[15–17] evil · · · Whispering all together, chuckled at me: Psalm 41: 5, 7: “speak evil of me · · · All that hate me whisper together”.
[Textual History II 316]
[16–17] in the darkness | Whispering all together: “Evening whisper of stars together”, Hidden under the heron’s wing 3. “whispers in darkness”, Murder in the Cathedral I.
[19] watch the darkness: Symons 25 on the supreme artist: “when he looks into the darkness, he sees”.
[19–21, 35] the darkness | Crawling among the papers on the table | It leapt to the floor · · · the darkness creep along the wall: “Across the floor the shadows crawled and crept”, Oh little voices of the throats of men 39. “crawled head downward down a blackened wall”, The Waste Land [V] 381.
[21–22] sudden hiss · · · across: Swinburne: “sudden serpents hiss across her hair”, Laus Veneris 116.
[23] Flattened itself: “the cat which flattens itself in the gutter”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 35. Wilde: “the squat misshapen figure that flattened itself into the shadow as he passed”, The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. XVI, an opium den night-scene with “gas-jets”, “an old man” and “chattered” (TSE: “gas-jet”, [8]; “A blind old drunken man”, [30]; “chatter”, [36]).
[24–25] Stretched out · · · And when the dawn at length: Paradise Lost I 208–209: “and wished morn delays: | So stretcht out huge in length the arch-fiend lay”.
[25, 28] And when the dawn at length had realized itself · · · the world: in F. H. Bradley: “an idea’s general tendency to realize itself”; “Truth is the whole Universe realizing itself in one aspect · · · For it is the whole Universe which, immanent throughout, realizes and seeks itself in truth”; “The Universe is nowhere apart from the lives of the individuals, and, whether as truth or otherwise, the Universe realizes itself not at all except through their differences”; “That which we call our real world · · · It is the Universe realizing itself as truth within finite centres”, Essays on Truth and Reality (1914) 80, 116, 121, 332 (first pub., respectively, July 1904; Apr 1907, the two; and July 1911). TSE: “a consciousness gradually realising itself by the effort of making itself its own objects; so that the term of the process would be an infinite consciousness contemplating the whole world”, The Ethics of Green and Sidgwick (1914). “The morning comes to consciousness”, Preludes II 1. the dawn · · · the world: Wilde: “we watch the dawn remaking the world”, The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. XI (for which see note to 17–22).
[25, 28–29] realized itself · · · experience · · · singing: “a poem, or a passage of a poem, may tend to realize itself first as a particular rhythm before it reaches expression in words · · · and I do not believe that this is an experience peculiar to myself”, The Music of Poetry (1942), which mentions the Pervigilium Veneris.
[25, 30] realized itself · · · blind: Henry Adams: “society in America was always trying, almost as blindly as an earthworm, to realize and understand itself; to catch up with its own head, and to twist about in search of its tail”, The Education of Henry Adams ch. XVI (see note to the title Introspection).
[Textual History II 316]
[28–29] the world · · · my Madness: “the real world is quite mad, and it is the self-appointed task of ethics and metaphysics to organise it”, The Ethics of Green and Sidgwick (1914).
[28, 30–33] fumbled · · · blind · · · man · · · gutters · · · fall: Adams: “one fumbled over it as feebly as ever. In such labyrinths, the staff is a force almost more necessary than the legs; the pen becomes a sort of blind-man’s dog, to keep him from falling into the gutters”, The Education of Henry Adams ch. XXV.
[29] hear my Madness singing: “heard the mermaids singing”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 124. King Lear IV iv: “As mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud” (Lear in his madness, an “old · · · man”, in a play with a “blind old · · · man” too: TSE’s next line). Caliban on the forms which harass him, The Tempest II ii: “sometime like apes that mow and chatter at me · · · Do hiss me into madness” (TSE: “hiss” [21], “my Madness chatter”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 74 ^ 75 [2]). Purg. XXVI 142–43: “Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan; | consiros vei la passada folor” [“I am Arnold, that weep and go a-singing; in thought I see my past madness”]. For the uses to which TSE put this passage, see note to title Ara Vos Prec in headnote to “Poems (1920)”, 7. PUBLICATION OF ARA VOS PREC.
[30–31] A blind old drunken man who sings and mutters, | With broken boot heels stained in many gutters: Kipling: “When the drunken comrade mutters and the great guard-lantern gutters”, Gentleman-Rankers 29 (included by TSE in A Choice of Kipling’s Verse). Baudelaire: “L’âme d’un vieux poëte erre dans la gouttière | Avec la triste voix d’un fantôme frileux” [An old poet’s soul is walking the tiles, lifting a voice as miserable as a shivering ghost’s] (tr. Scarfe, taking gouttière as roof gutter), Le Spleen: Pluviôse 7–8. In Madame Bovary, Emma is haunted by the blind old man, half-mad, who sings. TSE: “A blind old man who coughs and spits and sputters | Stumbling among the alleys and the gutters”, First Debate between the Body and Soul 2–3. “Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter”, Gerontion 14. With broken boot heels stained in many gutters: Wyatt: “With naked foot stalking in my chamber”, They flee from me that sometime did me seek 2 (see note to Paysage Triste 10–12).
Notes to published poem resume.
70 Shall I say: Isaiah 38: 15: “What shall I say?” John 12: 27: “Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say?”
70, 72 at dusk through narrow streets · · · lonely men in shirt-sleeves · · · windows: Henry James: “narrow streets—that vague historic dusk”, and “I not only don’t curse my wakefulness, but go to my window to listen. Three men · · · or a lonely troubadour in his shirt-sleeves draws such artful love-notes”, Siena Early and Late I in Italian Hours (1909). In Prufrock’s Pervigilium the line following “Of lonely men in shirtsleeves, leaning out of windows” [3] began “And when the evening woke”.
73 I should have been a pair of ragged claws: Darwin on the “sexual characters” of crabs: “development of these hook-like processes has probably followed from those females who were the most securely held during the act of reproduction, having left the largest number of offspring”, The Descent of Man ch. IX, a passage marked by TSE in his copy. TSE: “crabs · · · ragged toes · · · Lobsters”, Dirge 4, 10, 16. For “crab-louse” and Turgenev’s Smoke, see March Hare 187–88.
73–74, 120 I should have been a pair of ragged claws | Scuttling · · · I grow old: Hamlet II ii (Folio): “you yourself sir, should be as old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward”. For TSE and the submarine world, see note to Mr. Apollinax 11–15. Scuttling: OED “scuttle” n.4 “= cuttle · · · Also scuttle fish”. across the floors of silent seas: Coleridge: “that silent sea”, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner [II] 106. TSE: “Across the floors that soak”, Interlude: in a Bar 4.
74 ^75 [1] seen · · · darkness creep: Milton: “They creep, yet see, I dark in light exposed”, Samson Agonistes 75 (TSE: “blind · · · man”, [30]). Writing to Olive Walker, 4 Feb 1946, TSE’s brother Henry recalled that at twelve or thirteen TSE “read (much to the family’s astonishment) Milton’s Samson Agonistes”. seen · · · creep along the: Keats: “See, as they creep along the river side, | How she doth whisper to that aged Dame”, Isabella 345–46 (TSE: “Whispering”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [17]).
74 ^75 [1–2] I have seen · · · along the wall · · · I have heard · · · chatter: Tennyson: “I have led her home · · · Just now the dry-tongued laurels’ pattering talk | Seemed her light foot along the garden walk”, Maud I [xviii] 599, 606–607. TSE: “I have heard · · · I have seen”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 124, 126. “I have seen · · · I have had”, Five-Finger Exercises III. Lines to a Duck in the Park 6–7. my Madness chatter: Tennyson: “And then to hear a dead man chatter | Is enough to drive one mad”, Maud II [v] 257–58.
Isaiah 38: 14: “so did I chatter” (for this chapter of Isaiah, see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 70).
74 ^75 [1, 3] I have seen: more than thirty biblical occurrences, among them Job 5: 3: “I have seen the foolish taking root: But suddenly I cursed his habitation”; and Psalm 37: 35–36: “I have seen the wicked in great power”. Symons: “I have seen love, that was so quick a flame, | Go out in ashes; I have seen desire | Go out in smoke, that was so bright a fire”, Time and Memory (1906) 5–7. “I have seen · · · I have seen · · · I have seen · · · I have seen”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 82–85, 126. “I have seen eyes in the street”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 41. See note to WLComposite 321–27, for “Unreal City, I have seen and see”.
74 ^75 [3] I have seen the world roll up into a ball: for Marvell’s To his Coy Mistress, see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 92–93. Bergson on Aristotle’s treatment of ideas: “Aristote les pressa les unes dans les autres, les ramassa en boule, et plaça au-dessus du monde physique une Forme” [Aristotle pressed them into each other, rolled them up into a ball, and set above the physical world a Form], L’Evolution créatrice ch. IV.
74 ^75 [3–4] I · · · the world · · · dissolve · · · fall away: Keats: “That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, | And with thee fade away · · · dissolve, and quite forget”, Ode to a Nightingale 19–21. the world roll · · · a ball · · · away: Blake: “The Senses roll themselves in fear | And the flat Earth becomes a Ball | | The Stars Sun Moon all shrink away”, The Mental Traveller 63–65.
75, 77 evening · · · malingers: Schmidt 1982a objects that despite “apt associations with both malign and lingers”, the idea of an evening pretending illness (OED) “seems absurd”. OED: “To pretend illness, or to produce or protract disease, in order to escape duty”, quoting “The question comes to be, whether the patient .. is malingering” and (under “malingering”) “Malingering is generally easily detected by one who is accustomed to examine nervous cases”, 1899 (TSE: “the evening · · · like a patient etherised”, 2–3, and “the nerves” , 105).
[Poem I 7 · Textual History II 316–17]
76–77 Smoothed by long fingers, | Asleep … tired … or it malingers: “I should for a moment linger | And follow the curve with my finger”, The Love Song of St. Sebastian 29–30. “Just while they linger shaking a finger”, Suite Clownesque II 7.
79–80 tea and cakes and ices · · · crisis: Symons: “we ’scape, with sweets and ices, | The folly of Love’s sacrifices”, From Paul Verlaine: Fêtes Galantes XII: Cythère. TSE: “With cakes and tea”, Goldfish III 4. “Evening, lights, and tea!” Spleen 7. Edmund Husserl: [No one understands the sentence “There are cakes” as he understands the mathematical sentence “There are regular solids”. In the first case we do not mean that cakes exist absolutely and in general, but that there are cakes here and now—for coffee], Logische Untersuchungen ch. 3, §27; beside which TSE wrote in his copy: “es sollte überhaupt Kuchen geben” [there should always be cake].
80 the strength to force the moment to its crisis: TSE after the Abdication of Edward VIII: “I can speak, at least, as one who, from what may be either a judicial or a vacillating temper of mind, failed to make up his mind until some time after the ‘crisis’ was over · · · one’s feelings might vary several times a day · · · my own private opinion fluctuated constantly, so I can hardly be expected to take at their face value the ‘instinctive reactions’ of the people at such a moment · · · In taking the step he did, or ‘forcing the issue,’ King Edward is to be commended”, Mr. Reckitt, Mr. Tomlin and the Crisis (1937). Contrast “a moment’s surrender | Which an age of prudence can never retract”, The Waste Land [V] 403, 405; see note. crisis: OED 1: “Pathol. The point in the progress of a disease when an important development or change takes place which is decisive of recovery or death.” William James: “medicine used to speak of two ways, lysis and crisis, one gradual, the other abrupt, in which one might recover”, The Varieties of Religious Experience lecture VIII. TSE: “every generation, every turn of time when the work of four or five men who count have reached middle age, is a crisis”, Observations (1918).
81 I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed: 2 Samuel 1: 12: “they mourned, and wept, and fasted”; 2 Samuel 12: 22: “I fasted and wept” (Hands). Edwin Diller Starbuck: “I mourned and wept and prayed”, The Psychology of Religion (1899) 83; title mentioned in Harvard index cards (1914) (Joshua Richards, personal communication).
82 head · · · brought in upon a platter: the head of John the Baptist “was brought in a charger” to Salome (Matthew 14: 6–11 and Mark 6: 22–28). Laforgue: “Plat veuf du chef de saint Jean-Baptiste!” [the salver widowed of St. John the Baptist’s head!], Jeux [Pastimes]. TSE: “the head of Mr. Apollinax rolling under a chair”, Mr. Apollinax 13.
82–85 slightly bald · · · hold my coat: see note to Spleen 11–14.
[Poem I 7–8 · Textual History II 317]
83 I am no prophet: Amos 7: 14: “I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet’s son” (Southam). Blake: I am no Homer’s Hero (see note to Portrait of a Lady II 28–30). For Blake’s Rossetti ms, which has much on “Michael Angelo”, see headnote to Love seeketh not Itself to please (“Uncollected Poems”). In Reflections on Contemporary Poetry II (1917), TSE quoted Jean de Bosschère: “n’est pas un prophète”, from Homere Mare Habite sa Maison de Planches, pub. with facing tr. by F. S. Flint in The Closed Door (1917). “prophets · · · of whom I am not one”; and of Dante, Donne and Laforgue: “They were no prophets”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 159, 224 (Clark Lectures V, VIII). “Jules Laforgue also was among the prophets, who say Credo, not among those lost people who say Dubito”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 279–80 (Turnbull Lecture II). “I would hesitate to make myself a prophet. In any case, you see, the prophetic element in poetry very often is unconscious in the poet himself. He may be prophesying without knowing it”, A Conversation, recorded in 1958, between T. S. Eliot and Leslie Paul ([1964/]1965). In 1938 R. G. Collingwood sent TSE a copy of The Principles of Art which ends with praise of TSE as prophetic “not in the sense that he foretells things to come, but in the sense that he tells his audience, at risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own hearts · · · The reason why they need him is that no community altogether knows its own heart · · · For the evils which come from that ignorance the poet as prophet suggests no remedy, because he has already given one. The remedy is the poem itself.” TSE to Tom Stauffer, 17 Aug 1944: “do you know Collingwood’s · · · Principles of Art · · · To a plain literary practitioner like myself, who, as F. H. Bradley said of himself, has no capacity for the abstruse, Collingwood seems very good.” TSE began his preface to Leone Vivante’s English Poetry (1950) with a reference to Collingwood’s book. I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter: “he was no prophet · · · his prose is great prose”, Machiavelli (1927). Hamlet V i: “’tis no great matter there” (Shawn Worthington, personal communication).
83, 111 I am no prophet · · · I am not Prince Hamlet: Dante on his unworthiness: “Io non Enea, io non Paolo sono” [I am not Æneas, am not Paul], Inf. II 32
84 I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker: “I have seen the darkness creep along the wall | I have heard my Madness chatter before day”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 74 ^ 75 [1–2]. “I have seen the morning shine”, Five-Finger Exercises III. Lines to a Duck in the Park 6.
85 eternal Footman: for the Footman in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ch. VI, see note to Portrait of a Lady II 28, III 25. Bunyan, The Heavenly Foot-Man; or, A Description of the Man that Gets to Heaven (1689) (Moody 32). In response to an untraced letter about Poems 1909–1925, TSE wrote to Wyndham Lewis, 9 Jan 1926: “Of course I agree with you about the footman and indeed about most [of] the early stuff” (possibly referring to the “footman” of Aunt Helen).
88 the cups, the marmalade, the tea: “With marmalade and tea at six”, Interlude in London 3.<
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89 Among the porcelain, among some talk: the preposition is at odds with these nouns. “Among the music”, 53 variant. (For “along”, see note to Oh little voices of the throats of men 48, and for “across”, see note to Suite Clownesque I 1, 12.) porcelain · · · talk: “porcelain, | Murmurs a word”, Mandarins 2 16–17. some talk of you and me: FitzGerald: “Some little Talk awhile of ME and THEE | There was—and then no more of ME and THEE”, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 4th ed., XXXII (Unger). TSE: “But what is there for you and me | For me and you · · ·?” The Death of the Duchess I 10–11.
[Poem I 8 · Textual History II 317]
92–93 To have squeezed the universe into a ball | To roll it: Marvell: “Let us roll all our strength and all | Our sweetness up into one ball, | And tear our pleasures with rough strife, | Thorough the iron gates of life”, To his Coy Mistress 41–44; quoted in Andrew Marvell (1921). “I have seen the world roll up into a ball”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 74 ^ 75 [3]. With “squeezed” in one and “the world” in the other, TSE’s two adaptations divide the debt to Symons 109: “In Laforgue, sentiment is squeezed out of the world before one begins to play at ball with it” (Kenner 134). TSE translating Mauron: “all the phenomena of nature are irrational, inasmuch as we have not yet squeezed the world into syllogisms”, Concerning “Intuition” (1927).
92–102 To have squeezed the universe into a ball · · · teacups: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, on women: “If they can’t agitate the universe and play ball with hemispheres, they’ll make · · · social storms in household teacups”; and “the universe is suddenly narrowed into about half a dozen acres; the mighty scheme of creation is crushed into a bandbox”, Lady Audley’s Secret ch. VI, ch. IX (Heywood). For the novel, see notes to 122 and to The Waste Land [II] 78–87. TSE: “I should say that the mind of any poet would be magnetised in its own way, to select automatically, in his reading (from picture papers and cheap novels, indeed, as well as serious books, and least likely from works of an abstract nature, though even these are aliment for some poetic minds) the material—an image, a phrase, a word—which may be of use to him later”, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 78.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 35
