The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
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33, 39 knowledge · · · famishes: Isaiah 5: 13: “they have no knowledge: and their honourable men are famished.”
33–42 knowledge · · · History · · · can be dispensed with: “A large part of any poet’s ‘inspiration’ must come from reading and from his knowledge of history. I mean history widely taken; any cultivation of the historical sense, of perception of our position relative to the past, and in particular of the poet’s relation to poets of the past”, A Note on Ezra Pound (1918). “Tradition · · · involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity”, Tradition and the Individual Talent I (1919).
34 cunning passages: cuniculus, underground passage (L.). George Chapman: “I am suspicious, my most honour’d father, | By some of Monsieur’s cunning passages, | That his still ranging and contentious nostrils, | To scent the haunts of mischief have so used | The vicious virtue of his busy sense”, Bussy d’Ambois IV i (Mermaid ed.; commonly IV ii). “F. M.”: “Proust himself cunningly leads them into every by-way”, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1925), review of Virginia Woolf. For “cunning axletree” and the debt to Chapman, see notes to 67–71 and to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 7–12. Sir John Davies: “Now after, now afore, the flattering Dame | With divers cunning passages doth erre”, Orchestra st. 38. cunning: OED 2b: transf. “skilfully contrived or executed; skilful, ingenious”. Frequent in Webster’s plays. contrived corridors: “corridors of death · · · alleys of death”, In silent corridors of death; and, for the Trenches, see headnote to that poem. “The Polish Corridor along the Vistula to the sea” (The Times 21 Mar 1919) was a strip of land taken from Germany by the Versailles Treaty (Bergonzi 54). For TSE and “the Economic Clauses of the Peace Treaty”, see note to The Waste Land [III] 277–78, 290–91.
35 issues: OED n. 1a: “The action of going · · · outgoing, outflow.” 6a: “Offspring, progeny · · · Now chiefly in legal use” (TSE: “propagates · · · fathered”, 43, 45). 10a: “The outcome of an action”. 11c: “A matter or point which remains to be decided”. v. 5a: “To turn out (in a specified way); to have a certain issue or result; to end or result in.”
[Poem I 32 · Textual History II 340]
38–39 what she gives, gives with such supple confusions | That the giving famishes the craving: Chapman: “drowning their eternal parts in sense | And sensual affections: while we live | Our good parts take away, the more they give”, The Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron III i, with “my confusions” later in the scene. (The Waste Land [II] 89: “drowned the sense in odours”.) Chapman’s long scene of losses, cunning and constellations has “neither hot nor cold” (“neither at the hot gates”, 3), “infected houses” (“decayed house”, 7), “my weak brain” (“dry brain”, 75), and “crave” (“craving”, 39); it also shares with Gerontion “fought”, “knee”, “passion”, “fear”, “profit” and, punning on a name, “Gulf/gulfs”. For Chapman’s scene see note to 62–64. supple · · · the giving famishes the craving: Coriolanus IV ii, VOLUMNIA: “I sup upon myself, | And so shall starve with feeding.” the giving famishes the craving: Antony and Cleopatra II ii: “other women cloy | The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry | Where most she satisfies” (Grover Smith 305). Hamlet I ii: “As if increase of appetite had grown | By what it fed on.” Chapman: “envy, fed with others’ famishment”, The Shadow of Night. TSE commended “Chapman’s long, obscure and very beautiful poems Ovid’s Banquet of Sense and The Shadow of Night”, in Wanley and Chapman (1925). confusions: OED 3: “Mental perturbation or agitation such as prevents the full command of the faculties; embarrassment, perplexity, fluttered condition”, with 1611: “What Monarch wrapt in my confusions | Can tell what patience meanes?” 6c: “pl. Disorders, commotions”, with Romeo and Juliet IV v: “Peace ho for shame, confusions’ | Cure lies not in these confusions.” 39–41 Gives too late · · · Gives too soon: “I wonder if it is too late or soon”, Entretien dans un parc 6. “tardy or too soon”, Portrait of a Lady III 37.
41–42 too soon | Into weak hands: Shelley: “Too soon, and with weak hands”, Adonais 237 (Grover Smith 1983 30).
42–44 weak hands · · · fear · · · saves us: Isaiah 35: 3–4: “Strengthen ye the weak hands · · · fear not · · · he will come and save you”. a fear: Jeremiah 49: 5: “I will bring a fear upon thee.”
44 Neither fear nor courage saves us: Denham, of the stag: “All safety in despair of safety plac’d, | Courage he thence resumes · · · since ’tis in vain to fear · · · and more | Repents his courage, than his fear before; | Finds that uncertain waies unsafest are”, Cooper’s Hill 290–92, 297–99. TSE: “The description of the stag pursued by hounds has still a mild excitement”, Sir John Denham (1928). George Pierce Baker: “the weakness or the strength, the courage or the vacillation of a particular king · · · If the dramatist sees these facts, tragedy will be born, for the discovery will correlate his illustrative tragic incidents”, The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist (1907) 179. TSE scored the passage in his copy. (TSE in Hamlet (1919): “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion · · · Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies”.)
47 tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree: Blake: “I was angry with my friend: | I told my wrath, my wrath did end · · · tears · · · beneath the tree”, A Poison Tree (Wolf Mankowitz in Rajan ed. 136). TSE: “Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew”; “voices shaken from the yew-tree · · · Let the other yew be shaken”, Ash-Wednesday III 28, VI 23–24. “a shudder from afar of space shaking an iron tree”, Anabasis VI vi.
[Poem I 32 · Textual History II 340]
48 The tiger springs in the new year: Tennyson, In Memoriam CVI: “ring in the new · · · year · · · Ring in the Christ that is to be” (TSE: “Christ the tiger”, 20) (Shawn Worthington, personal communication). Us he devours: Chapman: “to devour | Him that devour’d what else had swallowed him”, The Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron III i (see note to 62–64).
49 reached conclusion: without an article (as also with), coming to an end or to a judgment. Thomas Gaspey: “The vagabondizings · · · were not to reach conclusion till near six o’clock”, The Witch-Finder (1824) I 279. John Esten Cooke: “I have detailed the process by which I reached conclusion”, The Heir of Gaymount (1870) ch. XLI.
51–54 I have not made this show purposelessly · · · honestly: The Revenger’s Tragedy III iv: “I have not fashioned this only for show”. Henry Eliot to TSE, 12 Sept 1935, on the Church: “Unlike a certain character in one of your poems, you cannot declare ‘I have not made this show purposelessly’. I believe that you have an irresistible, instinctive, more or less unconscious talent for publicity, but your exercise of it is purposeless.” TSE, 1 Jan 1936: “the words of mine that you quote seem to me simple honest words. Their publicity value was not in my mind when I wrote them, nor is it now.”
52–53 concitation | Of the backward devils: OED “concitation”: “arch. Stirring up, rousing, or exciting; agitation, excitement; esp. of the mind”, with no instances quoted between 1656 and TSE’s line. TSE to his Italian translator, Roberto Sanesi, 28 Oct 1960: “I think that by ‘c
oncitation’ I meant co-operative cajolery, or a mixture of cajolery and coercion on the part of the devils. But why were the devils ‘backward’? I should like to find an explanation of that because no poet likes to admit that he did not know what he was saying or that his words are meaningless. I suppose I meant taking one back to the past, or holding one’s thought in the past. I think you will have to use your own fancy freely and if necessary explain that after a great many years the poet does not know what he meant and is not sure that he meant anything that could be put into other words. It is only in more recent years that I have formed the habit of looking up in the dictionary every important word that appears in my verse!” The Merchant of Venice I iii: “The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.” Of concitation of scripture: “If for any reason you should wish to call up the Devil, you must say the Lord’s Prayer backwards”, Angelina Parker, Collectanea in Folklore Mar 1913. Sir Thomas Browne: “the revelations of Heaven are conveyed by new impressions · · · whereas the deceiving spirit, by concitation of humours, produceth his conceited phantasms”, with gloss: “How the Devil works his pretended revelations or predictions”, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Vulgar Errors, 1646) I x. (TSE: “in the prose of Sir Thomas Browne only a commonplace sententiousness is decorated by reverberating language”, Prose and Verse (1921). For “Damn Sir T. Browne”, see note to Little Gidding III 35–36.) backward devils: augurers in Inf. XX, condemned to walk backwards, with heads reversed on their shoulders, for presuming to tell the future. Stephen Gardiner, preaching in 1541: “The devil tempteth the world, and biddeth them to cast themselves backward. There is no ‘forward’ in the new teaching, but all backward. Now the devil teacheth, come back from fasting, come back from praying, come back from confession, come back from weeping for thy sins; and all is backward”, Foxe’s Acts and Monuments bk. VIII.
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54–56 I would meet you upon this honestly. | I that was near your heart was removed therefrom | To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition: braced by TSE in Thayer’s AraVP with “v. Middleton: the Changeling”, referring to “I that am of your blood was taken from you · · · regardlessly” (V iii). The play is now regarded as a collaboration with Rowley, but in Thomas Middleton (1927), TSE wrote with assurance:
Middleton in the end—after criticism has subtracted all that Rowley, all that Dekker, all that others contributed—is a great example of great English drama · · ·
I that am of your blood was taken from you
For your better health; look no more upon’t,
But cast it to the ground regardlessly,
Let the common sewer take it from distinction.
Beneath the stars, upon yon meteor
Ever hung my fate, ’mongst things corruptible;
I ne’er could pluck it from him; my loathing
Was prophet to the rest, but ne’er believed.
The man who wrote these lines remains inscrutable, solitary, unadmired; welcoming collaboration, indifferent to fame; dying no one knows when and no one knows how; attracting, in three hundred years, no personal admiration.
The 17th-century reading was “I am that of your blood” (a metaphor from blood-letting), but this was emended in the Mermaid edition, ed. Havelock Ellis (2 vols, 1887–90). Gerontion has its relations also to two of TSE’s other favourite passages from 17th-century drama which turned out to be defective in the Mermaid editions: 65–66 relate to Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (see note to The Waste Land [V] 403, 405 for the textual crux bewildering/bewitching); and 67–71 relate to Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois (see note to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 7–12 for the textual crux burning/cunning). To Masuru Otaké, 6 Apr 1934: “The Mermaid Series are extremely useful because of the form and size but the establishment of the texts leaves something to seek.” For misquotation from Measure for Measure, see note to epigraph, and from Lancelot Andrewes, see note to 18–20. For misquotation from Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, see note to The Death of the Duchess II 23–24, 51–53.
58 adulterated: see note on second epigraph to Sweeney Among the Nightingales.
59 I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: for Measure for Measure III i: “Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty”, see note to epigraph. As You Like It II vii: “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”. Newman: Soul: “how comes it then | That I have hearing still, and taste, and touch, | Yet not a glimmer of that princely sense | Which binds ideas in one, and makes them live?” ANGEL: “Nor touch, nor taste, nor hearing hast thou now”, The Dream of Gerontius §4 133–37. Newman: “Let us beg and pray Him day by day to reveal Himself to our souls more fully, to quicken our senses, to give us sight and hearing, taste and touch of the world to come”, Sermon on Divine Calls (1839). TSE, annotating his Greek text of Aristotle’s De Anima II ch. 1: “A. says that taste is a kind of touch. If so, touch can not be separated from all the other senses. But here he is speaking vaguely and generally.” (De Anima II ch. 9: “our sense of taste is · · · a modification of touch”.)
[Poem I 32–33 · Textual History II 340–41]
60–66 contact · · · a wilderness of mirrors · · · spider · · · Suspend: Conrad Aiken to TSE [23 Nov 1913], on Bergson: “It seemed to me that he was not in contact with life: or if he was, in his first premises, he soon lost it in images of light and sound. And I always was impatient with these withered little spiders who spin endless subtleties out of their own consciousness, mainly using the external world as attacking-points, or points of suspension.” Bacon: “This kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the Schoolmen: who having sharp and strong wits · · · shut up in the cells of a few authors · · · did out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin out unto those laborious webs of learning · · · as the spider worketh his web · · · admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit · · · unprofitable subtility”, The Advancement of Learning bk. I iv 5 (Grover Smith, personal communication). TSE on Paris in the first decade of the century: “over it all swung the spider-like figure of Bergson”, A Commentary in Criterion Apr 1934. (“like a syphilitic spider | The Absolute sits waiting”, He said: this universe is very clever 6–7.)
62 delirium: pronounced in TSE’s recording as though to rhyme with bacterium.
62–64 profit of their chilled delirium, | Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled, | With pungent sauces: Chapman: “High coolisses, and potions to excite | The lust of their ambition”, The Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron III i, “coolisses” being “strong broths” (Mermaid footnote). For this scene see notes to 38–39 and 48, and to The Waste Land [I] 71–76. TSE mentioned the scene in the last of his Clark Lectures (The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 220). chilled delirium | excite: James Huneker, comparing Baudelaire with Poe, De Quincey, Hoffmann, James Thomson and Coleridge: “Existence for such natures is a sort of muffled delirium”, The Baudelaire Legend in Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1909), reviewed by TSE in Harvard Advocate 5 Oct 1909. Huneker’s essay was reprinted as the preface to The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire (NY, 1919). when the sense has cooled: Macbeth V v: “The time has been, my senses would have cool’d” (Jennifer Formichelli, personal communication).
[Poem I 33 · Textual History II 341]
62, 64–65 delirium · · · multiply variety | In a wilderness of mirrors: Poe: “Who does not remember that, at such a time as this, the eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of its sorrow”, The Assignation. TSE read this Venetian story in childhood (see headnote to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar). “I suppose that the Murders in the Rue Morgue would be called prose, Shadow prose poetry, and The Assignation perhaps something between the two”, Prose and Verse (1921). TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “Jonson: The Alchemist”, referring to “my glasses | Cut in more subtle angles, to disperse | And multiply the figures, as I walk”, The Alchemist II i (Mermaid e
d.; commonly II ii). TSE quoted these lines and the previous four in Ben Jonson (1919), after describing a scene in Catiline as “a wilderness of oratory”. Pound: “And all the rest of her a shifting change, | A broken bundle of mirrors · · · !” Near Perigord III, final lines (TSE: “Shifting”, 28) (Jain 1991). TSE quoted the last 17 lines of Pound’s poem in Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry. a wilderness of mirrors: Poe: “Along that wilderness of glass”, The City in the Sea 37. The Merchant of Venice III i: “I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys” (Grover Smith 305). TSE: “Levy a wilderness of mirrors on the boneyard of streams”, Anabasis VII ix. The Versailles Treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors, 28 June 1919 (Bergonzi 54), where the new German Reich had been proclaimed in 1871. Although contemporary British newspapers made little of this symbolism, the humiliating terms imposed by the Allies were a reflection of the humiliation imposed by Germany on France half a century earlier (see notes to The Waste Land [I] 8–17 and [III] 277–78, 290–91). The Times 1 July 1919: “The Royalist Action Française, which has always refused its benediction to the Treaty, observes:—‘German unity, which was formerly made by the error of France, is cemented by the error of the Allies. They will regret it one day.’” TSE: “It is not particularly the Treaty of Versailles that has separated nation from nation; nationalism was born long before; and the process of disintegration which for our generation culminates in that treaty began soon after Dante’s time”, Dante (1929) I.
65 spider: “spider · · · he is very old”, The Engine II (Gerontion = little old man).
65–66 What will the spider do | Suspend its operations: Remy de Gourmont: “elle fuit, se laisse · · · glisser le long d’un fil · · · On dit même qu’elle n’attend pas toujours la fin de l’opération” [she flees; she lets herself · · · slide down a thread · · · she does not always wait for the end of the operation], Physique de l’amour: essai sur l’instinct sexuel (1903) ch. XIII (of the epirus spider); this translation, by Pound, dates from 1922. In Tradition and the Individual Talent II (1919), TSE quoted eleven lines of Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy III iv (giving neither title nor author), including “Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours | For thee? For thee does she undo herself?” What will the spider do · · · weevil: Ricks 254: “the weevil joins forces with the spider, for the weevil has its etymological filaments back to the web and to weaving, as well as to the root, ‘to move about briskly’.”