[III] 201–202 They wash their feet · · · chantant: Hayward: “The sound of singing at the ceremonial feet-washing, preceding the restoration of Anfortas (Fisher King) by Parzifal (in the Perceval Legend) and the removal of the curse from the Waste Land.” In Wagner’s opera, the foot-washing occurs in act III before Parsifal can enter the Grail Castle. wash their feet: The Duchess of Malfi IV ii: “Don clean linen, bathe your feet”, Bosola’s taunting of the Duchess before her murder (for the scene, see note to [II] 117–23). soda water: “Eliot has emphatically denied that the soda water here is anything but water with soda in it—‘Not White Rock,’—he has said” (naming an American brand), Grover Smith 86. See note to Sweeney Agonistes II. Fragment of a Prologue 43, 52, 61. Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!: TSE’s Notes refer to Verlaine’s sonnet Parsifal (first pub. in the Revue wagnérienne), ending: “—Et, ô ces voix d’enfants chantant dans la coupole!” [And, oh those children’s voices, singing in the dome!] TSE: “Children singing in the orchard”, Ode (“Tired. | Subterrene”) 12. For other “children’s voices” (from First Caprice in North Cambridge to Little Gidding), see notes to Landscapes I. New Hampshire 1 and 1, 8, 12.
[III] 202–206 Et O ces voix d’enfants · · · Jug jug jug jug jug jug · · · Tereu: John Lyly: “O t’is the ravish’d Nightingale. | Iug, Iug, Iug, Iug, tereu, shee cryes”, Trico’s song, Campaspe V i (see note to [II] 98–104). The title page of Campaspe (1584, Second Quarto) notes that it was “Played beefore the Queenes Maieſtie on newyears day at night, by her Maieſties Children, and the Children of Paules”. (For Elizabethan child actors—Hamlet’s “little eyases”—see note to Gus: The Theatre Cat 45–48.)
[III] 203–206 Twit · · · Tereu: OED “twit”, int. and n. 2: “an imitation of the shrill chirp of a small bird”, citing these lines.
[III] 204] As “jug-jug, jug-jug, jug-jug” in TSE’s 1933 recording, but as “jug-jug-jug-jug-jug-jug” in that of 1946 (Saskia Hamilton, personal communication).
[III] 205 So rudely forc’d: Hayward: “Example of re-entry of a theme” (from [II] 100, where the spelling is “forced”).
[Poem I 62–63, 334 · Textual History II 390]
[III] 206 Tereu: to Roberto Sanesi, 8 Dec 1960: “Tereus was of course the husband of Procne and ravisher of Philomela. Tereus, according to some accounts, was metamorphosed into a hoopoe, as Procne into a swallow and Philomel into a nightingale. From what literary source I got the use of the name here in the vocative I don’t know, but I should say that it also had represented to somebody at least, like the previous ejaculation, the notes of the nightingale herself” (see note to [II] 98–104). Accented on the first syllable, teerr-oo, in TSE’s 1933 recording, but on the second, tee-rooo, in that of 1946.
[III] 207 Unreal City: see note to [I] 60–63.
321 I have seen and see: Hamlet III i, OPHELIA: “Oh woe is me, | T’have seen what I have seen, see what I see” (Shawn Worthington, personal communication). TSE has “I have seen” ten times, including The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 82, thirty lines before “Prince Hamlet”.
321–22 Unreal City, I have seen and see | Under the brown fog of your winter noon: Pound put a box around “your” in ts3b and asked “vocative?” presumably questioning whether it was addressed to the Unreal City, or whether TSE intended OED’s “your” 5b: “Used with no definite meaning, or vaguely implying ‘that you know of’ · · · often expressing contempt”. Likewise, Pound wrote “vocative ??”, apparently referring to “your” again in the line “(London, your people is bound upon the wheel!)”, which TSE had typed, typed through, then retyped a few lines later, only for Pound to delete it again, WLComposite 343. “Unreal City, I have sometimes seen and see”, WLComposite 114 variant.
321–27 Unreal City, I have seen and see · · · merchant · · · luncheon: to Eleanor Hinkley, 23 July 1917: “If I have not seen the battlefield, I have seen other strange things, and I have signed a cheque for £200,000 while bombs fell about me. I have dined with a princess and with a man who expected two years hard labour; and it all seems like a dream. The most real thing was a little dance we went to a few days ago.” Reviewing the anthology Others: “I have seen the forces of death with Mr. Chesterton at their head upon a white horse”, Observations (1918).
I was lunching one day at The Princess Louise · · ·
I have seen much of life, in its various shades,
And the fat and the lean, and the profit and loss;
I have done everything and I’ve been everywhere
Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats 1, 8–10
[III] 209–11 Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant · · · with a pocket full of currants | C.i.f. London: documents at sight: Hayward: “Syrian merchants were carriers of the old Grail legends and mysteries. Mr. Eugenides, their modern counterpart, is a deplorable end-product.” Smyrna was occupied by Greek forces in May 1919 and recaptured by the Turks in 1922 (see Donald J. Childs, EinC Apr 1988). Eugenides: (“well-born”, Gk.) Pronounced with a hard g (U-ghen-idd-ees) in TSE’s recordings of 1933 and 1946 (see note on pronunciation of “Gerontion”). a pocket full of currants: “A pocket full of rye”, Sing a song of sixpence, nursery rhyme (with a mercantile touch: “The king was in his counting house | Counting out his money”). This, says The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, “might be the specific ‘pocket’ sack-measurement of that grain.” OED “pocket” 1: “A bag or sack. Sometimes used as a measure of quantity · · · a pocket of hops about 168 lbs.” (“seller of currants”, Notes on the Waste Land, 218.) Smidt 1973 21: “A probably less significant memory is that of the Smyrna merchant, whom Eliot, as he told me, encountered in his Lloyds Bank days, and who really had a pocketful of currants” (see note to [III] 211–14). currants: as OED notes, dried grapes imported from the Levant.
[Poem I 63, 334 · Textual History II 390–91]
[III] 209–10, 214 the Smyrna merchant | Unshaven · · · at the Metropole: Baedeker’s Great Britain (7th ed, 1910) on Brighton: “Baths · · · Métropole Turkish Baths, at the Hôtel Métropole”.
[III] 211 TSE’s Notes cost insurance and freight: this explanation of C.i.f. was emended in 1963 from “carriage and insurance free”. TSE’s secretary to Alan Clodd, 29 June 1959: “Mr. Eliot says that he is quite likely to have been mistaken about the meaning of ‘c. i. f.’, but if so it was a piece of misinformation which he picked up while working in the Foreign Department of Lloyds Bank.” Norman Nathan had pointed out the error previously (N&Q June 1958), but this may not have come to TSE’s notice. Clodd reminded TSE in 1962, but too late for corrections for the Mardersteig edition. TSE to Clodd, 19 Apr 1962: “the alteration can be made in notes on The Waste Land in other editions, as reprinted. I have confirmed from Lloyds Bank that c.i.f. stands for cost, insurance and freight.” David Bland to printers (MacLehose), 22 June 1962 (Faber archive):
Mr. Eliot has asked us to circulate the following correction for notes to The Waste Land, line 210. This would apply to The Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot which you print. The note should read: “The currants were quoted at a price ‘cost, insurance and freight to London’”.
TSE on his own banking career: “I was on inward bills, foreign coins and notes, and documentary credits until I was sent to Head Office to take charge of Pre-War Enemy Debts for the bank and its customers”, Harvard College Class of 1910, Seventh Report (1935). Leyris’s French translation has “C.A.F.” [Coût, Assurance et Frêt]. But where Menasce’s French translation had retained “C.i.f.”, TSE emended to “T.a.p.” (Total account payable). Kipling: “How he met with his fate and the V.P.P. | At the hand of Harendra Mukerji”, with Kipling’s note: “Value Payable Post = Collect on Delivery”, The Ballad of Boh Da Thone. A letter from TSE to J. D. Aylward, 5 Nov 1944, concerning terms offered to Aylward for a book, is headed:
Private and Confidential.
Without Prejudice or Responsibility.
Errors and Omissions Excepted.
C.I.F.
[
III] 211–14 documents · · · demotic French · · · Metropole: Francis Jammes: “Tu écrivais: ‘La Métropole | n’en a pas de pareille.’ Et tu disais: ‘Ma vie | m’a rendu comme un vrai créole’” [You wrote “The Métropole has no parallel.” And you said: “My life has turned me into a real creole”], Tu écrivais 18–20 (1889). French · · · Metropole: Baedeker’s Great Britain has this hotel head the Brighton list, as the most expensive, and on two occasions observes the acute accent. To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel | Followed by a weekend at the Metropole: Gilbert Frankau: “Friday lunches at the Ritz | Prelude a week-end at the Metropole”, One of Us (1912) 113. the Cannon Street Hotel: Hayward: “The Cannon Street Hotel (at Cannon Street Station) was at this period a common and convenient meetingplace for foreign business men and their British colleagues, being in the heart of the City at the terminus of one of the routes to the Continent. Its importance as a railway terminal has declined and it is now largely used for company meetings.” a weekend at the Metropole: Hayward:
[Poem I 63, 334 · Textual History II 391]
One of the principal hotels-de-grand-luxe on the sea-front at Brighton, much frequented by wealthy business men for pleasure-jaunts. It is not what is called a ‘Family Hotel’! (It is desirable not to make any comment which could be construed as libellous.) The Metropole is notorious for its raffish clientèle, cf. the Music-Hall song, made famous by George Robey:—
Now Henry VIII was a wag in his day
He had several wives and was very gay
He founded The Metropole, Brighton, they say · · ·
Really! Yes, would you believe it!
(TSE to Pierre Leyris, [26 Oct] 1947, on the proofs of Poèmes: “I call your attention also to some matter about the Hotel Metropole, which John has deleted: it was never intended for publication but for your own guidance, and I should certainly not wish it to be included.”) In St. Louis, the Metropole Hotel, built 1912, was known to cater for prostitutes until 1920 (St. Louis Post-Dispatch 26 Nov 1972; Charles T. Dougherty, Yeats Eliot Review June 1982).
[III] 212 demotic: OED 1a: “Of or belonging to the people: spec. the distinctive epithet of the popular form of the ancient Egyptian written character (as distinguished from the hieratic”). b. “Of or belonging to the popular written or spoken form of modern Greek.” 2: “Of, pertaining or proper to, the common people; popular, vulgar” (quoting this line).
[III] 212 variant abominable: Housman: “For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair”, Oh who is that young sinner. OED “abominable”: “The abhomynable Synne of Sodomye” (1366). Spelt with an h from a mistaken etymology—“away from man, inhuman, beastly”—the only spelling in the First Folio of Shakespeare. For intermediate stages of TSE’s revision, see Textual History. Smidt 1973 21: “Eliot was annoyed that some critics had found a suggestion of perversion in the incident which he had never intended” (see Peter and Miller).
326–28 French, | To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel, | And perhaps a weekend at the Metropole: to Pound [26? Jan 1922], presumably in response to a comment now missing, asking whether it was a comment or a proposed reading: “What does THENCE mean (To luncheon at the Cannon St. Hotel)???” Pound replied [28? Jan 1922]: “I merely queried the dialect of ‘thence’; dare say it is o.k.” The surviving drafts do not have “thence” either in TSE’s text or among Pound’s comments, and neither do Pound’s previous letters. And perhaps: Pound’s annotation: “dam per’apsez”. The annotation was initially transcribed as “dam per’apsey” in WLFacs, but was corrected when reprinting. Valerie Eliot also corrected the copy of WLFacs she sent to I. A. Richards (Magdalene). J. B. Beer proposed “damn perhapses”, TLS 13 Apr 1973, suggesting that Pound might have read the phrase in a letter from Coleridge to Southey [26 Sept 1794].
Notes to WLComposite 334–48:
338–40 Knowing neither how to think, nor how to feel · · · London, your people is bound upon the wheel: “They know what to think and what to feel | The inhabitants of Hampstead are bound forever on the wheel”, The Death of the Duchess I 8–9. Also (title) Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think?
[Poem I 63, 334–35 · Textual History II 391–92]
341 Phantasmal gnomes: WLFacs notes: “Palmer Cox (1840–1924) worked in America as an illustrator and author of children’s books. His popular ‘Brownie’ series portrayed in verse and pictures the activities of a group of benevolent elves.”
344 motions of these pavement toys: “a toy that was running along the quay”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 39.
348 Ademantus (variant Glaucon): WLFacs notes:
Adeimantus and Glaucon, brothers of Plato, were two of the interlocutors in The Republic. Appalled by his vision of the “Unreal City”, Eliot may be alluding to the passage which inspired the idea of the City of God among Stoics and Christians, and found its finest exponent in St. Augustine. [Plato, The Republic bk. IX 592 A–B]:
Μανθάνω, ἔφη· ἐν ᾗ νῦν διήλθομεν οἰκίζοντες πόλει λέγεις, τῇ ἐν λόγοις κειμένῃ, ἐπεὶ γῆς γε οὐδαμοῦ οἶμαι αὐτὴν εἶναι. Ἀλλ᾽, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ἐν οὐρανῷ ἴσως παράδειγμα ἀνάκειται τῷ βουλομένῳ ὁρᾶν καὶ ὁρῶντι ἑαυτὸν κατοικίζειν·
“‘I understand,’ he [VE: Glaucon] said: ‘you mean the city whose establishment we have described, the city whose home is in the ideal; for I think that it can be found nowhere on earth.’ ‘Well,’ said I [VE: Socrates], ‘perhaps there is a pattern of it laid up in heaven for him who wishes to contemplate it and so beholding to constitute himself its citizen’” (tr. Paul Shorey, Loeb, 1935).
Notes to published poem resume
[Poem I 63, 335 · Textual History II 392]
[III] 215–256 Hayward: “The sterile ‘love’ of modern urban civilization exposed. Tiresias is represented here as the expert on sexual relationships.” (For Tiresias, see note to [III] 218.) TSE to Geoffrey Faber, 10 May 1936, in a letter on John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra: “What puzzles me especially, however, is your statement that ‘when sex becomes charged with something more than physical pleasure, it means all kinds of results I want to avoid’. If I took this into my mind in what would be literalness for me, I should say that I held just the opposite point of view. But this is improbable, for two reasons. One is, that it seems to me unlikely that you and I should hold directly opposite views on such a fundamental matter; and the other is, that in my experience two people seldom agree closely enough on the meaning of words to be able to disagree exactly about the use of them in propositions · · · I should think that when sex meant merely physical pleasure, it ceased to mean any kind of pleasure; that it had become merely a habit, as the confirmed cigarette smoker (as we know) ceases to get any gustatory or olfactory pleasure from smoking, and the drunkard and the glutton also cease to enjoy the sense of taste and smell. The first and perhaps most universal complication of sex is I think the pleasure of vanity, which can enter in even when there is no reasonable justification for being vain. Further, there is the moral element: the heightening of pleasure by the sense of either doing something positively good or something positively evil (the pleasure of consciously doing evil can be a very refined and intense one). I will not admit, to begin with, that the enjoyment of wine is a purely physical pleasure. It is easier to show that, than in the case of sex. To begin with, the enjoyment of wine is an acquired and trained taste (of course I should make the same claim for the pleasures of sex, but that is less easily proved). At one stage, and perhaps always, the enjoyment of wine is complicated by one’s self‑approval for having a taste in wine; but I have no doubt that those who really enjoy wine to the keenest are enjoying a sense of discrimination which is almost a spiritual good.”
[III] 215–18 At the violet hour · · · the human engine waits · · · throbbing · · · throbbing: James Thomson: “throughout the twilight hour · · · Life throbbing he
ld its throbs supprest”, In the Room 17–20 (Crawford 51); for the poem, see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 13. On the ts of Vernon Watkins’s The Ballad of Mari Lwyd (1941), TSE wrote: “there’s a throb of genuine passion in almost all these poems” (BL).
[III] 215, 220 the violet hour · · · the violet hour, the evening hour: Henry James: “It was the evening hour, but daylight was long now and Paris more than ever penetrating. The scent of flowers was in the streets, he had the whiff of violet”, The Ambassadors bk. VII ii. TSE: “Mr Symons has enveloped Baudelaire in the Swinburnian violet-coloured London fog of the ’nineties”, Baudelaire in Our Time (1927).
[III] 216 the human engine: see The Engine and notes.
[III] 217 a taxi throbbing waiting: John Buchan: “the throbbing of a stationary car”, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) VI. (TSE to Major Coker, 3 May 1945, of Buchan’s Path of the King: “I enjoyed the book, like most of Buchan’s.” See note to Landscapes IV. Rannoch, by Glencoe 6–7.) The first two typescripts of The Cultivation of Christmas Trees have at 21 “Still throbbing” and “Still awaiting”, respectively. throbbing: Whitman: “the infinite separate houses · · · each with its meals and minutia of daily usages, | And the streets how their throbbings throbb’d”, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d 115–16. TSE on the sensibility of James, Frazer and Bradley: “throbbing at a higher rate of vibration with the agony of spiritual life”, A Prediction with Regard to Three English Authors (1924).
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 85
