The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  [II] 126 Is there nothing in your head: Hayward: “Cf. ‘headpiece filled with straw’, The Hollow Men I 4.”

  [II] 128 O O O O: Hamlet V ii: “The rest is silence. O, o, o, o. Dyes”, Hamlet’s last utterance in the Folio text (Grover Smith 82). King Lear V iii: “thanke you, sir, O, o, o, o”, Lear’s last utterance, First Quarto (Archie Burnett, personal communication). See note on “O” and “Oh”, [I] 74, and note to [II] 111–28.

  [II] 128–30 that Shakespeherian Rag— | It’s so elegant | So intelligent: “That Shakes-pea-ri-an rag, Most in-tel-li-gent, ve-ry el-e-gant”, chorus of That Shakespearian Rag (1912), which became a hit in Broadway’s Ziegfeld Follies: “That Shakespearian rag, | Most intelligent, very elegant, | That old classical drag, | Has the proper stuff, the line ‘Lay on Macduff,’ | Desdemona was the colored pet, | Romeo loved his Juliet | And they were some lovers, you can bet, and yet, | I know if they were here today, | They’d Grizzly Bear in a diff’rent way, | And you’d hear old Hamlet say, | ‘To be or not to be,’ | That Shakespearian Rag” (Gene Buck and Herman Ruby, music by David Stamper) (B. R. McElderry, Jr., American Quarterly Summer 1957). TSE:

  “A pick-axe and a spade, a spade,

  For and a winding sheet—”

  I ’eard that at the Old Vic once. That’s Shakespeare, that is. He wrote some good songs, Shakespeare.

  ts draft of The Rock (Bodleian, MS Don. d. 44 fol. 107)

  [Poem I 59, 329–30 · Textual History II 381–82]

  Shakespeherian: pronounced Shakespee-heerian in TSE’s recordings. Rag:Hayward: “ragtime. The syncopated ‘jazz’ post-war world of the 1920s—restless, aimless, jittery, futile, neurotic.” St. Louis was a centre of the controversial ragtime music, attracting musicians including Scott Joplin. See headnote to Sweeney Agonistes, 4. JAZZ. TSE: “caper to the rhythm known as ‘swing,’” Three Sonnets (to Geoffrey Faber) 9.

  TSE and popular songs:

  (i) adaptation, as here and in 10–11; likewise in The smoke that gathers blue and sinks (“What, you want action? | Some attraction?” 11–12) and Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of an Agon (“Under the bamboo | Bamboo bamboo”, 40–41). Of the two epigraphs to the Clark Lectures (The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 40), one is from Dante; the other reads: “I want someone to treat me rough. | Give me a cabman. | Popular song”. This appears to adapt the song “What I want is low-brow love— | Heavy, knock-down, cave-man stuff; | I’m no cooing turtle-dove— | Treat me rough, kid, treat me rough!” (1916).

  (ii) imagining songs of his own, apparently, as in Suite Clownesque (“I may meet you | Very likely greet you”, III 3–4) and again in Fragment of Agon (“My little island girl”, 73). See individual notes and Chinitz.

  For music hall songs, see note to WLComposite 47, and notes to the title Triumphal March; The Dry Salvages I 1–3; Suite Clownesque III 15, 16, 23; and Billy M’Caw: The Remarkable Parrot 1.

  [II] 128–137a Shakespeherian · · · make company between us: Vivien Eliot: “We read Shakespeare aloud | And we two were a crowd”, final couplet of a draft poem beginning “During May | J. came to stay” (c. 624 fol. 11). After the poem’s final line she wrote: “(Meaning we were good companions & not lonely)”.

  [II] 131, 159–60 What shall I do? · · · It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. | (She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.): Beddoes, Death’s Jest-Book III iii:

  Squats on a toad-stool under a tree

  A bodiless childfull of life in the gloom,

  Crying with frog voice, “What shall I be?

  Poor unborn ghost, for my mother killed me

  Scarcely alive in her wicked womb.

  What shall I be?”

  TSE quotes the second and third lines in The Three Voices of Poetry (1953).

  [II] 132–33 “I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street | “With my hair down so: Beaumont and Fletcher: “Suppose I stand upon the sea-beach now, | Mine arms thus, and mine hair blown with the wind”, The Maid’s Tragedy II ii (see note to Sweeney Erect epigraph). Also Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster III ii: “send me naked, | My hair dishevelled, through the fiery streets” (Grover Smith 309). Dante, Vita Nuova [XXIII] tr. Rossetti: “Where ladies through the street, like mournful lights, | Ran with loose hair”, The Early Italian Poets 271 (Grover Smith 313). Walter Besant in London, 1854–55: “the silence grew more and more intolerable · · · When my nerves would stand it no longer, I have taken my hat and rushed out into the streets”, Autobiography (1902) 275 (turning then to the world of prostitution). walk the street: OED “street” 3g: “to walk the street(s)”: “to go about on foot in a town.” Also: “to be on the streets: to be a prostitute”.

  [Poem I 59, 330 · Textual History II 381–82]

  [II] 134 “What shall we ever do?”: “But what is there for you and me | For me and you | What is there for us to do?” The Death of the Duchess I 10–12. E. M. Forster: “‘Two philosophic youths repining in the British Museum! What have we done? What shall we ever do?’” The Longest Journey (1907) ch. XX.

  [II] 135–36 hot water at ten. | And if it rains, a closed car: Hayward: “Getting up late in order to curtail the boredom of an empty morning. And on a wet afternoon an aimless drive around in a limousine to kill time.” For awakening by a servant, see headnote to Sweeney Agonistes, 6. THE SUPERIOR LANDLORD (conclusion of this draft). Similarly Fresca and her servant Amanda, WL Composite 231–39.

  191 closed carriage: ringed by Pound with “Why this between 1922 & Lil” (objecting to the anachronism). Valerie Eliot: “‘OK’ wrote Pound when Eliot suggested as an alternative: ‘A closed car. I cant use taxi more than once’” (WLFacs notes, quoting letter of [26? Jan 1922]. See headnote, 1. COMPOSITION, and Textual History.) OED “waiting” quotes James Payn, The Talk of the Town (1885): “A closed carriage, well appointed, was at the door, in waiting for her”. In the early 1920s, cars commonly had retractable not fixed roofs. Advertisement for Dafoe-Eustice Co.: “For over a decade Ford owners have wanted closedcar luxury without the large first cost that goes with it. They have wanted a Ford Top that could instantly be converted into a closed or open car without the disagreeable work of fastening and unfastening curtains · · · This enables the car to be instantly converted from a cozy closed car in winter to an open car for the breezes of summer. Also it enables you to keep out the dust and rain” (Popular Science Oct 1919). TSE: “an open car | Is so undignified: you’re blown about so, | And you feel so conspicuous, lolling back | And so near the street, and everyone staring”, The Family Reunion II i. To Middleton Murry, 25 Apr 1923: “Vivien is so dangerously ill that there is a fresh consultation of doctors every day to decide whether she can be moved to London in a closed car.” Continuing a ms story by Vivien Eliot, TSE wrote: “an immense closed car standing waiting at the kerb · · · the chauffeur peered round at her. ‘And I expect he thinks I am an odd looking party to be leaving this house’ she thought. Nevertheless, she lingered for an instant the more fully to drink in every detail of this super car · · · Rolls-Royce—ah” (d. 936/2, fols. 32–33). To John Hayward, 9 Dec 1936, parodying newspaper reports of the Abdication crisis: “3.30 p.m.—Mr. Eliot left hurriedly in a closed car, in the company of an individual who described himself to the reporters as a taxi-driver.” (“shuttered barge”, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 11; “female smells in shuttered rooms”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 66.)

  [II] 136–38 And if it rains · · · upon the door: adapted from The Death of the Duchess II 45–49.

  [II] 137 And we shall play a game of chess: TSE’s Notes refer to Middleton’s Women Beware Women II ii:

  MOTHER: ’Tis a great while

  Till supper-time; I’ll take my leave then now, madam,

  And come again i’ th’ evening, since your ladyship

  Will have it so.

  LIVIA: I’ th’ evening! By my troth, wench,

  I’ll keep you while I have you: you’ve great business, sure

  To si
t alone at home; I wonder strangely

  What pleasure you take in’t; were’t to me now,

  I should be ever at one neighbour’s house

  Or other all day long: having no charge,

  Or none to chide you, if you go or stay,

  Who may live merrier, ay, or more at heart’s ease?

  Come, we’ll to chess, or draughts; there are an hundred tricks

  To drive out time till supper, never fear’t, wench.

  [Poem I 59, 330 · Textual History II 382]

  For Middleton’s A Game at Chesse, see note to title, part II: A Game of Chess. For TSE to E. M. Stephenson on “a dialogue over the chessboard”, see note to [II] 111–38. Tristan and Isolde play chess in some versions of their tragedy. “Marivaux’ people are a small and well-bred company, none of whom engrosses the conversation · · · It is with a surprisingly small company of actors, and apparent monotony of plots, that Marivaux gets his effects. He does not even invent new names; the Dorantes, the Lisettes, the Madame Argantes, turn up again and again, and they might be the same people, come back to play at life as an end-game with the chessmen shifted about. Yet, though each of them is shadowy, a roomful of them is very real; and it is always to the room, to the situation, that Marivaux directs our attention”, Marivaux (1919).

  [II] 137a] WLFacs notes: “This line was omitted at Vivien Eliot’s request. The author restored it, from memory, when he made a fair copy of the poem for the sale in aid of the London Library in June 1960.” He had previously added it in the margin of Geoffrey Curtis’s copy of 1936 and also included it later when copying the poem into Valerie’s Own Book. For cards as “the eternal duologue which they played” (c. 624 fol. 91), see McCue 2016. ivory men: Van Zo Post: “If she wanted to fight it out with ivory men instead of words, all right—provided the stakes were the same”, Diana Ardway (1913) 49. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is in a different sense a tragedy of ivory men (see Conrad’s “that ivory face” in note to the epigraph on the section-title page to The Hollow Men). make company between us: on the analogy of “make peace between”. Thomas Fuller, Scripture Observations: “No purgatory condition between hell and heaven, but instantly, when out devil, in angel. Such is the case of every solitary soul. It will make company for itself”, Good Thoughts in Bad Times (1645). Conrad: “But the anchors · · · inert and powerful, those emblems of hope make company for the look-out man in the night watches”, Emblems of Hope in The Mirror of the Sea (1906). company: among other senses is OED 2: “sexual connexion. Obs.” TSE: “I shall not want Company in heaven | Lucrezia Borgia shall be my bride”, A Cooking Egg 17–18 variant (“Company” having previously read “Conversation”, which also has a sexual connection: OED “crim. con.”: “criminal conversation, i.e. adultery”).

  [Poem I 59–60, 330 · Textual History II 382]

  [II] 138 lidless eyes: Shelley: “Dost imagine | We will but laugh into thy lidless eyes?” Prometheus Unbound I 478–79 (George Franklin, ELH Winter 1994). James Thomson: “Thy lidless eyes tenebriously bright; | Thy wings, thy vesture, thy dishevelled hair”, To Our Ladies of Death st.15 (Hands) (TSE: “with my hair down”, [II] 133). Kipling: “Only lidless eyes see clear”, Outsong in the Jungle. Tourneur: “Let our two other hands tear up his lids, | And make his eyes like comets shine through blood”, The Revenger’s Tragedy III iv. TSE: “Leaned backward with a lipless grin · · · sockets of the eyes!” Whispers of Immortality 4–6. waiting for a knock upon the door: “they knock upon the door · · · a knock upon the door”, The Death of the Duchess II 43, 49 (see note). In his 1933 recording, TSE says “the knock upon the door”, perhaps suggesting eviction. “KNOCK. Mrs. Porter is expected · · · Pereira · · · intimates his intention of evicting the two girls”, The Superior Landlord I.

  [II] 139 demobbed: OED: “colloq. abbrev. of demobilization and of demobilize”, with first citation from 1920, then this line. TSE to Herbert Read, 20 June 1920: “I had been waiting, since the appearance of your first book, to see what you would do when you demobilised your talents.”

  In WLFacs the word is printed in red as Pound’s, but Helen Gardner records: “Mrs. Eliot tells me she is not absolutely certain it was his suggestion and he has not pencilled over a suggestion of Vivien Eliot’s. [Footnote: Mrs. Eliot tells me that she thinks the writing is Vivien’s, but that Pound believes that he supplied the word]”, Litz ed. 76–77.

  [II] 139–172 When Lil’s husband · · · good night: WLFacs notes: “Eliot said this passage was ‘pure Ellen Kellond’, a maid employed by the Eliots, who recounted it to them.” Valerie Eliot on Vivien: “It could be that she had a better memory than her husband, because the Eliots had been treated to Lil’s monologue by their maid, Ellen Kellond, and it was probably Vivien’s keen ear that made her cancel the d on each ‘Good night’ exchanged by the cockneys leaving the pub”, BBC broadcast 2 Nov 1971. husband · · · I said · · · He did, I was there · · · He said, I swear · · · I said · · · He’s been in the army · · · I said · · · she said · · · I said · · · she said · · · I said · · · (And her only thirty one.) · · · she said · · · The chemist · · · I said · · · get married · · · they had a hot gammon: 2 Henry IV II i, MISTRESS QUICKLY (keeper of the Boar’s Head Tavern): “Thou didst swear to me then (as I was washing thy wound) to marry me · · · my Lady · · · Did not goodwife Keech the butcher’s wife come in then, and call me Gossip Quickly? · · · telling us, she had a good dish of prawns · · · whereby I told thee · · · And didst thou not (when she was gone downstairs) · · · And didst thou not · · · deny it if thou canst?”

  [II] 141 HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME: Hayward: “The conventional formula of English publicans, bellowed from the bar of public-houses as closing-time (fixed by the Licensing Acts) approaches.” TSE to E. M. Stephenson, 27 May 1942: “meant to be taken literally as the cry of the licensee or barman at closing time in a public house. This section of the poem has nothing to do with the game of chess preceding and is merely a shift to a different stratum of society.” Licensing hours had been severely curtailed during the Great War, with drinking-up time earlier by three hours, at 9.30 p.m., strictly policed. The rules were relaxed somewhat in 1921. (For Prohibition in America, see note to WLComposite 2.) By 2014, OED gave “time” A 21c: “The moment at which a public house … ceases to sell drink; closing time”, with TSE’s line as first citation. OED has removed “One spake unceasing: ‘Gentlemen! Time, please!!’” from Gilbert Frankau’s One of Us (1912) 104, where it is followed by prolonged goodnights while taxis tick. OED (2014) “time” B: “the end of opening hours in a public house”, with G. Hill: “The potmen look to the fastenings of doors, lights are lowered, and cries of ‘Time, gentlemen, please!’ grow more peremptory”, Living London (1902). TSE: “rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight)”, The Cultivation of Christmas Trees 4.

  [Poem I 60, 330 · Textual History II 383

  [II] 144 To get yourself some teeth: Hayward: “The incidence of dental decay among the British working class is notorious, and among young men and women especially so. False teeth, because so common and because so badly fitted, are a popular object of vulgar jokes.” Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb: “when he was past sixty he went and got himself some teeth from the dentist”, Cobb’s Anatomy (1912) 44. See note to How to Pick a Possum 53 (Noctes Binanianæ).

  [II] 149 if you don’t give it him, there’s others will: The Rock I, ALFRED: “religion is like drink. People may not want it drawn very strong, or very much a’ the time, most of ’em; but they seems to like to know that it’s always there · · · if they don’t get it one way, they will another.”

  [II] 150 Something o’: pronounced Somethink o’ in TSE’s 1933 recording, but Somethin o’ in that of 1946. In ts2a Vivien Eliot had proposed spelling with -k, but TSE replied “I want to avoid trying to show pronunciation by spelling” (see Textual History and WLFacs 12/13). Another pub scene: “anythink what wasn’t right”, Billy M’Caw: The Remarkable Parrot 5 (variant “anything”).


  [II] 153 If you don’t like it you can get on with it: “perhaps a more robust comment on the situation is, that if you don’t like it, you can get on with it”, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 107, after quoting Arnold: “And love, if love, of happier men. | | Of happier men—for they, at least, | Have dreamed two human hearts might blend | In one”, Isolation. To Marguerite 36–39.

  209 you needn’t look old-fashioned at me: OED “old-fashioned” 4: “disapproving, tart, reproachful: used spec. of facial expression. Also as adv., in a disapproving, reproachful or quizzical manner”, quoting this line and Storm Jameson’s Three Kingdoms (1926).

  [II] 155 it won’t be: TSE omits “it” in his 1933 recording.

  [II] 156 so antique: “Well you are a antique” (Ethelbert’s reaction to the agitator), ts drafts of The Rock (Bodleian). “gentility · · · makes the Fabians look to-day so antique”, A Commentary in Criterion Apr 1932.

  [II] 159 them pills · · · to bring it off: before the age of the Pill, dangerous remedies were available under the counter. Partridge gives “bring it away” as 20th-century slang for “effect an abortion”.

  [II] 160–61 had five already, and nearly died · · · never been the same: see note to A Cooking Egg 20 for “Mrs. Molden the ex-midwife.”

  [II] 161 all right: ts2 had “allright”, and both the Criterion and the Dial printed “alright”. All three appear in TSE’s letters, with “alright” the least frequent. The Criterion printing of Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of a Prologue had “Allright” (45). The contraction to a single word was the subject of half a dozen pages of “Open Court on Alright”, Society for Pure English, Tract XVIII (1924): “The question surely is whether alright has a fair claim to take its place alongside of such words as already · · · altogether” (opening section by Matthew Barnes). The editor’s final note acknowledges that “the preceding articles arrive at no definite judgement”. Fowler notes that alright, “if seldom allowed by the compositors to appear in print, is often seen in MS”.