The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  92–93, 120 To have squeezed the universe into a ball | To roll · · · grow old: Bergson: “This inner life may be compared to the unrolling of a coil, for there is no living being who does not feel himself coming gradually to the end of his rôle; and to live is to grow old. But it may just as well be compared to a continual rolling up, like that of a thread on a ball, for our past follows us · · · and consciousness means memory”, An Introduction to Metaphysics (tr. T. E. Hulme, 1912) 11–12. (TSE to David Higham, 11 May 1934: “although I used to attend Bergson’s lectures in 1910, and at that time studied all of his works very carefully, I am now wholly incompetent to write about such subjects · · · I might possibly consent to write an essay on Bergson, if you could induce Bergson to write an essay about me.”)

  93 to roll it towards: “Rolls toward the moon a frenzied eye”, Nocturne 11. towards: to Hope Mirrlees, 25 July 1948: “In my absence you will receive a copy of a profound, but brief book called Notes towards a Definition of Culture (I am never sure when to write ‘towards’ and when ‘toward’).” With the exception of the printing in Catholic Anthology, the reading was “toward” until the proof of 1963 (as it remains at 108). “Toward”, the more American form, is usual in the March Hare poems and appears in Rhapsody on a Windy Night and Sweeney Among the Nightingales. In WLComposite 551, TSE adds -s apparently as a second thought in forming the word (WLFacs 60), after which “towards” is usual in his poems, although he sometimes pronounced it to’rd (both 1946–47 recordings of Little Gidding II 34). Fowler: “best pronounced but in recent use the influence of spelling is forcing on the half educated · · · the -s form is the prevailing one, & the other tends to become literary on the one hand & provincial on the other.”

  [Poem I 8 · Textual History II 317–18]

  94 Lazarus: at Luke 16: 19–31, Christ tells the parable of the deaths of Dives, the rich man who went to hell, and Lazarus, the beggar who went to heaven. Dives then besought Abraham to send Lazarus to his five brothers, urging them to repent. Abraham replied: “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.” At John 11: 1–44, Christ raises a different Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, from the dead (Clifford J. Fish, Explicator VIII, 1949–50). Similar dualities include St. Narcissus/Narcissus (The Death of Saint Narcissus), Euphorion (Suite Clownesque III 10), and St. John (see headnote to The Love Song of St. Sebastian). Geographic dualities: “Belle Isle · · · the horn · · · the Gulf” (Gerontion 69, 71), and Cairo (see note to Ash-Wednesday unadopted part title to I, and headnote to II). TSE’s mother wrote a poem entitled The Raising of Lazarus (Hands). come from the dead: Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “a special revelation, shakes the heart | Of all the men and women in the world, | As if one came back from the dead and spoke”, Aurora Leigh bk. 1 906–908 (TSE: “shaking my heart”, The Waste Land [V] 402). Aurora Leigh bk. 1 178 also mentions Lazarus, but in What is Minor Poetry? (1944), TSE said he had not read the poem. I shall tell you all: Matthew 18: 26: “I will pay thee all” (see note to O lord, have patience 1).

  96 one, settling a pillow by her head: Donne: “Where, like a pillow on a bed, | A Pregnant banke swel’d up, to rest | The violets reclining head”, The Extasie 1–3. TSE: “To compare a bank to a pillow (it is surely superfluous to add ‘on a bed’ since a pillow may be presumed to have much the same shape wherever it be disposed) does neither dignify nor elucidate”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 109 (Clark Lecture III); also, for Crashaw’s pillow, 172 (Lecture VI). Pope: “As long as Atalantis shall be read, | Or the small Pillow grace a Lady’s Bed”, The Rape of the Lock III 165–66. (TSE’s schoolboy copy of Pope’s Poetical Works was catalogued at Milton Academy in the late 1930s.) one · · · her head: Fowler: “the impersonal one always can, & now usually does, provide its own possessive &c.—one’s, oneself, & one; thus, One does not like to have one’s word doubted · · · But · · · in American, in older English, & in a small minority of modern British writers, the above sentences would run One does not like to have his word doubted; If one fell, he would hurt himself badly.” one · · · her head: specific: “while one lifts her hand”, Mandarins 2 14; unspecific: “one who smiles · · · his expression in a glass”, Portrait of a Lady [III] 16–17.

  97–108 at all · · · not it, at all · · · If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl · · · should say: “F. M.”: “On my replying faintly, painfully aware of all that was involved, that I found Gilbert and Sullivan a bore, the same expression convulsed his features as, at a certain moment in 1919, would have distorted the marble countenance of Dorilant, if one had said, ‘settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl’: No, I did not care for the Boutique at all, not at all”, Letters of the Moment II (1924). For Gilbert and Sullivan, see note to 122–25.

  101 sprinkled streets: streets were watered in summer to control dust. Henley: “I can smell the sprinkled pavement”, In Hospital XXIII 18. TSE: “the sawdust trampled street”, “trampled by insistent feet”, Preludes II 3, IV 3. “the trampled edges of the street · · · Sprouting”, Morning at the Window 2–4.

  101–102 After the sunsets and the dooryards · · · After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts: Charles K. Harris: “After the ball is over, | After the break of morn, | After the dancers’ leaving, | After the stars are gone”, After the Ball (1892); reputedly the sheet music sold more than 5 million copies. Whitman: “After the sea-ship, after the whistling winds, | After the white-gray sails taut to their spars and ropes”, After the Sea-Ship (Musgrove 27). TSE: “After the praying and the silence and the crying · · · After the judges and the advocates and wardens”, After the turning of the inspired days 2, 6. “After the torchlight · · · After the frosty silence · · · After the agony”, The Waste Land [V] 322–24.

  [Poem I 8 · Textual History II 318]

  101–102, 108 sunsets · · · teacups · · · toward the window: “by a window drinking tea · · · sunset”, Mandarins 2 2, 13.

  104 It is impossible to say just what I mean: to Richard Aldington, 13 Oct 1921: “I really cannot say enough—but it is not merely quantity of expression, but impossibility of saying what I feel.”

  105 as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: just such a projection using “the X-Ray with microscopic attachment” was illustrated beside an article on Seeing the Brain in St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat 17 Jan 1897 (reproduced Crawford 8). Clough: “Severing · · · As by a magic screen, the seer from the sight | (Palsying the nerves · · ·)”, Why should I say 50–53. (Pound to Joyce, 6 Sept 1915, on literary reviewing: “anything which casts the human psychology on the screen or makes it act visibly from ascertainable motives is of interest”.) TSE: “images · · · flickered against the ceiling”, Preludes III 4–6. as if a magic lantern: Henley: “as when you change | Pictures in a magic lantern”, In Hospital XXIII 5–6. threw: the standard verb: “pictures thrown on a screen with the ordinary magic lantern”, Popular Mechanics Sept 1909. nerves: OED “nerve” 8d: “pl. A disordered nervous system; nervousness” (a distinct sense since 1890). Symons’s Nerves (1895) begins: “The modern malady of love is nerves”, and the penultimate line has “Nerves, nerves!” Symons 108: “It is an art of the nerves, this art of Laforgue, and it is what all art would tend towards if we followed our nerves on all their journeys.” TSE: “the imagination | Or the nerves”, Easter: Sensations of April II 9–10 (see note). On Donne’s Satires: “this deliberate over-stimulation, exploitation of the nerves—for such it is—has in it, to me, something unscrupulous”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 158 (Clark Lecture V). On Baudelaire: “We cannot be primarily interested in any writer’s nerves (and remember that ‘nerves’ used in this way is a very vague and unscientific term)”, Baudelaire in our Time (1927). See note to The Waste Land [II] 111 “nerves”.

  110 That is not what I meant: Kipling: “(And it wasn’t the least what the lady meant)”, The Vampire 16 (in A Choice of Kipling’s Verse). TSE
: “we cannot wholly discriminate what we mean from the meaning of our words deeds. The former is extension, the latter description. The former gives something which really seems more nearly what we had in mind than what we thought we had in mind. The latter is so remote that it is not even thought that we might or should have had it in mind. When you can say ‘Oh yes! I beg pardon—that is what I meant,’ you have extension”, The Ethics of Green and Sidgwick (1914).

  111 No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be: Pater: “No! Shakespeare’s Kings are not, nor are meant to be, great men”, Shakespeare’s English Kings in Appreciations (1889) (Robert F. Fleissner, American Literature Mar 1966). Byron (quoting Hamlet III i): “‘To be or not to be! That is the question,’ | Says Shakespeare, who just now is much in fashion. | I am neither Alexander nor Hephaestion’”, Don Juan IX xiv; for the passage, see notes to Whispers of Immortality 4 and The Waste Land [III] 186. “But I’m not Oedipus · · · Davus sum”, Don Juan XIII xii–xiii (alluding to Terence, Andria, where Davus the slave explains he cannot solve the Sphinx’s riddle, because “Davus sum, non Oedipus”).

  [Poem I 8–9 · Textual History II 318]

  112 Am an attendant lord: the stage direction heralding the play scene in Hamlet III ii (Folio) begins: “Enter King, Queen, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and other Lords attendant”.

  112–13 one that will do | To swell a progress, start a scene: Henry Adams: “One felt one’s self a supernumerary hired to fill the scene”, The Education of Henry Adams ch. XIX. a progress: a royal procession. 2 Henry VI I iv: “The King is now in progress towards Saint Albans.”

  113, 116 swell a progress, start a scene or two · · · Politic, cautious, and meticulous: HAMLET (of Polonius): “A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him · · · A king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar” (IV iii). POLONIUS (to Ophelia): “And that in way of caution—I must tell you” (I iii). Polonius does “start a scene or two”: II i, III iv. Politic, cautious, and meticulous: with the letters Pol-o-n-i-us spanning the line (Christopher Ricks, Proceedings of the British Academy 2003). Blake: “Lawful, cautious and refined”, Love to faults is always blind. meticulous: OED 1: “Fearful, timid. Obs.” (“In short, I was afraid”, 86.) OED 2: “Over-careful about minute details, over-scrupulous. In present usage: careful, punctilious, scrupulous, precise.” This “present usage” was not in OED 1st ed. and was deprecated by Fowler: “What is the strange charm that makes this wicked word irresistible to the British journalist?”

  116, 118 Politic, cautious, and meticulous · · · ridiculous: Verlaine: “Correct, ridicule et charmant”, Nuit de Walpurgis classique 4 (Kenner 15). For “fastidious · · · Punctilious”, see note to Spleen 11–14. “Ladies, who find my intentions ridiculous · · · Pompous, pretentious, ineptly meticulous”, The Triumph of Bullshit 11. (Ottoline Morrell to Bertrand Russell, spring 1916, on TSE: “He is obviously very ignorant of England and imagines that it is essential to be highly polite and conventional and decorous, and meticulous.”)

  117 Full of high sentence: Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford: “Noght o word spak he moore than was neede, | And that was seyd in forme and reverence, | And short and quyk and ful of hy sentence”, The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue 304–306 (Grover Smith 302).

  118 At times · · · ridiculous: “at last a bit ridiculous”, Entretien dans un parc 18.

  118–19 ridiculous · · · the Fool: “It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. | Resign yourself to be the fool you are”, The Cocktail Party I i.

  [Poem I 9 · Textual History II 318–19]

  120 I grow old … I grow old: 1 Henry IV II iv, FALSTAFF: “There lives not three good men unhang’d in England; and one of them is fat, and grows old” (Kenner 1972 275). 2 Henry IV II iv, FALSTAFF: “I am old, I am old” (Henry W. Wells, New Poets from Old, 1940, 74). TSE to Warner Allen, 25 May 1960: “That line, if I remember rightly, was borrowed from Sir John Falstaff.” Yeats: “I grow old among dreams”, Men Improve with the Years 16 (a poem TSE discussed at Harvard, Mar 1933). TSE: “‘When I grow old, I shall have all the court | Powder their hair with arras, to be like me’”, The Death of the Duchess II 51–52, misquoting Webster, The Duchess of Malfi; see note. TSE to I. B. Cauthen, 29 Aug 1962: “I also have no doubt that the page from Webster’s play was at the back of my mind” (presumably referring to this line). Brigit Patmore: “I remember very clearly one evening before August 1914, when Tom asked me to have dinner with him and talked for many minutes of how old he was · · · ‘I am so old that it makes me despair’”, My Friends When Young 89. TSE: “The young man in Prufrock is meant to signify someone young and sportive and a man conscious of growing old”, reported Time 13 Nov 1950. “A poet must express his vision at the age at which he is. When he is young he will write of one kind of experience in one way, and when he is older he should be writing of another kind of experience in another way, and that is the difference”, The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse (1950 recording). “Which is worse: a child writing as an adult or an adult writing as a child? Just received enclosed from a fellow poet · · · But as I was born old, I wouldn’t know” (undated leaf in the Pierpont Morgan Library, among TSE’s letters to McKnight Kauffer).

  121 I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled: to John Hayward, 31 May 1940, mocking himself in Italian and Romanian:

  Well, as the poet says so aptly

  Portero pantelone arrotelati in fondo

  or as he has said elsewhere, voicing the same idea but I think a little more aptly

  Voiu purta pantalonii suflecati …

  (TSE had just received cântecul de lubire a lui J. A. Prufrock, and wrote to Dragos Luta on the same day: “it is a matter of pride for me to receive this first translation of any of my work into Roumanian”.) Trousers are often rolled for paddling (“on the beach”, 123). (OED “turn-up” 2. cites Minister’s Rep. of Fashion for Gentlemen 1925: “Permanent turn-ups are still worn for outdoor wear.”)

  121 variant trowsers: changed after the first two printings to “trousers” (1917+) although in 1926 Fowler recommended that “trowsers” be “so spelt”. TSE did not abandon his earlier spelling altogether, writing to Bonamy Dobrée, 2 Sept 1927: “When appointing Morley President of the newly founded Bolovian Club I think it will be only fair to warn him that as President he will be expected to wear Top Hat and Morning Coat at Dinners (Trowsers facultative).” In New England, “petticoat trousers” (or trowsers) were “wide baggy trousers”. “Trowsers”, with nautical associations, occurs under several headwords in OED and in the sailor’s ballad Wapping Old Stairs (see note to Billy M’Caw: The Remarkable Parrot 34). For the spelling “ancle”, see note to Suite Clownesque II 1.

  [Poem I 9 · Textual History II 319]

  122 Shall I part my hair behind: C. S. Calverley: “Though my scalp is almost hairless · · · Striven to part my backhair straight”, “Hic Vir, Hic Est” 15, 62 (“With a bald spot in the middle of my hair”, 40). Mary Elizabeth Braddon: “do you suppose that because people · · · part their hair on the wrong side · · · that they may not be just as sensible of a · · · girl”, Lady Audley’s Secret ch. XVI. Aiken on TSE: “The Tsetse, early inoculated by the subtle creative venoms of Laforgue and Vildrac, looked rather to France than to England: an editor of the Advocate had returned from Paris, after a year, in exotic Left Bank clothing, and with his hair parted behind: it had made a sensation”, Ushant 143. Do I dare to eat a peach: E. C. Gaskell: “we felt very genteel · · · When oranges came in, a curious proceeding was gone through. Miss Jenkyns did not like to cut the fruit; for, as she observed, the juice all ran out nobody knew where; sucking (only I think she used some more recondite word) was in fact the only way of enjoying oranges; but then there was the unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies; and so, after dessert, in orange season, Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty used to rise up, possess themselves each of an orange in silence, and withdraw to the privacy of
their own rooms, to indulge in sucking oranges”, Cranford ch. III. TSE: “she is among those English (and American) writers who have known how to make a virtue out of provinciality”, Letters of Mrs. Gaskell and Charles Eliot Norton, 1855–1865, review (1933). TSE: “Horace demands an orange. Conversation with Felise about how to eat an orange. Covered in orange pulp juice he suddenly turns his back on everybody reads a paper” (ms for “F. M.”, Maryland folder 2, fols. 1–3). peach: Marvell: “The nectarine and curious peach, | Into my hands themselves do reach · · · I fall on grass”, The Garden 37–40. Like Eve’s apple, the peach (pêche) tempts to sin (péché). Blake: “I asked a thief to steal me a peach: | He turned up his eyes. | I ask’d a lithe lady to lie her down: | Holy & meek she cries.”

  122–25 Do I dare to eat a peach? · · · the beach · · · each to each · · · to me: Gilbert and Sullivan: “Over the ripening peach | Buzzes the bee. | Splash on the billowy beach | Tumbles the sea. | But the peach | And the beach | They are each | Nothing to me!” Ruddigore act I.

  123 I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach: following the excision of two leaves from the March Hare Notebook, the ms of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock begins on a leaf opposite the lines “If you’re walking on the beach | You hear everyone remark | Look at him! · · · In the quintessential flannel suit”, Suite Clownesque III 15–17, 25. “White flannel ceremonial”, Goldfish III 3. To Eleanor Hinkley, 5 Sept 1916: “I lived most of the time in a shirt and flannel trowsers. The chief occupations bathing, boating, and bicycling.”