The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
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8–15 squats · · · iron, merds · · · an old man: Edward John Waring: “Pill Aloes and Iron · · · Sulphate of Iron · · · In Habitual Constipation · · · whether this be the result of fever and debilitating diseases, old age, or sedentary habits”, A Manual of Practical Therapeutics (3rd ed. 1871).
9 estaminet: pronounced estaminée in TSE’s recording, as recommended by Fowler. OED: “A café in which smoking is allowed. Now, any small establishment selling alcoholic liquor.” Frederic Manning, of the Great War: “quite a bon place, two decent estaminets an’ some mad’moiselles”, The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929) ch. 4.
10 patched and peeled: Pope: “Peel’d, patch’d, and pyebald, linsey-wolsey brothers”, The Dunciad (1742) III 115 (Henry Woudhuysen, personal communication). Isaiah 18: 2–7: “a nation scattered and peeled · · · a people scattered and peeled”.
10–12 patched and peeled in London. | The goat coughs · · · in the field · · · iron: “The peeled hull, a pile of rusty iron, | In a street of scattered brick where the goat climbs”, Choruses from “The Rock” III 25–26 (see note for TSE’s annotation “Shadwell”, the London district).
11 The goat coughs: TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “Cf. Wyndham Lewis: The Enemy of the Stars”, referring to Lewis’s “coughing like a goat”. Lewis’s play appeared in Blast 1 (July 1914).
12 moss, stonecrop: Meredith: “Yellow with stonecrop; the moss-mounds are yellow”, Love in the Valley 115. Mary Elizabeth Braddon: “wall · · · ivy, yellow stonecrop, and dark moss”, Lady Audley’s Secret ch. I (for which see note to The Waste Land [II] 78–87). iron, merds: Jonson: “merds, and clay, | Powder of bones, scalings of iron”, The Alchemist II i (Mermaid ed.; commonly II iii) (Grover Smith 305). OED “merd, merde”: “Now usu. treated as unnaturalized. a. Dung, excrement; a piece of excrement, a turd.” Pronounced murds in TSE’s recording (OED also gives the French pronunciation).
[Poem I 31 · Textual History II 339–40]
12–15 iron, merds. | The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea, | Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter. | I an old man: FitzGerald to Frederick Tennyson, 8 Dec 1844: “I really do like to sit in this doleful place with a good fire, a cat and dog on the rug, and an old woman in the kitchen · · · the great event of this winter is my putting up a trough round the eaves to carry off the wet. There was discussion whether the trough should be of iron or zinc; iron dear and lasting; zinc the reverse. It was decided for iron; and accordingly iron is put up”, quoted Benson 29 (John Abbot Clark, South Atlantic Quarterly Apr 1949). TSE to John Hayward [16 Apr 1937]: “two days with the plumbers camping in the bathroom both days—no hot water—part of the time no gas—didnt wash—could only rear in the evening · · · depended upon odd unknown parochial females who poked cups of bovril and tea at me”. TSE repeated the scene to Geoffrey Faber four days later, but with “women” for “females”. Sneezes at: OED 2. colloq. With at: “To regard as of little value, worth, or consideration; to despise, disregard, underrate”, from 1806. at evening, poking the peevish gutter: “evening · · · sparrows | Delve in the gutter with sordid patience”, First Caprice in North Cambridge 2, 9–10. poking the peevish gutter. | I an old man: “old man who coughs and spits sputters | Stumbling among the alleys and the gutters. | | He pokes”, First Debate between the Body and Soul 2–4. peevish: used twice of FitzGerald in Benson (70, 86). OED 3: “An epithet of dislike, hostility, disparagement, contempt, execration, etc., expressing the speaker’s feeling rather than any quality of the object referred to” (obs. with 16th-century citations only). 5: “Morose, querulous, irritable, ill-tempered, childishly fretful”.
15–16] indented and isolated by line spaces in AraVP, as though a refrain. I an old man, | A dull head among windy spaces: “I a tired head among these heads”, Coriolan II. Difficulties of a Statesman 37 (which in draft had been “I a head among these weary heads”).
16–17 A dull head among windy spaces. | | Signs are taken for wonders: to Hope Mirrlees, 16 Sept 1953: “Astronomy bores me—it seems to me a study that interests chiefly people with no precise Christian faith: they like to wander about in the vast interstellar spaces. I have always noticed among non-Christians a hankering for natural wonders, bizarre phenomena, thaumata and odd theories about the origin of the world.”
17–19 Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!” | The word within a word, unable to speak a word, | Swaddled with darkness: Matthew 12: 38–39: “Master, we would see a sign from thee. But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall be no sign given.” Acts 2: 43: “many wonders and signs were done by the apostles” (see note to The Cultivation of Christmas Trees 32). TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “Bishop Andrewes: Sermon on the Nativity”, referring to Lancelot Andrewes:
Signs are taken for wonders. “Master, we would fain see a sign,” (Matthew 12: 38), that is a miracle. And in this sense it is a sign to wonder at. Indeed, every word here is a wonder. Τὸ βρέφος, an infant; Verbum infans, the Word without a word; the eternal Word not able to speak a word; 1. a wonder sure. 2. And the σπαργανισμὸς, swaddled; and that a wonder too · · · swaddling bands of darkness (Job 38: 9) · · · 3. But yet, all is well.
Christmas Sermon 1618
[Poem I 31 · Textual History II 340]
(The paradox occurs also in the Christmas Sermon 1611. For Andrewes see headnote to Journey of the Magi.) Augustine: “with that same end of perverted knowledge magical arts be enquired by · · · signs and wonders are demanded of Him”, Confessions bk. X 35. North’s Plutarch: “Before this war as it is reported, many signs and wonders fell out”, Life of Mark Antony (ed. W. H. D. Rouse, Temple Classics, 1898–99) IX 83 (for this volume see note to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 5–8). wonders · · · a word, unable to speak a word: Donne: “The Word but lately could not speake, and loe | It sodenly speakes wonders”, Holy Sonnets IV 5–6. Signs · · · unable to speak a word: FitzGerald: “Who shall interpret us the speechless sign … ?” Agamemnon chorus XI, quoted Benson 122 (Clark 260). Swaddled with darkness: John Mackay Wilson: “Religion, without knowledge, and still swaddled in darkness, fostered the idle fear”, The Doom of Soulis in Tales of the Borders (1835).
18, 20 The word within a word, unable to speak a word · · · Christ the tiger: Andrewes on procrastination and the twelve days of Christmas: “We love to make no very great haste · · · Why should we? Christ is no wild-cat. What talk ye of twelve days?” Christmas Sermon 1622; in The New Elizabethans and the Old (1919), TSE quoted: “Christ is no wild-cat”. In Thayer’s AraVP, alongside 20, TSE wrote “Andrewes: ‘Christ is no tiger’”, so associating his own with Andrewes’s wording. In Lancelot Andrewes (1926), he quoted:
Phrases such as “Christ is no wild-cat. What talk ye of twelve days?” or “the word within a word, unable to speak a word”, do not desert us.
The first of these is now correct, but the second again attributes TSE’s words to Andrewes. For the Infant was “without a word”, whereas “within a word” is from Gerontion. TSE: “the unspoken word, the Word unheard, | The Word without a word, the Word within | The world · · · in darkness · · · the silent Word”, Ash-Wednesday V 4–9. “the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word”, A Song for Simeon 22. To Pound, 10 Apr 1928: “WOT the WORD unable to Speak a Word? Infans Natus? Wot about it?” unable to: of the newborn: “Unable to fare forward”, Animula 26.
[Poem I 31 · Textual History II 340]
19–20 darkness. In the · · · Christ the tiger: Blake: “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, | In the forests of the night”, The Tyger 1–2. In the juvescence of the year | Came Christ: Philip Acton: “And in the juvenescence of the morn, | With feathered choristers on every thorn, | All Earth proclaims ‘The Lord is risen indeed’”, Easter in Sonnets (1875) (TSE: “feathers”, 71). juvescence: not in OED 1st ed., but later added as “rare”, noting its irregular etymology and defining it as “The state of becoming young
, juvenescence”, with TSE as first citation. (“Juvenescence” is recorded from 1800, “senescence” from 1695.) The entry for “Old Age restored to Youth” in E. Cobham Brewer, The Reader’s Handbook (rev. ed. 1911) includes “The fontaine de jouvence · · · the river of juvescence at the foot of Olympus.” In Robert Wever’s Interlude (1565), “Lusty Juventus” personifies Youth. (TSE: “Senectus”, Anabasis III iii variant.) Given the epigraph’s “nor youth nor age”, TSE’s word may be a compacting of youth and age. “its source of strength and rejuvenescence”, The Man of Letters and the Future of Europe (1944).
To R. W. Chapman, 24 May 1949: “I can hardly believe that I was so temeritous as to invent the word ‘juvescence’ and there doesn’t seem to be any other word which in my illiteracy I might have intended. I have a very strong impression that together with certain other phrases in that poem I found the word juvescence in a sermon of Lancelot Andrewes’s; it is most likely to have been one of his Christmastide sermons before James I, but it might have stuck in my head from a quotation in some other book and so be almost impossible to trace. The word is certainly not a vestige of my Sanskrit studies.” To Lynette Roberts, 11 May 1949: “It is all right to invent words for yourself, but when one invents a word the meaning ought to be immediately evident to the reader who ought to be made to feel that the invention was a happy thought.” Christ the tiger: Richard Aldington to TSE, 7 Apr 1926: “if I could join the Church I think I would, but my temperament and what little ability to think I have are both violently opposed to it. Moreover, I don’t really like the gospels, and I don’t much like Christ.” TSE, 9 Apr: “I agree with you about Christ and I do not disagree with anything else.”
19, 22, 39 juvescence · · · To be eaten · · · famishes the craving: Corbière: “Fontaine de Jouvence et Borne de l’envie! | —Toi qui viens assouvir la faim inassouvie!” [Fountain of Youth and Boundary of desire!—You who come to satisfy the hunger that is unsatisfied!], Litanie du sommeil [The Litany of Sleep] 54–55.
21 depraved May, dogwood and chestnut: “Cf. Henry Adams’s autobiography”, TSE in Thayer’s AraVP. Henry Eliot noted in his account of TSE in America: “Then two phrases from The Education of Henry Adams”, Excerpts from Lectures 1932–33. Adams: “Here and there a negro log cabin disturbed the dogwood and the judas-tree, the azalea and the laurel. The tulip and the chestnut gave no sense of struggle against a stingy nature · · · The brooding heat of the profligate vegetation; the cool charm of the running water; the terrific splendor of the June thunder-gust in the deep and solitary woods, were all sensual, animal, elemental. No European spring had shown him the same intermixture of delicate grace and passionate depravity that marked the Maryland May”, The Education of Henry Adams (1918) ch. XVIII (Robert G. Davis, Matthiessen 73). depraved May: traditionally the merry month. Love’s Labour’s Lost IV iii: “Love whose month is ever May.” See notes to The Waste Land [I] 1–2, “April is the cruellest month, breeding | Lilacs”. dogwood: Pound: “a dog-wood tree some syne”, La Fraise 15 (a reminiscing monologue by a “grave councillor · · · wise, and very old”; Personae, 1909).
22 To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk: Luke 22: 17–18: “And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and said ‘Take this, and divide it among yourselves: for I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come.’” Tourneur: HIPPOLITO: “you vowed once | To give me share to every tragic thought.” VENDICE: “By the mass, I think I did too; | Then I’ll divide it to thee”, The Revenger’s Tragedy III iv (Mermaid ed., commonly III v). Writing to Henry Dugdale Sykes on 17 Feb 1922, TSE compared The Revenger’s Tragedy with Tourneur’s undisputed work The Atheist’s Tragedy, and in Cyril Tourneur (1930) and Tourneur and “The Revenger’s Tragedy” (1931) he rejected the case for Middleton’s authorship. For the same scene see notes to 65–66, Dans le Restaurant 14 and Burnt Norton I 11. TSE to Polly Tandy, 23 Dec 1941: “the enclosed, to be divided among the chillun according to their various needs and desires”.
23 Mr Silvero: TSE drew a swooping line here in Thayer’s AraVP, with a comment now illegibly erased. Pronounced Sil-vairo in TSE’s recording.
24 caressing · · · Limoges: “Her hands caress the egg’s well-rounded dome”, WLComposite 245. OED “Limoges”: “The name of a city in central France used (freq. attrib.) to designate painted enamels, porcelain, etc., made there”, and quoting Disraeli: “a collection of Limoges ware that is the despair of the dilettanti”. Pronounced Limm-òzj in TSE’s recording. To his mother, 3 Sept 1919: “At 4 we reached Limoges, where I waited an hour for my train.” For TSE’s intention to revise the poem while in France, see headnote.
[Poem I 31 · Textual History II 340]
24, 29 caressing hands · · · one hand on the door: Symons on the actress Eleonora Duse: “her open hand upon a door, certain blind caresses”, Plays, Acting, and Music (1903) 62. hand on the door: Henry James: “hand on the door”, “hand on the door”, “hand on the door-knob”, Washington Square ch. XII, XVIII, XXIX (TSE: “knob”, 32).
26 Hakagawa: pronounced Harkagawa in TSE’s recording. For Pound on the name, see Textual History.
26–28 Hakagawa · · · Tornquist · · · Kulp: TSE drew a line from each name in Thayer’s AraVP to comments now illegibly erased.
26, 34, 54 among the Titians · · · History · · · honestly: Henry James: “stream of history · · · among the Titians and the Turners; she had been honestly nursing the hours”, The Wings of the Dove bk. V VII (Ricks 124–25).
27 Tornquist: Carlos Alfredo Tornquist and Ernesto Tornquist each published on Argentina’s economy and balance of payments in 1918–19 (D’Ambrosio 166). Pronounced Tornkwist in TSE’s recording.
28 Shifting the candles: Crashaw: “Nor by alternate shreds of light, | Sordidly shifting hands with shades and Night”, In the Glorious Epiphany of Our Lord God 34–35. TSE scored these lines in his Crashaw. Against the description of this as a “Black Mass” ritual in G. Jones (197), TSE wrote “!!” underlining Jones’s phrase. von Kulp: pronounced Coolp by TSE in his recording (L. culpa: guilt).
29–30 Vacant shuttles | Weave the wind: underlined by TSE in Thayer’s AraVP, with a line to a comment now illegibly erased. Job 7: 6–7: “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope. O remember that my life is wind: mine eye shall no more see good.” Sacheverell Sitwell: “On the neverceasing shuttles of the wind”, Trumpets 2, in The People’s Palace, a book TSE praised in Contemporanea (1918). Weave the wind: Webster: “To leave a living name behind, | And weave but nets to catch the wind”, The Devil’s Law Case V iv (the play is not in the Mermaid volume of Webster and Tourneur). Vassar Miscellany News 10 May 1933 on TSE’s reading three days previously: “He mentioned the phrase ‘Weave the wind,’ which he had anticipated James Joyce in coining.” (Joyce: “Words Mulligan had spoken a moment since in mockery to the stranger. Idle mockery. The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind” and “‘For them too history was a tale like any other too often told · · · Weave, weaver of the wind’”, Ulysses episode I (Telemachus) in Little Review Mar 1918.) TSE: “weave, weave the sunlight”, La Figlia Che Piange 7.
32 Under a windy knob: OED 2: “A prominent isolated rounded mound or hill; a knoll; a hill in general; esp. in US.” TSE: “The dancers are all gone under the hill”, East Coker II 50.
[Poem I 31–32 · Textual History II 340]
33 After such knowledge: Psalm 139: 1–6: “O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising · · · For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether · · · Such knowledge is too wonderful for me.” TSE: “by such knowledge”, The Death of Saint Narcissus 16 (Grover Smith 64). “except such knowledge”, Notes on the Way (12 Jan 1935); see note to Choruses from “The Rock” VIII 38. Often in legal contexts with “condone”: “To condone means to forgive, and this forgiveness, to be effectual, must be freely given, with a full knowledge of all the surrou
nding circumstances · · · Condonation must be with knowledge; such knowledge as will satisfy a prudent man that a crime has been committed”, Shackleton v. Shackleton, New Jersey, 19 May 1891 (Central Law Journal vol. 33).
33–36] Braced by TSE in Thayer’s AraVP with “Duchess of Malfy” (the brace subsequently extended to 41 or so). No specific reference is apparent, but TSE reviewed a performance by the Phoenix Society in Art & Letters Winter [1919/]1920.