501 the garboard-strake began to leak: “The garboard strake leaks”, Marina 28 (WLFacs notes). The garboard strake is animated as a character in Kipling’s story The Ship That Found Herself (1898): “The garboard strake is the lowest plate in the bottom of a ship”, and so crucial to seaworthiness (George Simmers, personal communication). “In a drifting boat with a slow leakage”, The Dry Salvages II 16.
503 gleet: OED 3: “A morbid discharge of thin liquid from a wound, ulcer, etc. Now rare”.
510 injurious race: the Argonautics (a maritime poem) of Apollonius Rhodius: “whatever place | The Mossynæci hold, injurious race”, tr. W. Preston (1811) II 1601–02.
516 moaned: OED “moan” 3c gives this line as the earliest citation for the Navy slang given in Fraser & Gibbons’ Soldier and Sailor Words (1925): “to complain, to grumble, to be a pessimist”. Partridge: from no later than 1915. Chambers Slang Dictionary has “moan n.” from 1910: “(orig. milit.) a grievance, complaint”.
516–17 the sea with many voices | Moaned all about us: Valerie Eliot: Tennyson: “the deep | Moans round with many voices”, Ulysses 55–56. TSE: “The sea has many voices”, The Dry Salvages I 24–25 (WLFacs notes).
518 the suspended winter: “Midwinter spring · · · Suspended in time”, Little Gidding I 1, 3.
519 Hyades: Lemprière: “five daughters of Atlas · · · who were so disconsolate at the death of their brother Hyas, who had been killed by a wild boar, that they pined away and died. They became stars · · · The antients supposed that the rising and setting of the Hyades was always attended with much rain.”
519, 529 under the Hyades · · · scudding: Tennyson: “Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades”, Ulysses 10 (Thormählen 163).
520–21 The northern banks | Had never known the codfish run so well: TSE, anonymously: “In the summer, the Gloucester fishing schooner, laden with its seines and dories, can reach the south Banks, or ‘Georges’; in the winter the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, where the codfish abound”, Fishermen of the Banks by James B. Connolly (1928), Publishers’ Preface. See note to Gerontion 69–71.
523–24 the pleasant violin | At Marm Brown’s joint: “Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, | The pleasant whining of a mandoline”, The Waste Land [III] 260–61. Marm: OED: “Var. of ma’am, freq. in U.S. writers” (now citing this line). OED “ma’am”: “Prefixed to a surname. Obs. exc. U.S. vulgar.” joint: OED 14: “slang or colloq. (chiefly U.S.) · · · a place of meeting or resort, esp. of persons engaged in some illicit occupation; spec. (in America) a place illegally kept (usually by Chinese) for opium-smoking, an opium-den; also applied to illicit drinking-saloons”, citing this by TSE.
525 I laughed not: Genesis 18: 15: “Then Sarah denied, saying, I laughed not; for she was afraid.”
[Poem I 67, 340–41 · Textual History II 399–400]
526 unfamiliar gust: “familiar compound ghost”, Little Gidding II 42 (typed from TSE’s dictation, in a letter to Kristian Smidt, 25 Sept 1961, as “a familiar compound guest”).
529 trysail: OED: “A small fore-and-aft sail, set with a gaff, and sometimes with a boom, on the fore- or mainmast.”
539–46 One night | On watch, I thought I saw in the fore cross-trees | Three women leaning forward, with white hair | Streaming behind · · · I thought, now, when | I like, I can wake up and end the dream: De Quincey: “high aloft amongst the shrouds stood the lady of the pinnace. The deeps opened ahead in malice to receive her, the billows were fierce to catch her. But far away she was borne into desert spaces of the sea · · · still I saw her, as at the moment when she ran past us, standing amongst the shrouds, with her white draperies streaming before the wind. There she stood, with hair dishevelled”, The English Mail Coach: Dream-Fugue. TSE: “The difference between De Quincey’s Dream Fugue and Browne’s Urn Burial is that De Quincey aims to express a content of some intensity, and that he is not diverted into verbal suggestiveness”, Prose and Verse (1921). For Browne, see notes to WLComposite 487 and Little Gidding III 35–36.
540 cross-trees: OED 1: “Two horizontal cross-timbers supported by the cheeks and trestle-trees at the head of the lower and top masts.”
541–43 Three women leaning forward, with white hair · · · who sang above the wind | A song that charmed my senses: Sirens. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. | | I do not think that they will sing to me. | | I have seen them riding seaward on the waves | Combing the white hair of the waves blown back”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 124–27 (WLFacs notes, now revised).
545, 548 (Nothing was real) · · · A different darkness: “a poet, once he has found his way into these strange lands of more than polar darkness and more than equatorial light, may gradually lose his interest in the ordinary planes of reality. His characters may come to be, in the ordinary sense, less real”, The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse (1937).
550–51 A line, a white line, a long white line, | A wall, a barrier: Conrad: “The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line”, Heart of Darkness pt. 1.
552 My God man there’s bears on it: Poe: “Upon coming up with the floe, we perceived that it was in the possession of a gigantic creature of the race of the Arctic bear”, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym ch. XVII.
554 Where’s a cocktail shaker, Ben, here’s plenty of cracked ice: Ben used to be the nickname for a sailor (WLFacs notes). The businessman Benjamin Guggenheim died in the Titanic disaster. Apocryphally, a card-player on the ship said: “See if any ice has come aboard: I would like some for this” (Graham Nelson, N&Q Sept 1997). “Shaking cocktails on a hearse”, Suite Clownesque III 13. For fear of sinkings, see note to The Engine II. here’s plenty of cracked ice: Shackleton ch. IV: “Suddenly the floe on the port side cracked and huge pieces of ice shot up” (Shawn Worthington, personal communication).
555 Remember me: the Ghost in Hamlet I v.
[Poem I 67, 341–42 · Textual History II 400–401]
556 Another: the name of God cannot be spoken in Hell. Ulysses in Dante: “com’altrui piacque, | infin che il mar fu sopra noi richiuso” [as pleased Another, till the sea was closed above us], Inf. XXVI 141–42 (Edmund Wilson, The Devils and Canon Barham, 1973, 117).
Notes to published poem resume
Part IV translates Dans le Restaurant 25–31.
[IV] 312–21] WLFacs notes: “Depressed by Pound’s reaction to the main passage, Eliot wrote: ‘Perhaps better omit Phlebas also???’ [26? Jan 1922]. ‘I DO advise keeping Phlebas’ replied Pound. ‘In fact I more’n advise. Phlebas is an integral part of the poem; the card pack introduces him, the drowned phoen. sailor, and he is needed ABSOloootly where he is. Must stay in’ [28? Jan 1922].” See headnote, 1. COMPOSITION.
[IV] 312 Phlebas the Phoenician: pronounced Flee-bas and F’nissian in TSE’s recordings. The French of Dans le Restaurant is accented and has a comma: “Phlébas, le Phénicien”. Hayward: “Phlebas, the drowned god of the fertility cults. And the merchant. Cf. ‘Although I do not hope to turn again · · · Wavering between the profit and the loss | In this brief transit where the dreams cross | The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying’, Ash-Wednesday VI 1–10.” For TSE’s association of Plato’s Philebus with the submarine world, see note to Mr. Apollinax 11–15. Phoenician: William Morris: “The thin bright-eyed Phoenician | Thou drawest to thy waters wan”, and then:
And as for Hylas, never think to see
His body more, who yet lies happily
Beneath the green stream where ye were this morn · · ·
Forgetting the rough world, and every care;
Not dead, nor living
The Life and Death of Jason bk. IV 119–20, 693–98
For this book of Morris’s poem, see Margaret Gent, N&Q Feb 1970, and notes to Airs of Palestine, No. 2 20 and 27.
[IV] 314 the profit and loss: Paul Elmer More, of the sailors “De Gama or Magellan” discovering the southern
seas: they “held in contempt the profit and the control of mundane laws. Both of our explorers reached the desired land, one returning to add a new continent to the realm of his sovereign, the other leaving his body in the new ocean he had traversed”, The Great Refusal 78 (for the passage see note to Little Gidding II 69, 72). John Davidson: “One song you hear in every mouth, | ‘Profit and loss, profit and loss’”, Scaramouch in Naxos sc. iii. TSE: “between the profit and the loss”, Ash-Wednesday VI 4. “the fat and the lean, and the profit and loss”, Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats 9.
[Poem I 67, 342 · Textual History II 401]
[IV] 314, 319 profit and loss · · · Gentile or Jew: 1 Corinthians 10: 32–33: “Give none offence, neither to the Jews nor to the Gentiles, nor to the church of God: even as I please men in all things, not seeking mine own profit, but the profit of many, that they may be saved”. Romans 3: 9: “we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin · · · they are together become unprofitable”. (Garvie’s ed. of Romans, which TSE owned, notes: “The Jew has undoubtedly the advantage in his position and function. But inasmuch as greater privilege involves greater responsibility, the Jew’s failure may bring on him a severer doom than the failure of the Gentile.”) The order in the Bible is repeatedly “Jews” then “Gentiles” (both in the plural). 1 Corinthians 12: 13: “we are all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles”. Likewise Joyce: “—A merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or gentile, is he not?” Ulysses episode II (Nestor) in Little Review Apr 1918 (Grover Smith 60). TSE to H. L. Adlerstein, 30 Dec 1949: “In the long run, of course, the decay of religious faith comes to the same thing for both Jew and Gentile.”
[IV] 317–18 passed the stages of his age and youth | Entering the whirlpool: Shelley: “We have passed Age’s icy caves, | And Manhood’s dark and tossing waves, | And Youth’s smooth ocean”, Prometheus Unbound II v 98–100.
[IV] 320 the wheel: although sometimes associated by critics with the Wheel of Fortune ([I] 51) or the wheel of torture (“London, your people is bound upon the wheel!” WLComposite 340, 343), here the ship’s wheel. windward: pronounced winderd in TSE’s 1933 recording (see note to [III] 272 for loo’rd); but pronounced wind-w’rd in his recordings of 1946 and 1950.
[IV] 321 Consider: in Dante (1929) I, TSE quotes Ulysses’ words from Inf. XXVI 118–20, departing slightly from the Temple Classics punctuation and translation:
Considerate la vostra semenza,
fatti non foste a viver come bruti
ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.
· · · “Consider your nature, you were made not to live like beasts, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.”
[Poem I 67–68, 342–43 · Textual History II 401]
V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID
Lehmann records how, after a reading at Bryn Mawr in Oct 1948, TSE described the composition of The Waste Land: “The first three parts were laboured, whereas the fifth part was written down in one afternoon, and no corrections have been made. You cannot tell from the result how long the poet worked to write a line.” To Bertrand Russell, 15 Oct 1923: “It gives me very great pleasure to know that you like the Waste Land, and especially Part V which in my opinion is not only the best part, but the only part that justifies the whole, at all.” In reply to Kenneth Allott’s conjecture, 20 June 1935, that the passage “about bats and fiddling on hair and violet and twilight · · · came out very quickly, was touched up very little and was exhilarating to write”, TSE wrote, 12 Nov 1935: “Not only that page but the whole section was written at one sitting, and never altered.” Henry Eliot to Henry B. Harvey, 16 Sept 1944: “I believe Coleridge claimed that his Kubla Khan was a bit of automatic writing. TSE also told Theresa [Eliot] (I didn’t hear it, but I take her word for it) that parts of The Waste Land were automatically written” (U. North Carolina, Chapel Hill). Stephen Spender: “Eliot considered the last part of The Waste Land to be the best part of the poem, partly because it was almost automatic writing”, T. S. Eliot: Voices and Visions (documentary, 1988). Valerie Eliot confirmed in a broadcast on 7 Nov 1971 that TSE had in mind the composition of Part V of The Waste Land when he wrote: “it is a commonplace that some forms of illness are extremely favourable, not only to religious illumination, but to artistic and literary composition. A piece of writing meditated, apparently without progress, for months or years, may suddenly take shape and word; and in this state long passages may be produced which require little or no retouch. I have no good word to say for the cultivation of automatic writing as the model of literary composition; I doubt whether these moments can be cultivated by the writer; but he to whom this happens assuredly has the sense of being a vehicle rather than a maker · · · You may call it communication with the Divine, or you may call it a temporary crystallization of the mind”, The “Pensées” of Pascal (1931). “That there is an analogy between mystical experience and some of the ways in which poetry is written I do not deny · · · I know, for instance, that some forms of ill-health · · · may (if other circumstances are favourable) produce an efflux of poetry in a way approaching the condition of automatic writing · · · it gives me the impression · · · of having undergone a long incubation, though we do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on”, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 144.
To Montgomery Belgion, 19 July 1940:
I hold (and I am sure that you will consider this doctrine untenable, so I fling it to you to tear to tatters) that punctuation in poetry is rather different from in prose: that in poetry its value is more largely that of musical notation, and the point is to indicate the emphases for the incantation. Perhaps this is a difference of degree or proportion rather than kind. But it is obvious that the end of a line is a kind of punctuation in itself, so that a comma at the end of a line may have the value of a semi‑colon in prose. The absence of commas in parts of the last section of the Waste Land is to indicate that the voice is not to be dropped, and that the passage is to be read aloud in a kind of monotone. Of course I should deprecate the development of any exact notation for poetry, indicating the changes of tempo etc. for I think that latitude should be left to different readings just as a musical piece can be interpreted very differently by different conductors. The author’s way of reading a poem is only one possible way: certainly a good poem should be capable of being recited differently by different people, just as it should be capable of meaning different things to different people.
(Hamlet to the Players: “tear a passion to tatters”, III ii.) See the Author’s Note issued with the recording of Four Quartets (headnote, 9. TSE ON FOUR QUARTETS).
Title What the Thunder said: John 12: 28–29: “Then came a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again. The people therefore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it thundered: others said, An angel spake to him.” Jane Ellen Harrison, “The Rite of the ‘Thunders’”, Themis (1912) ch. III, “on the association of thunder with the voice of God and with purification in initiation and fertility rites”. TSE’s capitalisation follows Keats: What the Thrush said: Lines from a Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds (Al Benthall, Newsletter of the T. S. Eliot Society Spring 2011). Although many later editors use only the first line, “O thou whose face hath felt the winter’s wind”, this was the title given by Harry Buxton Forman in his five-volume edition of Keats, listed as “Poems and Letters” in TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934).
[Poem I 68, 343 · Textual History II 401]
[V] 322–94] TSE’s Notes include a general note for Part V, uniquely. C. J. Ackerley, of the biblical story: “The ‘torchlight red on sweaty faces’ pictures the moment of betrayal; ‘torches’ are mentioned in John 18: 3, but the Gospels do not refer to sweaty faces, and the image may derive from the many paintings of the scene. The ‘frosty silence’ suggests the cold night Christ spent in prayer, and the ‘agony in stony places’ that lonely vigil [Luke 22: 44] and the passion at Golgo
tha, ‘the place of a skull’. The ‘prison’ is that in which Christ spent what was left of the night before being taken to the palace of Caiaphas, the High Priest [John 18: 15], and led before Pilate; the ‘shouting and the crying’ is that of the multitude, demanding Christ’s crucifixion.”
[V] 322–26 After · · · | After · · · | After: see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 101–102. the torchlight · · · faces · · · dead: “He appreciates the battles, the torchlight, the ‘dead sound’ of drums, the white, worn face of Cicero in his flight peering from his litter”, A Romantic Aristocrat (1919) (Ricks 174). See note to [I] 68. the torchlight red on sweaty faces · · · silence in the gardens | After the agony: Hayward: “The association of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane with the older hanged gods of legend.” John 18: 1–3: “he went forth with his disciples · · · where was a garden · · · Judas then, having received a band of men and officers · · · cometh thither with lanterns and torches and weapons.” Luke 22: 44: “And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood.” Whitman: “countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces”, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d 38. Conrad: “the effect of the torch-light on the face”, Heart of Darkness pt. 1. TSE (title): The Little Passion: From “An Agony in the Garret”. “a face that sweats with tears · · · The campfire”, Song (“The golden foot I may not kiss or clutch”) 10, 12. “family portraits, dingy busts, all looking remarkably Roman · · · lit up successively by the flare | Of a sweaty torchbearer”, Coriolan II. Difficulties of a Statesman 29–31.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 90
