The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 83
[17] stunt press: OED “stunt” n.2 2a: attrib. 1931: “We are on the eve of a reaction from the ‘stunt Press’, he believes—the Press of competitions and coupons and catchpenny sensations.” Orwell: “the press · · · preserving their ‘stunt’ make-up, with screaming headlines”, Partisan Review July–Aug 1941. For the programme of a “Stunt Show” in which TSE took part on 17 Feb 1913, see Letters 1 40.
Some related couplets in the hands of TSE and Vivien Eliot (c. 624 fol. 45) read:
[TSE:] We know the man’s ambitious lust
And literature is but a crust
He serves a charming Tinka Bell
And some wd say he serves her well.
[Vivien Eliot:] A [alt: The] Commentary wd. be smart
Was more a Commination tart
And what a awful thing to do
to let upstarts who are Taboo
Write nasty articles on Apes
or speak of Love in Curious Shapes [margin: Whibley]
[TSE:] Exploiting Tory mountebanks
Is the most tedious of pranks
[3] Tinka Bell: Tinker Bell, the fairy in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.
271 Magdalene: OED also gives the spelling Magdalen. Each can be pronounced either Mag-dalen or Mag-daleen. However, “lowly weeping” invokes “the vernacular form of the word · · · Maudlin” (see note to 286, 291), the pronunciation used for both Magdalen College, Oxford and Magdalene College, Cambridge. TSE uses the “Oxford” spelling when writing of “the beauty of the Magdalen” in Dante (1929) II. Scofield Thayer, who introduced TSE to Vivien Haigh-Wood in Oxford, and took them punting, was host to a lunch party in Magdalen College. (For TSE on “the nymphs · · · the young ladies whom the young gentlemen took out on the river”—a tributary of the Thames—see note to [III] 175–84.) Pope: “In Magdalen’s loose hair and lifted eye”, Of the Characters of Women 12. OED 2: “transf. One whose history resembles that of the Magdalen; esp. a reformed prostitute.” For cheapening of another female saint, see note to 278.
272 More sinned against than sinning: King Lear III ii: “I am a man | More sinn’d against than sinning” (WLFacs notes).
[Poem I 62, 333 · Textual History II 385–87]
273 The lazy laughing Jenny of the bard: Rossetti: “Lazy laughing languid Jenny | Fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea”, Jenny (WLFacs notes). See note to Paysage Triste 11.
274–75 The same eternal and consuming itch | Can make a martyr, or plain simple bitch: Pope: “Avidien or his Wife (no matter which, | For him you’ll call a dog, and her a bitch)”, Imitations of Horace: Satire II ii 49–50. TSE: “La sueur aestivale, et une forte odeur de chienne · · · Saint Apollinaire”, Lune de Miel 4, 8 (Arrowsmith 1982 32).
278 slattern in a tawdry gown: OED “tawdry” B: “showy or gaudy without real value”; “tawdry lace”, etym. “St. Audrey died of a tumour in her throat, which she considered to be a just retribution, because in her youth she had for vain show adorned her neck with manifold splendid necklaces”.
281 Unreal emotions, and real appetite: “Stendhal’s scenes, some of them, and some of his phrases, read like cutting one’s own throat; they are a terrible humiliation to read, in the understanding of human feelings and human illusions of feeling that they force upon the reader”, Beyle and Balzac (1919). “real; unreal”, Oh little voices of the throats of men 26. See note to [V] 376.
284, 285 ^ 286 ms4 [1] born upon a soapy sea · · · Venus Anadyomene: Lemprière: “the Venus sprung from the froth of the sea”. A subject for artists ever since Pliny described a painting by the Greek artist Apelles, now lost. Pound printed Rimbaud’s poem Vénus Anadyomène within A Study of Modern French Poets in Little Review Feb 1918. Gautier: “La Vénus Anadyomène | Est en pelisse à capuchon” [Venus Anadyomene in a hooded fur-lined cloak], Fantasies d’hiver III (Grover Smith 1983 64). Gautier’s women are dressed “En martre, hermine et menu-vair” [In sable, ermine and miniver] (TSE: “Minerva”, [9]). TSE: “The re-creation of word and image · · · happens almost incessantly with Shakespeare. Again and again, in his use of a word, he will give a new meaning or extract a latent one; again and again the right imagery, saturated while it lay in the depths of Shakespeare’s memory, will rise like Anadyomene from the sea”, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 146–47 (on saturation, see note to [I] 48). Anadyomene: pronounced Ana-dy-yòm-enee.
285 Symonds—Walter Pater—Vernon Lee: Valerie Eliot: “John Addington Symonds (1840–93). Walter Horatio Pater (1839–94). Vernon Lee, pseudonym of Violet Paget (1856–1935). These critics of the Renaissance, the source of Fresca’s ‘culture’, are satirically linked together as aesthetes” (WLFacs notes, as corrected in copy sent to I. A. Richards from the printed “aesthetics”; later printings also corrected). The conclusion of Browning’s Inapprehensiveness is an exchange about a book; it
“Was not by Ruskin.”
I said “Vernon Lee?”
TSE to de la Mare, 20 Nov 1929: “My only qualification for writing about the 80s is that I was, by a fair margin, born in that decade; I am not an authority on Aesthetics, or on Walter Pater, and I am remarkably ignorant of the work of Vernon Lee. I mean, I could write about Pater, but there seems no obvious reason why I should be the man chosen for that task; and I have no all round knowledge of the aesthetic of the period. I used to know Symonds’s work pretty well, but that is long ago.” Symonds: pronounced as if with a long i.
285 ^ 286 insertion ms4 (see Textual History)
[Poem I 62, 333 · Textual History II 385–86]
[1–6] Venus Anadyomene | She stept ashore · · · Propelled by Lady Katzegg’s guiding hand · · · wealth and fashion · · · She passed · · · our little age: “the gondola stopped · · · the countess passed on · · · the little park · · · Descending at a small hotel; | Princess Volupine arrived · · · Passed seaward · · · Money in furs”, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar epigraph, 2, 3, 6, 24.
[6] the wonder of our little age: WLFacs notes: “An ironic contrast to ‘the wonder of our age’, Fulke Greville’s tribute to Sir Philip Sidney.”
[7] She gave the turf her intellectual patronage: “Not sharp enough to associate with the turf”, WLComposite 380.
[9] boxing peers: WLFacs notes: “The well-known boxing peers were the eighth Marquis of Queensberry (1844–1900), who supervised the drafting of the ‘Queensberry rules’, and the fifth Earl of Lonsdale (1857–1944), a notable boxer who donated the Lonsdale belt.”
[10–15] Aeneas’ mother · · · worships from afar: Aeneid I 314–417 (see epigraph to La Figlia Che Piange).
[12] variant goddess by her smooth celestial pace: WLFacs notes: Aeneid I 405: “et vera incessu patuit dea” [And by her graceful Walk, the Queen of Love is known], tr. Dryden I 561.
[14] variant Sees on the screen: “Who see their outlines on the screen”, Mandarins 4 4.
286 The Scandinavians: for Ibsen, see note to [I] 19–20. On Strindberg: “Forty years ago, his work appeared to most of us the ravings of a morbid man of genius: now, they seem less morbid, because they seem to correspond to the world in which we live · · · he was, as a dramatist, essentially a poet in an age of prose: and the poetic vision is that which sees the matter of fact and sordid as strange and fantastic, and the fantastic and strange as matter of fact. And I think that the experience of the sordid and fantastic 35 years that we have lived through, has prepared us for a juster appreciation of his work”, Strindberg (1949).
286, 291 bemused her wits · · · She may as well write poetry: Pope: “Is there a Parson, much be-mus’d in Beer, | A maudlin Poetess, a rhyming Peer”, An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot 15–16 (see note to 271 on “maudlin”).
287 The Russians: Dostoevski’s Plan of the novel, “The Life of a Great Sinner” was published in the first issue of the Criterion in Oct 1922 along with The Waste Land. TSE to Enid Faber, 24 Feb 1938, of The Family Reunion: “The tragedy, as with my Master, Tchehov, is as much for the people who have to go on living, as f
or those who die. And may I urge you · · · to go to see St. Denis’ superb production of Three Sisters · · · the best production of a great play that I have seen for a long time.” Hodin reported TSE in conversation: “what Russia has to give to the West is a peculiar—peculiar, that is, to Russia—spiritual point of view, which is something one is very much aware of in the great Russian novelists”, Horizon Aug 1945.
[Poem I 62, 333 · Textual History II 386]
287–88 fits · · · misch-masch: in 1855 Lewis Carroll’s childhood periodical Misch-masch included the Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry which grew into Jabberwocky. In 1876 he gave The Hunting of the Snark the subtitle An Agony in Eight Fits, punning on the ancient “fytte”, a part or section of a poem. (TSE to Aurelia Hodgson, 25 Mar 1934: “I have a Nonsense Book which I have been working on by fits and starts.”)
288 potpourri: OED “pot-pourri” 3b: “A literary medley, or collection of miscellaneous extracts.” 3c: “Any diverse collection or assortment” (with 1921: “We have a houseful of indiscriminate relatives and it has been hard to collect myself for even this potpourri”). TSE: “‘I test people’, said Eeldrop, ‘by the way in which I imagine them as waking up in the morning. I am not drawing upon memory when I imagine Edith waking to a room strewn with clothes, papers, cosmetics, letters and a few books, the smell of Violettes de Parme and stale tobacco · · · I think of her as an artist without the slightest artistic power’”, Eeldrop and Appleplex II (1917). For potpourri in English and French and for Austin Dobson’s Pot-Pourri, see note to Burnt Norton I 16. Fowler recommends the pronunciation poe-poori.
290 When restless nights distract her brain from sleep: “I have questioned restless nights and torpid days”, Oh little voices of the throats of men 17. “Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 6. distract her brain: Symons 142 (on Huysmans): “It fixes, in precise words, all the uncertainties, the contradictions, the absurd unreasonableness and not less absurd logic, which distract man’s brain.”
298 can-can salonnière: WLFacs notes: “Probably the vulgar exhibitionism of the dance is implied in ‘can-can’, with an element of the gossip too; while ‘salonnière’ suggests a frequenter or holder of salons, someone who moves in fashionable circles.” OED “salonnière”: “a woman who holds a salon; a society hostess”, with this as first citation.
Notes to the “Fresca couplets” (see Textual History, following 298).
Although previously thought to be an early manuscript, these two leaves were written by TSE in 1924 as part-reconstruction and part-reimagining of the opening of Part III. In Letters of the Moment II by “F. M.” in the Criterion Apr 1924, the couplets, slightly revised, were “flung” as “obsequies” for the “Caroline renovations” by the Phoenix Society, such as the production of Wycherley’s The Country Wife in Feb that year (“You beg me not to describe The Country Wife and The Way of the World as all that, you say, is already too Voguish”). See Textual History headnote, 5. THE “FRESCA COUPLETS”.
WLFacs notes:
It probably amused Eliot to print “these few poor verses” knowing that only two other people knew their source. In addition he drafted (pencil holograph in a black exercise book) the two [prose] paragraphs that follow, ending with a parody of Prufrock: “if one had said, yawning and settling a shawl, ‘O no, I did not like the Sacre at all, not at all’.”
The description “these few poor verses” is Vivien’s own; the third person was Pound.
[1, 4] rude entrance of the Tarquin, day · · · rapes: unwelcome dawn characterised as the rapist in Shakespeare’s Lucrece.
[Poem I 62, 333–34 · Textual History II 386–88]
[3–5] gapes · · · dreams of love pleasant rapes | Draped in translucent silks (variant gapes · · · dreams of love in curious shapes): Marlowe: “There might you see the gods in sundrie shapes, | Committing headdie ryots, incest, rapes”, Hero and Leander I 143–44 (see note to [II] 77–110). Alan Seeger: “And painters with big, serious eyes go rapt in dreams, fantastic shapes | In corduroys and Spanish capes and locks uncut and flowing ties”, Paris II, followed a dozen lines later by “dreams of love”. TSE quoted Seeger’s two lines in Short Reviews (1917). See Sweeney Among the Nightingales 11, “Spanish cape”, and note. curious shapes: writing anonymously of “the verse-producing units circulating on the surface of Great Britain”, TSE listed “the ageing, including · · · the curious shapes of Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound”, Murmuring of Innumerable Bees (1919). pleasant rapes: Dryden: “Doubt not, but when he most affects the frown, | Commit a pleasing rape upon the crown”, Absalom and Achitophel 473–74, following “like women’s lechery”, 472 (Shawn Worthington, personal communication).
[6] Chloe: Pope: “When bold Sir Plume had drawn Clarissa down, | Chloe stept in, and kill’d him with a Frown”, The Rape of the Lock V 67–68 (Haffenden). Cloe figures in Pope’s Of the Characters of Women (see note to WLComposite 270–98).
[15], [20] variant Dorilant · · · sparkish wits: Dorilant and Sparkish are characters in The Country Wife, where “sparkish” is also used adjectivally. TSE to Virginia Woolf, 7 May 1924. “I wish for nothing better than to attract the sparkish wits of undergraduates.”
[21–22] laws · · · little senate · · · applause: Pope: “Like Cato, give his little Senate laws, | And sit attentive to his own applause”, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot 209–10.
[25] And the close rabble in the cinema: “I am, unfortunately, incapable of being convinced by the arts of the cinema”, A Commentary in Criterion Apr 1932. “I think that the spoken word will always be secondary in the film. Film goes too fast”, The Need for Poetic Drama (broadcast Nov 1936; the last four words were omitted in the Listener). “I think that the cinema comes nearer to pure distraction, to ‘taking our minds off …’ the things they ought to be on as well as the things they need at times to be taken off from. The picture of an actor is never so serious a thing as that actor present on the stage: the film may be nearer in detail to superficial reality, but is always at a further remove from some deeper reality; and to see a moving picture is nearer to merely participating in a common and impersonal dream. (As, in passing, a good photograph is never so near to reality as a good painted portrait)”, Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern (1937). “In looking at a film, we are much more passive; as audience, we contribute less · · · And, as the observer is in a more passive state of mind than if he were watching a stage play, so he has to have more explained to him”, The Film of “Murder in the Cathedral” (1952), Preface. In A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry (1928), TSE wrote: “The suburban drama has today fundamentally the same morality as it had in the days of Arden of Feversham and The Yorkshire Tragedy”; but in his copy of the American first edition of Selected Essays he wrote alongside (probably in the 1950s): “Alas, no more! The animated picture has changed all that.” On mass amusements and boredom, see note to Sweeney Agonistes II. Fragment of an Agon 18–31.
Notes to published poem resume
[Poem I 62, 333–34 · Textual History II 388–89]
[III] 173–76 The river’s tent is broken · · · fingers of leaf · · · sink · · · nymphs · · · my song: after his soliloquy “To be, or not to be” (III i), Hamlet greets Ophelia as “Nymph”. In IV v she bids the court farewell (see note to [II] 172). In IV vii the Queen recounts how Ophelia fell from a broken branch: “There is a willow grows aslant a brook · · · dead men’s fingers · · · an envious sliver broke · · · snatches of old lauds · · · her melodious lay” (Collingwood 353). Conrad: “the leaves of the tree-tops caught the rays of the low sun, and seemed to shine with a goldengreen light of their own shimmering around the highest boughs which stood out black against a smooth blue sky that seemed to droop over the bed of the river like the roof of a tent”, The End of the Tether (pt. X). E. F. Benson: “even the willow by the side of the bridge had no movement in its slim pendulous fingers of leaf, and the reflecting surface of the slow stream was unbroken”, Robin Linnet
(1919) 18. TSE: “Dropping from fingers of surf”, Mr. Apollinax 12. The nymphs are departed. | Sweet Thames: Pope: “Where Thames with Pride surveys his rising Tow’rs · · · Hither the Heroes and the Nymphs resort”, The Rape of the Lock III 2, 9 (TSE: “Falling towers”, [V] 373); for Pope’s lines see note to WLComposite 237–38).
[III] 173–82 The river’s tent · · · leaf | Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind · · · nymphs · · · Thames, run softly, till I end my song · · · summer nights · · · loitering · · · waters: Gilbert Frankau: “Thames · · · the river’s bank · · · water’s restful panorama, | Lulled by the music · · · The sun sinks · · · she lingers · · · breezes and wavelets sink · · · Softly · · · another Naiad’s yielding · · · The coy resisters of a summer’s night”, One of Us (1912) XIII, the four pages 122–25 (“coy”: see note to [III] 185, 196–97 for Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress).
[III] 175–84 The nymphs are departed · · · Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long: TSE’s Notes refer to the refrain in Spenser’s Prothalamion, where the speaker “Walkt forth to ease my payne | Along the shoare of silver streaming Themmes” (10–11). Nature’s beauties (16–21)
crowne their Paramours,
Against the Brydale day, which is not long:
Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song.
There, in a Meadow, by the Rivers side,
A Flocke of Nymphes I chaunced to espy,
All lovely Daughters of the Flood thereby.