The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 76
[Poem I 55–56, 326 · Textual History II 374]
[I] 31–34 Frisch weht · · · Wo weilest du?: TSE’s Notes refer to the song of the Young Sailor which opens Tristan und Isolde I: [Fresh blows the wind towards the homeland. My Irish child, where are you lingering?]; see [I] 42 and note. For TSE and performances of Tristan, see note to Opera 1. In letters to TSE in 1911–12, Verdenal expressed overwhelming enthusiasm for Wagner, and especially for Tristan (see headnote to Opera). The first British publication of The Waste Land was immediately preceded in Criterion Oct 1922 by T. Sturge Moore’s The Story of Tristram and Isolt in Modern Poetry I. TSE: “In spite of a taste for Wagner’s music, I find myself bored by the various marital shifts and changes of the Liszts the Wagners and their congeners”, “Cosima Wagner” by Count Richard du Moulin Eckart, reader’s report (1930). After tea with TSE on 10 Oct 1954, Robert Halsband recorded his having said he was “glad he doesn’t have to sit through the Ring again” (“Memorandum”, Columbia U). Frisch weht der Wind: Wagner specifies that the sailor’s song is “heard from a height, as if from the masthead, or from off-stage”.
85 schwebt: ( = floats, Ger.) transferred from the lines of Donner, the God of Thunder, in Das Rheingold sc. IV: “Schwüles Gedünst schwebt in der Luft” [A sultry haze floats in the air] (Oliver Soden, personal communication).
[I] 33 Irisch: pronounced (correctly) Earish in TSE’s recordings. TSE took courses in German at Harvard in 1906–07 and 1907–08.
[I] 35 first: advice to the Swedish translator, Erik Mesterton, 20 Jan 1932: “You are right about the word ‘first’. One might have said ‘d’abord’ in French but certainly ‘pour la première fois’ would have been more natural, and I understand the impossibility of putting it in one word.”
89–90 Pound’s annotation: “? ? Marianne”.] WLFacs notes: “Pound is not certain, but thinks he may have been referring to Tennyson’s Mariana. It is definitely not a reference to Miss Marianne Moore.” Identified by Barbara Everett (RES Feb 1980) as the heroine of the unfinished La Vie de Marianne by Marivaux. TSE: “But it is the novels, Marianne and Le Paysan Parvenue, that deserve the most attention”, Marivaux (1919).
[I] 36–38 hyacinth girl · · · hyacinth garden · · · Your arms full, and your hair wet: Lemprière on Hyacinthus: “greatly beloved by Apollo and Zephyrus. He returned the former’s love, and Zephyrus · · · resolved to punish his rival. As Apollo · · · played at quoits with his pupil, Zephyrus blew the quoit · · · upon the head of Hyacinthus, and he was killed with the blow. Apollo was so disconsolate at the death of Hyacinthus that he changed his blood into a flower, which bore his name and placed his body among the constellations.” Poe: “Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face”, To Helen 7; and in prose, “Her hair · · · in curls like those of the young hyacinth”, The Assignation. (For this story of Poe’s, see notes to [II] 83–88 and [II] 85–95, and headnote to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar.) TSE: “the smell of hyacinths across the garden | Recalling”, Portrait of a Lady II 41–42. “Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers”, La Figlia Che Piange 20.
[I] 38–40 I could not | Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither | Living nor dead: Sappho, bk I: 2: “When I look on you · · · my speech comes short or fails me quite · · · my eyes grow dim · · · and death itself seems not very far away”, tr. J. M. Edmonds (Lyra Graeca vol. I, Loeb, 1922). TSE on the Ode to Aphrodite (bk. I 1): “A poem like the great ode of Sappho, however acute its observation and statements of the feelings of a lover, is not metaphysical”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 294 (Turnbull Lecture III).
[I] 39 my eyes failed: Webster, The Duchess of Malfi IV ii, FERDINAND: “Mine eyes dazzle”. For Webster’s scene, see note to [II] 117–23.
[Poem I 56, 326 · Textual History II 374–75]
[I] 39–40 I was neither | Living nor dead: Inf. XXXIV 25: “Io non morii, e non rimasi vivo” [I did not die, and did not remain alive] (Grover Smith 308). Wordsworth: “Such seemed this Man, not all alive nor dead”, Resolution and Independence 64 (Shawn Worthington, personal communication). TSE: “I was always dead, | And still alive, and always something other”, Little Gidding II 46–47 variant. To Middleton Murry [mid-April? 1925]: “I have deliberately died—in order to go on with the outward form of living—This I did in 1915.”
[I] 40–41 dead · · · the heart of light, the: Meredith: “Death · · · the heart of light, the”, Hymn to Colour 43–45.
[I] 41 the heart of light, the silence: Hayward: “Cf. Burnt Norton”, referring to “quietly, quietly, | The surface glittered out of heart of light” (I 36–37) and “answered light to light, and is silent” (IV 9). Also, Burnt Norton variant after the closing lines of V: “Light of light | | Gone” (see Textual History). In the ts of Jean de Menasce’s translation, alongside “au coeur la lumière, le silence”, TSE wrote: “query—coeur de la lumière du silence ? Is this not permissible (cf. ‘Coeur des ténèbres’).” the heart of light: Paradiso XII 28: “del cor dell’una delle luci nuove | si mosse voce” [from out the heart of one of the new lights there moved a voice] (Grover Smith 308). Daubeny’s preface to Lancelot Andrewes, Seventeen Sermons [1887]: “the rays of truth from its heart of light flash from every facet”. Conrad (title): Heart of Darkness.
[I] 42 Oed’ und leer das Meer: TSE’s Notes refer to Tristan und Isolde III 24: [Empty and waste the sea]. Quoted, without attribution, in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy §21 (C. J. Ackerley, personal communication). Hayward: “The watchman’s words to Tristan reporting that Isolde’s ship is nowhere in sight. The lovelessness of the waste land.” Grover Smith 76: “The desolation in this second quotation used by Eliot contrasts with the fresh breeze, a portent of happy love, in the first” ([I] 31–34). leer · · · Meer: pronounced (correctly) layr and mayr in TSE’s recordings.
[I] 43–59] This passage about Madame Sosostris, like Sweeney Agonistes I. Fragment of a Prologue, resembles Mina Loy’s description of a “card-teller” in At the Door of the House:
“You see these three cards
But here is the double Victory
And there is an elderly lady
Ill in whom you are concerned
This is the Devil
And these two skeletons
Are mortifications · · ·
And this ace of spades turned upside-down
‘With respect’
Means that some man
Has well you know
Intentions little honourable · · ·
And look
Here are you
And here is he
In life and thought
At the door of the house”
[Poem I 56, 327 · Textual History II 375]
Loy’s poem appeared in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse (1917) ed. Alfred Kreymborg along with Loy’s Human Cylinders (for which see headnote to The Hollow Men) and TSE’s Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night.
The ancestry of Madame Sosostris is uncertain. TSE to Masuru Otaké, 6 Apr 1934: “So far as I know there are no literary sources whatever for Sosostris or Phlebas or Mrs. Equitone. To the best of my knowledge both names and persons were pure inventions but as you are a student of Coleridge, you will know how large a part memory plays in invention” (referring to The Road to Xanadu, 1927, John Livingston Lowes’s account of the sources of Coleridge’s poetry; see note to [I] 48). Frazer on a Hittite carving: “Herodotus thought that the figure represented the Egyptian king and conqueror Sesostris”, The Golden Bough V (Adonis Attis Osiris I) 185 (Vickery 254). Beddoes: “Here’s wine of Egypt … to wash Sesostris’ throat”, Death’s Jest-Book V iv 126–28. In Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921), Mr. Scrogan dresses as a “Bohemian hag” to play the part of “Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana” (Grover Smith 76). TSE: “Crome Yellow was a coherent book; and its characters, being copied from life to the best of the author’s ability, were at least simulacra of human beings”, Misogyny over the Weekend (1930). To Grover Smith, 10 Mar 195
2: “Although I was unaware of the identity of name between my fortune-teller and the role assumed by Mr. Scrogan, I did read Crome Yellow on its appearance, and I should think it was almost certain that I borrowed the name from Mr. Huxley without being aware of the fact.” However, the typescript, ts1, was produced on TSE’s dilapidated typewriter, for which his brother substituted his own newer one in Aug 1921, and Crome Yellow was not published until Nov 1921. Stead 361–63 records Helen Gardner’s suggestion that TSE had heard the name in conversation or heard Huxley read a chapter. Grover Smith 1996 84: “The Sesostris scene in Crome Yellow may have antedated the novel itself in some different context, before Huxley, in Italy between the beginning of June and the early part of August 1921, composed his sixty thousand-word work as published that fall. The preceding year two tentative sketches for Crome Yellow had been published, One Sunday Morning in Art and Letters and A Country Walk in Coterie.”
TSE’s Notes deny familiarity with “the exact constitution of the Tarot pack”. Much later, TSE recalled an occasion on which he and Huxley were speakers: “I have another reason to remember that dinner. One of my neighbours subsequently invited me to dine at her house; and to her I owe my introduction to the Tarot pack, which I turned to account in The Waste Land. I pay this tardy tribute of thanks. But I should not like my present reader to draw the inference that this lady was the original of my Madame Sosostris—a wholly fictitious character!” Aldous Huxley (1965). To his Aunt Susie (Mrs. Hinkley), 28 Dec 1931, he wrote of an “elderly member of the Lycaeum Club who explained the Tarot cards to me” (believed to have been in 1921). To William Turner Levy, 28 Sept 1956: “I am sorry to hear that The Waste Land has caused the rifling of Tarot Packs. Still, the use of such cards for divination is certainly a black art forbidden to the faithful” (for legal sanctions, see note to [I] 58–59). A Faber secretary to Michael Sayers, 19 Mar 1958: “Mr. Eliot has returned from Italy and has seen your letter · · · his only knowledge of the Tarot pack was many years ago through dining at the house of a lady, whose name he has now forgotten, when she showed him the pack and told him something about its use. He has never, since then, examined the Tarot pack or studied any literature on the subject.” See note to [V] 373, “Falling towers”. TSE to Herbert Read, 28 Dec 1929: “I shall have to consult Morley on Monday about Wheen’s dream. We may have to visit Madame Sosostris to clear it up.”
[Poem I 56, 327 · Textual History II 375]
[I] 43 Madame · · · clairvoyante: Fowler: “As a prefix to a foreign lady’s name · · · Madame is right”, as opposed to appellation, common noun or prefix (citing “Madam Fortune”). OED “clairvoyant” B n. 2: “Often treated as Fr. with fem. clairvoyante.” TSE originally typed “clairvoyant”. He pronounced it as French in his recordings but apparently without sounding the -te.
[I] 43–45 Madame Sosostris · · · known to be the wisest woman in Europe: Henry James: “Madame Merle · · · is one of the most brilliant women in Europe”, The Portrait of a Lady ch. XIX; “‘Honestly, my dear boy, she’s perhaps the most remarkable woman in Europe.’ · · · Hyacinth was preoccupied with the idea of meeting the most remarkable woman in Europe · · · the most remarkable woman in Europe”, The Princess Casamassima ch. XII (“the hyacinth girl”, [I] 36; for “Hyacinth garden” [I] 37, with a capital, see Textual History). Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills is dedicated to “The Wittiest Woman in India”. clairvoyante, | Had a bad cold: to Eleanor Hinkley, 23 Mar 1917: “Mrs Howells is a spiritualist, and wanted to give me mental treatment for a cold in the head” (Crawford 2015 271).
[I] 46 wicked: the first citation for OED 3b, “Excellent, splendid; remarkable. slang (orig. U.S.)”, is from F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920).
[I] 46 TSE’s Notes the Hanged God: Frazer’s chapter “The Hanged God” includes the story of Marsyas, which “may well reflect a ritual practice of flaying the dead god and hanging his skin upon the pine as a means of effecting his resurrection”, The Golden Bough V (Adonis Attis Osiris I) 293.
[I] 47 Phoenician Sailor: Hayward: “The type of fertility god, cast annually into the sea to symbolize the death of summer. Tarot cards were used to foretell the rising of the waters.” See note to [IV] 312.
[Poem I 56, 327 · Textual History II 375]
[I] 48 (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!): The Tempest I ii, Ariel’s song. FERDINAND: “The ditty does remember my drowned father.” But his father Alonzo is not among the drowned. The brackets were an addition by TSE. He also added three different exclamatory monosyllables, “Look!” (here), “See!”, in the opening line of Those are pearls that were his eyes. See! (“Uncollected Poems”), and “Yes!” (WLComposite 180). To look closely at “eyes” is to see “yes”. (Whereas the imperative “Look!” is presumably addressed to an observer, “See!” might be an entreaty to the pearls that were eyes.) “Think.”—also entreating the faculties of another—likewise ends a line, [II] 114.) On Ariel’s song, see headnote to Dirge, and note to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 5–6. Richard III I iv: “fearful wrecks · · · heaps of pearl, | Inestimable stones, unvalu’d jewels, | All scatter’d in the bottom of the sea. | Some lay in dead men’s skulls, and in the holes | Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept— | As ’twere in scorn of eyes—reflecting gems”. For TSE and the submarine world, see note to Mr. Apollinax 11–15. Shelley: “the holes he vainly sought to hide, | | Were or had been eyes”, The Triumph of Life 187–88, from the passage which TSE said “made an indelible impression upon me”, What Dante Means to Me (1950); see note to [I] 60–63. On Kubla Khan: “The imagery of that fragment, certainly, whatever its origins in Coleridge’s reading, sank to the depths of Coleridge’s feeling, was saturated, transformed there—‘those are pearls that were his eyes’—and brought up into daylight again”, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 146 (Drew 40); for “saturation”, see “A Beginner in 1908”, 2. SYMONS AND LAFORGUE, and note to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 7–12. “Daffodil bulbs instead of balls | Stared from the sockets of the eyes!” Whispers of Immortality 5–6.
[I] 49 Belladonna: [beautiful lady]. Grover Smith 1949: “Belladonna is not only deadly poison (Atropa belladonna) and one of the three Fates by virtue of her name, but also (what is to the point here) the lily Amaryllis belladonna, a symbol of resurrection like Eliot’s hyacinths, violets, and roses.” the Lady of the Rocks: Leonardo da Vinci’s altarpiece Our Lady of the Rocks is in the Louvre. Pater refers to it as “the Madonna of the Rocks” (see note to [V] 338). Pater on Leonardo’s La Gioconda (the Mona Lisa): “She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secret of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants”, Studies in the History of the Renaissance ch. VI (Grover Smith 1949) (“Smyrna merchant”, [III] 209). TSE on Pater: “Compare this whole passage about La Gioconda with the last chapter of Ecclesiastes, and see the difference between direct suggestiveness by precise reference, and the meretricious suggestiveness of vague literary association”, Prose and Verse (1921). Rocks: to his Swedish translator Erik Mesterton, 20 Jan 1932: “You can give either the equivalent for ‘rock’ or for ‘cliff’. There is no particular intention of referring to either use of the word ‘rock’ in the poem. Here it is definitely ‘sea-rocks’, i.e. a siren.”
[I] 50 The lady of situations: Situation, cancelled title of Entretien dans un parc (see note).
[I] 51 the man with three staves: the Tarot pack has a “three of wands”.
[I] 52 one-eyed · · · card: Hayward: “i.e. seen only in profile on the playing-card.” Pope: “Th’embroider’d King who shows but half his Face”, The Rape of the Lock III 76. On 26 May 1947, replying to an audience question: “the artist must do more than just state the problem, as many modern writers do. Merely stating it often entails a definite and uncompromising ambiguity that is like a playing card; eith
er way you look at it, the face is the same” (Mattingly).
[I] 54 forbidden to see: Weston on the Grail: “It is so secret a thing that no woman, be she wife or maid, may venture to speak of it”, From Ritual to Romance ch. X (Ronald Tamplin, American Literature Nov 1967).
[I] 55 death by water: Frazer: “in the Emmenthal they say, ‘This day will have three persons; one must perish in the air, one in the fire, and the third in the water’”, The Golden Bough XI 27 (Vickery 264).
[I] 56 crowds of people, walking round in a ring: Gérard de Nerval: “First of all I imagined that the persons collected in the garden (of the madhouse) all had some influence on the stars, and that the one who always walked round and round in a circle regulated the course of the sun · · · My own part seemed to me to be the re-establishment of universal harmony by Kabbalistic art, and I had to seek a solution by evoking the occult forces of various religions”, Le Rêve et la Vie (Symons 28–29). Wilde: “I walked, with other souls in pain, | Within another ring”, The Ballad of Reading Gaol I iv (Archie Burnett, personal communication).
[Poem I 56, 327 · Textual History II 375]