THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
1–54] opening page of ts1, deleted by TSE. (For his return to the fray in Sweeney Agonistes, see notes to 3 and 43.)
1 feelers: similar to OED “snifter” 4: “A (small) quantity of intoxicating liquor, a drink, a ‘nip’. colloq. (orig. U.S.).” OED “feel” 4: “To test or discover by cautious trial”. 7: “To perceive by smell or taste”, including “To feele how the ale dost tast” (1575). 16: “Used (like taste, smell) in quasi-passive sense · · · to produce a certain impression on the senses”.
2 boiled to the eyes: OED “boiled” 1c: “Intoxicated. slang”, from 1886. to the eyes: OED 2e: “to the limit”; “eye” 2d: “colloq. or slang. Referring to drinking or drunkenness”, including Twelfth Night V i: “O he’s drunk · · · his eyes were set at eight i’th morning”. blind: OED 1g: “Short for blind drunk”. Under a Massachusetts law of 1881, municipalities had a right to an annual ballot on whether to grant licences for the sale of liquor within their borders. Unlike Boston, Cambridge voted for Prohibition in 1886 and renewed it (partly because of church campaigns) every year until 1918. The following January, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors throughout the US. Alcohol continued to be available in private clubs, however, using a ticket system which was not technically sale. Prohibition proved to be of little use except to criminals and to corrupt policemen, and it was abolished in 1933. Charlotte C. Eliot’s biography of TSE’s grandfather emphasises his moral zeal, and quotes a newspaper report: “Dr. Eliot may not desire to be police commissioner, and the suggestion of his name may be meant as a joke, but we sincerely wish the joke to become a reality. Forty-eight hours after Dr. Eliot assumed the reins of the police department there would be no gambling houses in St. Louis.” He had written to the Senate and House of Representatives of Missouri, “asking that prohibition, as a constitutional amendment be submitted to the vote of the people at the next general election”. On brothels and whether they should be acknowledged to exist and be regulated, he concluded “that the ‘social evil’, considered as a sin and crime, should be treated like all other sins and crimes, to be ‘prohibited by law and prevented as far as possible by the conjoined action of legal and moral force’”, William Greenleaf Eliot (1904) ch. XII, “Social Reform”. For Prohibition and “religion is like drink”, see note to [II] 149.
3 Don’t you remember that time: “What about that poker game? eh what Sam?” Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of a Prologue 131.
[Poem I 53, 324 · Textual History II 373]
4 Silk Hat Harry: cartoon character from 1910, drawn by Tad Dorgan. Conrad Aiken to TSE, 23 Feb 1913: “Write and tell me about yourself, your latest meditations, and how Silk Hat Harry demeans himself.” TSE: “One of the low on whom assurance sits | As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire”, The Waste Land [III] 233–34.
7 I’m proud of all the Irish blood that’s in me: WLFacs notes: “‘Harrigan’ from the musical play Fifty Miles from Boston (1907) by George M. Cohan, American composer and comic actor: ‘Proud of all the Irish blood that’s in me | Divil a man can say a word agin me’.”
7–8 variant Meet me in the shadow of the watermelon Vine | Eva Iva Uva Emmaline: WLFacs notes: “Eliot has adapted lines from two songs: ‘Meet me pretty Lindy by the watermelon vine’ (from By the Watermelon Vine, words and music by Thomas S. Allen, 1904), and ‘Meet me in the shade of the old apple tree, Ee-vah, I-vah, Oh-vah, Ev-a-line!’ (from My Evaline, by Mae Anwerda Sloane, 1901).”
9 Bengal lights: WLFacs notes: “On page 550 of Connorton’s Tobacco Brand Directory of the United States for 1899, Bengal Lights are listed as both cigarettes and cheroots”. For fireworks, see note to [I] 76.
10–11 variant Tease. Squeeze lovin wooin | Say Kid what’re y’ doin’: WLFacs notes: “‘Tease, squeeze, lovin’ and wooin’ | Oh babe, what are you doin’?’ The Cubanola Glide (words by Vincent Bryan, music by Harry von Tilzer, 1909).” TSE: “‘Throw your arms around me—Aint you glad you found me’”, The smoke that gathers blue and sinks 18 (and note). TSE to Enid Faber, 21 Feb 1938, while writing The Family Reunion: “Your suggestion that the Eumenides should do a strip tease act is novel, and I believe has box‑office possibilities.” To Ronald Duncan (c. 1940?): “It’s what you can do behind the audience’s back that counts. Remember they have an appetite for strip-tease”, quoted by Duncan, Religion and Drama in Guardian 2 Mar 1960.
11 drum: OED 9e: “slang. A house, lodging-place, or other building; esp. (a) U.S. a drinking-place, saloon, night-club; (b) a brothel, low dive”. The sequence of thought is unclear.
12, 31, 46 but rough · · · Get me a woman · · · the cabman: TSE’s second epigraph to the Clark Lectures: “I want someone to treat me rough. | Give me a cabman.” with “Popular song”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 40. See notes to WLComposite 34 and [II] 128–30.
14–15 Blew in to the Opera Exchange | Sopped up some gin, sat in to the cork game: WLFacs notes: “When Eliot was an undergraduate at Harvard, he attended melodrama at the Grand Opera House in Washington Street, Boston, and after a performance he would visit the Opera Exchange (as he recalled later in life, although that name cannot be traced in records of the period) for a drink. The bartender, incidentally, was one of the prototypes of Sweeney.” For a report of TSE on “the bartender at the Opera Exchange · · · where he had gathered with friends in his Harvard student days, circling Champagne corks on the table in a fortune-telling game”, see note to the title Sweeney Erect. Blew in to: Chambers Slang Dictionary “blow in”: “to arrive unexpectedly and casually”, from late 19th century, U.S. L. M. Hastings in London Mercury Apr 1920: “blew in here with Willy Braid for lunch”.
[Poem I 53, 324 · Textual History II 373]
16 “The Maid of the Mill”: WLFacs notes: “Words by Hamilton Aïdé, music by Stephen Adams: ‘Do not forget me! Do not forget me! | Then sometimes think of me still, | When the morn breaks, and the throstle awakes, | Remember the maid of the mill!’”
23–28 kept a decent house · · · what with the damage done · · · reputation · · · a clean house: OED “house” 11: “house of ill (evil) fame (repute): a disreputable house; esp. a brothel”. TSE: “Mrs. Turner intimates | It does the house no sort of good”, Sweeney Erect 39–40 and see note. And the reputation the place gets, on account of a few bar-flies, | I’ve kept a clean house for twenty years, she says: 2 Henry IV II iv, Mistress Quickly: “I am in good name, and fame, with the very best: shut the door, there comes no swaggerers here: I have not lived all this while to have swaggering now.” (Mistress Quickly calls the Boar’s Head her “house”.)
24 Buckingham Club: Aiken recalled meeting TSE “at Buckingham and Brattle Hall dances” during their Harvard years (March & Tambimuttu eds. 20).
27 bar-flies: OED: “slang (orig. and chiefly U.S.) A person who frequents bars; a habitual drinker”, from 1906: “Three dull-witted bar-flies—thick, beer-soaked toughs, such as hang about the East Side bar-rooms”.
34 variant treated me white: Wallace Irwin: “Say, will she treat me white, or throw me down”, The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum (1902) I. Harry Leon Wilson: “If you treat me white I’ll treat you white”, Ruggles of Red Gap (1915) 28.
35 fly cop: OED: “slang · · · U.S., a detective, a plain-clothes policeman”. TSE contested an in-house report at Faber on a description of underworld activity: “Pringle is wrong again: the U.S.A. bull is often just as described. If Pringle had ever been battered about the bean by a South Boston fly cop he would know better”, “The Rambling Kid” by Charles Ashleigh, reader’s report (1930).
36 committing a nuisance: OED “nuisance” 2f: from 1863, “Commit no Nuisance”. (Euphemism for urinating or defecating in public.)
37–38 I’m sorry, I said, | It’s no use being sorry, he said; let me get my hat: “I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends | For what she has said to me?” Portrait of a Lady II 29–30. It’s no use being
sorry, he said: Arnold Bennett: “It’s no use being sorry if you persist in doing it”, The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) bk. II, ch. 4 (Shawn Worthington, personal communication).
43 particular friends of mine: “We want you to meet two friends of ours”, Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of a Prologue 118.
45 variant Gus Krutzsch: Valerie Eliot on the publication of Song (“The golden foot I may not kiss or clutch”) in Tyro, Spring 1921, under its other title:
Eliot may have used a pseudonym when Song to the Opherian was published in Wyndham Lewis’s magazine because there were two signed articles [of his] in the same number, but his choice of “Gus Krutzsch” is interesting. In The Sewanee Review (Special Issue, Winter 1966), Mr. Frances Noel Lees traces the influence of Petronius’ Satyricon on The Waste Land, and observes that “Gus Krutzsch” is “remarkably reminiscent of the English of ‘Encolpius’, namely ‘the Crutch, or Crotch’.” Professor J. P. Sullivan writes that the name Encolpius “like most of the other names in the Satyricon, has point … and a Peacockian translation might be Mr. Encrotch, an appropriate choice for the protagonist of a predominantly sexual story” (The ‘Satyricon’ of Petronius, 1968).
WLFacs notes
[Poem I 53, 324–25 · Textual History II 373]
August Rodney Krutzsch was one year ahead of TSE at school (Smith Academy Catalogue, 1899–1900, Washington U.; Stayer). Joseph Wood Krutch (1893–1970), who pronounced his name Krootch, was a literary friend of Mark Van Doren. TSE: “I have been reading · · · Was Europe a Success? by Joseph Wood Krutch · · · a thoughtful littérateur of considerable ability · · · to be regarded with the gravest suspicion by anybody with any positive beliefs”, A Commentary in Criterion Apr 1936. For Petronius, see note to epigraph. In Charles Whibley (1931), TSE quoted Whibley on the modern Encolpius: “He haunts the bars of the Strand, or hides him in the dismal alleys of Gray’s Inn Road” (Studies in Frankness, 1912, 38). Gus: “crutch portions and gussets respectively being concave”, US Patent Office Official Gazette 28 June 1927.
47 We all go the same way home: the music hall song We All Go the Same Way Home by Harry Castling and C. W. Murphy (1911) ends with the police making arrests (Shawn Worthington, personal communication).
50–51 little Ben Levin the tailor, | The one who read George Meredith: WLFacs notes: “George Meredith (1828–1909) was the grandson of a remarkable Portsmouth tailor whom he depicted in his novel Evan Harrington. When Eliot’s father died in 1919, he wrote to his mother: ‘I wanted you more for my sake than yours—to sing the Little Tailor to me.’ Perhaps the childhood memory of the song his father sang to him prompted the reference.” Worthen 247: a ballad sometimes called The Three Rogues: “The miller he stole the corn | And the weaver he stole yarn | And the little tailor he stole broadcloth | For to keep these three rogues warm”. The poem on the page facing the opening of Preludes in Others Anthology (1917) was Jeanne D’Orge’s The Little Tailor Meditates. TSE: “the fact is that most of Meredith’s profundity is profound platitude”, Studies in Contemporary Criticism I (1918). “And the suspicion is in our breast that Mr. Whibley might admire George Meredith”, The Sacred Wood 36. Henry Eliot noted from TSE’s American lectures: “dislikes Meredith”, Excerpts from Lectures 1932–1933 (additional leaf). For Meredith see note to [I] 40–41, headnote to Cousin Nancy and note to Entretien dans un parc 34.
54 So I go out to see the sunrise, and walked home: “So in our fixed confusion we persisted, out from town”, concluding So through the evening, through the violet air. “At which I started; and the sun had risen”, Little Gidding II 67–96, first venture in verse, likewise concluding.
Notes to published poem begin.
[Poem I 55, 325 · Textual History II 373]
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
Title The Burial of the Dead: TSE’s library included the liturgical Service for The Burial of the Dead, printed and published by Douglas Pepler, 1922 (Valerie Eliot collection). W. H. F. Basevi’s The Burial of the Dead was reviewed by R. R. Marett in Folk-Lore 30 June 1920, immediately preceding Eleanor Hull’s review of Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. (Marett’s The Threshold of Religion, 1909, which TSE read at Harvard, appears to have stirred TSE’s interest in cave paintings. As founder of Oxford’s Department of Social Anthropology in 1914, Marett had been president of the Folk-Lore Society, which TSE joined at its meeting at University College London in Nov 1922.)
The burial of the dead of the Great War was symbolically marked on Armistice Day, 11 November 1920, when “a vast concourse of the nation” lined the route of a casket brought from France and laid in the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey. A similar ceremony was conducted in France. See note to [I] 71 (and for Victory parades in London and Paris in 1919, see headnote to Coriolan I: Triumphal March).
The opening and closing of The Burial of the Dead have affinities with TSE’s April poem Interlude in London, with its “hibernate · · · sudden rains · · · garden plots · · · spring”. For Nathaniel Wanley on “the burial of the dead”, see headnote to Ash-Wednesday II.
[I] 1–42] Rupert Brooke on a friend’s reaction to the Declaration of War in 1914: “A youth ran down to them with a telegram: ‘We’re at war with Germany. We’ve joined France and Russia.’ My friend ate and drank · · · His mind was full of confused images, and the sense of strain. In answer to the word ‘Germany,’ a train of vague thoughts dragged across his brain · · · the wide and restful beauty of Munich; the taste of beer; innumerable quiet, glittering cafés; the Ring; the swish of evening air in the face, as one skis down past the pines · · · long nights of drinking and singing and laughter · · · certain friends; some tunes; the quiet length of evening over the Starnberger-See · · · an April morning · · · Children · · · in Munich”, Letters from America (with a Preface by Henry James, 1916) 173–74 (John Finley, Matthiessen 92–93). TSE to Cleanth Brooks, 15 Mar 1947: “it is quite possible that I read this letter, and I cannot say that it was not at the back of my mind, but actually this particular passage [of the poem] approximates more closely to a recollection of a personal experience of my own than anything else, and indeed is as nearly as I could remember a verbatim report.” TSE was himself in Germany, in Marburg, at the outbreak of the Great War. On 26 July 1914, in a comic letter from there, he tried to reassure Eleanor Hinkley: “Here I am, safely out of harm’s way.” His next surviving letter, postmarked 22 Aug, tells her “I have just got to London after being five days on the route. The Germans treated us royally, but we had to stay in Marburg two weeks without any outside communication, and did not feel very much at ease.”
[I] 1 April: Hayward: “April the month of rebirth. Cf. ‘This Birth was | Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death · · · I should be glad of another death’, Journey of the Magi 38–43’. Cf. ἀποθανεῖν θέλω [I want to die]—the Sibyl’s wish. Sacrificial death may be an awakening to life.” Rebirth after the supreme sacrificial death suffered in April or March: the date of the Crucifixion is disputed. In his copy of The Golden Bough (one-volume ed., repr. 1925, 360), TSE marked a sentence about the traditional date of 25 Mar: “The inference appears to be inevitable that the passion of Christ must have been arbitrarily referred to that date in order to harmonise with an older festival of the spring equinox.” The Oxford Companion to the Year records that Scaliger chose 23 Apr; that modern writers generally adopt either 3 or 7 Apr; and that several relate the partial lunar eclipse of 3 Apr AD 33 to the “darkness over the whole land from the sixth to the ninth hour”, Mark 15: 33, Luke 23: 44. Easter: Sensations of April (see note to the title) recalls Laforgue, Simple agonie 17, “se crucifie”.
St. Thomas Becket having suffered martyrdom, Chaucer’s pilgrims make their way to Canterbury, “The holy blisful martyr for to seke”:
[Poem I 55, 325 · Textual History II 373]
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed ever
y veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales 1–12
Vivien Eliot to Charlotte Eliot, 14 Dec 1920: “April is a charming month. I always love Chaucer’s ‘Whanne that Aprile, with his showres sote’—I expect I’ve spelt it all wrong!! But you know what I mean.” TSE: “These are Spring days in London—feeling of something struggling pushing underneath”, pencil jotting (Bodleian, c. 624 fol. 121). April is the cruellest month: TSE to Natalie Clifford Barney, 11 May 1923: “April is indeed the cruellest month, and the fact follows the word.” The Family Reunion I ii: “Is the spring not an evil time, that excites us with lying voices?” April falls in the “hungry gap”, between the end of winter vegetables and the summer crops, when what is left of the old food (such as tubers) must be buried in the earth for next season’s feeding. In the 7th century BC, Alcman wrote of “spring · · · When everything flowers | And nobody has enough | To eat”, frag. 20, tr. Guy Davenport (Saskia Hamilton, personal communication). For the story of the nightingale in George Gascoigne’s The Complaynt of Phylomene, which opens “In sweet April”, see note to [II] 98–104. Nightingales go south in the winter, returning to Britain in April with their song of the cruel fate of Philomel.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 74
