The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  II 1–2 morning · · · stale smells: “waking up in the morning · · · stale tobacco”, Eeldrop and Appleplex II (1917). “the stale smell of morning!” Anabasis V xi (where “stale” was “sick” prior to 1959). (Perse: “l’odeur fade du matin!”)

  II 1–4 The morning comes to consciousness · · · beer · · · the sawdust-trampled street · · · muddy: John Davidson: “On muddy beer | The melancholy mean suburban street | Grew maudlin for an hour; pianos waked”, A Woman and her Son (for which see note to The Waste Land [III] 220–23). TSE on Davidson’s Thirty Bob a Week: “I am sure that I found inspiration in the content of the poem, and in the complete fitness of content and idiom: for I also had a good many dingy urban images to reveal”, John Davidson (1961). See note to Coriolan II. Difficulties of a Statesman 14.

  III

  Epigraph] See headnote. Grover Smith 20 points to Charles-Louis Philippe:

  Dans la chambre d’hôtel, rue Chanoinesse, à midi, la fenêtre donnant sur la cour, avec ses rideaux gris et ses carreaux sales, envoyait un jour sale et gris · · · il y avait le lit défait où les deux corps marquèrent leur place de sueur brune sur les draps usés, ce lit des chambres d’hôtels, où les corps sont sales et les âmes aussi. Berthe, en chemise, venait de se lever. Ses épaules étroites, sa chemise grise et ses pieds malpropres, mince et jaune, elle semblait sans lumière non plus. Par ses yeux bouffis et ses cheveux écartés, au milieu du désordre de la chambre elle était en désordre et ses idées étaient couchées en tas dans sa tête. Les réveils de midi sont lourds et poisseux comme la vie de la veille avec l’amour, l’alcool et le sommeil · · · Elle ressentit encore ce poids d’angoisse qui, depuis hier, l’empêchait de respirer. Elle se rappela tout, et cela s’appuyait à deux genoux sur sa poitrine comme un monstre en colère.

  [Poem I 15–16 · Textual History II 325–26]

  [At noon, in the hotel room of the rue Chanoinesse, a grey and dirty light filtered through the grey curtains and dirty panes of the window · · · there was the unmade bed where the two bodies had left the impress of brownish sweat upon the worn sheets—this bed of hotel rooms, where the bodies are dirty and the souls are as well. Berthe, in her chemise, had just got up. With her narrow shoulders, her grey shirt and her unclean feet, she too seemed, in her pale yellow slimness, to have no light. With her puffy eyes and scraggly hair, in the disorder of this room, she too was in disorder and her thoughts lay heaped confusedly in her head. These awakenings at mid-day are heavy and sticky like the life of the night before with its love-making, its alcohol, and its torpid sleep · · · She remembered everything, and it all pressed its two knees upon her chest, like a raging monster.]

  Bubu de Montparnasse ch. IV

  III 1–3 You tossed a blanket from the bed, | You lay upon your back · · · and watched the night: “I tossed the blankets back, to watch the darkness”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [19].

  III 3–9 watched the night revealing · · · sordid images · · · flickered against the ceiling · · · shutters · · · gutters: Kipling: “When the drunken comrade mutters and the great guard-lantern gutters | And the horror of our fall is written plain, | Every secret, self-revealing on the aching whitewashed ceiling, | Do you wonder that we drug ourselves from pain?” Gentlemen-Rankers (in A Choice of Kipling’s Verse).

  III 4 sordid images: “from Baudelaire I learned first, a precedent for the poetical possibilities, never developed by any poet writing in my own language, of the more sordid aspects of the modern metropolis, of the possibility of fusion between the sordidly realistic and the phantasmagoric, the possibility of the juxtaposition of the matter-of-fact and the fantastic”, What Dante Means to Me (1950).

  III 4, 9 The thousand sordid images · · · And you heard the sparrows in the gutters: “sparrows | Delve in the gutter with sordid patience”, First Caprice in North Cambridge 8–9.

  III 5 Of which your soul was constituted: in her French translation, Vivien wrote “Desquelles votre âme était constituée”, which TSE revised to “Desquelles fut constitué votre âme”.

  III 6–7 flickered against the ceiling. | And when all the world came back: “darted stealthily across the wall | Flattened itself upon the ceiling · · · And when the dawn · · · world”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [22–23, 25, 32].

  III 8–9 And the light crept up between the shutters | And you heard the sparrows in the gutters: “A blind old drunken man who sings and mutters, | With broken boot heels stained in many gutters”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [30–31].

  III 10–11 such a vision of the street | As the street hardly understands: Conrad: “between the tall houses of a street as still and decorous as a well-kept alley in a cemetery, I had a vision of him on the stretcher”, Heart of Darkness pt. 3.

  III 10, 14 vision of the street · · · feet: Paul Elmer More: “a wonderfully radiant lady · · · that vision of the street”, The Great Refusal 18, introducing a poem (of his own) which begins with the rhyme “feet · · · street” and uses it again three times in seventeen pages. TSE: “a sudden vision of incompetence · · · we walk on”, Entretien dans un parc 8–10. For Hulme, “visions, alien to long streets”, see note to Morning at the Window 2–9.

  [Poem I 16 · Textual History II 326]

  III 10, IV 1, 3 a vision of the street · · · across the skies · · · trampled by insistent feet: W. G. Tinckom-Fernandez: “newly burnished skies · · · the vision in my wintry eye · · · And a thousand feet are stamping on familiar trails again!” Song of the Sap 10, 14, 16 in The Argonaut 11 June 1910 (TSE: “winter” I 1). For the poem, see note to Cousin Nancy 2.

  III 10–11, IV 8–9 such a vision of the street | As the street hardly understands · · · The conscience of a blackened street | Impatient to assume the world: William James, on a graduate student: “he had always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic classroom you had to open relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one you left behind you in the street. The two were supposed to have so little to do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy- professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble”, Pragmatism (1907) Lecture I. TSE later wrote that an antithesis “seems to belong to the year 1910, with the pleasant essays of William James (as popular a writer for his time as are Eddington and Jeans in ours) and with the epidemic of Bergsonism”, A Commentary in Criterion Oct 1932. “I fumbled to the window to experience the world”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [28]. Symons on Henley: “the humanity of streets, if we have but the vision”, Studies in Two Literatures (1897) 188.

  III 12–15 Sitting along the bed’s edge · · · hair, | Or clasped the yellow soles of feet | In the palms of both soiled hands: Swinburne: “She, sitting edgewise on her bed, | Holding her feet · · · I sit still and hold | In two cold palms her cold two feet. | Her hair, half grey half ruined gold”, The Leper 42–43, 101–103, one of the Swinburne poems that a volume of selections “should certainly contain”, Swinburne as Poet (1920).

  III 13–14 clasped the yellow soles of feet | In the palms of both soiled hands: against the quotation of these lines in G. Jones (225), TSE wrote “Marie Donadieu”, perhaps a mistake for Bubu de Montparnasse ch. IV (see first note to Preludes III).

  IV

  IV 1, 13 His soul stretched tight · · · Infinitely suffering thing: to A. L. Rowse, 3 Mar 1941 on the “metaphysicality” of William Empson: “it springs from a peculiarly twisted and tormented, but very painfully suffering soul” (recalling also the next poem, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 24–32: “twisted things · · · twisted · · · broken spring · · · curled and ready to snap”).

  IV 3, 8 insistent feet: “insistent sweet”, Easter: Sensations of April II 7.

  IV 5 short square fingers stuffing pipes: Dickens: “the speaker’s square forefinger”, “squarely pointing
with his square forefinger”, “the square finger”, Hard Times ch. I, II (Archie Burnett, personal communication).

  IV 5–7 fingers stuffing pipes · · · Assured: Charles-Louis Philippe: “fumant sa pipe · · · tassait la cendre du bout de son doigt · · · avec l’assurance” [smoking his pipe · · · tapped off the ash with his fingertip · · · with assurance], Marie Donadieu (1904) II i (Grover Smith 21). stuffing pipes, | And evening newspapers: “reading evening papers | And boys were smoking cigarettes”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [11–12].

  [Poem I 16 · Textual History II 326–27]

  IV 6–7 and eyes | Assured of certain certainties: “eyes · · · And your assuring certainties”, Goldfish IV 28, 34. “certain uncertainties”, Entretien dans un parc 4 variant. certain: OED I 1: “Determined, fixed, settled”. II 7a: “Used to define things which the mind definitely individualizes or particularizes from the general mass, but which may be left without further identification in description; thus often used to indicate that the speaker does not choose further to identify or specify them. Different as this seems to be from sense 1, it is hardly separable from it in a large number of examples: thus, in the first which follows, the hour was quite ‘certain’ or ‘fixed’, but it is not communicated to the reader; to him it remains, so far as his knowledge is concerned, quite indefinite; it may have been, as far as he knows, at any hour; though, as a fact, it was at a particular hour.”

  In his copy of Mallarmé’s Vers et Prose, TSE marked the word “certain” in the description of when Jules Laforgue “nous initia au charme certain du vers faux” [initiated us into the certain charm that artificial verses have], and wrote “indubitable”. In his copy of I. A. Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism, TSE underlined “certain” in the phrase “certain individuals” (177) and wrote “Which?” (for a similar concern, see note to Little Gidding II 39–45, “some dead master”). For “uncertain age”, see note to Mandarins 2 1.

  IV 8 a blackened street: Henry Blackburn: “for landscape a damp, dreary, muddy, blackened street, with a vista of areas and lamp-posts”, Artists and Arabs (1878) ch. III. “blackened trees”, Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse 7 (with “street” 1, 14). “a blackened wall”, The Waste Land [V] 381 (see note to [V] 379–81).

  IV 8–16 street · · · assume the world · · · moved by fancies · · · and laugh; | The worlds revolve like ancient women | Gathering fuel in vacant lots: “We have · · · Gathered wood against the winter · · · Talked at the corners of streets · · · had laughter and gossip · · · In a void apart · · · the doom of the world”, Murder in the Cathedral I second chorus. “The old without fire · · · Gathering faggots at nightfall”, third chorus.

  IV 9 assume: OED I: “To take unto (oneself), receive, accept, adopt · · · b. esp. To receive up into heaven” (this sense arch. or obs.); III: “To take as being one’s own, to arrogate, pretend to”; 11: “Logic. To add the minor premise to a syllogism”, quoting “The antecedent is assumed, when the words of it are barely repeated in the second proposition, or assumption.”

  IV 10 moved by fancies: Geraldine Stewart: “One should never allow one’s self to be moved by fancies, as if they were realities”, The Laird’s Return (1861) 79–80.

  IV 12–13 The notion of some infinitely gentle | Infinitely suffering thing: according to Valerie Eliot, these lines were written “with his brother in mind”, Letters (1988) 54.

  IV 12–14 some infinitely gentle | Infinitely suffering thing. | Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh: Symons 53 (on Villiers de l’Isle-Adam): “Contempt, noble as it may be, anger, righteous though it may be, cannot be indulged in without a certain lack of sympathy · · · It is certain that the destiny of the greater part of the human race is either infinitely pathetic or infinitely ridiculous” (TSE: “certain certainties”, IV 7 and note).

  IV 14–15 Wipe · · · mouth · · · women: Proverbs 30: 20: “an adulterous woman · · · wipeth her mouth, and saith, I have done no wickedness.”

  [Poem I 16–17 · Textual History II 327]

  IV 16 fuel: pronounced as two syllables in TSE’s three recordings. vacant lots: Whitman: “out on the vacant lot at sundown after work”, I sing the body electric 21. Laforgue has “terrains vagues” in Complainte sur certains ennuis, Cythère and Pierrots I. TSE: “This charm of vacant lots!” Second Caprice in North Cambridge 1 (and see note to 1, 7). “Perpetual crackling of insects in this quarter of vacant lots and rubbish”, Anabasis IV x. (Perse: “· · · ce quartier aux détritus!”) In the 1933 revised (though unadopted) ending to Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of an Agon, “The old gentleman” who appears like the choric Time in The Winter’s Tale introduces himself: “Good evening. My name is Time. I come from the vacant lot in front of the Grand Union Depot.”

  Rhapsody on a Windy Night

  Published in Blast 2, then Others: An Anthology of the New Verse (1917), 1917+ and Penguin / Sel Poems. Excerpts were printed with lithographs by Gerald Wilde in Poetry London Dec 1944. TSE to Anthony Sylvestre, 30 June 1944: “I have seen some of Mr. Wilde’s illustrations of Rhapsody on a Windy Night, and have found them very interesting. Indeed, I should hardly call them illustrations, as their value is independent of the value of the poem. But I fear that material considerations prevent us, at present, from entertaining any suggestion, however interesting, for illustrated editions: the practical difficulties, both of materials and of expert labour, are too great.”

  No recording has been traced. However, TSE read this poem at Columbia University on 28 Apr 1958 and a recording was broadcast on 30 Apr and again on 5 May by the university’s radio station WKCR. A transcript of the occasion appeared in Columbia University Forum Fall 1958. The poems read that day were The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, The Hippopotamus, The Waste Land II and V, Growltiger’s Last Stand, Sweeney Agonistes II. Fragment of an Agon, Ash-Wednesday V, The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, Lines for an Old Man, a chorus from Murder in the Cathedral act II and East Coker.

  Dated Mar 1911, ms1; Paris, 1911 in Isaacs’s US 1920 and by TSE in both Morley’s US 1920 and Hayward’s 1925. Dated “1910, Paris” by TSE to Edward J. H. Greene, 18 Oct 1939. Before reading the poem at Columbia, 28 Apr 1958: “This was written in Paris in 1910 or ’11. I don’t know very much about it now. If it needs an explanation I must leave it to others to explain it.”

  “My early vers libre, of course, was started under the endeavour to practise the same form as Laforgue. This meant merely rhyming lines of irregular length, with the rhymes coming in irregular places. It wasn’t quite so libre as much vers, especially the sort which Ezra called ‘Amygism’ [after Amy Lowell]. Then, of course, there were things in the next phase which were freer, like Rhapsody on a Windy Night. I don’t know whether I had any sort of model or practice in mind when I did that. It just came that way”, Paris Review (1959).

  [Poems I 17–20 · Textual History II 327–30]

  To John Collier, 4 Oct 1923, on a poem submitted to the Criterion: “it reminds me somewhat of the work of Mr. Conrad Aiken, which you probably have not read; it reminds me certainly of my own earlier verse. This is something which I have outgrown, and which I think you will outgrow also: I think that there is a great deal of sentimentality to be purged out of it. This particular type of fragmentary conversation · · · was invented by Jules Laforgue and done to death by Aldous Huxley · · · I have been a sinner myself in the use of broken conversations punctuated by three dots.”

  Title Rhapsody: OED 3b: “A literary work consisting of miscellaneous or disconnected pieces, etc.; a written composition having no fixed form or plan. Obs.” Also: 4. “An exalted or exaggeratedly enthusiastic expression of sentiment or feeling; an effusion (e.g. a speech, letter, poem) marked by extravagance of idea or expression, but without connected thought or sound argument”, and 5. “Mus. An instrumental composition enthusiastic in character but indefinite in form.” Windy Night: Shakespeare: “Give not a windy night a rainy morrow”, Sonnet 90. />
  3–4 lunar · · · lunar: Symons 107 on Laforgue: “He has constructed his own world, lunar and actual.”

  4, 6 incantations · · · clear relations: “Imagination’s | Poor Relations”, First Debate between the Body and Soul 32–33.

  5 Dissolve the floors of memory: Henry M. Lyman: “The residual strata which, so to speak, have been deposited from the sea of events upon the floor of memory, have become broken and ‘faulted.’ The line of rupture marks the division between the two fields of consciousness”, Insomnia, and other Disorders of Sleep (1885) 205. Oliver Wendell Holmes: “pegs to hang facts upon which would otherwise have strewed the floor of memory”, Medical Essays (1891) 373. Holmes: “The area of consciousness is covered by layers of habitual thoughts, as a sea-beach is covered with wave-worn, rounded pebbles, shaped, smoothed, and polished by long attrition against each other · · · The tides of wakening consciousness roll in upon them daily as we unclose our eyelids, and keep up the gentle movement and murmur of ordinary mental respiration until we close them again in slumber. When we think we are thinking, we are for the most part only listening to the sound of attrition between these inert elements of intelligence. They shift their places a little, they change their relations to each other, they roll over and turn up new surfaces. Now and then a new fragment is cast in among them, to be worn and rounded and take its place with the others, but the pebbled floor of consciousness is almost as stationary as the pavement of a city thoroughfare”, Over the Teacups (1891) 11. William Fleming on G. H. Lewes: he “proposes to apply the word subconscious to perceptions which do not appear above the ‘floor of consciousness’”, The Vocabulary of Philosophy (4th ed. rev. Henry Calderwood, 1890), “Perceptions (Obscure)”. The phrase “floor of consciousness” became current and in 1920 H. Wildon Carr translated Bergson’s “au-dessous de la scène illuminée par la conscience” as “below the floor of consciousness”, Mind-Energy ch. IV “Dreams” (Jain 1992 55). Bradley: “which quietly, or it may be longingly, remains below the ‘floor of consciousness’”, Ethical Studies Essay I. In Bradley’s Appearance and Reality ch. XXI, TSE underlined “Memory is plainly a construction from the ground of the present.” Dissolve · · · memory: On Coleridge’s definition of imagination: “it is not enough to say that the one ‘dissolves, diffuses and dissipates’ the memories in order to re-create”, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 79.