[Poem I 34 · Textual History II 342]
17 lustreless protrusive eye: Poe: “the eye-balls protruded”, and later “To look at a star by · · · turning toward it the exterior portions of the retina · · · is to behold the star distinctly—is to have the best appreciation of its lustre—a lustre which grows dim just in proportion as we turn our vision fully upon it. A greater number of rays actually fall upon the eye”, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. TSE: “And yet one cannot be sure that one’s own writing has not been influenced by Poe. I can name positively certain poets whose work has influenced me, I can name others whose work, I am sure, has not; there may be still others of whose influence I am unaware, but whose influence I might be brought to acknowledge; but about Poe I shall never be sure”, From Poe to Valéry (1948). Dickens: “a lustreless eye”, David Copperfield ch. XVI. Henry James: “‘Well, I admire Miss Evers—I don’t mind admitting that; but I ain’t dangerous,’ said Captain Lovelock, with a lustreless eye”, Confidence ch. XV. James: “every protrusive item almost”, The Middle Years ch. I; quoted by TSE in A Sceptical Patrician (1919) (Ricks 70). Rupert Brooke: “behind the eyes · · · sightless · · · Lustreless”, The Fish (32–35), a poem praised by TSE for its “amazing felicity and command of language”, Reflections on Contemporary Poetry I (1917). Arrowsmith 1981 counts Bleistein among “Eliot’s whole gallery of one-eyed men” including Polyphemus (Sweeney Erect 10), the “one-eyed merchant” (The Waste Land [I] 52) and “one-eyed Riley” (Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly in The Cocktail Party).
18 protozoic slime: OED cites Webster’s Dictionary (1864): “Protozoic, of, or pertaining to, the protozoa”, and T. H. Huxley: “A similar process takes place in sundry Protozoa and gives rise to a protozoic aggregate.” Coleridge: “The lowest class of animals or protozoa · · · have neither brain nor nerves”, Aids to Reflection XV.
18–19 from the protozoic slime | At a perspective of Canaletto: Luigi Lanzi: “For the greater correctness of his perspectives, Canaletto made use of the optic camera”, The History of Painting in Italy tr. Thomas Roscoe (1828) III 387. The Art-Union 15 Mar 1841: “If buildings, vanishing to a well-defined perspective point, appear (for example, a picture of Canaletto), a few inches below the eye’s level would, indeed, be as incorrect as a few inches above it · · · although the perspective of the buildings were evidently correct · · · water will seem not to have been painted flat, but · · · incline · · · towards the bottom of the picture.” Canaletto’s Venice is often a combination of elements from different perspectives.
20 candle end of time: “the old stumps and bloody ends of time”, WLComposite 159.
20, 24 candle end · · · Money: Donne: “this covetous man can date his happinesse by an Almanack · · · and though all his joy be in his bonds, yet denies himself a candles end to look upon them”, Sermons ed. Pearsall Smith (1919) 187.
21–22 On the Rialto once. | The rats: TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “Mcht of Venice”, referring to I iii, SHYLOCK: “upon the Rialto · · · there be land-rats, and waterrats”. TSE: “it’s a play I’ve never been able to enjoy myself, because it was a text for me at school, and I very much disliked what was called elocution and I was forced to declaim before a class ‘The quality of mercy is not strained’—I hated it”, The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse (recording, 1950).
21–24, 29 On the Rialto · · · the piles · · · smiles · · · lion’s wings: Byron: “I stood in Venice, | On the Bridge of Sighs · · · smiles · · · Look’d to the winged Lion’s marble piles”, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV i.
[Poem I 34–35 · Textual History II 342]
22 The rats are underneath the piles: “Lower than the wharf rats dive”, Dirge 5. “Subsiding basements where the rat breeds”, Choruses from “The Rock” III 49. “rats’ feet · · · In our dry cellar”, The Hollow Men I 9–10.
22–24 The rats · · · Money in furs: J. G. Wood: “Brown Rats · · · are marvellous exterminators of other ‘vermin,’ and permit none but themselves to be in possession of the domain which they have chosen · · · the brown Rat is not without its value in commerce, as the prepared skin is said to furnish the most delicate leather for the manufacture of the thumbs of the best kid gloves”, Natural History Picture Book: Mammalia (1869). TSE informed Father Martingale, 30 Jan 1930, that he had been “nourished in my childhood on the Natural History of the Revd. Mr. Wood”, but which of Wood’s many books he owned is unknown. piles. | The Jew · · · Money: William Carson Corsan: “They made piles of money. They’re as rich as Jews”, Two Months in the Confederate States (1863) 133. The Jew · · · Money in furs: to the Rev. Agnellus Andrew, 25 Feb 1949: “A young Austrian Jew, aged 27, came to me to ask whether I could find him a position · · · he contrived to leave Vienna in 1939 and came to this country · · · after his discharge in 1945 he was employed in the fur trade. In November last he paid a visit to Rome, which confirmed him in a desire to be received into the Catholic Church · · · He asserts, what seems to me likely, that his present situation renders him unacceptable to Jewish employers; that employment in the fur trade is therefore closed to him.” Money in furs: beginning as a fur-trading post, St. Louis was long dominated by the Missouri Fur Company, and in TSE’s childhood it had the world’s largest trade in raw furs. Arthur J. Ray: “high levels of employment in wartime industries served to increase the demand · · · Fur prices surged · · · During the inflationary period the auction business became ever more lucrative · · · Just before the market crashed in late 1920, the February sale in St Louis disposed of more than $27 million worth of fur · · · In the scramble for furs between 1914 and 1920, buying became highly speculative and was financed largely by the lavish use of credit”, The Canadian Fur Trade in the Industrial Age (1990) 98–102.
23 Jew: the lower-case “j” used in all printings until 1963 was marked for capitalisation by Valerie Eliot in VE’s 1951. Oscar Williams’s printing of this poem in his American revision of The Golden Treasury in 1953 was perhaps the first to use a capital here, but as an editor Williams took many liberties. Joyce uses “jew” 66 times in Ulysses (Sloane 64).
25–28 Gautier: “L’esquif aborde et me dépose, | Jetant son amarre au pilier, | Devant une façade rose, | Sur le marbre d’un escalier” [The skiff lands and deposits me, throwing its rope around a pillar, in front of a rose-red façade, upon the marble stairs], Variations sur le carnaval de Venise II: Sur les lagunes 21–24 (Grover Smith 53); see also note to epigraph, above. Gautier’s stanza is quoted in The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. XIV, Wilde writing of 23–24: “The whole of Venice was in those two lines.”
[Poem I 35 · Textual History II 342]
26–27 phthisic · · · Lights, lights: OED “phthisic” (pronounced tisic) cites 1587 “the disease of the lights, which is, to bee pursie and ptisike” (lights = lungs). Laforgue: “Tout à la chère morte phtisique” [devoted to my darling, dead of TB], Complainte de l’Organiste de Notre-Dame de Nice [Lament of the Organist of Notre-Dame de Nice]. For Laforgue on Baudelaire, “le spleen et la maladie (non la Phtisie poétique mais la névrose)”, see note on the title Spleen. Troilus and Cressida V iii, Pandarus: “a whoreson tisic, a whoreson rascally tisic”. hand · · · waterstair. Lights, lights: Poe: “the convulsive pressure of that trembling hand · · · hand · · · hand · · · the lights had died away within the palace · · · the water-gate”, two paragraphs of The Assignation, a story of Byronic and aristocratic adultery (see headnote). waterstair: OED “water” VII 24m: “Situated or built on or beside water”, including 1608: “orators’ wives shortly will be known like images on water stairs.” Lights, lights: TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “Shakespeare”. Instances include “Light, I say! Light!” Othello I i, and “Lights, lights, lights” in both Hamlet III ii and Romeo and Juliet I v. Also Marston: “Lights! Lights!” What You Will V i (Jones 298); and see note to Coriolan I. Triumphal March 48–50.
28 entertains: on The Relique by John Donne: “the notion of the violation of the grave
for ‘entertaining’ a ‘second guest’, and still more the analogy of the fickleness of graves with the fickleness of women, are of very doubtful value in this place”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 125 (Clark Lecture IV). See note on additional draft stanzas at the end of Whispers of Immortality ts2 for this and other terms shared here.
28–29 Sir Ferdinand | | Klein: Thayer’s AraVP has a line drawn by TSE to a note now erased, but possibly consisting of four names including (second) “Sir Henry [illegible] Bart”. (“Lady Kleinwurm’s party”, WLComposite 254.) Jonson breaks his own name across a stanza break: “Such truths as we expect for happy men; | And there he lives with memory—and Ben | | Jonson: who sung this of him, ere he went | Himself to rest”, To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison 84–87 (in Oxf Bk of English Verse). Kipling: “Surely my Kith and Kin will not refuse | | Pay—and I promise · · ·”, The Rupaiyat of Omar Kal’vin 8–9. (“Kal’vin”, as Kipling’s headnote made clear, was Sir Auckland Colvin.) Klein: (= little, Ger.), in this position (and after the final d of “Ferdinand”), a clipped diminutive of “Decline” (21). Klipstein is abbreviated to “Klip” by his friend Krumpacker in Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of a Prologue.
29–30 Who clipped the lion’s wings · · · and pared his claws?: Ariosto: “And so you par’d the Lyons teeth and pawes | That since that time to feare we had no cause. [Footnote: The Lyons teeth and pawes meaning the Venecians, called Lyons of the sea]”, Orlando Furioso, tr. Sir John Harington, XL 3 (Roy J. Booth, N&Q Oct 1981). Swift: “the writers of and for Grub Street have in these latter ages so nobly triumphed over Time; have clipped his wings, pared his nails, filed his teeth, turned back his hour-glass”, The Tale of a Tub I. Byron: “St Mark yet sees his lion where he stood, | Stand, but in mockery of his wither’d power”, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV ix. (The winged lion is the symbol of both St. Mark and Venice.) Charles Lamb on The Jew of Malta: “The idea of a Jew, which our pious ancestors contemplated with so much horror, has nothing in it now revolting. We have tamed the claws of the beast, and pared its nails”, Characters of Dramatic Writers, Contemporary with Shakespeare (Sloane 186). TSE to Theodore Spencer, 10 Nov 1936: “I understand that there is a boy on the Haverford team who recently CLIPPED THE TIGER’S CLAWS.” For Browning’s “clipped her wings”, see note to The Death of the Duchess II 7–10, 16–17.
29–31 wings · · · meditating: “meditates its wings”, Bacchus and Ariadne 18.
[Poem I 35 · Textual History II 342]
29–32 Who clipped · · · seven laws: TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “Ruskin”. See note to 32.
31–32 meditating on | Time’s ruins: Byron: “To meditate amongst decay, and stand | A ruin amidst ruins”, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV xxv (Bush 27). Edmund Spenser, The Ruins of Time (title) in Complaints (F. W. Bateson, the Review Nov 1962). TSE to Virginia Woolf, 12 Oct [1939]: “In the ruins of time, it may be that posterity—or the posterity of some foreign race—will make various conjectures as to the identity of the T. S. Eliot whose name is associated with the works of Old Possum.”
32 seven laws: Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture offered seven guiding moral and architectural principles, developed in The Stones of Venice. On the “incrusted architecture” of St. Mark’s: “LAW I. That the plinths and cornices used for binding the armour are to be light and delicate · · · LAW VII. That the impression of the architecture is not to be dependent on size”, The Stones of Venice II iv (Arrowsmith 1981 25).
Sweeney Erect
Published in Art & Letters Summer 1919, then AraVP, US 1920+ and Penguin / Sel Poems.
No recording known.
Undated in tss. Dated “London ? 1917” in Isaacs US 1920 and 1917 by TSE in Hayward’s 1925, but 1918 by TSE in Morley’s US 1920. Assigned to 1918–19 Rainey 198. Sent to John Rodker 17 May 1919.
[Poems I 35–37 · Textual History II 342–43]
Title] OED “Sweeney” 1: “from the name of Sweeney Todd, a barber who murdered his customers, the central character of a play by George Dibdin Pitt”, Sweeney Todd, the Barber (for OED 2, see note to 21–24). Asked at his trial in 1910 about patients for whom he might have required the poison hyoscin, the murderer “Dr.” Crippen replied: “it is extremely difficult to remember names. I think I can remember one. Sweeney—no, M’Sweeney”, Filson Young, The Trial of Hawley Harvey Crippen (1920) 90 (Arrowsmith 1981). For TSE’s association of Sweeney and Crippen, see headnote to Sweeney Agonistes, 11. BRITISH PERFORMANCES.
TSE’s childhood family newspaper contained a home-drawn advertisement: “When Others | ~ Fail ~ | Come to Me | Dr. Sweany, M.D. | cures INSOMNIA” (with a picture of the doctor), Fireside No. 4. Crawford 28: “Doctor F. L. Sweaney · · · advertised daily in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. His speciality · · · was ‘Nervous Debility’ · · · Eliot was so impressed as a child with this advertisement that he drew his own copy in the Fireside, reproducing the doctor’s name, face, and rubric with its warning to seek consultation ‘when others fail’.” (TSE suffered from a hernia which needed treatment in childhood.) James Johnson Sweeney to TSE, 27 May 1958: “Gould’s St. Louis Directory ran an advertisement every year from 1896 to 1950: ‘Dr. F. L. Sweaney leading specialist of St. Louis for nervous, chronic and private diseases, located at the Northwest corner of Broadway and Market Street, 1 North Broadway’.” TSE replied: “I think the grounds for regarding this Dr. Sweaney, whose name evidently attracted me at the age of ten, as the original of my hero [added to carbon in unknown hand: are insufficient]. The fact, however, that the name ‘Sweeney’ had such a fascination for me at an early age is perhaps one of great significance for subsequent analysts of my work.”
Discussing Sweeney Among the Nightingales and this poem, Matthiessen 105 referred to “‘apeneck Sweeney,’ whose prototype Eliot has said he first saw in a bar in South Boston” (perhaps quoting TSE in conversation). When TSE read Sweeney Among the Nightingales at Harvard on 13 May 1947 (following Preludes and Morning at the Window), he said he chose it “because it also has a certain local sentimental association. My figure of Sweeney is of course like many other characters of fiction, an amalgam from metals of very different sources and kinds, with, I hope, something in it that I have added myself. But amongst the chief ingredients were three friends of my youth, all now dead, all citizens of South Boston, and none of them was named Sweeney. I should add that two at least of these friends were men of much more loveable disposition than the use which I have made of them might suggest.” In the Criterion, the review “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1925) by “F. M.” took issue with Virginia Woolf’s idea of character, asking “did Mr. Eliot · · · deduce Sweeney from observations in a New York bar-room?” TSE: “I think of him as a man who in younger days was perhaps a professional pugilist, mildly successful; who then grew older and retired to keep a pub”. (For Conrad Aiken on TSE’s boxing lessons, see headnote to Sweeney Agonistes: 9. AFTER PUBLICATION.) Francis Sweeney described a conversation he had in 1961:
I asked Eliot about the prototype of the rough-and-ready Sweeney image in his poems—for example, in Sweeney Erect and Sweeney Agonistes. He had commented once, “It happens that I know many Sweeneys, some of them among friends of mine. I happen to like the name. It has a pleasant sound.” Among his friends named Sweeney was John Lincoln Sweeney, a humanities preceptor at Harvard. At the River Club, I said, “Your classmate, Conrad Aiken, traces Sweeney to your boxing instructor in the South End of Boston.” “There were others,” Eliot said—among them the bartender at the Opera Exchange, also in Boston, where he had gathered with friends in his Harvard student days, circling Champagne corks on the table in a fortune-telling game. Eliot lifted his forefinger and waved it in a circle.
Boston College Magazine Winter 2001
[Poem I 36 · Textual History II 343]
For the game with corks, see WLComposite 14–15. Harvard College Class of 1910: Secretary’s Fourth Report (1921) lists both an Albert and an Arthur
Sweeney. Erect: when discovered in 1891, Homo erectus was named Pithecanthropus erectus (upright ape-man). Paradise Lost IV 288–90: “Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall, | Godlike erect, with native Honour clad | In naked majesty”. (TSE: “naked · · · I stand erect before her”, How the Tall Girl’s Breasts Are 1, 4.) Emerson: “He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and, so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head”, Self-Reliance (Southam). The essay has an epigraph from “Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune” (the play is now attributed to Field, Fletcher and Massinger); see note to epigraph, below. Irving Babbitt: “discredit all the higher values of human nature and the words that describe them, until nothing is left erect but a brutal positivism”, The New Laokoon (1910) 228, citing Emerson in the next paragraph. TSE: “it is a great strain for the erect animal to persist in being erect, a physical and still more a moral strain. With or without mechanical aids of movement and noise, most people spend a good deal of their time avoiding the human responsibility”, Literature and the Modern World (1935).
Epigraph And the trees about me · · · wenches!: TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “Beaumont Fletcher in The Maid’s Tragedy” (II ii). In a scene that TSE often remembered, Aspatia, who has been deserted by her betrothed, casts herself in the role of Ariadne, forsaken by Theseus on the island of Naxos in the wild Cyclades (see note to 7–8). Aspatia asks to see a picture of Ariadne which her maid Antiphilia has done in needlework, and bids her rework it:
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 55
