”, Ash-Wednesday IV 5. “talking of effect and cause”, Convictions (Curtain Raiser) 15. “Talking of art and of aesthetic laws”, WLComposite 229–98 [21]. Michelangelo: pronounced “Michael Angelo” in TSE’s recordings; see Ricks 17–18. (For Napoleon Bonaparte changing the spelling of his name along with his nationality, see TSE to Nelson Landale, 22 June 1938, in headnote to Four Quartets, 3. COMPOSITION.) In his copy of Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ch. V, TSE scored Pater’s comment that Michelangelo “is one of those who incur the judgment of Dante, as having wilfully lived in sadness” (a quotation repeated five pages later). According to Oscar Wilde, who cites the same passage of Pater in De Profundis (1906) 45, the allusion is to the end of Inferno VII. In A Neglected Aspect of Chapman (1924), TSE wrote of Pater “whose ‘Renaissance’ can be fixed nearer to 1890 than to 1500 A.D.”
[Poem I 5 · Textual History II 313]
15 The yellow fog · · · the window-panes: Conan Doyle: “Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses”, The Sign of Four ch. 1; itself invoking Hamlet I ii: “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable | Seem to me all the uses of this world” (Mark Thompson, personal communication). TSE to Mrs. Greacen [Patricia Hutchins], 11 Dec 1956: “As for the fog in Prufrock, it certainly came to seem to me also an English fog, but I assure you that when I wrote those lines I had never seen a London, or an English, fog! We used to have something similar in St. Louis in the old days before smoke abatement had been thought of, on winter mornings when a moist East wind blew the smoke [at the foot: very soft coal!] from the factories in east St. Louis across the river.” For Baudelaire’s “Un brouillard sale et jaune” [a dirty yellow fog], see note to The Waste Land [I] 60.
15–22 fog · · · Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap · · · fell asleep: “It leapt to the floor and made a sudden hiss”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [21]. Feline again: “the GREAT RUMPUSCAT · · · gave a great yawn · · · looked out through the bars of the area · · · looked at the sky and he gave a great leap”, Of the Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles 50–57.
17–20 Licked its tongue · · · Slipped: “the cat which flattens itself · · · Slips out its tongue”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 35–36. “She slips down the stairs”, The Old Gumbie Cat 8. made a sudden leap: Carroll: the White Knight (the leaping chess-piece) “made a sudden pause”, Through the Looking-Glass ch. VIII, “It’s My Own Invention”. a sudden leap: Bergson: “un saut brusque de l’animal à l’homme” [a sudden leap from the animal to man], L’Evolution créatrice (1907) ch. II, final paragraph (Mitchell’s translation, 1911).
17–22 corners of the evening · · · Curled once about the house and fell asleep: Wilde: “shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside · · · wind · · · wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers · · · sleep”, The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. XI. For the same pages of Wilde, see notes to 49 and Prufrock’s Pervigilium [25, 28], Oh little voices of the throats of men 38–40, and The Waste Land [II] 84–87, [II] 87–95. (Richard Shusterman related Wilde’s ch. VII to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and to Rhapsody on a Windy Night in T. S. Eliot Annual I, ed. S. Bagchee, 1990.) TSE: “Dorian Grey has fled to Germany, where a cigarette has been named after him; and the ’Nineties’ æsthetic eccentricities may now be ignored”, The Borderline of Prose (1917). “I am much deceived if Dorian Gray be not perfect rubbish, and the best of Wilde be not in Intentions”, A Preface to Modern Literature (1922). Writing to Eric Barton, 19 Mar 1954, TSE declined to officiate at the unveiling of a plaque for Wilde’s centenary.
18, 22 lingered · · · fell asleep: Van Wyck Brooks: “the genius of romance had lingered here and grown forgetful of itself and fallen asleep”, The Wine of the Puritans: A Study of Present-Day America (1908) 10. TSE reviewed the book in Harvard Advocate 7 May 1909: “Mr. Brooks has handled successfully a difficult form—the dialogue; never allowing it to degenerate into soliloquy, and often rendering a slight difference in the point of view, a shift of personality.”
22 Curled once about the house: “a wave of excitement curled into the street”, Eeldrop and Appleplex I (1917). Curled · · · and fell asleep: “England puts her Great Writers away securely in a Safe Deposit Vault, and curls to sleep”, Observations (1918).
23 And indeed there will be time: Marvell: “Had we but world enough and time”, To his Coy Mistress 1. For Marvell’s poem, see notes to 92–93 and to The Waste Land [III] 196–97 and Elegy 9.
[Poem I 5–6 · Textual History II 313]
24–27 smoke that slides along the street · · · prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet: Emerson: “We come to wear one cut of face and figure · · · foolish face · · · the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease · · · by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the friend’s parlor · · · faces · · · put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs”, Self-Reliance in Essays: First Series (“gusty · · · newspapers”, P
reludes I 5, 8). Tennyson: “And I loathe the squares and streets, | And the faces that one meets”, Maud II [iv] 233–34 (Wimsatt 1952). Charles-Louis Philippe: “Louis Buisson, passionné pour deux ou trois principes philosophiques, y trouvait assez de force pour regarder les hommes en face” [Louis Buisson, in his zeal for two or three philosophical principles, derived therefrom strength enough to look men in the face]; “Le bonheur des filles publiques ressemble aux gueules des rues” [The happiness of the prostitute is like those faces of the street]; “l’on met son sourire aux rencontres des rues et où toute chose se passe avec une ironie française” [a smile is worn for the people met in the street, and wherein everything is carried off with the irony of France], Bubu de Montparnasse ch. I, VII, IX. See note to Little Gidding II 36–47. “the man who in the morning | Has to make up his face before he looks in the mirror”, The Elder Statesman I. to meet the faces that you meet: “to keep the ways you keep”, Oh little voices of the throats of men 10.
24–39 there will be time · · · Time to: Ecclesiastes 3: 1–8 (see East Coker I 9–11 and note).
28–29 murder · · · works and days of hands: Revelation 9: 20–21: “yet repented not of the works of their hands · · · neither repented they of their murders”.
29, 60 works and days · · · days and ways: Tennyson, adopting Hesiod’s title: “he that sang the Works and Days”, To Virgil 3. TSE on Tennyson: “for this side of him you should read the two beautiful poems, to Virgil and to Catullus”, “The Voice of His Time” (1942). Hesiod’s title was also adopted for an essay by Emerson (John Clendinning in Roby ed.). “the maze | Of means and ways”, Goldfish III 19.