The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
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Conundrum: “Why do ladies talk least in February?” Answer: “Because it is the shortest month”, A Choice Collection of Riddles and Conundrums by Peter Puzzlewell (1835). (F. T. Prince’s opening: “February is the shortest month, and good | For this too”, The Inn, 1954.)
[I] 1–4 April · · · cruellest · · · dead · · · mixing · · · Memory · · · roots: Gautier: “mêle · · · souvenue · · · l’avril · · · Sous l’herbe · · · mêlions · · · si cruel · · · mortel”, Clair de Lune Sentimental 8–24 (Ricks 1993). April · · · breeding · · · dead land · · · stirring · · · spring: Murder in the Cathedral I: “the springtime fancy · · · waking a dead world”. breeding · · · out of the dead land · · · Dull roots: Joyce: “A barren land, bare waste · · · the dead sea · · · weedless, sunk deep in earth · · · cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land · · · The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, multiplying, dying, being born everything · · · Desolation”, Ulysses episode IV (Calypso) in Little Review June 1918 (Shawn Worthington, personal communication). TSE: “This is the dead land”, The Hollow Men III 1. “Blooming at this season toward the dead land”, A Song for Simeon 7 variant. stirring | Dull roots with spring rain: “sudden rains | Softening last year’s garden plots”, Interlude in London 5–6 (see note to [I] 71–73).
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[I] 1–6 breeding | · · · mixing | · · · stirring | · · · covering | · · · feeding: “bearing | · · · restoring | · · · wearing”, Ash-Wednesday IV 12–14. “the ‘auditory imagination’ is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating · · · sinking · · · returning · · · bringing · · · seeking”, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 118–19. (I. A. Richards: “This possibility of being enjoyed at many levels is a recognised characteristic of Elizabethan Drama”, Principles of Literary Criticism ch. XXVII; scored by TSE. See note to Mandarins 3 12, “different planes”.)
[I] 1–2, 71, 74 breeding | Lilacs out of the dead land · · · That corpse you planted · · · Dog: Hamlet II ii: “if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, | Being a good kissing carrion” (famously emended by Warburton to “God, kissing carrion”).
[I] 2–3 Lilacs · · · mixing | Memory and desire: on Paris in 1910–11: “I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli”, A Commentary in Criterion Apr 1934 (“rain”, 4; “Earth”, 6). For the friend, Jean Verdenal, see note on the volume dedication to Prufrock and Other Observations. Whitman on the death of Lincoln (on 15 Apr 1865): “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, | And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, | I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring”, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d 1–3. TSE to William Turner Levy, 27 Dec 1954: “it takes my mind back to a steel engraving of a portrait of Lincoln, which hung in our front hall when I was a child. My grandfather had known him slightly.” See Preludes II 1, “Now that lilacs are in bloom”, and note. mixing | Memory and desire: Swinburne: “Mixed each in other, or as mist with sea | Mixed, or as memory with desire”, To Victor Hugo 30–31. James Thomson: “thoughts that raged with memory and desire”, Weddah and Om-el-Bonain II xix (Crawford 38). The Cocktail Party II: “shuffling memories and desires”. Charles-Louis Philippe: “Un homme qui marche porte toutes les choses de sa vie et les remue dans sa tête. Un spectacle les éveille, un autre les excite. Notre chair a gardé tous nos souvenirs, nous les mêlons à nos désirs” [A man walks carrying with him all the properties of his life, and they churn about in his head. Something he sees awakens them, something else excites them. For our flesh has retained all our memories, and we mingle them with our desires] Bubu de Montparnasse ch. I (Grover Smith 307); see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 4–6 and headnote to Preludes III.
[I] 2–5 dead · · · stirring · · · spring · · · Winter: “F. M.”: “One’s soul stirs stiffly out of the dead endurance of the winter—but toward what spring?” Letters of the Moment I (1924) (with “hyacinths” and “the essential spring—spring in winter, spring in London”).
[I] 3–4 stirring | Dull roots · · · spring: The Family Reunion I ii: “The cold spring now is the time | For the ache in the moving root” (Harold E. McCarthy, Philosophy East and West Apr 1952).
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[I] 5 Winter kept us warm: Webster: “The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole | To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm”, The White Devil V iv. See [I] 71–75 and note (Drew 100). Snow in Atlantic Monthly Feb 1862: “The wool on Sheep keeps them warm in the Winter season. So when the back of the Ground is covered with Snow, it keeps it warm · · · tho’ it is itself cold, yet it makes the Earth warm.” TSE to Ottoline Morrell, 20 Aug 1936: “the winter is to me a warm and anaesthetic season”.
[I] 6–7 feeding | A little life with dried tubers: Swinburne: “Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love”, Hymn to Proserpine 20. James Thomson: “Our Mother feedeth thus our little life, | That we in turn may feed her with our death”, To Our Ladies of Death st. 29 (Grover Smith 72). (OED “tuber”: b. “Anat. A rounded projecting part”; etymologically from Latin for “swelling”. TSE: “wrinkled female breasts · · · wrinkled dugs”, [III] 219, 228.)
[I] 8–17] Hayward: “The scene is Munich and its environs.” TSE to Edward Forbes, 22 May [1911]: “After the middle of June I shall go to Munich for some time, to study German.” Valery Larbaud: “Et l’odeur du foin frais coupé, comme en Bavière | Un soir, après la pluie, sur le lac de Starnberg” [And the scent of fresh-cut grass, as in Bavaria, one evening, after a shower, by the lake at Starnberg], Nevermore (1913).
[I] 8–17 the Starnbergersee · · · In the mountains ([I] 8 variant: Königssee): the change of location from one lake to the other may have been prompted by the story of Ludwig II of Bavaria. He and his physician were found drowned in the Starnbergersee (Lake Starnberg), in June 1886, the day after he had been deposed and confined to the grounds of Berg Castle (see Anthony Hecht, Melodies Unheard, 2003, 122–30). A lifelong devotee of Wagner (for whom, see notes to [I] 31–34, [I] 42), “Mad King Ludwig” had funded the completion of the opera house at Bayreuth, and spent 17 years building the neo-Gothic Schloss Neuschwanstein on a peak in the Alps, where he loved to walk. Much of the rich decoration of this castle shows legendary scenes from Wagner’s operas, notably the Grail symbolism of Parsifal. For his swan-boat at Linderhof, see note to [III] 281–85. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, at a ceremony in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed Kaiser of a newly united German Empire, which absorbed Bavaria. In 1878, at Herrenchiemsee, Ludwig began constructing a replica of Versailles, including the Hall of Mirrors. The terms of Germany’s settlement at that time required France to pay an indemnity of five billion francs, which John Maynard Keynes later called “the only precedent of any importance” for reparations after the Great War (memorandum to the Board of Trade by Keynes and W. J. Ashley, 2 Jan 1916; Collected Writings XVI (1971) 315). For Keynes on the Versailles Treaty of 1919, see note to [III] 277–78, 290–91, the Rhine-daughters’ song. In the mountains, there you feel free: translation of “Auf den Bergen wohnt die Freiheit”, the first line of the loyalist song Das König-Ludwig-Lied (1886), lamenting the death by water of Ludwig II (Eva Hesse, T. S. Eliot und “Das Waste Land”, 1973; her letter, TLS 21 June 1974). Milton: “The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty”, L’Allegro 36. Wordsworth: “The freedom of a mountaineer”, To the Highland Girl of Inversneyde (in The Golden Treasury). TSE to Dorothy Pound, 22 May 1921: “In October I shall be ready for a little mountain air, after I have finished a little poem which I am at present engaged upon�
� (The Waste Land).
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[I] 9–18 a shower of rain · · · the arch-duke’s, | My cousin’s · · · Marie, hold on tight · · · go south in the winter: Countess Marie Larisch, My Past (1913): “we were overtaken by a storm, and in a few moments we were soaked to the skin” (57); “‘Now Marie, let me hold your hand tight’” (171); “in summer one’s worries fly before the advent of the bright new day, whereas in winter-time they are not so easily banished. ‘O for the sunshine and warmth of the South!’ I said to myself” (228) (G. L. K. Morris, Partisan Review Mar–Apr 1954; Variety Mar–Apr 1954). Marie Larisch, a cousin of Ludwig II, was the unwilling confidante of Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria (the archduke, her cousin) and his 17-year-old mistress Marie (Mary) Vetsera, with whom the Crown Prince committed suicide at Mayerling in 1889. No recollection of sledding appears in the memoirs, but similarities between the Countess’s book and the poem include Empress Elizabeth’s reaction to meeting Queen Victoria: “Ah · · · I’m glad it’s over” (100; TSE [III] 252); an incognito visit to a woman who reads cards (109), and Ludwig’s love of Wagner and his Parsifal (135) (C. J. Ackerley, personal communication). WLFacs notes “The assumption was that Eliot must have read the book, but in fact he had met the author (when and where is not known), and his description of the sledding, for example, was taken verbatim from a conversation he had with this niece and confidante of the Austrian Empress Elizabeth.”
[I] 10 the Hofgarten: in the centre of Munich, constructed 1613–17.
[I] 12 Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch: [Not a Russian, I’m from Lithuania, genuinely German]. Moody 357: “A ‘real German’, from Lithuania, in Munich, would be a stateless person. Lithuania had been for a long period before 1917 subject to Russia; the German claim to it began · · · with the brief occupation of 1917.” The feminine “keine” indicates a female speaker.
The Cocktail Party I i, ALEX: “She never misses anything unless she wants to.” CELIA: “Especially the Lithuanian accent.” JULIA: “Lithuanian? Lady Klootz?” PETER: “I thought she was Belgian.” ALEX: “Her father belonged to a Baltic fam— | One of the oldest Baltic families | With a branch in Sweden and one in Denmark.” TSE to Dr. Alphonse Sesplaukis, 10 Sept 1958: “The mention of Lithuania in The Waste Land does refer to a lady who was daughter of a Baltic baron of German origin and Russian nationality. As for the reference to Lithuanian in The Cocktail Party, he [Alexander] was merely thinking that there were several distinguished families which had branches in countries on both sides of the Baltic Sea.”
To Eleanor Hinkley, 8 Sept [1914], of Ann Van Ness: “she hasn’t really a German mind at all, but quite American.” To Henry Eliot, 13 Dec 1921, from Lausanne: “I am very much better, and not miserable here—at least there are people of many nationalities, which I always like, and I like talking French better than English · · · I am certainly well enough to be working on a poem!” In a sketch by Vivien, TSE added: “The Cambridge man · · · thought it things were awfully jolly when he found that Mike was really a German. He loved the party. It was quaint. It was international” (c. 624 fol. 88). See note to [I] 18.
[I] 12, 14 echt deutsch · · · My cousin’s: E. M. Forster: “their cousin, Fräulein Mosebach, who remembers all the time that Beethoven is ‘echt Deutsch’”, Howards End (1910) ch. 5. (Rupert Brooke: “wholly English”, Letters from America, the paragraphs quoted in note to [I] 1–42.) echt: “those poets whom we can agree to be echt metaphysisch”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 48 (Clark Lecture I). Pound three times praises passages as “echt” in annotating TSE’s drafts of The Waste Land (see note to [III] 187–202).
[I] 13 archduke’s: stressed on the first syllable in TSE’s recordings 1946 and 1947. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand precipitated the Great War.
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[I] 18 go south in the winter: The Family Reunion I i , Ivy: “I have always told Amy she should go south in the winter. | Were I in Amy’s position, I would go south in the winter. | I would follow the sun” · · · Violet: “Well, as for me, | I would never go south, no definitely never, | Even could I do it as well as Amy: | England’s bad enough, I would never go south, | Simply to see the vulgarest people.” To Sydney Schiff, 12 Jan 1920: “Vivien got run down largely through nursing me, and she is not at all well. I wish she was in the south.” To Sydney Waterlow from Lausanne, 19 Dec 1921: “I shall not stay in this carte-postale colorée country any longer than necessary—its chief recommendation is that it is full of foreigners—American countesses, Russian princesses, Rumanians, Greeks and Scandinavians, Czecho counts, Belgian punks etc. I am not quite certain whether I shall immediately rejoin Vivien in Paris, or go south first · · · I am trying to finish a poem—about 800 or 1000 lines.” (OED “punk” n.1: Obs. or rare arch. “A prostitute”.)
[I] 19–20 What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow | Out of this stony rubbish: Ibsen, tr. William Archer: “What are those trunks and tree-roots | That grow from the ridge’s clefts?” Peer Gynt II iv (Smidt 79).
[I] 20 Son of man: TSE’s Notes refer to Ezekiel 2: 1: “Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee.” Grover Smith 73: “He thinks of Ezekiel, the ‘son of man,’ chosen to turn the Israelites in their captivity back to God, and hence of Christ, the ‘Son of man,’ whose temples, like his own, are now in ruins.” Also Ezekiel 37: 1–2, quoted in note to Ash-Wednesday II (A. D., N&Q 19 Aug 1950) and Ezekiel 40: 4 (see note to Choruses from “The Rock” IX 1–2). OED “son” 5: “son of man: a. One of the human race · · · b. spec. Jesus Christ.”
[I] 22 A heap of broken images: Ezekiel 6: 4: “And your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken.” Pope: “the last image of that troubled heap”, Epistle to Cobham 45. Hawthorne, on an excavation in Italy: “that heap of forlorn fragments · · · a heap of worthless fragments”, The Marble Faun ch. XLVI (Andrew Souter, N&Q Sept 2009). Edward Carpenter: “heaps of broken glass and old bones and shoes and pots and pans in blind alleys”, Towards Democracy (1912 ed.) 17 (Tony Brown, RES Aug 1983, as also later notes here on Carpenter). TSE: “A heap of broken barrows”, First Caprice in North Cambridge 7.
[I] 23 the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief: TSE’s Notes refer to Ecclesiastes 12: 5: “fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.”
[I] 25 shadow under this red rock: Isaiah 32: 2: “And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land” (A. D., N&Q 19 Aug 1950). red rock: to Colin Still, 13 May 1930: “Some of the symbolism I have used was of course intentional; some was unintentional; and some symbolism is used (as of ‘red rock’) which has been called to my attention by critics, which so far as I know was wholly spontaneous.”
[I] 25–30 There is shadow · · · handful of dust: derived from The Death of Saint Narcissus 1–7.
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[I] 26–27 (Come in · · · red rock) | And I will show you: “Come in under the shadow of this gray rock, | And I will show you”, The Death of Saint Narcissus 2–3, where it was without the parentheses, which are at odds with the surrounding syntax (Ricks 152–53). On Harold Joachim: “In working on the text of Aristotle he taught me, incidentally, the importance of punctuation. Some readers of my verse have maintained that this is a subject of which I am profoundly ignorant: so I would assure them that I could not have violated punctuation so outrageously, had I not devoted some attention to its study”, Christ Church, Oxford, Speech (1948). TSE to Paul Elmer More, 28 Oct 1930: “Why, my dear More, are you so foolish as to discuss seriously with a mere ignoramus like myself questions of philosophy and theology, and then go for me on the one subject on which I know more than almost
anyone living. I am quite aware that I am a minor romantic poet of about the stature of Cyril Tourneur, that I have little knowledge and no gift for abstract thought; but if there is one thing I do know, it is how to punctuate poetry.” For “the absence of punctuation marks”, see headnote to Four Quartets, 9. TSE ON FOUR QUARTETS. Come in under: “Come in under the little bat’s wing, with the small flare of the firefly”, Coriolan II. The Difficulties of a Statesman 47 variant. under the shadow of this red rock: Hayward: “‘And this stone all men call the Grail · · · As children, the Grail doth call them, | ’neath its shadow they wax and grow’, Parzifal” (referring to Jessie Weston’s translation of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “Knightly Epic” bk. IX).
[I] 27 something different from either: The Cocktail Party I i: “to be with Celia, that was something different | From company or solitude.” either: pronounced eye-ther in TSE’s recordings.
[I] 28–29 Your shadow at morning striding behind you | Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you: Beaumont and Fletcher: “How all the good you have is but a shadow, | I’ the morning with you, and at night behind you | Past and forgotten”, Philaster III ii (Grover Smith 73). rising to meet you: Purg XXI 133 (the half-line preceding the epigraph to Prufrock and Other Observations): “Ed ei surgendo” [And he, rising]. The shade of Statius rises after stooping before the shade of Virgil.
[I] 30 fear in a handful of dust: see the Sibyl and her sand in note to epigraph. Conrad: “He was afraid of that penetrating faltering fear that seems, in the very middle of a beat, to turn one’s heart into a handful of dust”, The Return in Tales of Unrest (1898) (A. D. in N&Q 8 Dec 1951, with other echoes of the story). Conrad: “the heat of life in the handful of dust”, Youth (1902; title story of the volume containing Heart of Darkness); see note to Little Gidding II 78. For Conrad, see note on the epigraph on the section-title page for The Hollow Men. Donne: “what’s become of man’s great extent and proportion, when himself shrinkes himself, and consumes himself to a handful of dust?” Devotions, Meditation IV (Genesis 3: 19: “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”). Nicholas Ferrar: “A handful of dust cast among Bees stilleth their greatest tumults”, The Story Books of Little Gidding: Being The Religious Dialogues Recited in the Great Room, 1631–32 (1899). Tennyson: “Long dead! | And my heart is a handful of dust”, Maud II [v] 240–41; “Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!” The Lotos-Eaters 113.