[I] 70 in the ships at Mylae: Hayward: “260 BC. The great naval victory of the Romans over the Carthaginians in the First Punic War. A trade war (cf. 1914–18). All wars one war.” For Carthage and for Keynes on a Carthaginian peace, see note to [III] 306–307. F. W. Bateson: “those who were ‘in’—rather than ‘on’ or ‘with’—the ships · · · propelled the triremes”, in Newton-De Molina ed. the ships at: TSE to his Swedish translator Erik Mesterton, 20 Jan 1932: “I see no great loss in omitting the ships if there are metrical difficulties.” Mylae: pronounced Mylee in TSE’s recordings.
[I] 71 “That corpse you planted · · · in your garden: Clement Wood: “But these war-killed men should sleep | Planted deep, planted deep”, Seedtime in Poetry Jan 1917. The Imperial War Graves Commission was established in 1917. “Garden-Graves on the Western Front”, The Times 7 May 1921, concluded with three words from Rupert Brooke: “Somewhere in France there is a white garden graveyard of British warriors which stands complete as it will stand through the centuries to come. Its wealth of flowers and wreaths will change and be renewed · · · this garden which is ‘for ever England’.”
[I] 71–72 “That corpse you planted · · · “Has it begun to sprout?: Lancelot Andrewes: “Christ rising was indeed a gardener, and that a strange one, Who made such an herb grow out of the ground of this day as the like was never seen before, a dead body to shoot forth alive out of the grave”, Easter Sermon 1620, on John 20: 15, in which Mary Magdalene, “supposing him to be the gardener”, says to Jesus “if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him”. TSE: “Their petals · · · They sprang from the limbs of the dead”, Circe’s Palace 4–6. To Conrad Aiken, 30 Sept [1914]: “it’s interesting to cut yourself to pieces once in a while, and wait to see if the fragments will sprout”. (“the damp souls of housemaids | Sprouting”, Morning at the Window 3–4.) TSE annotating his Greek text of Aristotle’s De Anima II ch. 1: “A corpse cannot be said to have the potentiality of life.” (Aristotle: “By that which has in it the capacity of life is meant not the body which has lost its soul, but that which possesses it. Now the seed in animals, like the fruit in plants, is that which is potentially such and such a body.”) TSE on childhood: “we know that it is something to be buried and done with, though the corpse will from time to time find its way up to the surface”, The Silurist (1927). See note to [I] 1–2, 71, 74.
[Poem I 57, 328 · Textual History II 376]
[I] 71–73 “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, | “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? | “Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?: “sudden rains | Softening last year’s garden plots”, Interlude in London 5–6. 1 Corinthians 15: 36–37: “that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain.” Frazer: “priests used to bury effigies of Osiris made of earth and corn. When these effigies were taken up again · · · the corn would be found to have sprouted from the body of Osiris, and this sprouting of the grain would be hailed as an omen, or rather as the cause, of the growth of the crops. The corn-god produced the corn from himself: he gave his own body to feed the people: he died that they might live”, The Golden Bough VI (Attis Adonis Osiris II) 90.
[I] 71–75 “That corpse you planted · · · dig it up again!: TSE’s Notes refer to Webster:
Call for the robin-red-breast and the wren,
Since o’er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole,
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm,
And (when gay tombs are robbed) sustain no harm:
But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men,
For with his nails he’ll dig them up again.
They would not bury him ’cause he died in a quarrel
The White Devil V iv (stage direction: “Cornelia
doth this in several forms of distraction”)
[Poem I 57, 328 · Textual History II 376]
The Mermaid ed. adds a footnote quoting Lamb: “I never saw anything like this dirge, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in the Tempest. As that is of the water, watery; so this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intenseness of feeling, which seems to resolve itself into the elements which it contemplates.—C. Lamb, Spec. of Eng. Dram. Poets.” The two dirges appear consecutively under Palgrave’s titles A Sea Dirge and A Land Dirge in The Golden Treasury, which also quotes Lamb’s remarks (Joan Brain, pub. John Pikoulis, N&Q Oct 1981). The Golden Treasury was prescribed reading in TSE’s sixth-year class at school (Smith Academy yearbook, 1904–05). For Ariel’s song (“Full fathom five”), see headnote to Dirge. Webster again: “The wolf shall find her grave, and scrape it up, | Not to devour the corpse, but to discover | The horrid murder”, The Duchess of Malfi IV ii (Francis Noel Lees, Tate ed. 352). Mermaid notes: “This was a commonplace superstition of the time.” (For Webster’s scene, see note to [II] 117–23.) Again: “they imagine | Themselves to be transformed into wolves · · · And dig dead bodies up”, The Duchess of Malfi V ii. Chapman: “Whence with my nails and feet I’ll dig enough | Horror and savage cruelty to build | Temples to massacre”, The Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron III i (for Chapman’s scene, see notes to [II] 89 and to Gerontion 38–39). corpse · · · dig it up again: FitzGerald: “As, buried once, Men want dug up again”, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (4th ed) XV (Crawford 35). Pound: “Judge ye! | Have I dug him up again?” Sestina: Altaforte (1909) epigraph (TSE included the poem in Pound’s Selected Poems). Also: “He and the dug-up corpse”, Canto II (first version, in Poetry July 1917). keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men: Hayward: “The suburban garden. The Englishman and his dog—his friendly ‘familiar’. The substitution of dog for wolf in this allusion is a striking example of Eliot’s use of quotation to bring the past into the present. There is also the suggestion that the dog, by digging up the corpse, might prevent the possibility of rebirth.” James Huneker: “The legend of Charles Baudelaire is seemingly indestructible. This French poet himself has suffered more from the friendly malignant biographer and Parisian chroniclers than did Poe. Who shall keep the curs out of the cemetery? asked Baudelaire after he had read Griswold on Poe”, Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1909) 67 (Grover Smith 79). In the same essay on Baudelaire, Huneker quoted “Hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!” (Hands); see note to Gerontion 62–64. OED “man” 34: “man’s best friend · · · the dog”. Keats: “a friend to man”, Ode on a Grecian Urn 48. TSE: “long lanes of dogs and men”, Airs of Palestine, No. 2 15. To Bonamy Dobrée, 21 Aug 1926: “individual Gods (my God for my dog, my pipe, my golf-tools and my allotment garden, your god for yours).” Badenhausen 183: “the metaphor also evokes Sirius, the Dog Star, for [Jessie] Weston points out the importance of Sirius to the fertility rites of the Egyptians”. Virginia Woolf, however, had recorded TSE denying any such connection: “Not a bit of it says Tom: I was having a joke about Webster”, Diary 10 Sept 1933. TSE: “Gloomy Orion and the Dog”, Sweeney Among the Nightingales 9.
[I] 74 O: Fowler “O & Oh”: “as the sign of the vocative (O God our help · · ·) O is invariable, & as an exclamation the word is O when no stop immediately follows it, but before any stop oh (Oh, what a lie! O for the wings of a dove!)” TSE changed the spelling in Washington copy 1954 (see Textual History), perhaps to conform to [III] 199, [III] 309–10, and [IV] 320 (but see [II] 150). The sense is not as at The Dry Salvages III 39. TSE hesitated over “O” or “Oh” again in The Country Walk 26.
[I] 75 again: pronounced to rhyme with “men” in TSE’s recordings at this point; elsewhere he often said agayne.
[I] 76 “You! hypocrite lecteur · · · frère”: TSE’s Notes refer to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, prefatory poem:
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat
,
—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!
[Dear Reader, you are well acquainted with that fastidious monster—hypocritical Reader,—my second self—my brother!]
Au lecteur [To the Reader]
TSE adds “You” to the line, having in an essay departed differently from Baudelaire in the vocative: “the poets who consider themselves most opposed to Georgianism, and who know a little French, are mostly such as could imagine the Last Judgment only as a lavish display of Bengal lights, Roman candles, catherine-wheels, and inflammable fire-balloons. Vous, hypocrite lecteur …”, The Lesson of Baudelaire (1921) conclusion (Scarfe); Baudelaire has Tu not Vous (in the preceding line). Both the Dial and the Criterion italicised the French words “hypocrite · · · frère”, with roman “You” at the head of the line. Subsequently the whole line has appeared in roman, with the effect that “You! hypocrite” can be read simply as English at first, before transition to the French “hypocrite lecteur!” TSE to Middleton Murry, 12 Feb [1926]: “You are in some sort of purgatory, I am perhaps thoroughly damned. But that’s one reason why I want to see you. And I always feel with you ‘mon semblable—mon frère.’” Richard Aldington: “Here, take my pennies | Mon semblable, mon frère”, end of Interlude, Images in Egoist 1 Dec 1915. mon semblable: Sir Thomas Elyot: “A man in his natural perfection is · · · desirous of knowledge, appetiting by generation to brynge forthe his semblable”, The Governour bk. I xxi (see East Coker I 28–33).
[Poem I 57, 328 · Textual History II 376]
II. A Game of Chess
IN THE CAGE
Unadopted title IN THE CAGE: WLFacs notes: “The cancelled title refers to the passage from the Satyricon of Petronius which replaced that from Heart of Darkness as the epigraph to The Waste Land.” But Grover Smith and Kenner doubted whether TSE yet had in mind “the quotation from Petronius without which an allusion to the decrepit Sibyl would be impenetrable”, Kenner in Litz ed. 38.
Pound to Scofield Thayer, 25–26 Nov 1920: “I want to get T. S. E. out of that bank · · · If some one wd. murder or elope with his wife it wd. have the same effect as finding a few hundred £ · · · I think you have done extremely well by him, in offering regular monthly opening [with the Dial]. One additional job of equal size ought to tempt him out of the cage.” Subsequently, “F. M.”, Letters of the Moment I (1924):
Now one begins to beat against the bars of the cage: the typewriter and the telephone, and the sight of one’s face in the glass. One’s soul stirs stiffly out of the dead endurance of the winter—but toward what spring?
Le temps s’en va, le temps s’en va, madame:
Las! le temps, non, mais nous nous en allons,
Et tost serons estendus sous la lame.
What happy meetings, what luminous conversations in twilight rooms filled with the scent of hyacinths, await me now?
[Time passes, time passes, Madame; alas! it is not time but we who pass, and are soon stretched below the stone].
(The first two of these lines from Ronsard’s Sonnet à Marie appear in TSE’s hand, c. 624 fol. 24v.) For Henry James’s In the Cage, see headnote to In the Department Store.
Title A Game of Chess: Middleton’s A Game at Chesse, staged 1624, was a political allegory. It tells of the attempted rape of a White (English) Virgin by a Black (Spanish) Bishop’s Pawn. (For England’s Virgin Queen of the previous generation and a Spanish bishop, see note to [III] 279.) TSE’s review of R. C. Bald’s edition of the play appeared in TLS 23 Jan 1930 (see headnote to Sweeney Agonistes, 2. ARISTOPHANES). Pound, The Game of Chess (title, in Lustra, 1916).
Title, [II] 82, 95, 108, 109, 137 A Game of Chess · · · the flames · · · Burned · · · firelight · · · fiery · · · we shall play a game of chess: Herbert: “When my house burnes, it’s not good playing at Chesse”; “To play at Chesse when the house is on fire”, Outlandish Proverbs nos. 666, 1136.
[II] 77–110] Hayward: “Contrast of high life and low life in a meaningless, sterile land. In Middleton’s play the game of chess was used as a cover for a seduction and rape. The curse on the land in the myth followed upon the rape of girls at the Court of the Fisher King. (Lust without Love). Cf. also the ‘Thames Daughters’.” TSE’s Notes refer to Antony and Cleopatra II ii:
[Poem I 58, 328 · Textual History II 376–78]
The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burn’d on the water. The poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar’d all description. She did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold, of tissue,
O’erpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy out-work nature. On each side of her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colour’d fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.
(The speech is still marked by the ribbon in TSE’s childhood copy.) “The great speech of Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra is highly decorated, but the decoration has a purpose beyond its own beauty”, Rudyard Kipling (1941). TSE had previously refashioned the speech in The Burnt Dancer 17–18 (“flame | Like perfumed oil upon the waters”) and in Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 11–12 (“Her shuttered barge | Burned on the water all the day”). Antony and Cleopatra III vi: “Cleopatra and himself in chairs of gold” (“golden”, [II] 80).
Cymbeline II iv, after mention of a tapestry of Cleopatra’s barge (Melchiori):
The roof o’ th’ chamber
With golden cherubins is fretted. Her andirons—
I had forgot them—were two winking Cupids
Of silver, each on one foot standing, nicely
Depending on their brands.
TSE’s Note to [II] 92 quotes Virgil’s “dependent lychni laquearibus aureis”. For Cymbeline again, see note to [II] 80–91.
Apuleius, The Golden Ass, Pater’s version in Marius the Epicurean I 30, as quoted by Pound, in The Spirit of Romance:
Golden pillars sustained the roof, arched most curiously in cedar-wood and ivory. The walls were hidden under wrought silver:—all tame and woodland creatures leaping forward to the visitor’s gaze. Wonderful indeed was the craftsman, divine or half-divine, who by the subtlety of his art had breathed so wild a soul into the silver! The very pavement was distinct with pictures in goodly stones. In the glow of its precious metal the house is its own daylight, having no need of the sun. Well might it seem a place fashioned for the conversation of gods with men!
(TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934) includes the Teubner ed. of Apuleius. To Robert Graves, 30 June 1947: “I read The Golden Ass at Harvard with a good deal of enjoyment, but my Professor of Latin failed to point out that the story was intended as parody.”)
Keats, Lamia II 173–82 (Melchiori):
[Poem I 58, 328 · Textual History II 376–78]
Of wealthy lustre was the banquet-room,
Filled with pervading brilliance and perfume:
Before each lucid panel fuming stood
A censer fed with myrrh and spicèd wood,
Each by a sacred tripod held aloft,
Whose slender feet wide-swerved upon the soft
Wool-woofèd carpets; fifty wreaths of smoke
From fifty censers their light voyage took
To the high roof, still mimicked as they rose
Along the mirrored walls by twin-clouds odorous.
Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal LXXIX, Une Martyre [A Martyred Woman]:
Au milieu des flacons, des étoffes lamées
Et des meubles voluptueux,
Des marbres, des tableaux, des robes parfumées
<
br /> Qui traînent à plis somptueux,
Dans une chambre tiède où, comme en une serre,
L’air est dangereux et fatal,
Où des bouquets mourants dans leurs cercueils de verre
Exhalent leur soupir final
[Surrounded with scent-bottles, sequined draperies, luxurious furniture, marble sculptures, oil-paintings, perfumed dresses scattered around in sumptuous folds; in a close bedchamber like a hothouse with its threatening morbid atmosphere, in which drooping bouquets in their glass coffins sigh their last]
Marlowe, Hero and Leander I 136–44 (incl. in Hayward’s Penguin Book of English Verse):
The wals were of discoloured Jasper stone,
Wherein was Proteus carv’d, and overhead,
A lively vine of greene sea agget spread;
Where by one hand, light headed Bacchus hung,
And with the other, wine from grapes out wrung.
Of Christall shining faire the pavement was,
The towne of Sestos calde it Venus glasse.
There might you see the gods in sundrie shapes,
Committing headdie ryots, incest, rapes
For TSE’s scene and Conrad’s The Return, see Robert L. Morris, MLN June 1950; for Dickens’s Dombey and Son ch. LIV, see Patrick Diskin, N&Q Dec 1984; for Mallarmé’s Hérodiade I, see Kenner, Litz ed. 39 (but TSE to P. M. Mansell Jones, 9 Dec 1936, of Mallarmé’s poetry: “I admit to being very fond of it myself, although I cannot trace ever having been much influenced by him”).
[II] 77 The Chair she sat in: Leigh Hunt: “Jenny kissed me when we met, | Jumping from the chair she sat in”, Rondeau (Archie Burnett, personal communication).
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 78
