The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  2, 5 And along the trampled edges of the street · · · The brown waves of fog: “Along the city streets · · · the garrulous waves of life”, Silence 1, 3.

  2–9 along the trampled edges of the street · · · housemaids · · · the bottom of the street · · · a passer-by with muddy skirts | An aimless smile that hovers in the air | And vanishes along the level of the roofs: T. E. Hulme: “at the end of westward streets · · · visions, alien to long streets · · · heaven’s jocund maid | flaunting a trailed red robe | along the fretted city roofs · · · a vain maid, lingering”, A City Sunset (1909). TSE of T. E. Hulme’s The Embankment: “in the world of 1910 or so, this and a dozen poems one might choose from the work at that time of Pound, Richard Aldington, H.D., F. S. Flint, were evidence of a radical change in the whole practice of verse”, The Last Twenty-Five Years of English Poetry (1940). For Hulme see note to Conversation Galante 1–5.

  3–4 damp souls of housemaids | Sprouting: Pound to Marianne Moore, 16 Dec 1918: “T.S.E. first had his housemaids drooping like the boas in my ‘Millwins’, and it was only after inquisition of this sort, that he decided, to the improvement of his line, to have them sprout.” (“The mauve and greenish souls of the little Millwins | Were seen lying along the upper seats | Like so many unused boas”, Lustra II in Poetry Nov 1913.) The word both in TSE’s drafts and in Poetry was “Hanging”, so Pound may be confusing this line with “Droop in a hundred A.B.C.’s”, A Cooking Egg 33 (wr. 1917). “‘That corpse · · · ‘Has it begun to sprout?’” The Waste Land [I] 71–72. TSE to Aiken, 30 Sept [1914]: “it’s interesting to cut yourself to pieces once in a while, and wait to see if the fragments will sprout.” housemaids · · · area gates: Courtship and Matrimony (a volume in The Fun Library, ed. J. A. Hammerton, 1890) shows a housemaid at the area gate, “Engaged” (the one-word heading) in conversation with the delivery boy: “A Study from the Parlour Window: Susan taking in what she not unaptly calls the ‘area-ated bread’” (TSE’s title: at the Window). area: OED 2a: “An enclosed court, spec. a sunken court, shut off from the pavement by railings, and approached by a flight of steps, which gives access to the basement of dwelling-houses”. (TSE: “the bars of the area”, Of the Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles 34.)

  [Poem I 21 · Textual History II 331]

  3–8 souls · · · despondently · · · a passer-by with muddy skirts · · · in the air: Clough: “prophet-soul · · · despair · · · soul · · · on the dusky air | His Skirts, as passed He by”, The New Sinai 71–79. TSE’s passer-by may be male. OED “skirt” 2a: “The lower part of a man’s gown or robe”, as in 1797: “I saw the skirts of his garments ascending up those steps”. But this is “Now chiefly Hist. or with reference to Eastern countries”, so TSE’s line suggests also 1a: “The lower part of a woman’s dress or gown”. (“the skirts that trail along the floor”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 102.) housemaids · · · at area gates · · · aimless smile · · · air: C. S. Calverley: “None of those engaging smiles is | Unreciprocated there. | | Often, ere yet thou hast hammered | Through thy four delicious airs, | Coins are flung thee by enamoured | Housemaids upon area stairs”, Lines on Hearing the Organ 43–48.

  6 from the bottom of the street: commonplace, but with “Twisted”, perhaps Henry James: “I approached with a vain tortuosity poor Limbert’s door. A smart victoria waited before it in which from the bottom of the street I saw that a lady who had apparently just issued from the house was settling herself”, The Next Time (1895). If distinct from “end of the street” (The “Boston Evening Transcript” 8, Aunt Helen 5; likewise ends of lines), perhaps because “bottom of the” suggests the sea (“waves”, 5). “Seen from the depths of a New York street”, Suite Clownesque III 12 ^ 13. A music-hall favourite of TSE’s ran: “My name is Tough | And I live in Tough Alley | And the further down you go | The tougher it gets, | And I live in the last house, | I am so tough my spit bounces!” (Valerie Eliot, Observer 20 Feb 1972).

  8–9 smile that hovers in the air | And vanishes: Carroll’s Cheshire Cat repeatedly vanishes from tree level, as shown in John Tenniel’s two engravings in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ch. VI. On Carroll and TSE, see introduction to March Hare 6–8. TSE: “Life evaporates into a smile”, First Debate between the Body and Soul 44.

  9 along the level of the roofs: “no longer aloof, | But some from the balcony, some from the roof”, Of the Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles 38–39. along: often taking an unusual turn: “Along the garden stairs”, Circe’s Palace 10; “Along the wet paths of the sea”, Goldfish IV 10; “Flat faces of American business men lay along the tiers of chairs”, The Engine I; “Arms that lie along a table”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 67; “Sitting along the bed’s edge”, Preludes III 12.

  The “Boston Evening Transcript”

  Published in Poetry Oct 1915 and Catholic Anthology, then 1917+.

  No recording known.

  Dated Oxford, 1915 in Poèmes, and by TSE in both Morley’s US 1920 and Hayward’s 1925.

  In a letter to his father shortly after 31 May 1915, Pound reported “Eliot has done a few amusing poems”. In a letter ascribed to Aug 1915 (and mentioning the recent appearance of the second issue of Blast, in July), Pound sent Harriet Monroe “the three jems of Eliot for ‘September’ and a fourth thing Cousin Nancy which may do to fill the second page.” Poetry printed The “Boston Evening Transcript”, Aunt Helen and Cousin Nancy in Oct 1915. The first two were reprinted in Catholic Anthology.

  [Poems I 21–22 · Textual History II 331–32]

  The Boston Evening Transcript (1830–1941) had printed TSE’s Ode (“For the hour that is left us Fair Harvard”) on 24 June 1910, as had the Boston Evening Herald. Pound’s Provença was reviewed unfavourably by the Transcript later that year (Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage ed. Eric Homberger, 1972, 75–76). The literary editor was William Stanley Braithwaite, who from 1905 wrote an annual survey of magazine verse, and who compiled anthologies of each year’s verse, 1913–29 (Williams 7–8). Pound, contending that Braithwaite had neglected to appreciate his role in Robert Frost’s career, wrote a letter to the paper which appeared on 14 July 1915 (misdated “August” in his Letters). “From the first”, Harriet Monroe wrote, Poetry took exception to Braithwaite’s “autocratic tone and criticized his somewhat provincial opinions”, which had assumed “an authority quite out of proportion to their value” (Sir Oracle in Poetry Jan 1917). Yet the “Bawston Transcript”, as Pound referred to it (to John Quinn, 8 Apr 1916), was too influential to ignore, and a copy of Catholic Anthology was sent for review (Elkin Mathews to Pound, 21 Feb 1916, printed in Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson). Braithwaite’s review, The Creed of a New Poetic Catholicism, appeared on 18 Mar. Then, on 28 Oct 1916, Braithwaite’s annual poetry round-up claimed that Pound’s “collected poems” had “so little interested the American public that they find it difficult to find an American publisher”. A hostile review of TSE’s US 1920 by Braithwaite followed on 14 Apr 1920. The jacket of the American edition of Murder in the Cathedral carried a quotation from the Boston Evening Transcript: “The author makes himself much clearer in this work than he has in the past” (Kenner 68). For other newspapers, see Airs of Palestine, No. 2 and Le Directeur.

  TSE: “It is true that the common newspaper reader no longer consciously asks his paper to provide his opinions for him; but that would be a superior state of consciousness to what actually exists. What the reader allows his paper to do for him is to select what is important and to suppress what is unimportant, to divert his mind with shallow discussions of serious topics, to destroy his wits with murders and weddings and curates’ confessions, and to reduce him to a condition in which he is less capable of voting with any discrimination at the smallest municipal election, than if he could neither read nor write”, A Commentary in Criterion Jan 1930. “the inarticulate folk is almost always mumbling the speech, become jargon, of its ancestors or of its newspaper editors”, The Vari
eties of Metaphysical Poetry 289 (Turnbull Lecture III). “To be filled with a litter of Sunday newspapers?” Choruses from “The Rock” III 19. On the readers of a daily or Sunday newspaper: “It helps, surely, to affirm them as a complacent, prejudiced and unthinking mass, suggestible to head-lines and photographs, ready to be inflamed to enthusiasm or soothed to passivity, perhaps more easily bamboozled than any previous generation upon earth”, A Commentary in Criterion July 1938. “Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press”, The Dry Salvages V 12. “Not the expression of collective emotion | Imperfectly reflected in the daily papers”, A Note on War Poetry. To Hayward, 19 June 1940: “I never see a news sheet or hear the news in the morning: that is a point of principle with me, a punctilio.” See Ricks 270–73.

  2 like a field of ripe corn: Shelley: “The ripe corn under the undulating air | Undulates like an ocean”, Letter to Maria Gisborne 119–20. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: “hair that lay along her back | Was yellow like ripe corn”, The Blessed Damozel 11–12 (see note to La Figlia Che Piange 1).

  [Poem I 22 · Textual History II 331–32]

  7 La Rochefoucauld: François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–80). TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934) includes the Maximes. TSE used the single-word “Rochefoucauld” here prior to 1963 (see Textual History), as in other early writings: “Rochefoucauld is hard, but there is not in him even the germ of cynicism: he is an implacable moralist. With the rest of the seventeenth century, he persists in measuring men by an invisible standard, fundamentally a Christian standard”, Marivaux (1919); also The Perfect Critic II (1920). He used the correct form, “La Rochefoucauld”, in The “Pensées” of Pascal (1931) and The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), and in 1964 inserted “La” in this line in his copy of G. Jones (149). To Theodore Spencer, 10 Nov 1936, on John Hayward: “John H. is as usual in the vortex of society and having Musical Evenings, and last week he asked me in to meet the Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld. It would not surprise me to meet Madame de Guermantes there.” (For Proust, see next note.)

  7–8 as one would turn to nod good-bye to La Rochefoucauld, | If the street were time and he at the end of the street: Irving Babbitt, quoting Sainte-Beuve: “‘If you live in a subject a short time,’ he says, ‘you are, as it were, in a city filled with friends. You can scarcely take a step in the main street without being instantly accosted’”; “This theory of the essential vice · · · Sainte-Beuve probably took from La Rochefoucauld”, The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912) 153, 156. Sainte-Beuve’s own essay on La Rochefoucauld is repeatedly quoted in Babbitt’s pages (“his cult for La Rochefoucauld”, 110). Virginia Woolf recorded in her Diary for 15 Nov 1918 that Desmond MacCarthy asked TSE “how on earth he came to add that remark at the end of a poem on his Aunt & the Boston Evening Transcript, that phrase about an infinitely long street, & ‘I like La Rochefoucauld saying good bye’ (or words to that effect). Eliot replied that they were a recollection of Dante’s Purgatorio!” Perhaps Virgil’s taking leave of Dante (Purg. XXVII 124–42) or Virgil’s final departure, when Dante turns to Beatrice (Purg. XXX 43–45). Maxim 104: “There is a particular point at which men and things are in proper perspective: some must be seen close up to be well judged, but others can never be so well appreciated as from a distance” (tr. Leonard Tancock). Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu: Du côté de chez Swann (1913): “l’air de vous apercevoir comme au bout d’une route interminable et à une si grande distance qu’elles se contentent de vous adresser un signe de tête minuscule pour le proportionner à vos dimensions de marionnette” [seem to have caught sight of you at the far end of an interminably straight road, and at so great a distance that they content themselves with directing towards you an almost imperceptible movement of the head, in proportion to your doll-like proportions], Scott Moncrieff tr. i 162 (Hands). Without naming the questioner, William Empson recorded that in an after-breakfast session during TSE’s Clark Lectures, Hayward asked what TSE thought of Proust. “‘I have not read Proust’ was the deliberate reply.” Yet when asked about the Scott Moncrieff translation the following week, TSE “delivered a very weighty, and rather long, tribute to that work” (March & Tambimuttu eds. 36–37). The Death of Albertine, an extract from À la recherche du temps perdu: Albertine disparue, appeared in Criterion July 1924. TSE to William Matchett, 19 Jan 1949: “I am almost completely ignorant of the work of Marcel Proust with the exception of a few essays. Of course I have dipped into his first volume but never more than enough merely to get the movement of his prose style.”

  [Poem I 22 · Textual History II 332]

  9 Cousin: see note on the title Cousin Nancy. Harriet: perhaps owing something to Shelley (see note to 2) and newspaper scandal: E. A. Freeman, during Oxford’s debates on the place of English studies: “A saying which fell from myself in one of the debates · · · has been quoted · · · ‘chatter about Shelley’ · · · I mentioned that I had lately read a review of a book about Shelley in which the critic · · · praised or blamed the author · · · for his ‘treatment of the Harriet problem’” (1887); Oxford Dictionary of Quotations notes: “often telescoped as “chatter about Harriet”. (After an entanglement with his cousin, Harriet Grove, Shelley eloped with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook.)

  Aunt Helen

  Published in Poetry Oct 1915, then Catholic Anthology, then 1917+.

  No recording known.

  Dated Oxford, 1915 in Poèmes and Isaacs’s US 1920, and by TSE in Morley’s US 1920 and Hayward’s 1925.

  A female relation, house and street, servants, ceremonious funeral and dead pet bird, all feature in an untitled prose sketch by TSE of c. 1924 (ms, U. Maryland):

  There was once a young girl who was very poor but she was very beautiful. A young man who was very rich She had a passion for everything yellow. She had everything in their house yellow. A young man who was very rich and very titled came and married her and took her away and they lived in a great house and the world was at their feet. They had a wonderful wedding and the carriages were decorated with red and yellow roses.

  A year later they another carriage came through the streets, but this was draped in black and had black roses. They were both dead.

  And several years later a great carriage was often seen, with coachman and footmen, driving from the great house to the humble house where the young girl had lived. In it was a little pale shrivelled twisted boy, very delicate fragile, going to see his grandmother. The coachman was sorrier for him than anyone. He used to visit his grandmother. She thought he came because he loved her. But once he said at last “Grannie, you know I LOVE everything yellow.” He looked at the stuffed canary.

  1 Slingsby: one of the “four little people” in Edward Lear, The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went round the World (Grover Smith 31). TSE to his sister Marion, 18 Dec 1948, recounting the celebrations at the Nobel Prize ceremony: “I explained to Professor Tiselius the importance of Edward Lear and promised to send him Lear’s Complete Poetical works”.

  2–10 house · · · servants · · · there was silence | And silence · · · clock: Revelation 8: 1: “there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour” (Moody 57). Job 4: 16–19: “there was silence · · · he put no trust in his servants · · · houses of clay.”

  6 wiped his feet: Pound to Harriet Monroe, 30 Sept 1914, on first impressions of TSE: “such a comfort to meet a man and not have to tell him to wash his face, wipe his feet, and remember the date (1914) on the calender.”

  [Poem I 22–23 · Textual History II 332]

  10 Dresden clock: rococco porcelain from the Meissen factory, where 18th-century taste continued to be imitated. C. H. Ross and A. Clarke: “Mademoiselle Coraline took possession of a Dresden clock ‘as a souvenir of madame;’ and then · · · practical steps were taken by sending for a doctor, a lawyer, and an undertaker”, Little France: A London Story ch. II, printed in Under the Crown Jan–June 1869 (TSE: “undertaker”, 6).

  11–12 the footman · · · Holding the
second housemaid on his knees: “young Bistwick, who three months ago married his mother’s housemaid and now is aware of the fact”, Eeldrop and Appleplex I (1917). Aunts and servants are prominent in Jerome K. Jerome’s Fanny and the Servant Problem: “His lordship, I take it, would hardly welcome the discovery that he had married his butler’s niece” (act I). TSE to Leonard Lyons of a performance at Harvard: “In the play in which e. e. cummings was the second footman, I played a charming young man, of the peerage. I was merely Lord Bantock, and a Jerome K. Jerome peer at that”, Lyons Den in San Mateo Times 7 June 1969.

  Cousin Nancy

  Published in Poetry Oct 1915; then (within an editorial disparaging vers libre) New York Times Book Review 17 Oct 1915; then 1917+.

  No recording known.

  Dated Oxford, 1915 by TSE in both Morley’s 1920 and Hayward’s 1925, and dated “??Oxford, 1915” in Isaacs’s US 1920. See note to 12. For Pound’s reference in a letter ascribed to Aug 1915 to “a fourth thing Cousin Nancy”, apparently newly composed, see headnote to The “Boston Evening Transcript”.

  Where Greene compares Tailhade’s sonnet “Les femmes laides qui déchiffrent des sonates”, TSE wrote “Good” on Greene’s typescript. TSE’s copy of Tailhade was printed in 1915 (see note to Afternoon 1–2). TSE included him among “a number of admirable poets much of whose work has permanent value”, Contemporary French Poetry (1952); see headnote to “Poems (1920)”, 4. WHAT FRANCE MEANT TO TSE.