The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  110 (I John saw these things, and heard them): Revelation 22: 8 (WLFacs notes).

  [I] 57 Mrs. Equitone: Appleplex has on file a letter with “some damaging but entertaining information about Lady Equistep”, Eeldrop and Appleplex II (1917).

  [I] 58–59 I bring the horoscope myself: | One must be so careful these days: Brian Diemert: “Astrologers and other ‘fortune tellers’ (crystal gazers, tarot readers, and the like) were frequently arrested and brought before the courts on charges of fraud · · · In 1921, for instance, the Times of London mentions no fewer than five such cases · · · the mails were being used illegally”, Journal of Modern Literature Autumn 1998. The Witchcraft Act of 1735 made it illegal to claim that a human being had magical powers, the last conviction coming in 1944. TSE: “We are, at least officially, prohibited from consulting the oracles, and from having our horoscopes cast in the Tottenham Court Road”, Charleston, Hey! Hey! (1927). “converse with spirits, | Describe the horoscope, haruspicate”, The Dry Salvages V 1–3. In a reader’s report: “This book consists entirely of messages received from persons in the Life Beyond · · · There are three types of communicator about which difficulties might arise: 1. The Blessed Virgin · · · 2. King Arthur · · · 3. Christina Rossetti. I am not sure about the legal position of messages from authors whose works are still in copyright”, “A Book of Preparation for the Coming Light” by R. M. T., reader’s report (1949). For “in these days one cannot look far enough ahead”, see letter to John Hayward, 23 June 1940, quoted in headnote to Four Quartets, 3. COMPOSITION. One must be so careful these days: Hayward: “A typical bourgeois catch-phrase, expressive of undefined fears and suspicions of her social inferiors.” The Green Book Magazine (1913): “One must be so careful nowadays. If it isn’t a dictagraph, it’s a movie camera.” TSE: “Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived”, Aunt Helen 13.

  [I] 60 Unreal City: TSE’s Notes quote Baudelaire: “Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves, | Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant” [O swarming city, city full of dreams, where ghosts accost the passers-by in broad daylight!], Les Sept vieillards [The Seven Old Men] 1–2. In What Dante Means to Me (1950), TSE represented Baudelaire as having used the capital “C” that was in fact his own (“O City city”, [III] 259 and note):

  His significance for me is summed up in the lines:

  Fourmillante Cité, cité pleine de rêves,

  Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant …

  I knew what that meant, because I had lived it before I knew that I wanted to turn it into verse on my own account.

  [Poem I 56, 327 · Textual History II 375]

  Baudelaire continues: “Un matin · · · Un brouillard sale et jaune inondait tout l’espace” [One morning · · · a dirty yellow fog flooded the whole of space]. For Baudelaire, see note to [I] 76. Bertrand Russell: “After seeing troop trains departing from Waterloo, I used to have strange visions of London as a place of unreality. I used in imagination to see the bridges collapse and sink, and the whole great city vanish like a morning mist. Its inhabitants began to seem like hallucinations, and I would wonder whether the world in which I thought I had lived was a mere product of my own febrile nightmares. [Footnote: I spoke of this to T. S. Eliot, who put it into The Waste Land]”, Autobiography II (1968) 18. TSE to Alan Wood, 28 July 1956: “You say that some of the ideas in The Waste Land were possibly suggested by talks I had with Bertrand Russell. I cannot for the life of me imagine what ideas might have been suggested in this way, and am not sure that there is anything in The Waste Land that could properly be called an idea.” Unreal: see note to [V] 376.

  [I] 60–63 Unreal City · · · A crowd flowed · · · I had not thought death had undone so many: TSE’s Notes quote Inf. III 55–57, [so long a train of people, that I should never have believed death had undone so many]. TSE underlined III 56–57 of the Italian in the copy his mother had given him. TSE: “For in Dante’s Hell souls are not deadened, as they mostly are in life”, Dante (1920). “Readers of my Waste Land will perhaps remember that the vision of my city clerks trooping over London Bridge from the railway station to their offices evoked the reflection ‘I had not thought death had undone so many’; and that in another place I deliberately modified a line of Dante by altering it—‘sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled.’ And I gave the references in my notes, in order to make the reader who recognized the allusion, know that I meant him to recognize it, and know that he would have missed the point if he did not recognize it · · · The Triumph of Life, a poem which is Shelley’s greatest tribute to Dante, was the last of his great poems. I think it was also the greatest”, What Dante Means to Me (1950); after quoting Shelley’s 176–205, TSE adds “Well, this is better than I could do.” (Earlier in the poem Shelley has: “All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know | Whither he went, or whence he came, or why | He made one of the multitude · · · Of their own shadow walked, and called it death”, The Triumph of Life 47–59.) Inf. XV 16–19: “we met a troop of spirits, who were coming alongside the bank; and each looked at us, as in the evening men are wont to look at one another under a new moon”. TSE scored XV 16–21 in the Italian. Paul Elmer More: “so numerous · · · this vision was given to me, and the hurrying eager multitude of the street were but shadows of humanity, unreal things seeking an unreal good. Who shall say that the unseen dead do not flock through our cities, leading over again in shadow-wise their former lives? Who shall say that to some they are not visible, jostling against the living amid the crowded streets in the very light of day?” The Great Refusal 127. (For More’s title, see note to [I] 69; for this description, see note to Little Gidding II 37–38.)

  Tennyson: “never an end to the stream of passing feet · · · But up and down and to and fro, | Ever about me the dead men go”, Maud II [v] 249, 255–56. Kipling: “This is a great and terrible world. I never knew there were so many men alive in it”, Kim ch. III (Alberto Manguel, A Reading Diary 49). Joyce: “How many. All these here once walked around Dublin”, Ulysses episode VI (Hades) in Little Review Sept 1918 (probably the reason for Pound’s annotation “J.J.” in ts1; see next note. TSE: “so many · · · such a press of people. | We hardly knew ourselves that day, or knew the City · · · so many crowding the way. | So many”, Coriolan I. Triumphal March 3–7. On D. H. Lawrence: “most people are only very little alive · · · Against the living death of modern material civilisation he spoke again and again, and even if these dead could speak, what he said is unanswerable”, After Strange Gods 60.

  [Poem I 56–57, 327–28 · Textual History II 375–76]

  114–22 Pound’s annotation: “J.J.”] Valerie Eliot wrote that “exhaled” in 64 “reminded Pound of Joyce’s Ulysses, but Eliot’s Notes direct the reader to Inf. IV 25–27” (WLFacs notes); “Evidently the word reminded Pound of Joyce · · · but its use here stems from the days when Eliot was a master at Highgate Junior School and helped to keep order in the gymnasium. He loved to imitate the way in which the boys mimicked the cockney instructor when he told them to ‘Inhale’ and ‘Exhale’”, BBC broadcast 2 Nov 1971 (briefly reported Listener 18 Nov). However, Joyce’s only use of the word in Ulysses is very different (“The beagle · · · exhales a putrid carcasefed breath”, episode XV, Circe). For a closer correspondence between TSE and Joyce, see previous note.

  [I] 61–65 Under the brown fog of a winter dawn · · · each man fixed his eyes before his feet: Inf. IV 10–12: “Oscura, profonda era, e nebulosa, | tanto che, per ficcar lo viso al fondo, | io non vi discernea alcuna cosa” [It was so dark, profound, and cloudy, that, with fixing my look upon the bottom, I there discerned nothing] (Friend). Inf. XXXIV 15: “altra, com’arco, il volto a’ piedi inverte” [another, like a bow, bends face to feet]. TSE: “under the oppression of the silent fog”, The Dry Salvages I 34. brown fog: Wilde: “Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses
into monstrous shadows?” The Decay of Lying. TSE: “brown waves of fog”, Morning at the Window 5. For “the brown air”, in Dante, see note to [III] 220–23. For “Un brouillard sale et jaune” in Baudelaire, see note to [I] 60.

  [I] 62 A crowd flowed over London Bridge: Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs: “London Bridge was made for wise men to go over, and fools to go under”, noting of Old London Bridge that “The danger to light wherries in shooting the bridge was appreciable.” The bridge that stood for five and a half centuries until the 1820s was one of the wonders of Europe. On 29 May 1660 it was especially crowded as the newly returned Charles II rode in a parade of thousands into the City (Gordon Home, Old London Bridge, 1931, 229–31). Edward Carpenter (of “New” London Bridge): “I see the solid flow of business men northward across London Bridge in the morning, and the ebb at evening”, Towards Democracy (1912 ed. 56). TSE’s Baedeker 122–23: “It is estimated that, in spite of the relief afforded by the Tower Bridge, 22,000 vehicles and about 110,000 pedestrians cross London Bridge daily, a fact which may give the stranger some idea of the prodigious traffic carried on in this part of the city. New-comers should pay a visit to London Bridge on a week-day during business hours to see and hear the steady stream of noisy traffic.” flowed over: to Virginia Woolf [3? Sept 1923], on his proofreading of the Hogarth Press edition: “I see one dreadful oversight for which I owe apologies: p. 7, I left under London Bridge instead of over!” However, the surviving proof has here two blank pages (Berg), so he may not have seen this line in proof. He corrected it in the Hogarth Press copy he presented to his mother (Houghton). (TSE, writing as Charles Augustus Conybeare: “much water has flowed under many bridges since the days of my dear old Oxford tutor, Thomas Hill Green”, Egoist letters column Dec 1917. To Hayward, 4 Aug 1940: “Well John many pontoons have flowed over the river since I last saw you.” To Richard Jennings, 25 Feb 1941: “A lot of bridges have flowed etc. since.”)

  [Poem I 56–57, 327 · Textual History II 375–76]

  [I] 62–65 London · · · undone · · · man · · · eyes: Byron: “they had all been undone | But for the maker, Mr Mann, of London”, Don Juan II xxix. Shelley: “Hell is a city much like London— | A populous and smoky city; | There are all sorts of people undone”, Peter Bell the Third 147–49 (S. Viswanathan, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 2, 1971). TSE: “Ill done and undone, | London · · · the Thames · · · Water”, The Builders 1–7. “Richmond and Kew | Undid me”, [III] 293–94. For the rhyme “undone / London”, see note to Ash-Wednesday I 1, 26, 30. Housman: “London streets · · · many an eye · · · Undone with misery, all they can | Is to hate their fellow man”, A Shropshire Lad XLI 21–30 (Mark Thompson, personal communication).

  [I] 63–68 I had not thought death had undone so many. | Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled · · · down King William Street · · · final stroke of nine: TSE’s Notes quote Inf. IV 25–27: “Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare, | non avea pianto, ma’ che di sospiri, | che l’ aura eterna facevan tremare” [Here there was no plaint, that could be heard, except of sighs, which caused the eternal air to tremble]. Hayward: “Those who lived without praise or blame, without hope of death, were wretched people who were never alive—The crowd is the morning crowd of commuters coming into the City from the suburbs on the south side of the Thames, business men, clerks, typists, etc. King William Street is the street running from the north side of the bridge into the heart of the City. A typical London scene during the morning ‘crush-hours’. City workers are due at their offices by 9am, hence the reference to St. Mary Woolnoth’s bell. This church, on the corner of King William and Lombard streets, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, a disciple of Wren, survived the Blitz of 1940–41 and is one of the finest of the remaining City churches. T. S. Eliot worked for a time in the City in the Foreign Department of Lloyds Bank.” death · · · Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled: Paradise Lost XI 146–48: “yet this will prayer, | Or one short sigh of human breath, upborne | Even to the seat of God.” TSE: “death | Short sighs”, In silent corridors of death 1–2. “short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery”, Hysteria. had undone so many: Thomas Heywood: “Pox o’ this use, that hath undone so many”, The English Traveller III ii (Stephen Matthews 104). down King William Street | To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours: in his Baedeker, TSE ticked a paragraph under the heading “6. London Bridge. The Monument. Lower Thames Street”, beginning: “King William Street, a wide thoroughfare with handsome buildings, leads S.E. from the Bank to London Bridge. Immediately on the left, at the corner of Lombard Street, is the church of St. Mary Woolnoth, erected in 1716, by Hawksmoor.” Thomas Kyd was baptised in the church in 1558 (The Works ed. Frederick S. Boas, 1901, xv; see [V] 431). TSE’s office at Lloyds was at “75, Lombard Street, first floor—Information Department—opposite clock of St. Mary Woolnoth” (to Richard Aldington, 4 Jan 1923). kept the hours: also [V] 383. OED “keep” 13: “To observe by attendance, presence, residence, performance of duty, or in some prescribed or regular way · · · Also, in weakened sense, to keep regular or proper · · · hours.” Mackenzie E. C. Walcott, the Victorian editor of Thomas Plume’s Life and Death of John Hacket (1675, 1865), explained that the devout “kept the hours, and compiled devotions for them”.

  121–22 Pound’s annotation: “Blake. Too old often used”] WLFacs notes: “This is a general, not a specific reference to Blake, and by starting to write ‘old’, Pound may have had ‘fashioned’ in mind.” F. T. Prince suggested, TLS 11 May 1973, that Pound was referring to “Till into the high dome of Paul’s they like Thames’ waters flow”, Holy Thursday 4 (Songs of Innocence). Valerie Eliot replied, TLS 18 May: “I put before Pound several passages from Blake, including that suggested by Professor Prince, in case he might have had at least one in mind. But he dismissed them.”

  [Poem I 57, 327–28 · Textual History II 376]

  [I] 68 dead sound: “A phenomenon which I have often noticed”, according to TSE’s Notes; his own hours at Lloyds Bank were 9.15 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. and until lunchtime on Saturdays (speech to the London Library, reported The Times 2 July 1958). To J. M. Aguirre, 23 Nov 1956: “that is the way the clock of St. Mary Woolnoth sounded to me when I worked for several years in an office on the first floor just across Lombard Street from the Church”. North’s Plutarch on the Parthians’ use of kettle drums: “they all made a noise everywhere together, and it is like a dead sounde · · · The Romans being put in feare with this dead sounde, the Parthians straight threw the clothes and coverings from them that hid their armour”, Life of Marcus Crassus (ed. W. H. D. Rouse, Temple Classics, 1898–99) VI. TSE on George Wyndham’s Plutarch essay: “He appreciates the battles, the torchlight, the ‘dead sound’ of drums, the white, worn face of Cicero in his flight peering from his litter”, A Romantic Aristocrat (1919) (Grover Smith 308); “torchlight · · · faces”, [V] 322.

  [I] 69 one I knew · · · Stetson: “One that I knew”, The Death of the Duchess II 30. Hayward: “Cf. Inf. III 58–60. ‘After I had distinguished some among them, I saw and knew the shade of him who made, through cowardice, the great refusal.’ There is no special significance in the name ‘Stetson’. It is simply a typical name for a business man.” (Hayward’s French note adds: “Cf. le chapeau ‘Stetson’, marque americaine de coiffures à l’usage des hommes d’affaires respectables.”) The Temple Inferno gives the lines as: “After I had recognised some amongst them, I saw and knew the shadow of him who from cowardice made the great refusal.” (Dante may have meant Celestine V, who became Pope in 1294 at the age of 80 but resigned five months later. For Paul Elmer More’s book The Great Refusal, see notes to [I] 60–63, [IV] 314 and [V] 359.) TSE to E. M. Stephenson, 27 May 1943: “I notice that you are inclined to identify Stetson with Brunetto Latini. This is an association which had not occurred to my own mind.” (See note to Little Gidding II 33–47.) To Fergus Fitzgerald, 6 June 1940: “Stetson here does not refer to anybody in particular. With some of my names, i
t is true, I have had a definite person of my acquaintance in the background, though in most cases the identification would not help in the least to further understanding of the passage. But in this case I simply meant any other superior bank clerk: a person in a bowler hat, black jacket and striped trousers. It would never have occurred to me that anyone would think that this referred to Ezra Pound, who does not dress like that, and who would look rather out of place in King William Street.” Valerie Eliot quoted this, TLS 11 May 1973, adding: “Since my husband’s death I have learnt that there was an American banker called Stetson who worked in London and Copenhagen, so it is possible that T. S. E. heard his name in the course of his duties at Lloyds Bank. At a date not yet determined the two men had a friend in common, E. McKnight Kauffer.” In 1867, Congressman Thomas Dawes Eliot, brother of TSE’s grandfather, acted with T. M. Stetson in the sensational Howland forgery trial concerning an estate of $2 million. The marriage of Stetson and TDE’s daughter in 1856 is recorded in Walter Graeme Eliot’s A Sketch of the Eliot Family [1887], which TSE consulted in the British Museum (see Letters 4 110).

  [Poem I 57, 328 · Textual History II 376]

  [I] 69–76 “Stetson! | “You · · · | “That · · · | “Has · · · | “Or · · · | “O · · · | “Or · · · | “You · · · frère!”: TSE used this old-fashioned convention of repeating quotation marks at the start of each line of spoken or quoted words in WLComposite 7–8 and at [II] 132–34, as also when quoting John Day and Baudelaire within his Notes. Here [I] 76 is complicated by incorporating a quotation. In Revelation (1937), TSE likewise put opening quotation marks at the head of four successive paragraphs quoted from Irving Babbitt; similarly, in a letter to his solicitor on 29 Apr 1939. The convention continued to be used into the 1940s by The Times when quoting prose. Contrast, for instance, [III] 292–305. “Stetson! | “You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!: TSE: “Marin! je te connais”, Tristan Corbière 1.