The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 34
32–33, 48 indecisions · · · visions and revisions · · · decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse: “revision · · · decision”, Entretien dans un parc 12, 15. “divisions and precisions”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 7. In a palm-reader’s report on himself, TSE pencilled “The Prufrock Complex” against “when faced with a personal problem, any prolonged contemplation of probabilities merely produces hesitancy and indecision. You must make quick decisions but not the impulsive ones.” He wrote “Prufrock complex” again in the matching report on Henry, against “you are inclined to weigh too carefully the pros and cons of your difficulty, with the result that you merely become hesistant and undecided”, Palm Readings—1938 by Noel Jaquin (ts Houghton). (To Henry Eliot, 26 March 1920: “It is almost impossible for any of our family to make up their minds.”)
34 a toast: OED “toast” n.1 2: “(without a or pl.): Bread so browned by fire, electric heat, etc.”
38–39, 45–46, 122 “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” | Time to turn back · · · Do I dare | Disturb the universe? · · · Do I dare to eat a peach?: Hector Chainaye, tr. Stuart Merrill: “dare not prevent them · · · do not dare to press too hard · · · does not dare to come forth · · · not daring to make a sound · · · And I dare not move. Yet I should leave · · · Ah! why am I human? · · · my presence disturbs them—and yet I do not move, I dare not”, The Guests in Pastels in Prose. Emerson: “Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much”, Self-Reliance.
39 Time to turn back: “‘Time to regain the door’”, The Death of the Duchess II 31.
[Poem I 6 · Textual History II 313–14]
40 with a bald spot in the middle of my hair: Richard Barham: “a little bald patch on the top of his crown”, The Brothers of Birchington: A Lay of St. Thomas à Becket 40 in The Ingoldsby Legends, for which see headnote to A Fable for Feasters (Crawford 2015 72).
40–43 bald · · · morning coat · · · collar · · · necktie rich and modest: Symons 101 on Laforgue: “D’allures? says M. Gustave Kahn, fort correctes, de hauts gibus, des cravates sobres, des vestons anglais, des pardessus clergymans, et de par les nécessités, un parapluie immuablement placé sous le bras.” [His aspect? firmly correct, tall hats, sober ties, jackets in the English style, overcoats à la clergyman, and by way of being indispensable, an umbrella unalterably tucked under the arm.] TSE: “And Life, a little bald and gray · · · Waits, hat and gloves in hand, | Punctilious of tie and suit”, Spleen 11–14.
40, 43, 49, 55 hair— | · · · pin— | · · · all— | · · · all—: on Arnold’s Memorial Verses: “The dashes at the end of two lines are a symptom of weakness, like Arnold’s irritating use of italicised words”, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 107.
44 (They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”): Laforgue: “(Oh! comme elle est maigre!)” [Oh! how thin she’s got!] Légende. In TSE’s copy of Coleridge’s poems (Houghton), he wrote at the head of Religious Musings: “barbarous splendour of exclamation points”. For Gautier’s “Carmen est maigre”, see note to Whispers of Immortality 17, 20.
48 decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse: “You made a decision. You set in motion | Forces in your life and in the lives of others | Which cannot be reversed · · · it is a serious matter | To bring someone back from the dead”, The Cocktail Party I iii (here: “Lazarus · · · dead”, 94).
49 known them all already, known them all: The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. XI: “He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world”. For Wilde’s chapter, see note to 17–22.
49–50 For I have known them all already, known them all— | Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons: “evenings · · · all · · · call, recall | So many nights and afternoons · · · all”, Goldfish I 1–8.
50–51 mornings … I have measured out my life with coffee spoons: Pope: “morning · · · pass her time · · · Or o’er cold coffee trifle with the spoon, | Count the slow clock”, Epistle To Miss Blount, on her leaving the Town, after the Coronation 14–18 (Valentine Cunningham, personal communication). measured out my life with coffee spoons: Samuel Osgood: “Measuring life by its moral worth”, Mile-Stones in our Life-Journey (1855). “Time, as an old man, measuring life with an hour-glass”, The Crayon Sept 1857. Sending F. S. Flint a copy of René Taupin’s L’influence du symbolisme français sur la poésie américaine, 1910–1920 (Paris, 1929; Berg), TSE corrected Taupin’s misquotation in this line, “with a coffee spoon” (Patricia Clements, N&Q June 1980). TSE: “Sounding the depths with a silver spoon”, Goldfish III 6. coffee spoons: used for stirring, but unlike teaspoons, not usually for measuring.
52 a dying fall: Twelfth Night I i: “That strain again, it had a dying fall.” TSE: “This music is successful with a ‘dying fall’”, Portrait of a Lady III 39.
[Poem I 6 · Textual History II 314]
52–53 a dying fall | Beneath the music from a farther room: 2 Henry IV IV iv, KING HENRY: “whisper music to my weary spirit.” WARWICK: “Call for the music in the other room.” A moment later the Prince enters, and stays to watch his dying father while the others withdraw “into the other room”. TSE: “whisper music”, The Waste Land [V] 378.
56 The eyes that fix you: Emerson: “do right and scorn eyes”, Self-Reliance in Essays: First Series, two pages before “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man” (for which see note to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 25–26). fix · · · formulated phrase: the fixative formaldehyde was in production by this time (“etherised”, 3). formulated phrase: “We may therefore formulate as follows”, Reflections on “vers libre” (1917). “formulaic recurrence” and “formulaic iterancy” are terms in The Higher Criticism applied to a Modern Science (anon.), The Living Age, 13 May 1899.
56, 58 fix · · · formulated phrase · · · pinned: William James in Some Problems of Philosophy on the inadequacy of concepts to our perceptions: “The concepts themselves are fixed, even though they designate parts that move in the flux · · · our flowing life must be cut into discrete bits and pinned upon a fixed relational scheme”, ch. V. And on empiricism: “it stays inside the flux of life expectantly, recording facts, not formulating laws, and never pretending that man’s relation to the totality of things as a philosopher is essentially different from his relation to the parts of things as a daily patient or agent in the practical current of events”, ch. VI (TSE: “patient”, 3). See note to 73–74 and headnote to I am the Resurrection and the Life.
58 pinned and: “one inevitable cross | Whereon our souls are pinned, and bleed”, The Little Passion: From “An Agony in the Garret” ms1 7–8 variant.
60 butt-ends of my days and ways: Swinburne: “the ending of the days and ways”, Laus Veneris 139 (see Prufrock’s Pervigilium [21–22]). TSE quoted Laus Veneris in a letter to Aiken, 19 July 1914, and considered it one of the Swinburne poems that “a volume of selections · · · should certainly contain”, Swinburne as Poet (1920). “a life composed so much of ways and ends”, Portrait of a Lady I 21, ms 1st reading.
60–61, 65, 68 days and ways · · · presume · · · lamplight · · · perfume · · · presume: Herbert: “way · · · day · · · light · · · perfume · · · presume”, Easter 19–26.
60, 71 butt-ends of my days · · · light · · · smoke: Kipling: “And the light of Days that have Been, the dark of the Days that Are, | And Love’s torch stinking and stale, like the butt of a dead cigar— | | The butt of a dead cigar · · · And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a smoke”, The Betrothed. OED “camel” 4 quotes “butt-end of your cigar” from 1827. TSE: “burnt-out ends of smoky days”, Preludes I 4. butt-ends: OED 1b: “fig. The mere concluding part; the ‘fag end’”, with Richard III II ii: “The butt-end of a mother’s blessing”.
[Poem I 7 · Textual History II 315]
63–64 Arms · · · braceleted · · · hair: Donne: “That subtile wreat
h of haire, which crowns my arme”, The Funeral 3 (Grover Smith 1996 155). TSE quoted Donne’s “A bracelet of bright haire about the bone” (The Relique 6) in The Metaphysical Poets (1921), and then in the fourth Clark Lecture as “an example of those things said by Donne which could not have been put equally well otherwise, or differently by a poet of any other school. The associations are perfect: those of ‘bracelet’, the brightness of the hair, after years of dissolution, and the final emphasis of ‘bone’”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 125–26. Arms · · · bare | (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!): “her arms were bare | Fixed for a question, her hands behind her hair | And the firelight shining”, The Death of the Duchess II 25–27 (relating “Fixed” to “hair”, as here “pinned”, 58). light brown hair: Stephen C. Foster’s popular song of 1854: “I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair, | Borne like a vapor on the summer air” (George Monteiro, Explicator Spring 1987).
[Poem I 7 · Textual History II 315]
65–66 Is it perfume from a dress | That makes me so digress: “Bonnets, silk hats, and conscious graces | In repetition that displaces | Your mental self-possession | By this unwarranted digression”, Spleen 3–6. “‘How you digress!’” Conversation Galante 6. perfume from a dress: Judith Gautier, tr. Stuart Merrill: “the wind blows perfumes from their dresses”, By the River in Pastels in Prose.
69 And how should I begin?: Aeneid IV 284: “quae prima exordia sumat?” [And how should he begin?], tr. Dryden, IV 408 (Joshua Richards, personal communication). Baudelaire: “Pourquoi réussirais-je, puisque je n’ai même pas envie d’essayer?” [How should I succeed, since I have not even the desire to make the attempt?], Mon Cœur mis à nu [My Heart Laid Bare], Journaux Intimes XXXIII.
Prufrock’s Pervigilium (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, after 69. Printed in Textual History.)
The indenting of the opening lines of Prufrock’s Pervigilium is uncertain in ms. The first three lines of Prufrock’s Pervigilium correspond to 70–72 of the final poem. In March Hare it was taken as including also, at the end, 73–74 of the final poem and four further deleted lines, 74 ^ 75, making it six lines longer in all. See Textual History, description of ms1.
Gordon 65–66: “Prufrock’s Pervigilium is undated, but it was probably copied into Eliot’s Notebook in 1912. The rest of Prufrock (i.e. the poem as it was eventually published) was copied into the Notebook, in his spiky hand, in Munich, July–August 1911. But Eliot deliberately left four pages in the middle of the poem blank, which suggests he had a rough draft of the Pervigilium which awaited completion.”
Title Pervigilium: OED “pervigilation”: “Obs. a watching through the night.” The Pervigilium Veneris, a poem of 93 lines, later than the second century, is preserved in the Latin Anthology. Set on the eve of the spring festival, it ends with the nightingale: “illa cantat; nos tacemus; quando ver venit meum?” [he sings; we are silent; when will my own springtime come?]. For “when will”, see note to Five-Finger Exercises I. Lines to a Persian Cat 7–8, 10.
In The Spirit of Romance (1910), Pound printed the poem in translation, after commenting:
The point is that the metric of the Pervigilium probably indicated as great a change of sensibility in its day as the change from Viennese waltzes to jazz may indicate in our own.
Cras amet qui nunquam amavit
Quique amavit cras amet
Let whoever never loved, love tomorrow,
Let whoever has loved, love tomorrow
W. H. Porter translated the Pervigilium as The Watch-Night of Venus in 1909. J. W. Mackail’s translation was printed by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson for the Doves Press in 1910, and another edition with translation by Cecil Clementi was published in 1911. TSE refers to the Pervigilium in his Note to The Waste Land [V] 428 (see Commentary), and in relation to “the native measure of Latin poetry” in The Music of Poetry (1942).
In Marius the Epicurean (1885) ch. VI–VII, Walter Pater had elaborately fantasised an author for the Latin poem. After catching the plague, “the terrible new disease” brought back from foreign lands, Flavian writes “a kind of nuptial hymn” while dying, and Marius keeps a nightlong vigil. So Veneris suggests not only “of Venus” but “of the venereal” (Pater: “depositing various degrees of lifelong infirmity in this member or that”). TSE: “Pater is inclined to emphasize whatever is morbid or associated with physical malady · · · Marius itself is incoherent; its method is a number of fresh starts · · · To the end, Marius remains only a half-awakened soul · · · The true importance of the book, I think, is as a document of one moment in the history of thought and sensibility in the nineteenth century”, Arnold and Pater (1930). (To William Blissett, 12 Aug 1953: “Pater had a much greater influence upon me at one period of my life than any reader would gather from my essay · · · At the age of sixteen or seventeen, I was fascinated · · · and think that I read all of his work—some of his books several times, especially Studies in the Renaissance, Marius the Epicurean and Imaginary Portraits”.)
A Parisian pervigilium, Laforgue’s sonnet La Première nuit, similarly has children, and an old man in a sexual setting, with—below the gas-light—prostitutes soliciting: “Ses filles aux seins froids qui, sous le gaz blafard | Voguent, flairant de l’oeil un mâle de hasard” [Its cold-breasted girls who, under the ashen gas-light, sail along, sniffing out with their eyes a random male]. Laforgue: “je rêve à ma fenêtre” [I dream at my window]. (TSE: “I fumbled to the window to experience the world”, [28].) Laforgue twice refers in his sonnet to “mon chat Mürr”; he praised Baudelaire’s originality: “Le premier, parla de Paris en damné quotidien de la capitale (les becs de gaz que tourmente le vent de la Prostitution qui s’allument dans les rues · · · et les chats)” [The first who spoke of Paris and the everyday damnation of the capital (the gaslamps lighting up the streets and tormented by the wind of Prostitution · · · and cats)], Notes sur Baudelaire. (This, the text of 1903 available to TSE, is corrected by P. Bonnefis in his edition of Mélanges posthumes, 1979, 111.) TSE: “It leapt to the floor and made a sudden hiss”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [21], and see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 15–22.
Wilde: “He remembered wandering through dimly-lit streets, past gaunt black-shadowed archways and evil-looking houses. Women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter had called after him. Drunkards had reeled by cursing, and chattering to themselves like monstrous apes. He had seen grotesque children huddled upon doorsteps, and heard shrieks and oaths from gloomy courts”, The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. VII. Paul Elmer More on James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night: “For this poem of unrelieved pessimism is simply the impressions of an insomniac changed from self-complaining to a phantom evocation of the London as he came to know it from his fierce nocturnal vigils—‘the City is of Night, but not of Sleep’”, Shelburne Essays fifth series (1908) 184.
[Textual History II 315–16]
[5] the children whimpering in corners: Charles-Louis Philippe: “parce que dans nos âmes il y a le bon coin qui, du temps où nous ne faisions pas le mal, était plein de sentiments simples et qui reste toujours à sa place et où des voix parfois descendent et viennent crier commes des enfants abandonnés” [because in the soul is a good corner which, in the days before doing harm, was replete with simple emotions, and there it remains forever, and at times voices descend into it, and come crying like forsaken children], Bubu de Montparnasse ch. VIII. TSE: “Children’s voices in little corners | Whimper whimper”, The Burnt Dancer 20–21. in corners: “Dust in sunlight and memory in corners”, A Song for Simeon 6.
[7–15] Women, spilling out of corsets, stood in entries · · · up stairs · · · at night through narrow streets · · · evil houses: see TSE to Aiken 31 Dec 1914: “One walks about the street with one’s desires”, quoted in note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 4–7. spilling out of corsets: Laurent Tailhade: “Vous dont la gorge flotte en amont du corset” [You whose bosom overflows the corset], Vieilles Actrices [Old Ac
tresses] 34. For Tailhade, see headnote to Cousin Nancy and note to Afternoon 1–2.
[8–9] flickered | And the oil cloth curled up stairs: Keats: “the wide stairs · · · lamp was flickering · · · And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor”, The Eve of St. Agnes 355–60. oil cloth: defined in Webster’s Dictionary (1828): “cloth oiled or painted for covering floors”.
[12] drifted: of Marius the Epicurean (see headnote): “Marius merely drifts towards the Christian Church”, Arnold and Pater (1930). “The artist is part of him a drifter, at the mercy of impressions”, Eeldrop and Appleplex II (1917).
[13] drug store: OED: “orig. U.S. and chiefly N.Amer. A pharmacy”, from 1810; by the end of the century, established as “often also dealing extensively or mainly in other articles”.
[14–16] I have gone at night through narrow streets, | | Where evil houses leaning all together · · · in the darkness: Proverbs 2: 13–18: “Who leave the paths of uprightness, to walk in the ways of darkness; who rejoice to do evil · · · deliver thee from the strange woman · · · For her house inclineth unto death.”
[14–17] night · · · evil houses · · · me in the darkness: Job 17: 12–13: “night · · · the grave is mine house: I have made my bed in the darkness.”
[15] evil houses leaning all together: “staring forms | Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed”, The Waste Land [II] 105–106. “We are the stuffed men | Leaning together”, The Hollow Men 12–13. “And breastless creatures under ground | Leaned backward with a lipless grin”, Whispers of Immortality 3–4. “Leaves the room and reappears | Outside the window, leaning in”, Sweeney Among the Nightingales 29–30. “In the square they lean against each other · · · The people leaning against another in the square”, The Death of the Duchess 18, 30. evil houses: including the sense of houses of evil repute, brothels (from 16th century).