The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 37
123–28 I shall · · · walk upon the beach · · · the white hair of the waves blown back | When the wind blows the water: Beaumont and Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy II ii, ASPATIA: “Suppose I stand upon the sea-beach now, | Mine arms thus, and mine hair blown with the wind” (see note to Sweeney Erect epigraph). “I am forsaken”, two lines later in Aspatia’s speech, may have prompted thoughts of Arnold’s The Forsaken Merman.
123–29 walk upon the beach. | I have heard the mermaids singing · · · I do not think that they will sing to me · · · seaward · · · Combing the white hair · · · in the chambers of the sea: Arnold: “In the caverns where we lay, | Through the surf and through the swell · · · comb’d its bright hair · · · But, ah, she gave me never a look · · · Singing · · · sweet airs come seaward · · · On the blanch’d sands · · · beaches”, The Forsaken Merman 32–33, 53, 80, 88, 128, 131–32.
123, 130 I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach · · · sea-girls: “walking on the beach · · · the girls · · · flannel suit”, Suite Clownesque III 15, 19, 23.
124 I have heard the mermaids singing: Donne: “Teach me to heare Mermaides singing”, Song: Goe, and catche a falling starre 5. A Midsummer Night’s Dream II i: “I · · · heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back | Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath | That the rude sea grew civil at her song.” TSE: “hear my Madness singing”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [29]. To Pound, 22 Oct 1936, querying a collocation in a draft Canto: “‘see weed’ etc. To one raised on the shore of the manymermaidcrowded sea, this collocation suggests ALGAE such as a child I dried and classified on the shores of Massachusetts.”
[Poem I 9 · Textual History II 319]
124–29 I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each · · · lingered in the chambers of the sea: Gérard de Nerval: “J’ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la sirène · · · tour à tour” [I have dreamed in the cave where the siren swims · · · one by one], El Desdichado [The Disinherited]. The first of these lines is quoted by Symons 35 (Howarth 196). Lemprière “Sirenes, sea nymphs”: “as soon as any persons passed by them without suffering themselves to be charmed by their songs, they should perish.”
124–31 I have heard the mermaids singing · · · white hair | Streaming behind · · · wake us:
One night
On watch, I thought I saw in the fore cross-trees
Three women leaning forward, with white hair
Streaming behind, who sang above the wind
A song that charmed my senses, while I was
Frightened beyond fear, horrified past horror, calm,
(Nothing was real) for, I thought, now, when
I like, I can wake up and end the dream.
WLComposite 539–46
126–31 I have seen … back … white and black … human: James Thomson: “murmured back … Behind me and before is black … human … I have seen”, In the Room 25–29 (TSE: “In the room”, 13; see note).
127 hair · · · blown back: Keats: “With hair blown back”, The Eve of St. Agnes 36 (for the Keats passage see note The Waste Land [II] 96–105). “Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown”, Ash-Wednesday III 17.
127–29 the waves · · · the chambers of the sea: Job 9: 8–9: “the waves of the sea · · · the chambers of the south”. the chambers of the sea: Wilde: “the chambers of the brain”, The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. XI (for the passage, see note to 17–22).
127–31 hair of the waves · · · lingered in the chambers of the sea · · · wreathed with seaweed red and brown | Till human voices wake us, and we drown: John Davidson: “like seaweed droops | My tangled beard, my tangled hair · · · cavernous · · · As if a still voice fell from heaven | To where sea-whelmed the drowned folk lie | In sepulchres”, A Loafer (1894) (Crawford 55).
128 When the wind blows the water white and black: Swinburne: “For ever the dark wind whitens and blackens the hollows and heights of the sea”, The Armada VI iii 14 (Archie Burnett, personal communication). When the wind blows the: “When the wind blows the cradle will rock”, nursery rhyme.
129 We have lingered in the chambers of the sea: “I have lain on the floor of the sea”, Murder in the Cathedral II chorus. lingered in the chambers: Braddon: “He had lingered · · · found his way to his chambers” Lady Audley’s Secret 441 (Heywood).
130 sea-girls: OED first citation. seaweed red and brown: “And about his hair the seaweed purple and brown”, So through the evening, through the violet air 32.
131 Till human voices wake us, and we drown: “human voices”, Oh little voices of the throats of men 47 (and see note for Tennyson). To Adrienne Monnier, 29 Apr 1925, approving the ending of the translation she made with Sylvia Beach (La Chanson d’amour de J. Alfred Prufrock in Le Navire d’Argent June 1925): “‘Coulons à pic’ est très bien” [We sink straight to the bottom]. (In the same letter: “Je pense que Prufrock se traduit en français mieux que The Waste Land, à cause du fait que l’influence de Laforgue y est pour beaucoup” [I think Prufrock goes into French better than The Waste Land, because Laforgue’s influence counts for a good deal].) For TSE and the submarine world, see note to Mr. Apollinax 11–15.
[Poem I 9 · Textual History II 319]
Portrait of a Lady
Published in Others (New Jersey) Sept 1915; then Catholic Anthology (Nov 1915) and Others: An Anthology of the New Verse, ed. Alfred Kreymborg (1916), 1917+ and Penguin / Sel Poems.
Recorded 26 Sept 1955, London; released Caedmon 1955 (US), 1959 (UK).
Dated “Cambridge, Mass., Feb 1910” (II), “Nov 1910” (I) and “Nov 1911” (III) in ms1. Dated “Cambridge (Mass.), 1910” (I & II), “Paris, 1910” (III) and “Cambridge (Mass.), 1911” in Poèmes. Dated “Cambridge Mass 1910” by TSE in Hayward’s 1925; and “1910–11 Paris” by TSE in Morley’s US 1920. TSE to Edward J. H. Greene, 18 Oct 1939, dates the poem 1910.
Pound to H. L. Mencken of The Smart Set, 3 Oct 1914: “I enclose a poem by the last intelligent man I’ve found—a young American, T. S. Eliot (you can write to him direct, Merton College, Oxford. I think him worth watching—mind ‘not primitive.’ His ‘Lady’ is very nicely drawn.” Mencken did not publish the poem.
TSE to Pound, 2 Feb [1915]: “I enclose a copy of the Lady, which seems cruder and awkwarder and more juvenile every time I copy it. The only enhancement which time has brought is the fact that by this time there are two or three other ladies who, if it is ever printed, may vie for the honour of having sat for it. It will please you, I hope, to hear that I had a Christmas card from the lady, bearing the ‘ringing greetings of friend to friend at this season of high festival’. It seems like old times.” Valerie Eliot noted in Letters: “Miss Adeleine Moffatt, the subject of the poem, lived behind the State House in Boston and invited selected Harvard undergraduates to tea. During a visit to London in 1927 she asked the Eliots to dine, offering ‘a modest choice of dates to sacrifice yourselves on the altar of New England’, but they were away.” In 1948, Conrad Aiken recalled Moffatt: “our dear deplorable friend, Miss X, the précieuse ridicule to end all preciosity, serving tea so exquisitely among her bric-à-brac”, March & Tambimuttu eds. 21 (also “Madeleine, the Jamesian lady of ladies”, Ushant 186).
TSE: “I have some knowledge of old ladies, and I have always been very fond of old ladies, and in the course of my life have collected in my memory some very choice specimens indeed”, “Those Who Need Privacy and Those Whose Need is Company” (1951).
In a letter to Henry Eliot, 2 July 1915, TSE lists his “assets up to date” as “the poem you have seen” (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) and “another long poem (earlier and inferior) which will be out presently in a small new publication called Others”. For the second, Portrait of a Lady, he also had “the assurance of a dozen pages in an anthology like Imagistes, to be out in the autumn”.
[Poem I 10–14 · Textual History II 319–25]
Pound to Wyndham Lewis (before July 1915): “With regard to futur
e potentialities I think that this thing of Eliot’s would probably be more advantageous than anything of Rodker’s admitting that it is a bit archaic · · · if you want to use this Portrait you’ll have to get his permission.” But Portrait of a Lady did not appear in Lewis’s Blast. So Pound, in order to ensure its appearance before his Catholic Anthology was published, sent it to Others in New Jersey—not to Poetry. He wrote to Harriet Monroe on 25 Sept 1915: “It was a great waste to let The Portrait of a Lady go to Others, but I was in a hurry for it to come out before the Anth.” Kreymborg, editor of Others, recalled that Pound insisted he “accept and publish immediately ‘the strange poem inclosed.’ The expatriate swore in the strongest handwriting that no man on the horizon of English or American letters could compete with this fellow, T. S. Eliot”, Troubadour (1925) 237.
[Poem I 10–14 · Textual History II 319–25]
Despite the similarity of TSE’s title to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, the poem’s closest affinities are with Mrs. Luna in The Bostonians ch. XXII:
She had not made him a scene · · · She might have made up her mind that she had lost him as what she had hoped, but that it was better than desolation to try and keep him as a friend · · · rang for some tea · · · a winter’s evening · · · (Mrs. Luna’s tea was excellent) · · · A silence of a few moments had fallen upon their talk · · ·
These all from James’s first two paragraphs. Then:
“Olive came home six weeks ago. How long did you expect her to endure it?”
“I am sure I don’t know; I have never been there,” Ransom replied · · · She answered that she didn’t care about ends, she cared about beginnings · · · he didn’t in the least long for this arrangement, and was conscious that the most pertinent sequel to her conjecture would be for him to take up his hat and walk away · · · His life, on the whole, had not been rich in episode · · · capricious · · · He did not pick up his hat to go · · · such a distinct place in her mind, especially when she might die twenty deaths before he came near her · · · clock, saw it was not yet late · · · at last he took up his hat in earnest.
TSE: “You cannot effectively ‘borrow’ an image, unless you borrow also, or have spontaneously, something like the feeling which prompted the original image. An ‘image’, in itself, is like dream symbolism, is only vigorous in relation to the feelings out of which it issues, in the relation of word to flesh. You are entitled to take it for your own purposes in so far as your fundamental purposes are akin to those of the one who is, for you, the author of the phrase, the inventor of the image; or if you take it for other purposes then your purposes must be consciously and pointedly diverse from those of the author, and the contrast is very much to the point; you may not take it merely because it is a good phrase or a lovely image. I confess that I never felt assured that Henry James was justified in naming a novel The Golden Bowl, though my scruples may only show that I have not understood the novel”, The Bible as Scripture and as Literature (1932). On TSE’s learning from Henry James, see “A Beginner in 1908”, 1. A BREAK WITH TRADITION.
Paul Elmer More’s Introduction to The Great Refusal (1894) tells of being cordially received, with a third occasion corresponding particularly to TSE’s Part III: “It had grown late. I had said what I could, very little perhaps, but words seemed quite ineffectual; and rose to leave. At his urgent request, however, I remained to take tea with him, which he had served in the same room · · · the final impression on me was something akin to sadness, and it was a relief when I left him and passed out into the clear atmosphere of a winter night. I never saw him again, and only learned of his death some months afterwards when these letters were put into my hands to edit · · · The letters are all to one person, the lady who was our friend.”
Title] Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady had been preceded by Winthrop Mackworth Praed’s Portrait of a Lady | in the exhibition of the Royal Academy in his series of poems Every-Day Characters. Jerome K. Jerome’s Sketches in Lavender Blue and Green (1897) also included a Portrait of a Lady. Among the paintings ticked in TSE’s catalogue of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (c. 1910; Houghton) is Antonio Pollajuolo’s Portrait of a Lady (now reattributed to his brother, Piero del Pollaiuolo). Among TSE’s marks in his London Baedeker in the list of National Gallery paintings are one against Antonio Pollaiuolo’s Martyrdom of St. Sebastian and another (176) which may indicate Moroni’s Portrait of a Lady. Pound’s Ripostes (1912) included Portrait d’une Femme.
Epigraph] Marlowe, The Jew of Malta IV i. Punctuated with quotation marks in Others, so acknowledging the two speakers, the Second Friar and Barabas.
I
I 1 Among: OED prep.: “In the mingling or assemblage of”, but overwhelmingly of objects or persons.
I 1–14 smoke · · · light · · · finger-tips · · · the bloom · · · slips: “to reduce the world to a set of formulae is to let it slip through our fingers in a fine dust; but to · · · retire into a sunlit stupor is to let the world slip through our fingers in a thin smoke”, The Relativity of Moral Judgment (1915) (“fingers · · · you let it flow · · · the world”, II 3, 7, 14).
I 2 You have the scene arrange itself: “You have the other raise”, Mandarins 2 15. “Behind the wall I have some servant wait”, Nocturne 7. “Arrange and comprehend the scene”, Mandarins 4 4 variant. James: “She had not made him a scene”, The Bostonians ch. XXII.
I 3–4 afternoon · · · four wax candles: to Conrad Aiken, 30 Sept [1914]: “Do you think it possible, if I brought out Inventions of the March Hare, and gave a few lectures, at 5 P.M. with wax candles, that I could become a sentimental Tommy?” (Letters notes: “Playing on his own name and J. M. Barrie’s title, Sentimental Tommy, 1896”. Aiken to Grayson P. McCouch [spring 1911?]: “Tom and I get along pretty well together · · · he irritates me with his ‘sentimental Tommy’.”)
I 4–5 four wax candles · · · Four rings of light: Exodus 25: 12, 31: “And thou shalt cast four rings of gold · · · a candlestick”. the darkened room: Dickens: “the dull old house, the yellow light in the darkened room, the faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass · · · as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time”, Great Expectations ch. XVII (TSE: “Correct our watches by the public clocks”, I 39). Four rings of light: “a ring of lights”, Suite Clownesque I 20. Murder in the Cathedral II, chorus: “I have seen | Rings of light coiling downwards, descending | To the horror of the ape”. upon the ceiling overhead: “Flattened itself upon the ceiling overhead”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [23].
I 4–6 four wax candles · · · Juliet’s tomb: Romeo and Juliet V iii: “This is the place. There, where the torch doth burn.” Baedeker on Verona: “on the Campo della Fiera · · · is a chapel · · · containing a mediævel sarcophagus called the Tomba di Giulietta, or ‘Tomb of Juliet’. The whole scene is prosaic and unattractive”, Northern Italy (13th ed., 1906). Bulwer Lytton: “Nothing can equal the sadness and gloom of the spot · · · the old tomb · · · is but a broken cistern to the eyes of the brethren of the convent!” Juliet’s Tomb in Verona in “The Honey-Moon” by the Countess of Blessington and Other Tales (1837).
[Poem I 10 · Textual History II 320]
I 7 things to be said, or left unsaid: to Lady Rhondda, 7 Oct 1943: “Indeed it is very difficult for anyone I think to come to a conclusion as to what should be said and left unsaid.” To Ottoline Morrell, 4 May 1924: “there will be a thousand and one things to be left undone during that time”. Of his own reflections: they are not “intended to give any direct guidance as to what we should do, or what we should leave undone”, Responsibility and Power (1943).
I 8–9 the latest Pole | Transmit the Preludes, through his hair: the Polish pianist Artur Rubinstein, known like the earlier Polish virtuoso Ignace Paderewski for his hair, made his American debut aged 19 at Carnegie Hall in 1906, then toured the country, playing a programme at Jordan Hall, Boston, on 16 Mar, which included two Chopin Preludes and other showpieces (Roger C
raik, personal communication). Laurent Tailhade: “Elles viennent d’ouïr Ladislas Talapoint, | Pianiste hongrois que le Figaro vante” [The women go to hear Ladislas Talapoint, a Hungarian pianist praised by Figaro], Place des Victoires (Greene 65); see note to Afternoon 1–2. Where Greene quoted Tailhade’s lines for comparison with Cousin Nancy, TSE wrote on Greene’s typescript: “cf also Portrait of a Lady—‘latest Pole’?” To John Hayward, 14 Nov 1939, of a reading at the Student Mission House, Gower Street: “What a reading it was. It appeared that there was a large contingent of Polish waifs, which I had not considered, so I felt a little selfconscious when I recited ‘we have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole’ etc.” TSE: “‘her passion for experience has taken her to a Russian pianist in Bayswater’”, Eeldrop and Appleplex II (1917). the latest Pole: TSE: “on se repose des fatigues de la journée en lisant un roman du dernier russe, tchèque, serbe” [one rests from the fatigue of daily life by reading a novel by the latest Russian, Czech, Serbian], Autour d’une Traduction d’Euripide (1916). “In the Karamazoff · · · the party carouse with a couple of quite irrelevant Poles”, A Neglected Aspect of Chapman (1924). the latest: OED 2a: “most recent. Also ellipt. as n. in the latest: the most recent story, piece of news, fashion, etc.”, with Kansas City Times & Star 1889, “The latest the dear girls hereabouts are singing .. is, Will he love you as today?”, and Arnold Bennett, 1911, “This was Denry’s ‘latest’”. Van Wyck Brooks: “conversation is largely morning paper conversation, the newest developments · · · the latest happenings · · · the latest book · · · the latest play that we have seen”, The Wine of the Puritans 59. TSE: “the latest tune”, Humouresque 10. Preludes: pronounced Pree-ludes in TSE’s recordings of Preludes.