The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 59
32 Weeping, weeping: Blake: “I laid me down upon a bank | Where love lay sleeping. | I heard among the rushes dank | Weeping, weeping”, I laid me down upon a bank.
32–33 Weeping, weeping multitudes · · · A.B.C.’s: Kipling imagined an Aerial Board of Control in his story As Easy as A.B.C. (1912):
Oh, cruel lamps of London,
If tears your light could drown,
Your victims’ eyes would weep them,
Oh, lights of London Town!
Then they weep · · · The old world always weeped when it saw crowds together. It did not know why, but it weeped. We know why, but we do not weep, except when we pay to be made to.
The last page of the story: “We shall go on preaching in London”, and the very end: “Then some began to weep aloud, shamelessly—always without shame.”
[Poem I 39 · Textual History II 345]
33 A.B.C.’s: US 1920 had an asterisk with a footnote: “i.e. an endemic teashop, found in all parts of London. The Initials signify: Aerated Bread Company, Limited.” (OED “endemic” a: “Constantly or regularly found among a (specified) people, or in a (specified) country · · · opposed to exotic.” b: “Of diseases: Habitually prevalent in a certain country.”) Wyndham Lewis listed who and what to BLESS and BLAST in both issues of Blast (imitated in TSE to Conrad Aiken, 19 July 1914); the second issue (July 1915) blasted “Lyons’ shops (without exception)” and blessed “All A.B.C. shops (without exception)”, as well as “The War Loan” (TSE: “five per cent. Exchequer Bond”, 16). (Tennyson: “O you, the Press! · · · What power is yours to blast a cause or bless!” Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper 7–8.) In these years the contributors’ meetings of A. R. Orage’s The New Age were held in the basement of the A.B.C. in Rolls Passage, Chancery Lane (Patricia Hutchins, Twentieth Century Oct 1958). Aldous Huxley to Ottoline Morrell, 21 June 1917: “I lunch now frequently with Evan [Morgan] at the Savoy and with Murry at the A.B.C.” (the letter also reported meeting Vivien Eliot for the first time). TSE to Virginia Woolf, 5 Mar 1933: “In Los Angeles · · · they have a restaurant called the Brown Derby which is built of concrete to look like a Brown Bowler Hat, and you go there and eat Buckwheat Cakes & Maple Syrup and Coffee at Midnight, and it seems just as normal as an A.B.C.”
Le Directeur
Published in Little Review July 1917 (with this title), then 1919 and Ara VP (both titled Le Spectateur), then 1920+. Pound to Margaret Anderson, 10 May 1917: “Eliot’s poems for July I will send soon.” 15 May: “His Hippopotamus must be in full size type, the french can be packed rather close, if necessary.”
No recording known.
No drafts known. Dated 1916 by TSE in Hayward’s 1925 but 1918 by TSE in Morley’s US 1920.
[The Editor]
[Woe betide the hapless Thames, that flows so close to The Spectator. The conservative editor of The Spectator befouls the breeze. The reactionary shareholders of the conservative Spectator go arm in arm, round and round, stealthily. In the gutter a small girl in rags, snub-nosed, gazes at the editor of the conservative Spectator and starves for love.]
[Poems I 39–40 · Textual History II 345–46]
Title Le Directeur: editor-in-chief, as opposed to rédacteur, a working editor (Arrowsmith 1989). For Baudelaire on “Les directeurs de journaux”, see note to Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of an Agon 108–12. Lytton Strachey’s cousin John St. Loe Strachey had been Proprietor and Editor-in-Chief of The Spectator since 1898. Pound to his father [3 June 1913]: “‘Strachey’ is actually the edtr. of The Spectator but I use him as the type of male prude”. Pound’s Salutation the Second adjured: “Rejuvenate even The Spectator · · · Dance the dance of the phallus · · · Speak of the indecorous conduct of the Gods! | (Tell it to Mr. Strachey)”. When TSE included this in Pound’s Selected Poems, the last of these lines appeared in smaller type. TSE to Amar Bhattacharyya, 22 June 1964: “Le Directeur was a mere jeu d’esprit, and I had no particular grievance against Mr. Strachey (that was his name) or against The Spectator—‘directeur’ and ‘spectateur’ happen to rhyme, that is about all there is in it.” The offices of The Spectator were at 1 Wellington St, The Strand, 100 yards from Waterloo Bridge. It was printed in Fetter Lane, adjoining Fleet St.
Title (1919 and AraVP) Le Spectateur: the magazine The Spectator, published from 1828, had been preceded by the papers issued daily by Addison and Steele, 1711–12. Their first issue explained the detachment of Mr. Spectator and the nature of his Observations: “I live in the World, rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species; by which means I have made myself a Speculative Statesman, Soldier, Merchant, and Artizan, without ever medling with any Practical Part in Life · · · In short, I have acted in all the parts of my Life as a Looker-on”, 1 Mar 1711 (Arrowsmith 1989); see the next poem, Mélange Adultère de Tout, for a similar list of roles. For the press, see Airs of Palestine, No. 2 (with its conjunction with the Thames) and The “Boston Evening Transcript”.
6 Empeste: particularly, infecting with pox or syphilis.
7–8 Les actionnaires | Réactionnaires: Diderot: “La vie, une suite d’actions et de réactions · · · Vivant, j’agis et je réagis en masse · · · mort, j’agis et je réagis en molécules” [Life is a succession of actions and reactions · · · Living, I act and react en masse · · · dead, I act and react in molecules], Le rêve de d’Alembert [The Dream of d’Alembert] (Arrowsmith 1989). TSE’s Diderot (1917) is a review of the early philosophical works. TSE: “The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript | Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn”, The “Boston Evening Transcript” 1–2. To Conrad Aiken 25 Feb [1915]: “one would be attached to a rock and swayed in two directions” (Arrowsmith 1989).
7–8, 12 Les actionnaires | Réactionnaires · · · Font des tours: see Anatole France, “Les petites marionnettes | Font, font, font | Trois petits tours” in note to Convictions 1.
12–13 Font des tours | A pas de loup: “Here we go round the prickly pear”, The Hollow Men V 1; “I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring”, The Waste Land [I] 56; “the ring of ghosts with joined hands”, The Family Reunion II iii (Arrowsmith 1989).
17 Camarde: “snubnose”, signifying death’s head or Death, is frequent in Gautier and Corbière (Arrowsmith 1989). “the skull beneath the skin”, Whispers of Immortality 2. The bridge of the nose can be deformed or destroyed by syphilis (“Empeste”, 6).
17–18 Camarde | Regarde: Rostand: “Je crois qu’elle regarde … Qu’elle ose regarder mon nez, cette Camarde!” [I think she’s looking … Let her dare to look at my nose, that snubnose!], Cyrano de Bergerac V vi. See note to A Practical Possum 60, “Possum’s Nose”.
Mélange Adultère de Tout
Published in Little Review July 1917, then 1919+.
No recording known.
Undated in ts1. Dated 1916 by TSE in Hayward’s 1925 but 1918 by TSE in Morley’s US 1920. Assigned to 1917 Rainey 198.
[Poems I 40–41 · Textual History II 346]
[Adulterous Mixture of Everything]
[In America, a professor; in England, a journalist; you must stride and sweat merely to keep track of me. In Yorkshire, a lecturer; in London, something of a banker; you will mock me, no doubt. When in Paris I sport the black beret of one who could-not-care-less. In Germany I am a philosopher, overcome by Exaltation, in the pose of a mountaineer. Still I wander here and there, with various breaks for tra la la, from Damascus to Omaha. I shall celebrate my day of festivity in an African oasis, clad in giraffe-skin. They will display my cenotaph—empty—on the burning coasts of Mozambique.]
Wyndham Lewis: “‘I am a hundred different things; I am as many people as the different types of people I have lived amongst. I am a “Boulevardier” · · · I am a “Rapin”; I am also a “Korps-student”’”, Tarr ch. II in Egoist June 1917 (immediately above an advertisement for Prufrock and Other Observations). Jean de Bosschère: “Pendant quatre saisons Homère voyage | Et dans chaque ville il est un autre personnage; | Bleu sous le ciel bl
eu, gris à Londres | Recueilli à Paris; perverti à Rome | Parmi l’ordre de tombe des tombes. | Byron dans les îles, et Shakespeare encore | Dans la poussière d’homme de Rome | Mais jamais il n’est Mare · · · n’est pas un prophète ni un critique” [For four seasons Homer travels, | And in each town he is another person: | Blue beneath a blue sky, grey in London, | Composed in Paris, corrupt in Rome | Amid the order of the tomb of tombs; | Byron in the Aegean, and Shakespeare again | In Rome’s dust of men. | But never is he Marsh · · · is neither a prophet nor a critic], Homère Mare habite sa Maison de Planches [Homer Marsh Dwells in his House of Planks]. Bosschère’s poem was sent to Poetry by Pound on 22 June 1916, but before it could appear there, it was published, with this translation by F. S. Flint facing, in The Closed Door (1917) (Williams 182). TSE quoted fourteen lines of the French poem in Reflections on Contemporary Poetry II (1917).
Title Mélange Adultère de Tout: Corbière, Épitaphe 7. Byron: “But yet is merely innocent flirtation, | Not quite adultery but adulteration”, Don Juan XII lxiii. Second epigraph to Sweeney Among the Nightingales: “The nightingale sings of adulterate wrong.” In Thayer’s AraVP, TSE wrote: “cf. Tristan Corbière”, pointing to the poem which gave him not only the title but a run of roles:
Poète, en dépit de ses vers;
Artiste sans art,—à l’envers,
Philosophe,—à tort à travers.
Un drôle sérieux,—pas drôle.
Acteur, il ne suit pas son rôle;
Peintre; il jouait de la musette;
Et musicien: de la palette.
[Poet,—in spite of his verses. Artist without art,—rather the reverse. Philosopher,—in the wrong, cross-wise. Comic character,—not comical. Actor,—doesn’t follow his part. Painter—he played a kind of oboe. And musician—but of the painter’s palette.] (tr. eds)
[Poem I 41 · Textual History II 346]
For Corbière’s poem see note to Petit Epître 1–2. Juvenal: “Grammaticus, Rhetor, Geometres, Pictor, Aliptes, | Augur, Schoenobates, Medicus, Magus, omnia novit”, Satires III 76–77 (Oser, adding that the lines are quoted by Newman in the Preface to The Idea of a University). Dryden’s translation describes “a nation in a single man”: “A Cook, a Conjurer, a Rhetorician, | A Painter, Pedant, a Geometrician, | A Dancer on the Ropes, and a Physician”. Dryden again: “But, in the course of one revolving Moon, | Was Chymist, Fidler, States-Man, and Buffoon”, Absalom and Achitophel 549–50 (see note to Verses To Honour and Magnify Sir Geoffrey Faber Kt. 7–8).
1–2 En Amérique, professeur; | En Angleterre, journaliste: “The world is full of journalists, | And full of universities”, Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse 15 ^ 16 variant.
1–6 professeur · · · journaliste · · · banquier: to his sister Charlotte, 21 Mar 1917: “I am at present combining the activities of a journalist, lecturer, and financier.” In a spoof letter addressed to “Miss Eleanor Gellielax” (sent to John Hayward, 24 Sept 1935), TSE quotes a series of telegrams from a private detective on the trail of “the person you name, who shall be nameless”. Among these, one reports on “JEAN JA CQUES AILLEVARD LEDIT A ILLEVARD RESORTISSANT SUISSE ORIGINE LEVANTINE STOP CARRIERE MEDIOCRE COMME BOXEUR PROFESSEUR GYMNASTIQUE ANCIENNEMENT MARCHAND DE STUPEFIANTS”.
5 En Yorkshire, conférencier: Schuchard 26: “Eliot’s lectures and classes on modern French literature were held in the afternoons from 3 October to 12 December 1916 at Ilkley, in Yorkshire.” See headnote to “Poems (1920)”, 5. TSE’S PROFICIENCY IN FRENCH.
6 A Londres, un peu banquier: Andrew Marvell (1921) ends with a cryptic flourish: “C’était une belle âme, comme on ne fait plus à Londres”. This modifies Laforgue’s “Ils virent qu’c’était un belle ame, | Comme on n’en fait plus aujourd’hui” [They countered that he was a fine spirit, such as they don’t make nowadays], Complainte de pauvre jeune homme [Complaint of the poor young man] (tr. eds). Mélange Adultère de Tout is in Marvell’s measure, rhymed octosyllabics.
9 Casque noir: Fr. casque a protruberance on the head of a bird: given noir, pointing to crow, raven—corbeau, corbin—and so to Corbière.
10 philosophe: in a tribute printed originally in French: “Valéry has been called a philosopher. But a philosopher, in the ordinary sense, is a man who constructs or supports a philosophical system; and in this sense, we can say that Valéry was too intelligent to be a philosopher”, “Leçon de Valéry” (1947).
11 Emporheben: (= lifting-up, Ger.) Hegelian terminology.
14 tra là là: Rimbaud: “tu sais bien, Monsieur, nous chantions tra la la” [Sire, as you yourself know, we would sing tra la la], La Forgeron [The Blacksmith]. TSE: “Tra-la-la-la-la-la-laire”, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar epigraph. “la la”, The Waste Land [III] 306.
15 Damas: Damascus, but also a village in Lorraine, north-eastern France. (“Damas jusqu-” perhaps tilts the balance.) Omaha: in Nebraska.
20 Aux côtes brûlantes de Mozambique: “The tropic odours · · · from Mozambique · · · flame”, The Burnt Dancer 15–17.
[Poem I 41 · Textual History II 346]
Lune de Miel
Published in Little Review July 1917, then 1919+. Included, along with Dans le Restaurant, in Poèmes.
No recording known.
Undated in ts1. Dated 1916 by TSE in Hayward’s 1925 but 1918 by TSE in Morley’s US 1920. Dated London, 1917 in Poèmes, and assigned to 1917 by Rainey 198.
[Honeymoon]
[They have seen the Low Countries, now they return to Terre Haute, but a summer night finds them in Ravenna, at rest between two sheets, the home to two hundred bugs. Seasonal sweat, and a strong smell of bitch. They lie on their backs and stretch out four fleshy legs, all swollen with bites. They lift the sheet to scratch more freely. Less than a league from here is Sant’Apollinaire in Classe, the basilica known to enthusiasts for its acanthus capitals twisted by the wind. They will take the eight o’clock train, prolonging their miseries from Padua to Milan, where they will find The Last Supper, and an inexpensive restaurant. He thinks about tips and calculates the bill. They will have seen Switzerland and crossed France. And Sant’Apollinaire, stiff and ascetic, old decommissioned mill of God, still keeps in its worn stones the precise form of Byzantium.]
1 Terre Haute: the name of the city in Indiana derives from the French for “high ground”. To Virginia Woolf, 5 Mar 1933: “I have learnt how to pronounce Los Angeles and Albuquerque, but Terre Haute is beyond me.”
3–4 entre deux draps · · · La sueur aestivale: Charles-Louis Philippe: “le lit défait où les deux corps marquèrent leur place de sueur brune sur les draps usés, ce lit des chambres d’hôtels” [the unmade bed where the two bodies had left the impress of brownish sweat upon the worn sheets—this bed of hotel rooms], Bubu de Montparnasse ch. IV.
4–6 une forte odeur de chienne · · · de morsures: “(The same eternal and consuming itch | Can make a martyr, or plain simple bitch)”, WLComposite 274–75 (Arrowsmith 1982).
6 tout gonflées de morsures: Augustine: “To Carthage I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves · · · my soul was sickly and full of sores”, Confessions V, first paragraph; see note to The Waste Land [III] 307 (Arrowsmith 1982).
8–9 Saint Apollinaire | En Classe: 6th-century basilica dedicated to St. Apollinaris, first bishop of nearby Ravenna, Italy.
[Poem I 42 · Textual History II 347]
10 chapitaux d’acanthe que tournoie le vent: the acanthus leaves at the top of the columns in the nave are twisted as though buffeted by the wind. Ruskin on St. Mark’s: “their capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and vine”; “the leaves drifted, as it were, by a whirlwind round the capital by which they rise”, The Stones of Venice IV xiv, V xx. TSE: “Four fine capitals, Romanesque, of foliage, one leaves blown to the right by the aura”, travel notebook, 1911, entry on Verona (Houghton; Arrowsmith 1982).
13 la Cène: Leonardo’s Last Supp
er in Milan. Anne Ridler on visiting TSE’s office while a secretary at Faber: “The pretext was a query raised by the proof reader on his Collected Poems 1909–1935, and concerned the gender of a noun in Lune de Miel, which he had given wrongly, writing ‘le Cène’. ‘Well, that depends of course on Italian’, he said, and I was puzzled, informing him of what I was sure he must know, that the Italian was cena, feminine. But it occurred to me afterwards that he was probably thinking of the masculine cenacolo, as the allusion is to Leonardo’s fresco of the Last Supper” (Ridler 5–6); to which she later added: “We didn’t have any further conversation, and I went away and corrected it” (interview with Kieron Winn, 9 Feb 2000). la Cène, et un restaurant pas cher: “cheap hotels | And sawdust restaurants · · · Talking of Michelangelo”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 6–7, 14.
17 Vielle usine désaffectée de Dieu: “Some men can understand the architecture of the cathedral of Albi, for instance, by seeing it as a biscuit factory”, Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (1928), Introduction (Allison Vanouse, personal communication).
18 la forme précise de Byzance: to Mary Hutchinson [11? July 1919]: “What I feel about much contemporary taste is that people have merely assimilated other people’s personal tastes without making them personal · · · One could make a short list: Byzantine (a little out of date) · · · Laforgue (really inferior to Corbière at his best).”