The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 89
D. H. Lawrence, of Kingston-on-Thames: “Yet it was a place of kings for her—Richard and Henry and Wolsey and Queen Elizabeth · · · Still she must see the stately, gorgeous barge of the Queen float down, the crimson carpet put upon the landing stairs, the gentlemen in their purple-velvet cloaks, bare-headed, standing in the sunshine grouped on either side waiting. ‘Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song’”, The Rainbow (1915) ch. XIII (John Zubizarreta, ELN Sept 1993). Lawrence’s “stately, gorgeous barge of the Queen” suggests not only Elizabeth and Leicester’s, but also Cleopatra’s barge (Whitworth, who points out that The Rainbow was pub. 30 Sept 1915 and suppressed by 5 Nov). For Spenser’s “Sweete Themmes” see note to [III] 175–84.
[III] 280 Beating oars: for “galleys when they row, | Even beat”, in The Maid’s Tragedy, see note to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 9–11.
[III] 281–85 The stern was formed | A gilded shell · · · Rippled both shores: Ludwig II liked to be rowed in a golden swan-boat, with shell-shaped stern, across the miniature lake in his artificial Venus Grotto (based on act I of Tannhäuser), at Linderhof Palace. For Ludwig, see note to [I] 8–17.
[Poem I 65, 338–39 · Textual History II 396–97]
[III] 289 White towers: Hayward: “The pinnacles of the White Tower, built from white Caen stone (1078) by William the Conqueror as the Keep of the Tower of London. They are a striking landmark on the left bank of the Thames below London Bridge.” Elizabeth had been imprisoned in the Tower in her youth (C. J. Ackerley, personal communication). TSE: “The fine weather and the coal strike have turned a blazing glare on London, discovering for the first time towers and steeples of an uncontaminated white”, London Letter in Dial Aug 1921.
[III] 292 and dusty trees: “through dusty trees”, First Debate Between the Body and Soul 13.
[III] 293 Highbury · · · Richmond and Kew: Hayward: “Highbury (North-East London) in the metropolitan borough of Islington, is a dreary, lower middle class suburb. It has no personal association in this context and was chosen simply to provide a contrast with the superior and salubrious suburbs of Richmond and Kew which lie to the south-west of London at the opposite pole of the NE-SW axis. Richmond, famous for its river picnics, and Kew, famous for its spacious botanical gardens, are favourite Thames-side resorts for London’s holiday-makers. At sunny week-ends and on Bank Holidays both places are packed with trippers and inexperienced but determined oarsmen and canoers.”
[III] 293–94 Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew | Undid me: Jean de Bosschère: “Recueilli à Paris; perverti à Rome” [Composed in Paris, corrupted in Rome], Homère Mare habite sa Maison de Planches [Homer Marsh Dwells in his House of Planks]. (OED “pervert” 12b: “spec. To turn (any one) aside from a right to a false or erroneous religious belief or system”). TSE quoted in total fourteen lines of the poem in French in Reflections on Contemporary Poetry II (1917). See headnote to Mélange Adultère de Tout. “Spawned in · · · Antwerp, | Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London”, Gerontion 9–10 and note. Richmond and Kew | Undid me: the lines of Dante quoted in TSE’s Notes recur in Dante (1929) II, where he quotes the last seven lines of Purg. V and translates them (departing from the Temple text): “remember me, who am La Pia. Siena made me, Maremma unmade me: this is known to him who after due engagement wedded me with his ring”. La Pia, the Lady of Siena, was murdered at Maremma reputedly on her husband’s orders. Siena me Fe’, Disfecemi Maremma is the title of part VII of Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) (C. J. Ackerley, personal communication).
455–62 ms2 1st draft [8–10] Richmond Kew | Undid me · · · on the river, at last I raised my knees: Fenimore Cooper: “‘It was the river that made your fortune, Corny, and undid me’”, Satanstoe ch. XXX. Describing river excursions on “The Thames from London Bridge to Hampton Court”, Baedeker noted (388): “It was on an ‘eyot’ between Richmond and Kew that Prince William (William IV) used to meet Perdita Robinson” (his mistress). Middleton: “how soon maids are to their ruins won, | One minute, and eternally undone”, Michaelmas Term II ii. For Middleton’s play, see note to Choruses from “The Rock” II 49–51.
[III] 294–95 I raised my knees | Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe: to his mother, 19 Sept 1917: “I spent the afternoon on the river with a man in the bank who owns a ‘sailing canoe’; they are tiny little boats like toys. You sit on the edge of the cockpit with your knees up to your chin” (C. J. Ackerley, personal communication).
[Poem I 65, 339 · Textual History II 397–98]
[III] 295 Supine: stress as in repine in TSE’s recordings (this being described byOED as the pronunciation “formerly”). To E. M. W. Tillyard, 3 Apr 1947: “In my lecture I made a passing reference to Milton’s description of Satan as prone while lying on the Infernal Lake. I had always pictured his posture as being supine and thought that Milton was using prone because the associations of this word are more suitable to the situation than the associations of supine. I have just been in correspondence with Mr. E. H. W. Meyerstein who is convinced that Milton meant exactly what he said and that Satan is to be imagined in this scene as lying on his belly · · · I should dearly like to know how you picture this scene yourself.”
[III] 296 Moorgate: Hayward: “Moorgate was not one of the original City gates but was erected to replace a postern in the north wall between Bishopsgate and Cripplegate. The gate was demolished in 1762 and the quarter to which it gave its name is now in the heart of the financial district of the City. The ‘Thames Maiden’ who sings this lament was presumably a typist in one of the great office buildings of the quarter. When T. S. Eliot worked in a bank in the City he used the Moorgate Underground Station.”
[III] 296–97 my heart | Under my feet: “I’d throw my heart beneath his feet. | I’d give my life to his control”, Convictions 25–26 (“your heart would have responded | Gaily, when invited, beating obedient | To controlling hands”, The Waste Land [V] 420–22).
[III] 298 “a new start”: having written to Pound, 13 Oct 1925, of The Hollow Men as “post-Waste”, TSE wrote to Wyndham Lewis, 9 Jan 1926, of his new volume (Poems 1909–1925): “I wanted to collect all my stuff and get rid of it in one volume so as to get it out of my own way and make a fresh start.” Of Pater: “Marius itself is incoherent; its method is a number of fresh starts”, Arnold and Pater (1930).
[III] 300 Margate: Hayward: “a popular seaside resort in the Isle of Thanet, Kent, 74 miles east of London, at the tip of the North Foreland, much frequented by city workers and their ‘humble people’ for summer holidays.” For TSE’s work there on The Waste Land in Oct–Nov 1921, see headnote, 1. COMPOSITION.
[III] 301–302 I can connect | Nothing with nothing: King Lear I i: “Nothing will come of nothing.” Murder in the Cathedral II, chorus: “No colours, no forms to distract, to divert the soul | From seeing itself, foully united forever, nothing with nothing.” connect: E. M. Forster: “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer”, Howards End (1910) ch. XXII (TSE: “fragments”, [V] 430).
[III] 303 The broken fingernails of dirty hands: “dirty broken finger nails | Tapping the bar”, Interlude: In a Bar 12–13.
[Poem I 65–66, 339 · Textual History II 398]
[III] 304–305 My people humble people who expect | Nothing: Conrad: “‘They are simple people—and I want nothing, you know’”, Heart of Darkness pt. 3 (Grover Smith 309–10). Kipling: “Humble ye, my people”, A Song of the English 2. (Alexander Cruden: “To humble a woman, is to lie with her, to rob her of her honour. Deut. 21: 14: ‘Thou shalt not make merchandise of her because thou hast humbled her’”, Concordance to the Old and New Testaments, 1824 ed.) On the Eve (1925): “squandering everything that the humble people have worked to create—soldiers and generals and diplomats and administrators are humble people, in my opinion” (TSE’s authorship uncertain; see Index of Identifying Tit
les). “the work of the humble”, Choruses from “The Rock” I 78 (see note).
[III] 306–307 la la | | To Carthage then I came: on the ts of Menasce’s translation, TSE wrote “la la” above “alors à” and suggested “Je m’en fus alors à Carthage”. Spenser: “At length they all to mery London came”, Prothalamion 127. la la: OED: “la” b: “Repeated (a) as a refrain; (b) as an expression of derision. Obs. (Hence la-la adj. = ‘so-so’, poor.)” Ezra Pound used “Là-là” or “La! La!!” to mean something like “so it goes”, as to Dorothy Shakespear [12 Apr 1913], [28 Feb 1914], [7 Mar 1914]. “Tra-la-la-la-la-la-laire”, epigraph to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar.
[III] 307 To Carthage then I came: TSE’s Notes quote Augustine: “To Carthage I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought what I might love, in love with loving, and safety I hated, and a way without snares. For within me was a famine of that inward food, Thyself, my God; yet, through that famine I was not hungered”, Confessions, opening of bk. III. (TSE’s wording, with the addition of “then” after “Carthage”, appears to adapt Pusey’s 1838 revision of Watts’s translation. For Pilkington’s translation of the same passage, see note to Entretien dans un parc 22–25.) On 26 Mar 1926, TSE wrote to booksellers John Grant in disappointment that a 15-vol. set of Augustine that he had ordered was in English, not Latin. TSE: “If he walked in city streets, in the streets of Carthage | He seemed to tread on faces”, The Death of Saint Narcissus 18–19 draft. Carthage: Lemprière: “The city and republic flourished for 737 years · · · It maintained three famous wars against Rome, called the Punic wars, in the third of which Carthage was totally destroyed” in 146 B.C. A punitive peace is named “Carthaginian” after the sacking of Carthage, when the ground was sown with salt to make it barren. Augustine and later historians argued that Rome’s decline was hastened by the destruction of this Phoenician colony (see note to [I] 70, “Mylae”; and Eleanor Cook, ELH Summer 1979). For Keynes and the “Carthaginian peace” of the Versailles Treaties, see note to [III] 277–278, 290–91 on the Rhine-daughters’ song.
[III] 308 Burning burning burning burning: TSE’s Notes refer to the Buddha’s Fire Sermon. To his Spanish translator Angel Flores, 22 Feb 1928: “On page 13 of your translation you put ‘consumiéndome’. Would not simply ‘consumiendo’ be enough? My original is ‘burning’, and after all I was merely translating myself quite literally from the Pali original.” (Consumiendo = “consuming”, transitive; consumiéndome = “consuming me / myself”.) The Monument to the Great Fire of 1666, which destroyed much of the City of London, stands beside London Bridge. Kipling: “burning—burning—burning”, Through the Fire (one paragraph after the Policeman’s declaring: “it’s the story of Francesca da Rimini”).
[III] 308 TSE’s Notes Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translations: see note to part title “III. The Fire Sermon”.
[Poem I 66, 339 · Textual History II 398–99]
[III] 309 O Lord Thou pluckest me out: TSE’s Notes refer again to Augustine: “And I, though I speak and see this, entangle my steps with these outward beauties; but Thou pluckest me out, O Lord, Thou pluckest me out; because Thy loving-kindness is before my eyes. For I am taken miserably, and Thou pluckest me out mercifully”, bk. X 34.
[III] 309 TSE’s Notes is not an accident: Irving Babbitt: “You come to feel that the age of Louis XIV was not an accident ( … as an acquaintance of mine once said) but rather the result and natural fruit of a continuous culture and development”, The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912) 152.
[III] 310–11 pluckest | | burning: Amos 4: 11: “I have overthrown some of you, as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and ye were as a firebrand plucked out of the burning: yet have ye not returned to me, saith the Lord” (Grover Smith 90). Zechariah 3: 2: “Save me as a brand plucked out of the fire.” Cotton Mather’s book on the 17th-century witch trials was entitled A Brand Plucked out of the Burning. (In Dial Nov 1929, Pound wrote of William Carlos Williams that “None of his immediate forebears burnt witches in Salem”, to which, in the Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, there was added: “Note: We didn’t burn them, we hanged them. T.S.E.” To Pound, 8/10 Dec 1933: “As for me, I can’t help it. My great-grandfather was on same witch jury with Nat Hawthorne’s great-grandfather; and I just naturally smell out witches etc.” See note to Gerontion 7.)
IV. DEATH BY WATER
Title Death by Water: for fear of or longing for the submarine world, see notes to Mr. Apollinax 11–15 and to Dirge.
Notes to WLComposite 475–557:
TSE, interviewed by Donald Hall: “There was a long section about a shipwreck. I don’t know what that had to do with anything else, but it was rather inspired by the Ulysses canto in the Inferno, I think”, Paris Review (1959). Inf. XXVI 133–42:
n’apparve una montagna bruna
per la distanza, e parvemi alta tanto,
quanto veduta non n’aveva alcuna.
Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto:
chè dalla nuova terra un turbo nacque,
e percosse del legno il primo canto.
Tre volte il fe’ girar con tutte l’acque,
alla quarta levar la poppa in suso,
e la prora ire in giù, com’altrui piacque,
infin che il mar fu sopra noi richiuso.
In Dante (1929) I, TSE revised the Temple translation: “there appeared a mountain brown in the distance; and it seemed to me the highest that I had ever seen. We rejoiced, but soon our joy was turned to lamentation: for a storm came up from the new land, and caught the stem of our ship. Three times it whirled her round with all the waters; the fourth time it heaved up the stern and drove her down at the head, as pleased Another; until the sea closed over us.” (See notes to The Waste Land [V] 321, “Consider”, and to WLComposite 556, “Another”.)
[Poem I 66–67, 339–40 · Textual History II 399–401]
Valerie Eliot was presumably quoting TSE when she wrote that his eighty-four draft lines were “rather inspired” not only by Dante’s Canto but by Tennyson, adding: “In placing his voyage and shipwreck off the New England coast where he had sailed in his youth, Eliot makes the first mention of The Dry Salvages” (490). TSE: “The story of Ulysses, as told by Dante, reads like a straightforward piece of romance, a well-told seaman’s yarn; Tennyson’s Ulysses is primarily a very self-conscious poet · · · We do not need, at first, to know what mountain the mountain was, or what the words mean as pleased Another, to feel that Dante’s sense has further depths”, Dante (1929) I. “But for narrative Tennyson had no gift at all. For a static poem, and a moving poem, on the same subject, you have only to compare his Ulysses with the condensed and intensely exciting narrative of that hero in the XXVIth Canto of Dante’s Inferno. Dante is telling a story. Tennyson is only stating an elegiac mood”, In Memoriam (1936) (expanded from WLFacs notes).
479–81 ruffian · · · stairs · · · friends: W. E. Henley, of Life and Death: “He’s the ruffian on the stair. | | You shall see her as a friend”, To W. R. 4–5.
483 trade with wind and sea and snow: “the wind, in the windy straits · · · the snow · · · the Trades”, Gerontion 69–72. TSE, anonymously: “There is no harder life, no more uncertain livelihood, and few more dangerous occupations”, Fishermen of the Banks by James B. Connolly (1928), Publishers’ Preface.
484 “much seen and much endured”: WLFacs notes:
An allusion to the Odyssey I 3–4:
πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω,
πολλὰ δ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν
[He saw the cities and knew the thoughts of many men | And suffered many sorrows in his heart upon the sea].
And also to Tennyson’s Ulysses: “Much have I seen and known” (13), “all times I have enjoyed | Greatl
y, have suffered greatly” (7–8).
487 Kingfisher: OED “halcyon” B. 1: “Of, or pertaining to, the halcyon or kingfisher. halcyon days: fourteen days of calm weather.” Sir Thomas Browne: “the common opinion concerning the vertue prognostick of these birds; the natural regard they have unto the windes · · · especially remarkable in the time of their nidulation, and bringing forth of their young; for at that time · · · it hath been observed even unto a proverb, that the Sea is calm, and the windes do cease”, Pseudodoxia Epidemica III X. See note to The Dry Salvages II 72, “halcyon day”.
491, 497–98 swell · · · A water cask was opened · · · brackish: Shackleton ch. IX: “The water-casks were towed behind · · · and the swell · · · drove the boat on to the rocks, where one of the casks was slightly stove in · · · some sea-water had entered the cask and the contents were now brackish” (Shawn Worthington, personal communication). For Shackleton, see note to [V] 359–65.
492 triton rang the final warning bell: the mythical creature is generally “represented as a bearded man with the hind quarters of a fish, and usually holding a trident and a shell-trumpet” (OED). Wordsworth: “hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn”, Sonnet (“The world is too much with us”). TSE: “And Triton blew his wrinkled shell”, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 2 variant.
[Poem I 67, 340 · Textual History II 399]
496–502 everything went wrong. | A water cask · · · gaffjaws | Jammed. A spar split · · · good Norwegian pine · · · canned baked beans: Kipling, of explorers of North and South Poles: “Then the wood failed—then the food failed—then the last water dried”, The Song of the Dead 15. gaffjaws: U-shape at the end of a gaff boom which enables it to run up and down a mast and to turn on it. OED has no definition, but cites Westminster Gazette 25 July 1894: “Vigilant’s gaff-jaws broke”.