The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 54
[Poem I 34 · Textual History II 342]
1–2 little · · · small: on Georgian poetry: “it is not unworthy of notice how often the word ‘little’ occurs; and how this word is used, not merely as a necessary piece of information, but with a caress, a conscious delight”, Reflections on Contemporary Poetry I (1917). See note to WLComposite 175–76.
2 Descending at a small hotel: reviewing The Education of Henry Adams, TSE remarked how Adams in 1858 and Henry James in 1870 “land at Liverpool and descend at the same hotel”, A Sceptical Patrician (1922) (F. W. Bateson, The Review Nov 1962). Descending: OED 1c: “To disembark, land from a vessel; to alight from a horse, carriage, etc.” Described as obs., with last (maritime) citation 1600. Archaic for water transport such as that in Venice, but in later use for vehicles (such as the street car taken by the “little girls” in Suite Clownesque II 14: “Oh see the soldiers—let’s descend”). Lewis Carroll: “He thought he saw a Banker’s Clerk | Descending from the bus” (see note to TSE’s I thought I saw a elephant and I thought I saw a banker’s clerk). Marston’s masque has Ariadne pronouncing an invocation “at which they descended”, including “Descend” at the head of a line: “Devotely chaste you vow Pasithea, | Descend”. TSE to Lord Halifax, 3 Oct 1927: “I will take the same train · · · descending at Doncaster.” To Polly Tandy, 5 July 1947: “I descended at Heath Row Airport”. hotel: Fowler: “The old-fashioned pronunciation with the h silent · · · is certainly doomed, & is not worth fighting for.”
3, 24, 25 Princess Volupine · · · Money in furs · · · Princess Volupine: Jonson’s Volpone (or “The Fox”) is set in Venice. OED “voluptuous” 1: “Of or pertaining to · · · gratification of the senses · · · luxuriously sensuous.” 1c: “Of modes of life or conduct”, with 1432–50: “The luffe of the cuntre and elegancy voluptuous deceyvide his grevous labors.” 1d: “Of fare or feasting.” 1e: “Of places.” 3b: “Suggestive of sensuous pleasure by fulness and beauty of form.” Venus im Pelz (1870), by Leopold Sacher-Masoch, the Austrian who gave his name to “masochism”, was translated as Venus in Furs by C. Carrington (Paris, 1902). Baudelaire: “la torture · · · est née de la partie infâme du cœur de l’homme, assoiffé de voluptés” [torture · · · has been devised by the evil half of man’s nature, which is thirsty for voluptuous pleasures], Mon Cœur mis à nu [My Heart Laid Bare], Journaux Intimes XLIII.
4 They were together and he fell: TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “Tennyson The Two Sisters”, referring to “They were together, and she fell”, The Sisters (1832) 4. fell: OED “fall” 22: “To yield to temptation, to sin; esp. of a woman: To surrender her chastity”, citing Othello, the Moor of Venice IV iii: “it is their husbands’ faults | If wives do fall.”
5 Defunctive music: TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “Phoenix Turtle”, referring to Shakespeare: “Let the priest in surplice white, | That defunctive music can, | Be the death-divining swan, | Lest the requiem lack his rite”, The Phoenix and Turtle 13–16 (I. A. Richards, New Statesman 20 Feb 1926). TSE: “the Phoenix and Turtle is a great poem, far finer than Venus and Adonis”, A Romantic Aristocrat (1919). OED: “Of or pertaining to defunction or dying” (originally “obs. rare”, citing only Shakespeare, but this designation was dropped in the 2nd ed. when TSE and three subsequent citations were added).
5–6 under sea · · · passing bell: for Ariel’s song from The Tempest I ii, see notes to Dirge 1–7 and The Waste Land [I] 48.
[Poem I 34 · Textual History II 342]
5–8 music under · · · passing · · · the God Hercules | Had left him, that had loved him well: Antony and Cleopatra IV iii, Music of the hautboys is under the stage. SOLDIER 1: “Music i’th’air.” | SOLDIER 3: “Under the earth.” · · · SOLDIER 2: “’Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, | Now leaves him” (I. A. Richards, New Statesman 20 Feb 1926, and mentioned by TSE in US lectures in 1932–33). TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “v. Antony Cleopatra also North’s Plutarch Hercules the god of sensual virility”. North:
within little of midnight, when all the city was quiet · · · suddenly they heard a marvellous sweet harmony of sundry sorts of instruments of musick, with the cry of a multitude of people, as they had been dancing · · · and it seemed that this daunce went through the city unto the gate that opened to the enemies, and that all the troop that made this noise they heard, went out of the city at that gate. Now, such as in reason sought the depth of the interpretation of this wonder, thought that it was the god unto whom Antonius bare singular devotion to counterfeit and resemble him, that did forsake them.
Life of Mark Antony (ed. W. H. D. Rouse, Temple Classics, 1898–99) IX 103–104
6–10 Passed seaward with the passing bell · · · Beat: Ruskin, The Stones of Venice I 1: “the fast-gaining waves, that beat, like passing bells, against the Stones of VENICE.” TSE’s Syllabus: Modern English Literature (1916) included Ruskin’s book. See note to 32. passing bell: OED (adopting Johnson’s definition): “The bell which rings at the hour of departure, to obtain prayers for the passing soul: often used for the bell which rings immediately after death.”
7–12 Hercules · · · axletree · · · Burned: OED “axletree”: “being in earlier use than the simple axle, formerly included the sense of that word, and of axis · · · The fixed bar or beam of wood, etc. on the rounded ends of which the opposite wheels of a carriage revolve.” 4. “The imaginary or geometrical line which forms the axis of revolution of any body, e.g. the earth, a planet, the heavens. Obs.” The expression “burning axletree”, for Phoebus’ chariot, the sun, led to OED 5: “poetically · · · the heaven, the sky. Obs.” Seneca: Hercules Furens 129–36 (first chorus):
signum celsi glaciale poli
septem stellis Arcados ursae
lucem verso temone vocat.
Iam caeruleis evectus equis …
Phoebique fugit reditura soror.
[The ycye signe of haughtye poale agayne, | With seven starres markt, the Beares of Arcadye, | Do call the light with overturned wayne. | With marble horse now drawne, hys waye to hye · · · And to returne doth Phoebus syster flee]
(Tr. Jasper Heywood (1561), in Seneca: His Tenne Tragedies, with Introduction by TSE (1927) I 13.) Hercules Furens 1138–42 (start of act V), HERCULES:
Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?
ubi sum? sub ortu solis, an sub cardine
glacialis ursae? numquid Hesperii maris
extrema tellus hunc dat Oceano modum?
[What place is this? what region? or of the world what coast? | Where am I? under ryse of sunne or bond els uttermost | Of th’ ycy beare or els doth here of sea of Hespery | The fardest ground appoynt a bond for th’ ocean sea to lye?], Tenne Tragedies I 46.
[Poem I 34 · Textual History II 342]
TSE used the first of these lines (1138), in Latin, as the epigraph to Marina. In Seneca, Hercules Œteus 1521–27, the Chorus sends word of Hercules’ death to all parts of the world:
dic sub Aurora positis Sabaeis,
dic sub occasu positis Hiberis,
quique sub plaustro patiuntur ursae
quique ferventi quatiuntur axe,
dic sub aeternos properare manes
Herculem et regnum canis inquieti,
unde non umquam remeabit ille.
[Declare to th’ Easterlinges whereas the ruddy morne doth ryse, | Declare unto the Irishmen aloofe at western Skies: | Make knowne unto the Moores annoyed by flaming axentree, | Those that with the ysy Wayne of Archas pestred bee. | Display to these that Hercules to th’ eternall ghostes is gone]
Tenne Tragedies II 243.
Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois, in his death throes: “flie where men feele | The burning axletree: and those that suffer | Beneath the chariot of the Snowy Beare”, Bussy d’Ambois V i (Mermaid ed.; commonly V iii); the burning and freezing places beneath the sky: the tropics and the poles. (Milton: “He saw a greater Sun appear | Than · · · burning Axletree could bear”, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity 83–84.)
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sp; R. H. Shepherd’s edition of Chapman (1873) had contained the misprint “curning axletree”, which the Mermaid ed. (1895) erroneously emended to “cunning axletree” (Grover Smith; see also Gerontion 34: “cunning passages”). TSE quoted the Mermaid text in Reflections on Contemporary Poetry IV (1919):
No dead voices speak through the living voice; no reincarnation, no re-creation. Not even the saturation which sometimes combusts spontaneously into originality.
fly where men feel
The cunning axletree: and those that suffer
Beneath the chariot of the snowy Bear
is beautiful; and the beauty only appears more substantial if we conjecture that Chapman may have absorbed the recurring phrase of Seneca [quotes Hercules Furens 129–31 and 1139–40], a union, at a point at least, of the Tudor and the Greek through the Senecan phrase.
He quoted the defective Mermaid text again in The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 152, Seneca in Elizabethan Translation (1927), Thinking in Verse (1930) and Dryden the Dramatist (1931). In 1933 he quoted Chapman from F. S. Boas’s ed. of 1905:
I am glad of the opportunity to use it again, as on the previous occasion I had an inaccurate text. It is from Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois:
“Fly where the evening from the Iberian vales
Takes on her swarthy shoulders Hecate
Crowned with a grove of oaks: fly where men feel
The burning axletree, and those that suffer
Beneath the chariot of the snowy Bear …”
[Poem I 34 · Textual History II 342]
Chapman borrowed this, as Dr. Boas points out, from Seneca’s Hercules Œteus [quotes 1521–24] and probably also from the same author’s Hercules Furens [quotes 1139–40]. There is first the probability that this imagery had some personal saturation value, so to speak, for Seneca; another for Chapman, and another for myself, who have borrowed it twice from Chapman. I suggest that what gives it such intensity as it has in each case is its saturation · · · with feelings too obscure for the authors even to know quite what they were.
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 147–48
(The two borrowings referred to are the present lines, 7–12, and Gerontion 67–71.)
Comparing Hamlet’s soliloquies with Chapman’s scene, TSE described them as “full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art”, Hamlet (1919). Bussy d’Ambois ends: “may both points of heaven’s straight axle-tree | Conjoin in one, before thyself and me” (V i). Sir John Davies: “As the two Beares whom the first mover flings | With a short turne about heavens Axeltree, | In a round daunce for ever wheeling bee”, Orchestra st. 64. See also note to Burnt Norton II 1–2, 8–10, and McCue 2014a.
On saturation: “We cannot, as a matter of fact, understand the Vita Nuova without some saturation in the poetry of Dante’s Italian contemporaries, or even in the poetry of his Provençal predecessors. Literary parallels are most important, but we must be on guard not to take them in a purely literary and literal way.”
9 The horses, under the axletree: Marlowe’s Ovid: “Now o’er the sea from her old love comes she | That drawes the day from heaven’s cold axle-tree · · · Hold in thy rosy horses that they move not”, Amores I, elegy 13, quoted by Pound, Elizabethan Classicists in Egoist Sept 1917 (Literary Essays).
9–11 The horses · · · Beat up the dawn · · · With even feet: TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “Marston”, referring to “For see, the dapple grey coursers of the morn | Beat up the light with their bright silver hooves, | And chase it through the sky”, Antonio’s Revenge I i (Jones 297). “aequo pulsat pede” [with an impartial foot], Horace, Odes I iv 13; TSE quoted the Latin in Andrew Marvell (1921). Kipling: “their hoofs drum up the dawn”, The Ballad of East and West 37 (in A Choice of Kipling’s Verse) (Grover Smith 53). Beat up the dawn · · · With even feet: Beaumont and Fletcher: “Pace out, you watery powers below; | Let your feet, | Like the galleys when they row, | Even beat”, The Maid’s Tragedy I ii, the masque. Neptune leads “Music to lay a storm” and “descends” (TSE: “Descending”, 2); NIGHT: “I hope to see | Another wild-fire in his axle-tree” (TSE: “the axletree · · · Burned”, 9, 12); CYNTHIA: “whip up thy team: | The day breaks here”. For this masque, see note to Sweeney Erect 5. The Maid’s Tragedy appears in TSE’s Syllabus: Elizabethan Literature (1918). Beat up: OED “beat” v.1 19: “(Naut.) To strive against contrary winds or currents at sea”. even feet: “Lady Equistep”, Eeldrop and Appleplex II (1917).
10–12 Istria · · · day: the peninsula, sixty miles from Venice in the direction of the rising sun, provided the piles on which the city is built (“piles”, 22). Pope too took liberties in rhyming on names: “Breathing Revenge, in Arms they take their Way | From Chalcis’ Walls, and strong Eretria”, Iliad II 643–44.
[Poem I 34 · Textual History II 342]
11–12 Her shuttered barge | Burned on the water all the day: TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “Ant. Cleo.”, referring to II ii, ENOBARBUS: “The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne | Burned on the water”, lines quoted in “Rhetoric” and Poetic Drama (1919). Coleridge: “The water, like a witch’s oils, | Burnt green, and blue, and white”, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner II 47–48 (see note to The Waste Land [II] 94–95). TSE: “flame | Like perfumed oil upon the waters”, The Burnt Dancer 17–18. “The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, | Glowed on the marble”, The Waste Land [II] 77–78. In the Palazzo Labia on the Grand Canal, TSE may have seen Tiepolo’s frescoes of the lives of Antony and Cleopatra (Drew 63).
12 Burned on the water: John Gould Fletcher: “Lights burn upon the water”, The Red Gates in New Paths, ed. C. W. Beaumont and M. T. H. Sadler (1918). Burned · · · all the day: Browning: “Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day”, A Toccata of Galuppi’s 11 (Grover Smith 53). all the day: Donne: “All day, the same our postures were, | And wee said nothing, all the day”, The Extasie 16. On which, TSE: “the ‘All day’ beginning the third line, echoed by ‘all the day’ at the end of the fourth, is a real trouvaille or euphony which goes to make one of the most perfect quatrains in this form that I have ever met”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 110 (Clark Lecture III).
13 But this or such was Bleistein’s way: Browning: “And this, or something like it, was his way”, How It Strikes a Contemporary 2 (Loucks 1976a).
14–15, 17 A saggy bending of the knees | And elbows, with the palms turned out · · · eye: Thomas Wilkes: “Respect and submission may be expressed by the eyes mildly beholding the personage that enforces it, the body bent, and the hands either hanging down not close to the body, the fingers closed, and the palms turned outward; or else by the eye cast down”, A General View of the Stage (1759) ch. V. bending of the knees · · · turned out · · · protrusive: “The usual error · · · is a turning in of the toes, a bending of the knees, and a protrusion of the lower abdomen”, The Water-Cure Journal July 1856. with the palms turned out: Frances Trollope: “joining her hands together on her breast, and then separating them widely, with the palms turned outward, which gesture she repeated at every clause of her discourse: ‘Don’t tell me of fond indulgence’”, Mabel’s Progress bk. II xi (All the Year Round 8 June 1867). TSE: “those who would build and restore turn out the palms of their hands”, Choruses from “The Rock” II 6; “palms turned upwards”, Chorus VII 31 (Hands).
16 Chicago Semite Viennese: “For a number of generations there was some friction between the German Jew and the East European Jews [in Chicago] · · · and each had their own institutions · · · From the 1880s to the 1920s the Jewish population grew from 10,000 to 225,000, or from 2 percent to 8 percent of the general population. In 1900 about 65 percent of Chicago’s Jews were of East European origin; in 1920 about 80 per cent”, Encyclopaedia Judaica (2nd ed., 2006) 4,607–12. Kipling: “But the real reason of my wish to return is because I have met a lump of Chicago Jews and am afraid that I shall meet many more. The ship is full of Americans, but the American-Ger
man-Jew boy is the most awful of all”, From Sea to Sea VI (“Shows how one Chicago Jew and an American Child can Poison the Purest Mind”). Kipling again: “Wait till the Anglo- American-German-Jew—the Man of the Future—is properly equipped · · · He’ll be the finest writer, poet, and dramatist, ’specially dramatist, that the world as it recollects itself has ever seen”, From Sea to Sea XXXIII. TSE to Clive Bell, 25 July 1930: “Your son is a sturdy sprout and I have read his verse with warm approval. He seems to be almost the only one at Cambridge who has escaped the Chicago Semite taint and who is uncontaminated by either Joyce, Lewis, Pound, Léger [St.-John Perse] or myself.” (For “the Jew” and cities, see note to Gerontion 8–10.) “Jerusalem Athens Alexandria | Vienna London”, The Waste Land [V] 374–75.