The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 62
21 The: omitted in TSE’s recording of 1947. couched Brazilian: for tropical associations see Textual History and The Waste Land [V] 398 (“The jungle crouched”). couched: OED “couch” v.1 I: “To lay down flat”. c: “Said of animals; almost always refl. or pass. arch.”
24 maisonnette: OED: “part of a residential building which is let separately, usu. distinguished from a flat by not being all on one floor”, only from 1912 (with this as the second citation). Douglas Goldring’s sexually suggestive Maisonnettes, two quatrains, appeared in Others Anthology (1916), near Portrait of a Lady. TSE to Philippa Strachey, 8 Feb 1929: “We would not consider taking a maisonette over people of whom we know nothing.” See McCue 2016.
26, 28 gloom · · · drawing-room: “Inside the gloom | Of a garret room”, Inside the gloom 1–2. “in its own gloom · · · in a dusty room”, Animula 29–30.
[Poem I 47–48 · Textual History II 353–54]
29 Abstract Entities: John Stuart Mill on Greek philosophical theories: “Empedokles explained all things by the mixture and mutual action of earth, water, air, and fire. These material substances were usually supposed to require the concurrence of certain abstract entities called Wet and Dry, Cold and Hot, Soft and Hard, Heavy and Light, &c, which were the immediate if not ultimate agents in the generation of phenomena”, review of Grote’s Plato (1866). TSE: “It is equally possible to look upon consciousness as the cause or as the effect of a peculiar grouping of entities, though really I suppose that it is neither, but is the group itself”, The Ethics of Green and Sidgwick (1914). Rejecting Bertrand Russell’s conception of “neutral entities”, TSE wrote of immediate experience: “It is certainly neutral, but what ground have we for speaking of it as ‘entities’?” On Real, Unreal, Ideal, and Imaginary Objects (1914). “so many entities”, Suite Clownesque I 19.
30 variant sacerdotal: OED “of or pertaining to a priest”.
31 our lot: Pound: “And he said, ‘Have you seen any of our lot?’ | I’d seen a lot of his lot · · ·” The Gipsy in Poetry Mar 1915. Hugh Kenner asked TSE about “our lot”: “He said it meant ‘kind,’ not ‘fate,’ and conceded that it perhaps violated the diction of that particular poem”, Kenner xiii. (“whatever be our lot”, To the Class of 1905 44.)
32 variant their Ethics of the Dust: Ruskin, The Ethics of the Dust (1865), ten lectures given at a girls’ school.
Additional draft stanzas ts2 [3–7] the vanishd shade · · · the Sons of God descend | To entertain the wives of men. | | And when the Female Soul departs · · · The Sons of God: “departed · · · Descending · · · the God Hercules | Had left him · · · Declines · · · She entertains”, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar epigraph, 2, 7–8, 21, 28.
Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service
Published in Little Review Sept 1918, then 1919+ and Penguin / Sel Poems.
Recorded 26 Sept 1955, in London; released Caedmon 1955 (US), 1960 (UK).
Undated in ts1. Dated “? London 1917” in Isaacs US 1920 and 1917 by TSE in Hayward’s 1925, but dated 1918 by TSE in Morley’s US 1920. Assigned to 1918 by Rainey 198.
[Poems I 48–50 · Textual History II 354–56]
Title Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service: Emerson wrote to his wife, Lidian, 31 Dec 1852, about William Greenleaf Eliot (TSE’s grandfather): “Mr. Eliot, the Unitarian minister, is the Saint of the West, has a sumptuous church, crowds to hear his really good sermons” (Letters, ed. Ralph L. Rush, 1939). Gordon 110: TSE “resented Sunday morning services conducted by his cousin Frederick May Eliot, who · · · was ordained as a Unitarian minister”. Yet where the 1961 ts of Howarth suggested that the poem brought Unitarianism “under withering scrutiny”, TSE wrote in the margin “nothing to do with Unitarianism” (Materer). TSE to Virginia Woolf [2 Apr? 1934, incomplete], apparently comparing clerical forebears: “For the moment, I will post the Revd. Dan’l Greenleaf, the Revd. Dr. Asahel Stearns, the Revd. Obadiah Smith, and (among Moderns) the Revd. Fred. Eliot (author of Hammered on the Anvil, a book of parochial talks to Young Men) in charge of skirmishing parties and raiders · · · It is unfortunate that Julius Caesar Eliot never took orders · · · I have just been made a Churchwarden. That ought to count 3 points.” To Henry Eliot, 26 May 1934: “Sometime at your leisure I wish you would look up the names of all clerical ancestors, collaterals, and connexions by marriage that we have. The point being that I have a bet of half-a-crown with Virginia Woolf as to which is descended from more parsons. She has been rather boastful on the point. What’s the relationship to Richard Sterne, Archbp. of York? I shall count Laurence Sterne, as a collateral.” (TSE later accepted that there was no relation between “Stearns” and “Sterne”.) 20 June: “I think there are a few omissions—there were two Rev. Andrew Eliots in succession, one during the Revolution—and wasnt Uncle Oliver Stearns, Dean of the Divinity School, a parson? · · · Aunt Susie has produced (unasked) a Revd. John Rogers, admired by Hooker · · · The family came from Cotlands in Devon and that branch settled at Port Eliot in Cornwall · · · Our people, you remember, went to Coker, near Yeovil in Somerset.” To Frederick May Eliot on his election as president of the American Unitarian Association, 24 Feb 1937: “news reached me that the smoke had finally risen from the chimney on Beacon Hill, and the announcement made that you were to wear the triple crown. I congratulate the American Unitarian Association on having made the inevitable choice, and am glad to think that the family retain their proud position of being the Borgias of Unitarianism.” (The “triple crown” was worn by Popes, beginning in the 14th century.)
[Poem I 49–50 · Textual History II 355]
Henry to TSE, 12 Sept 1935, accusing him of sensationalising the change in his religious convictions: “how came you to address to the clergy of Boston, a city saturated with associations of your ancestors, immediate and distant, what seems to me in all truth a fanatically intolerant and shocking tirade? · · · even the Roman Church approves the injunction, ‘Honor thy father and mother.’” TSE, 1 Jan 1936: “As for the sensation of a person of my antecedents ‘going Romish’ etc. as you say; please consider that there was no such sensation, not at any rate in England. Most of the churchfolk I know do not even know that I was once a Unitarian, even if they know what a Unitarian is; they don’t know what an Eliot is · · · As for my address to the Unitarian clergy of Boston, I did not want to address them at all, and I only acceded to repeated invitation. I gave them exactly what I was asked for, and I did not get fair treatment either. As for my failure on that occasion to honour my father and my mother, I cannot attach any meaning to your words.” Declining to promote the Converts’ Aid Society, TSE described himself to F. W. Chambers, 25 Mar 1935, as “a member of the Church of England”. Mr. Eliot’s: see note to Five-Finger Exercises V. Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg 1, “How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot”. Sunday Morning Service: “There was once an organization called the Ethical Culture Society, which held Sunday morning services: that seems to be the kind of liberal religion to which Mr. Foerster’s Humanism boils down”, Second Thoughts about Humanism (1929). In 1960: “I was brought up in the orthodoxy of Boston Unitarianism: I use the word ‘orthodoxy’, because the tendency of American Unitarianism in our day has been to wander further and further from that attachment to the memory of Jesus Christ which gave it its tenuous claim to being Christian · · · My father was brought up in the atmosphere of Unitarian piety and strict Puritanism, and was a zealous upholder of the church which his father had founded · · · Sundays had both obligations and prohibitions for members of his family. But in the summer months the obligations were relaxed, and some of the prohibitions, indeed, slightly relaxed too. As is usual in American society, we had a house—what Americans call a ‘cottage’—at the seaside, in Massachusetts · · · there was a Unitarian church: but I do not remember my parents ever attending Sunday service there. Even if they did once or twice, the fact remains that the summer holiday was for my family a holiday from church-going as well
as from other serious occupations. This difference came to strike me as remarkable as I approached the age of serious reflection. Religion was associated with one particular church edifice”, All Souls’ Club (1960). “Sunday: this satisfied procession | Of definite Sunday faces”, Spleen 1–2. For Sunday observance, see note to Choruses from “The Rock” I 24–29.
Epigraph Marlowe, The Jew of Malta IV i. Portrait of a Lady takes its epigraph from the same scene.
1 Polyphiloprogenitive: not in OED 1st ed., but later added: “Very prolific, specifically of a person’s talent, imagination, inventive powers, etc.”, with this as the first citation, adding “perhaps influenced also by PHILOPROGENITIVE a. 2.” (“Phrenol. Loving one’s offspring”). Pronounced polly-fillow-progenitive in TSE’s recording. Byron:
That’s noble! That’s romantic! For my part
I think that philo-progenitiveness is
(Now here’s a word quite after my own heart,
Though there’s a shorter a good deal than this,
If that politeness set it not apart,
But I’m resolved to say nought that’s amiss.)—
I say, methinks that philo-progenitiveness
Might meet from men a little more forgiveness.
Don Juan XII xxii
“Philoprogenitive” occurs in Friedrich Strauss’s A New Life of Jesus, tr. George Eliot (1846) II 41. Matthew Arnold quotes Robert Buchanan: “‘If there is one quality which seems God’s, and his exclusively, it seems that divine philoprogenitiveness’”, commenting that it seems unjust “to attribute to Divinity exclusively this philoprogenitiveness, which the British Philistine, and the poorer classes of Irish, may certainly claim to share”, Culture and Anarchy ch. VI. “Philoprogenitiveness” appears also in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette ch. 11 (Eleanor Cook, personal communication). TSE to Sholom J. Kahn, 27 June 1958, rejecting a suggestion relating this word to Whitman: “One does not need to go to any particular author for words which are known to any educated man and are found in dictionaries, and I think that in my verse the prefix to the word is what makes all the difference.”
2 sapient: OED: “Wise. (A learned synonym, in serious use now only poet.)” Pronounced saypient in TSE’s recording (as OED). sutlers: OED: “One who follows an army or lives in a garrison town and sells provisions to soldiers.”
3 across the window-panes: “Across the window panes”, Oh little voices of the throats of men 37. “across the window panes”, Interlude in London 2. Conan Doyle: “at the window · · · the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses”, The Sign of Four ch. 1 (TSE: “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 15.)
4–8] TSE note against this stanza in Thayer’s AraVP now illegibly erased.
4 In the beginning was the Word: John 1: 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
[Poem I 49 · Textual History II 355]
6 Superfetation: OED 1: “formation of a second foetus in a uterus already pregnant”. Coleridge: “I purchased lately Cicero’s work, de officiis, which I had always considered as almost worthy of a Christian. To my surprize it had become a most flagrant libel. Nay! but how?—Some one, I know not who, out of the fruitfulness of his own malignity had filled all the margins and other blank spaces with annotations—a true superfœtation of examples, that is, of false and slanderous tales!” The Friend (1818) Essay VII, epigraph (Coleridge’s own translation from Rudolph von Langen, 1438–1519). τὸ ἕν: the One. Pronounced ta-hen in TSE’s recording (although some scholars recommend toe-hen). B. A. G. Fuller’s The Problem of Evil in Plotinus (1912) devotes eight pages to “The One. Its incomprehensible and ineffable character. Pure unity transcending all multiplicity and variety, even the duality of subject and object in thought. Inability of our experience to furnish any predicate or category descriptive of it. Neither quantity, nor quality, nor being, nor good, nor consciousness, nor mind, nor even one in the ordinary use of the term; but above and beyond them all. Describable in negative terms only. Union with it attained only in a super-rational and super-conscious state of ecstasy.”
7 mensual: originally “menstrual”, ringed and emended by Pound in ts1. OED “mensual”: “Of or relating to a month; occurring or recurring monthly; monthly”, from 1794. (La Nouvelle Revue Française, which TSE read keenly from 1911 and on which the Criterion was modelled, described itself as “Revue Mensuelle de Littérature et de Critique”.) OED “mensal”: “In the male as in the female, the maturation of the reproductive elements is a continual process, though we may hardly say that it is not influenced by the mensal periodicity” (1888). TSE to Bonamy Dobrée [22 Nov] 1927: “Mr. Eliot humbly suggests that the University of Ethiopia and Nubia and the land of Prester John might in return subscribe to one mensual copy of the Criterion.” In The Method of Mr. Pound (1919), TSE quoted Pound’s poem of 1912, Canzon (from Arnaut Daniel): “Her love-touch by none other mensurate”.
8 enervate: pronounced in-èrvaight in TSE’s recording. OED a. 1: “1 Wanting in strength of character; spiritless, unmanly, effeminate”, with Dryden: “The Dregs and Droppings of enervate Love.” OED v. 2: “To emasculate. Obs. rare”, with Augustine, City of God, tr. J. Healey 1610: “If earth were held no goddesse, men would lay their hands upon her and strengthen themselves by her, & not upon themselves, to enervate themselves for her: If she were no goddess, she would bee made so fertaile by others hands, that shee should never make men barren by their own hands · · · the massacre of man-hood is such, the gelded person is left neither man nor woman” (bk. VII ch. 23). Origen: (AD 185–254), most learned and prolific of the early church fathers, who committed zealous self-castration in his youth. Williamson 95: “ordained and deposed presbyter · · · he adapted Greek philosophy, especially the Logos doctrine, to Christian thought, particularly to the Gospel of St. John; and thus subtilized, made controversial and polymath, the Christian religion.”
8–12 enervate Origen · · · ground · · · cracked and browned: “parched eviscerate soil”, Little Gidding II 13, where draft variants included “fruitless / emasculate / sexless” (see Textual History). “the field was cracked and brown”, Five-Finger Exercises II. Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier 8 (John Fuller, the Review Nov 1962).
[Poem I 49 · Textual History II 355]
9–16 Umbrian school · · · Baptized God · · · water · · · The Father and the Paraclete: the Baptism of Christ (Matthew 3: 16). Southam: “The usual treatment of this subject shows Christ standing in a stream or shallow pool, John the Baptist beside him, pouring water over his head from a small bowl. Above Christ’s head, the Holy Ghost is often represented by a dove, and over the dove, God looks down from a gap in the clouds.” Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ, in the Umbrian School room of London’s National Gallery (identified by Watkins), is among the many Italian medieval and Renaissance works marked in TSE’s London Baedeker.
9–19 A painter · · · nimbus of the Baptized God · · · red and pustular: Whitman: “Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre-figure of all, | From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light · · · The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion”, To You (“Whoever you are”) 18–19, 31 (Musgrove 50). See note to 25–27.
10 gesso: pronounced jesso. “The gesso is much like ground chalk. Glue put on panel first, then gesso”, notes from Edward Waldo Forbes’s Harvard course “Florentine Painting”, which TSE took in spring 1910. Soldo 63: “A definition of gesso was one of the examination questions Eliot had to prepare.” TSE also noted that the “ground for gilding” was called “bolo” (Crawford 83); see headnote to “Improper Rhymes”.
11 nimbus of the Baptized God: Gautier: “Dans son nimbe trilobe | La Vierge et son Jésus” [Within her triple-lobed nimbus the Virgin and her Jesus], L’Art 37–38 in Emaux et Camées (Grover Smith 304). nimbus: OED 2: “Art. A bright or golden disk surroundi
ng the head, esp. of a saint.”
13–14 pale and thin · · · feet: Swinburne: “sweet the feet of the dove · · · Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean”, Hymn to Proserpine 5, 35. John Gray: “Pale Sebastian’s feet”, Saint Sebastian: On a Picture 51 (see note to The Love Song of St. Sebastian title).
16 Paraclete: Holy Spirit, represented in painting as a dove. Igor Stravinsky set Little Gidding IV, “The dove descending”, in 1962. Robert Craft: “In response to some speculations by IS concerning the word ‘paraclete,’ T.S.E. fetches a well-worn Liddell and Scott from behind his chair but offers a synonym (‘the comforter’) himself before opening it”, Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship (rev. ed. 1994).