Hayward: “The Thames, above London, from Richmond to Maidenhead and Henley, is a favourite resort for the kind of trippers described in lines 179–80—the latter-day ‘nymphs’ and their paramours in sports-cars, ‘good-time Charlies’ and their blonde puppets. Spenser’s bridal party has become a ‘petting party’.” TSE to Dr. Absalom Minola, 5 Nov 1958: “I should say that there is a difference between the two aspects of the river, but that it is not to glorify the past in contrast to the present or to give any suggestion of futility. As for the nymphs, this word is used merely to define indicate the young ladies whom the young gentlemen took out in punts on the river.” John Upton on Spenser:
he plan’d a poem, intitled Epithalamion Thamesis, in imitation and friendly rivalship of Cambden’s Bridale of the Isis and Tame; but afterwards, with many alterations, he made it (by way of Episode) a part of the Fairy Queen [Canto XI, “Where Thames doth the Medway wedd”] · · · In the Xth Eclogue [of The Shepheards Calendar], entitled October, there are plain hints given of some scheme of an heroic poem; and the hero was to have been the Earl of Leicester · · · This great man patronized our poet · · · But Spenser fell under his displeasure for a while · · · it seems owing to some kind of officious sedulity in Spenser, who much desired to see his patron married to the Queen of England.
Preface to Upton’s edition of The Faerie Queene (1758)
[Poem I 62, 333–34 · Textual History II 389–90]
See note to [III] 279 “Elizabeth and Leicester”. TSE: “The man who brought order out of the innovations and borrowings of the sixteenth century—a great innovator himself, and with a sensitiveness to words almost equal to that of Chaucer—was Edmund Spenser. He was an elaborator, and he elaborated to excess · · · The great poets who underwent and transmitted his teaching, happened to be dramatic poets”, The Spoken Word (1951). The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, | Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends | Or other testimony of summer nights: Spenser’s swans:
So purely white they were,
That euen the gentle streame, the which them bare,
Seem’d foule to them, and bad his billowes spare
To wet their silken feathers, least they might
Soyle their fayre plumes. (46–50)
Vivien Eliot: “The water was dirty, in it lay many cigarette ends, cards, matches, old rags bits of refuse flung or dropped from windows above”; TSE changed “lay” to “were” and inserted “dead” before “matches” (c. 624 fol. 123). (TSE: “Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops”, The Dry Salvages II 68. For The Dunciad on “filth” and the Thames, see note to Airs of Palestine, No. 2 13–20.) sandwich papers: The Bachelor’s Bridal: “Here, among the debris of their miscellaneous repast,—half hid beneath orange-peel, sandwich papers, and empty wine flasks · · · a sketch-book, forgotten by one of the party”, The New-York Mirror (1829) (Archie Henderson, personal communication). W. E. Heygate: “the Admiral would have been disgraced—and the only vestiges of the expected battle, sandwich papers and corks and cigar ends having been washed away and the air purified”, Sir Henry Appleton [1857] 388. Not in OED 1st ed., but TSE’s line was added later as first citation (followed by “Motorists’ sandwich papers and cigarette cartons”, Public Opinion 12 Sept 1924). silk handkerchiefs: reputedly used as contraceptives or condoms (see Textual History variant). Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (8th ed., rev. Paul Beale, 1984): “strained through a silk handkerchief · · · applied to a very undersized child; since ca. 1930”. Truman Capote: “the farmer said: ‘Sure she’s a pretty baby; oughta be, after having been strained through a silk handkerchief’”, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) I 7. Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long: Spenser’s refrain: “Against the Brydale day, which is not long: | Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song.” The drunken singer in Kipling’s story Brugglesmith (1891) had Spenser’s line as part of his cento:
Here he stood up in the bows and declaimed:—
“Ye Towers o’ Julia, London’s lasting wrong,
By mony a foul an’ midnight murder fed—
Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song—
And yon’s the grave as little as my bed.
I’m a poet mysel’ an’ I can feel for others”.
The story also mentions Dickens and Kew, [III] 293. Many appearances of Spenser’s refrain before TSE are adduced by Whitworth (and see note to [III] 279).
[Poem I 62, 333–34 · Textual History II 389–90]
[III] 176–79, 279, 293 Sweet Thames run softly · · · song · · · nymphs · · · Elizabeth · · · Richmond and Kew: Edward Carpenter: “The Thames runs down · · · I glide with tub and outrigger past flower-gardens, meadows, parks; parties of laughing girls handle the oars and tiller ropes; Teddington, Twickenham, Richmond, Brentford glide past; I hear the songs, I hear Elizabethan echoes”, Towards Democracy (1912 ed. 55–56); see note to [I] 62 for the same passage.
[III] 177–79 The river bears no · · · handkerchiefs · · · The nymphs are departed: Laforgue: “Elle est partie hier · · · Son mouchoir me flottait sur le Rhin” [She left yesterday · · · Her handkerchief waved to me on the Rhine], Complainte d’un Certain Dimanche [Lament for a Particular Sunday] 21–24 (“flottait” suggestive of floating). The Song of the Rhine-daughters is heard [III] 277–78, 290–91.
[III] 179 testimony: pronounced testi-moanie in TSE’s recordings.
[III] 181 have left no addresses: to Gilbert Seldes, 11 Aug 1924: “Spaniards never write letters in the summer, because they go to the mountains and leave no addresses.”
[III] 182 By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept … : Psalm 137: 1–3: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion · · · Sing us one of the songs of Zion.” TSE: “What is spring without the Opera? Drury Lane and Covent Garden mourn; the singers have flocked, we are told, to New York, where such luxuries can be maintained. They have forgotten thee, O Sion”, London Letter in Dial Aug 1921.
Hayward: “Babylonian Captivity. Part of the poem was written at Lausanne—hence ‘Leman’” (Lake Geneva being Lac Léman in French). Rousseau, on Lake Geneva: “Il me faut absolument un verger au bord de ce lac, et non pas d’un autre; il me faut un ami sûr, une femme aimable, une vache et un petit bateau · · · Combien de fois, m’arrêtant pour pleurer à mon aise, assis sur une grosse pierre, je me suis amusé à voir tomber mes larmes dans l’eau!” [I cannot live without an orchard on the shores of that lake, and no other; I must have a constant friend, a charming wife, a cow, and a little boat · · · How often I would stop to weep at my leisure and, sitting on a large stone, would be amused to see my tears fall into the water!] Confessions (tr. J. M. Cohen) IV (Arrowsmith 1981, noting Rousseau’s Narcissus-like water-gazing, his play Narcisse, and the relation of The Death of Saint Narcissus to The Waste Land). Leman: pronounced Leeman in TSE’s recordings. OED “leman” (pronounced lem’n or leem’n) 1. “A person beloved by one of the opposite sex” (including citation from The Faerie Queene, but with last citation 1739). 2. “One who is loved unlawfully; an unlawful lover or mistress” (last citation 1871).
[III] 182–92 I sat down and wept · · · bones · · · crept · · · on the bank · · · Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck · · · my father’s death before him: The Tempest I ii, where Ferdinand hears Ariel’s song.
FERDINAND: Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father’s wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters · · ·
ARIEL: Song. Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
TSE has already quoted the song’s third line at [I] 48, and he names Ferdinand in his Note to [III] 218. See below at [III] 191–92.
[Poem I 62, 333–34 · Textual History II 389–90]
[III] 185, 196–97 But at my back in a cold b
last I hear · · · But at my back from time to time I hear | The sound of horns and motors: TSE’s Notes refer to Marvell: “Had we but world enough and time · · · But at my back I always hear | Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near, | And yonder all before us lie | Deserts of vast eternity”, To His Coy Mistress 1, 21–24. The poem is quoted in Andrew Marvell (1921), and see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 92–93.
[III] 186 rattle of the bones: Dryden: “When rattling bones together fly, | From the four corners of the sky”, To the Pious Memory of · · · Mrs Anne Killigrew 184–85, alluding to Ezekiel 37: 1–11, for which see headnote to Ash-Wednesday II. bones · · · chuckle spread from ear to ear: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ch. VI: “a large cat which was · · · grinning from ear to ear”. Byron on a skeleton: “Mark how it laughs · · · From ear to ear | It laughs not · · · the dead bones will grin”, Don Juan IX xii. Baudelaire: “Tous les mécréants de mélodrame, maudits, damnés, fatalement marqués d’un rictus qui court jusqu’aux oreilles” [All the miscreants of melodrama · · · fatally marked with a grin which runs from ear to ear], De l’essence du rire [On the Essence of Laughter] III (tr. Jonathan Mayne in The Mirror of Art, 1955). (TSE to Edward J. H. Greene, 19 Apr 1940: “Baudelaire’s critical work, especially his art criticisms, I have always very much admired. I say always, but I cannot remember when I first began to read it. Perhaps not until the early ’twenties.”) Laforgue: “elle alla, dégringolant de roc en roc, râler, dans une pittoresque anfractuosité qui lavait le flot” [she toppled from rock to rock. With death rattling in her throat, and in a picturesque anfractuosity which was washed by the waves], Salomé IV (Hands).
[III] 187 crept softly: “It crept so softly | On silent feet, and stood behind my back, | Quietly”, The Elder Statesman I.
[III] 187–89 A rat crept softly through the vegetation · · · on the bank | While I was fishing in the dull canal: Tennyson: “While fishing in the milldam water · · · A water-rat from off the bank | Plunged in the stream”, The Miller’s Daughter (1832 text) (Mordell 52). fishing in the dull canal: Hayward: “The maimed and impotent Fisher King. (His legendary castle was always situated on a river or by the sea.)” the dull canal: Byron: “Damm’d like the dull canal”, Ode on Venice IV (Sloane 144).
301–16 Pound’s annotation: “Echt”] WLFacs notes: “Defined by Pound as ‘veritable, real’.” TSE’s word in [I] 12.
[III] 188 slimy belly: “slippery white belly”, The Death of Saint Narcissus 25.
[III] 189–90 the dull canal · · · gashouse: Joyce, Ulysses episode VI (Hades) in Little Review, Sept 1918:
Mr. Bloom put his head out of the window.
—The grand canal, he said.
Gasworks.
From the same episode, Grover Smith 84 points to “An obese grey rat toddled along the side of the crypt, moving the pebbles” (TSE: “A rat crept softly through the vegetation”, [III] 187).
[Poem I 62, 334 · Textual History II 390]
[III] 191–92 Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck | And on the king my father’s death before him: TSE’s Notes refer to The Tempest I ii: “the king my father’s wreck” (see note to [III] 182–92). In the same scene Ferdinand speaks of having “beheld | The king my father wreck’d”. Although Ferdinand’s phrase speaks only of his father, TSE splices it to apply to a father and a brother. So doing, he brings together the story of Alonso, King of Naples, and his son Ferdinand, with that of Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, and his usurping brother Antonio. Hamlet too is the story of a usurping brother and a rightful heir. First soliloquy (I ii): “My father’s brother—but no more like my father | Than I to Hercules”, followed by Horatio (of the ghost of Hamlet’s father): “My lord, the king your father.” HAMLET: “The king my father?” TSE’s father had died 7 Jan 1919 (so that TSE no longer had both “Henry, my father” and “Henry, my brother”).
[III] 193–94 on the low damp ground · · · low dry garret: “In our dry cellar”, The Hollow Men I 10, first read “In our damp cellar”, then “In our dark cellar”.
[III] 194 cast: pronounced with a short a in TSE’s recordings. in a little low dry garret: (title) The Little Passion: From “An Agony in the Garret” (“Uncollected Poems”).
[III] 194–95 And bones · · · Rattled by the rat’s foot only: Grover Smith 84 cites Ulysses episode VI (Hades), “Rattle his bones. Over the stones. Only a pauper. Nobody owns”; but this was absent from the Little Review text, Sept 1918.
[III] 197 sound of horns and motors: TSE’s Notes quote four lines of John Day (“When of the sudden · · · naked skin · · ·”) from The Parliament of Bees (wr. 1607?, pub. 1641), Character III, in which Polypragmus imagines a palatial hive:
I will have one built
Like Pompey’s theatre; the ceiling gilt
And interseamed with pearl · · ·
My great hall I’ll have paved with clouds; which done,
By wondrous skill, an artificial sun
Shall roll about, reflecting golden beams · · ·
A roof of woods and forests I’ll have spread,
Trees growing downwards, full of fallow-deer;
When of the sudden, listening, you shall hear
A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring
Actæon to Diana in the spring,
Where all shall see her naked skin; and there
Actæon’s hounds shall their own master tear,
As emblem of his folly that will keep
Hounds to devour and eat him up asleep.
All this I’ll do that men with praise may crown
My fame for turning the world upside-down.
[Poem I 62, 334 · Textual History II 390]
Lemprière on Actæon: “a famous huntsman · · · He saw Diana and her attendants bathing · · · for which he was changed into a stag, and devoured by his own dogs.” The Parliament of Bees was included in the Mermaid series in Nero and Other Plays, with an introduction by Arthur Symons (1888). Gabriel Pearson suggests that Day’s imagined ceiling may have led TSE to Verlaine’s “coupole” [III] 202 (New Comparison Autumn 1992). horns and motors: TSE: “Whether Strawinsky’s music be permanent or ephemeral I do not know; but it did seem to transform the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to transform these despairing noises into music”, London Letter in Dial Oct 1921. “Perhaps the conditions of modern life (think how large a part is now played in our sensory life by the internal combustion engine!) have altered our perception of rhythms”, Savonarola (1926). For “chorus, which ought to have a noise like a street drill”, see headnote to Sweeney Agonistes, 10. PREMIÈRE IN AMERICA: ENTER AN OLD GENTLEMAN.
[III] 198 Sweeney: Hayward: “Cf. Sweeney Agonistes.” TSE to his Swedish translator Erik Mesterton, 20 Jan 1932: “Refers certainly to the Sweeney poems, but not by intention to the dialogues which I have renamed Sweeney Agonistes, because they were not written at the time. A reference to it is suitable, however, although the dialogue is only obtainable in back numbers of The Criterion” (prior to collection in Sweeney Agonistes in Dec 1932).
[III] 199–201 O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter · · · soda water: the ballad which TSE’s Notes claim was “reported to me from Sydney, Australia” was popular among Australian troops during the Great War:
O the moon shines bright on Mrs. Porter
And on the daughter
Of Mrs. Porter.
They wash their cunts in soda water
And so they oughter
To keep them clean.fd
Grover Smith 86: “C. M. Bowra states that the song was sung by Australian soldiers at Gallipoli in 1915, but he follows a red herring in alleging that Mrs. Porter herself ‘seems to have kept a bawdy-house in Cairo’” (Bowra, The Creative Experiment, 1949, 182). The Columbiad st. 48: “The Kween sat by to rince her Kwunt”. Gr
over Smith gives the bawdy text, but also:
O the moon shines bright on Mrs. Porter
And on the daughter,
For she’s a snorter.
O they wash their feet in soda water,
And so they oughter,
To keep them clean.
[Poem I 62, 334 · Textual History II 390]
Clive Bell on a dinner party in “the middle ’twenties maybe”: “somebody wondered whether anything was known of Mrs Porter and her daughter beyond the fact that they wash their feet in soda water. ‘These characters are known’, said the master, ‘only from an Ayrian camp-fire song of which one other line has been preserved: And so they oughter. Of such pieces, epic or didactic’, he continued, ‘most have been lost, wholly or in part, in the mists of antiquity; but I recall one that is generally admitted to be complete: Some say the Dutch ain’t no style, ain’t no style, | But they have all the while, all the while’”, in March & Tambimuttu eds. 16. Faber secretary to James MacAuley (in Sydney), 4 July 1958: “Mr Eliot · · · cannot satisfy your curiosity about the jingle of Mrs Porter. It was first conveyed to him by an American friend who was a seaman and who had visited several Australian ports. It was on his authority that Mr Eliot attributed the lines to Australia, but he has no knowledge of the song beyond this.” Given TSE’s own improper rhymes, he was presumably well aware of bawdier versions (as also of ribald versions of One-eyed Riley when he incorporated two innocent verses into The Cocktail Party). Oh, Mr. Porter! (by George Le Brunn, addressed to a railway porter) and “Oh, the moon shines bright | On Charlie Chaplin” were both sung by Marie Lloyd. To the Chief Justice of Australia, 3 Nov 1942: “thank you for your kind letter of the 17th July; and for sending me the score of The Moon Shone Bright on Pretty Red Wing. I am much interested to find that the tune is fundamentally the same as that to which the words of The Moon Shone Bright on Mrs. Porter were commonly sung. It is curious that both the original song and this version should have come to me from Australia, because the words you send evidently refer to a tragedy of the American Indians. So I suppose that the song was originally of American composition.” In Part II of The Superior Landlord, Mrs. Porter is a hearty singer; see Sweeney Agonistes headnote, 6. THE SUPERIOR LANDLORD Porter: a kind of beer, OED: “app. because orig. made for or chiefly drunk by porters”. TSE: “Take my letters from the porter—ask him for a drink”, Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think? 5.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 84
