[V] 322, 326 torchlight · · · reverberation: see “street lamp · · · Beats”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 8–9, and for réverbère see note.
[V] 322–26 faces · · · crying · · · Prison and palace: Blake: “in every face I meet · · · In every cry · · · manacles · · · cry · · · Runs in blood down Palace walls”, London. See note to [V] 379–81.
[V] 323 frosty silence: OED does not record the sense of social chill. James Beresford: “frosty silence · · · with which it is received”, Miseries of Human Life (1806–07).
[V] 324–25 in stony places · · · the crying: Psalm 141: 1, 6: “I cry unto thee · · · When their judges are overthrown in stony places”. To Middleton Murry, 15 Dec 1924, apparently quoting him: “do you really consider it a good sign that the ‘time of stony places is over’? If so, you are luckier than the Saviour, who found things pretty stony to the last—and would, I believe, have continued to find them so, had he not been removed at an age less ripe than yours or mine. I do not suppose that I share any other characteristic of the Founder of Christianity, but at least I have nothing but stony places to look forward to. This isolates me, of course, from those who can pass in and out of stony places with practised ease.” (Christ was crucified at 33; at the time of this letter TSE was 36, Middleton Murry, 35.)
[V] 326, 330 reverberation · · · patience: “patience · · · considerations”, First Caprice in North Cambridge 9–10. “patience · · · sensations”, First Debate between the Body and Soul 5–7. “patience · · · irritations”, O lord, have patience 1, 3.
[V] 326–30 Prison · · · We who were living are now dying | With a little patience: 2 Corinthians 6: 4–9: “in much patience · · · in imprisonments · · · as dying, and, behold, we live”.
[Poem I 68, 343 · Textual History II 401–402]
[V] 326–34 Prison · · · distant mountains · · · mountains of rock without water: to Stephen Spender, 30 May 1931: “you are wise to avoid mountains · · · Mountains are only tolerable if one is not too near, and if there is a bit of water to break the monotony of the imprisonment—Lake Geneva possibly” (see note to [III] 182).
[V] 328 He who was living is now dead: Revelation 1: 18: “I am he that liveth, and was dead” (C. J. Ackerley, personal communication).
[V] 329 We who were living are now dying: Hayward: “Cf. ‘Living and partly living’, Murder in the Cathedral (chorus of the common women of Canterbury)”, the end of I.
[V] 329, 333 dying · · · among the mountains: Wordsworth: “The thought of death sits easy on the man | Who has been born and dies among the mountains”, The Brothers 182–83.
[V] 330 With a little patience: Tennyson: “A little patience ere I die”, In Memoriam XXXIV 12 (Grover Smith 1996 27). TSE: “With senile patience”, First Debate between the Body and Soul 5. “with sordid patience”, First Caprice in North Cambridge 9. To his German translator, E. R. Curtius, 4 Feb 1927: “I note that you have translated ‘with a little patience’ by the imperative. Is this right? I meant that we were dying patiently but without any great struggle or revolt, and therefore not much patience was necessary. It is intended to convey a state of torpor or exhaustion after a great or overwhelming event; not as an exhortation.”
[V] 331–58 Here is no water · · · no water: Psalm 63: 1: “my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is”. Mayne Reid: “The grey, rocky bluff that fronted them, looked parched and forbidding · · · ‘O brothers! should there be no water!’” The Boy Hunters (1853) ch. XXV (Crawford 25). TSE to Ford Madox Ford, 14 Aug 1923: “There are I think about thirty good lines in The Waste Land, can you find them? The rest is ephemeral.” 4 Oct: “As for the lines I mention, you need not scratch your head over them. They are the twenty-nine lines of the water-dripping song in the last part.”
[V] 332–41 sandy road · · · road · · · silence in the mountains: The Cocktail Party II, REILLY: “Bless the road.” ALEX: “Watch over her in the desert. | Watch over her in the mountain · · · Watch over her by the quicksand.” JULIA: “Protect her from the Voices · · · Protect her in the silence” (“voices”, [III] 384).
[V] 335–36, 352 If there were water we should stop and drink | Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think · · · If there were the sound of water only: George MacDonald: “I am weary, and very lonely, | And can but think—think. | If there were some water only | That a spirit might drink—drink”, Hard Times (1871) 1–4. For thirst and the sound of water, see note to Five-Finger Exercises II. Lines for a Yorkshire Terrier 7–8.
582 Among the rock: emended to “Amongst the rock”. Fowler: “The survival of both without apparent differentiation may possibly be due to the unconscious desire for euphony or ease · · · It may be said that · · · (1) among is the more normal word, (2) amongst is more usual before vowels, but (3) before the · · · the two forms are used quite indifferently.” (“among these rocks”, Ash-Wednesday VI 31.)
[V] 337, 342, 354 dry · · · dry · · · dry: Charlotte Eliot: “When we were in England in 1921, there was a drouth. Not only were the fields in the country parched and dry, but also the City Parks”, Reminiscences of a Trip to London (1924).
[Poem I 68, 343 · Textual History II 402]
[V] 338 If there were only water amongst the rock: Pater on Leonardo: “In him first, appears the taste for what is bizarre or recherché in landscape; hollow places full of the green shadow of bituminous rocks · · · all solemn effects of moving water; you may follow it springing from its distant source among the rocks on the heath of the Madonna of the Balances, passing as a little fall into the treacherous calm of the Madonna of the Lake, next, as a goodly river below the cliffs of the Madonna of the Rocks”, Studies in the History of the Renaissance ch. VI (TSE: “shadow of this red rock”, [I] 26).
[V] 339 mountain mouth of carious teeth: Browning: “broken hills | Like an old lion’s cheek teeth”, An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician 291–92 (a poem on the resurrection of Lazarus, with “through the thunder comes a human voice”, 306). Shackleton ch. X: “A jagged line of peaks with a gap like a broken tooth confronted us.” Shackleton, who died on 5 Jan 1922, was known to love Browning. James Thomson: “carious bone”, A Real Vision of Sin 14—with its landscape of the “foul canal” and “water-rat” (Crawford 48). carious: pronounced as rhyming with various in TSE’s recordings. OED 1: “Pathol. Of bones, teeth, etc.: Affected with caries, decayed.” 2: “transf. Decayed; rotten with dry rot.” OED records calcarious as the etymological form of calcareous “composed of or containing lime or lime-stone”.
[V] 340 Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit: Lawrence: “Her mind reverted often to the torture cell of a certain Bishop of France, in which the victim could neither stand nor lie stretched out, never”, The Rainbow (1915) ch. IV (Hands) (TSE: “prison”, [V] 326, 413, 414).
[V] 340, 365 Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit · · · But who is that on the other side of you: in Indian legend, three saint-poets experienced a strange meeting. “On a rainy day the first one sought shelter in a small house, the pial [verandah] of which offered him enough space to lie on. A little later, the second one came to the same place seeking accommodation and was told, ‘Here one alone can lie.’ The newcomer answered, ‘Where one can lie two may sit’ and his request was complied with. It was very dark and the torrential downpour brought the third Alvar also to the same spot. He was told, ‘Two of us are already sitting in this narrow space.’ Undeterred by this courteous denial, he argued that where two can sit, three may stand. He was immediately allowed to join the two and all of them, after standing together for some time, felt troubled by the presence of a fourth person. In the dark they could not identify the intruder and kept asking the question, ‘who is the fourth one?’ Finally each of the three seers became aware of the mysterious presence of Lord Vishnu himself and gave expression to his ecstasy in a song”, P. Marudanayagam, Explicator Fall 1986. See note to [V]
359–65.
[V] 341–45 There is not even silence in the mountains | But dry sterile thunder · · · mudcracked houses: Max Pemberton: “‘His armies come and go like the wind and the thunder. To-day we see them, to-morrow there is silence in the mountains. His enemies die, and their houses crumble to the dust’”, The Phantom Army (1898) ch. VII. TSE: “there is not enough silence | Not on the sea or on the islands, not | On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land”, Ash-Wednesday V 12–14.
[Poem I 68, 343 · Textual History II 402]
[V] 344–45 red sullen faces sneer and snarl · · · From doors of mudcracked houses: Hayward: “Asiatic (Tibetan) faces. The scene has shifted from Palestine to Central Asia.” TSE: “sullen sunbaked houses”, So through the evening, through the violet air 6. “in the light of the door | Which opens on her like a grin”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 17–18.
[V] 353 cicada: pronounced sicayda in TSE’s recordings (first of OED’s two pronunciations).
[V] 354 dry grass singing: Kipling: “alone with the winds and the grass singing under the wind”, Kim ch. XIII (Grover Smith 310).
[V] 356 TSE’s Notes Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush · · · Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America: on 18 June 1928, TSE inscribed his copy of Frank M. Chapman’s book: “A much coveted birthday present on my 14th birthday T. S. Eliot”. Vivien Eliot retained it after the couple separated (as TSE wrote to his brother on 16 Aug 1937), but TSE later retrieved it and presented it to Hayward. To Julian Bell, 2 Jan 1930: “I have spent a great deal of time myself in bird study.” Since Thomas Nuttall’s Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and Canada (1833–34), the hermit thrush has often been said to be the sweetest singer of all American birds. Whitman: “Solitary the thrush, | The hermit · · · Sings by himself a song · · · out of the cedars and pines”, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d 20–22, 101 (Musgrove 67). See note to [V] 359–65. TSE to Ralph Hodgson, 11 May 1935: “The Nightingales HAVE been something extra this year · · · and there are even other birds here that I prize as highly blackbirds etc. and I think the hermit thrush superior on his own habitat.” Burroughs untangles how, from Alexander Wilson and Audubon, to Thoreau and Emerson, Chapman and beyond, naturalists have confused (a) the different species of North American thrush, (b) their names, (c) their territories, and (d) their songs. Although Chapman gives Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii as the ornithological name, the accepted name now, after many changes, is Catharus guttatus. That TSE intended a joke on the name Turdus in his note is made more probable by American Literature and the American Language (1953): “For the first time, apparently, an American robin, well named Turdus migratorius, crossed the Atlantic under its own power”, and by his verse Oh dae ye ken the turdie lads. The barbarous “aonalaschkae”, as Burroughs explains, survives from an 18th-century catalogue of the flora and fauna of “Russia’s Wild East, including Alaska”, and was an attempt to Latinise the name of the island Umalaska. Quebec Province: on a memo dated 11 Aug 1952 from Peter du Sautoy concerning proofs of the American Collected Poems and Plays (1952) TSE asked for the correction from “Quebec County”. In the front of Hayward’s copy of Sel Poems (1954), the first British edition to make the correction, TSE wrote: “Quebec has at last been recognised as a Province” (King’s). However, Eleanor Cook points out that in TSE’s youth there was a Quebec County within Quebec Province, where he may have heard the bird sing in 1904: “Thrush song in the Quebec woods from May to mid-July and even later is so exquisite that it is a reason in itself for a visit”, N&Q Dec 2008. For the Eliot family camp in Quebec Province, see headnote to the verse letter of 1904, Hoping you are better (“Other Verses”). Its “water-dripping song” is justly celebrated: neither Chapman’s Handbook nor other standard works mention a “water-dripping song”, but the phrase is found in relation to a different bird in Ernest Seton-Thompson’s story (set in Canada), The Springfield Fox in Wild Animals I Have Known (1898):
[Poem I 69, 344 · Textual History II 403]
As I waited in the black woods I heard a sweet sound of dripping water: “Tink tank tenk tink, Ta tink tank tenk tonk.” I did not know of any spring so near, and in the hot night it was a glad find. But the sound led me to the bough of an oak-tree, where I found its source. Such a soft, sweet song; full of delightful suggestion on such a night:
Tonk tank tenk tink
Ta tink a tonk a tank a tink a
Ta ta tink tank ta ta tonk tink
Drink a tank a drink a drunk.
It was the “water-dripping” song of the saw-whet owl.
See McCue 2014c and Christoph Irmscher, Partial Answers June 2014. (Kipling: “With my ‘Tinka-tinka-tinka-tinka-tink!’ · · · we ride the iron stallions down the drink”, The Song of the Banjo 58–60.)
[V] 357 Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop: Coleridge: “Drip! drip! drip! drip!—in such a place as this | It has nothing else to do but drip! drip! drip!”, Osorio opening act IV. Poe: “And, softly dripping, drop by drop”, The Sleeper 5. W. E. Henley: “Dropping, dripping, drip-drip-dropping, | In the drip-drop of the cistern”, In Hospital XXVII 15–16 (“cisterns”, [V] 384).
[Poem I 69, 344 · Textual History II 403]
[V] 359–65 Who is the third who walks always beside you? | When I count, there are only you and I together · · · But who is that on the other side of you?: TSE’s Notes hesitantly identify Ernest Shackleton’s account (though that was three plus a fourth, not two plus a third): “During that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, ‘Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.’ Crean confessed to the same idea”, South: The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914–1917 (1919) ch. X. (Pound to his mother [June 1909]: “the american who has any suspicion that he may write poetry will walk very much alone, with his eyes on the beauty of the past of the old world, or on the glory of a spiritual kingdom, or on some earthly new Jerusalem, which might as well be upon Mr Shackletons antarctic ice fields”. Pound met Shackleton that October. For Shackleton, see notes to [V] 339 and WLComposite 491, 497–98.)
Dostoevski: “‘There’s no phantom here, but only us two and one other. No doubt he is here, the third, between us.’ ‘Who is he? Who is here? What third person?’ Ivan cried in alarm, looking about him, his eyes hastily searching in every corner. ‘The third is God Himself—Providence. He is the third beside us now. Only don’t look for Him, you won’t find Him’”, The Brothers Karamazov (tr. Constance Garnett, 1912) XI viii (C. J. Ackerley, personal communication); for Dostoevski’s novel, see note to [V] 366–76. Whitman: “Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me, | And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me, | And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions, | I fled”, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d 120–23 (Musgrove 75). Joyce: “Ask yourself who is he now. The Mystery Man on the Beach · · · And that fellow today at the graveside in the brown mackintosh · · · Whistle brings rain they say · · · Signs of rain it is · · · And distant hills seem coming nigh”, Ulysses episode XIII (Nausicaa) in Little Review July–Aug 1920 (Day 1970 160). The enigmatic figure appears twelve times in Ulysses.
TSE: “Who are you? I expected | Three visitors, not four”, Murder in the Cathedral I. To Hayward, 27 Mar 1944: “Why is it that there was always one other person, whom one has completely forgotten, even sometimes to the sex, at every party? It’s like Shackleton in the Waste Land or somewhere” (see note to [V] 364). Fireside No. 1 (1899): “I looked again, and found | Alas! ’Twas only us.”
[V] 359 TSE’s Notes The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s): as well as Shackleton’s South, TSE read Scott of the Antarctic. Janet Adam Smith on TSE in autumn 1941: “We t
alked of Scott, and particularly of his Journal” (in Olney ed.). The Journals of Scott’s last expedition had been published in 1913. Paul Elmer More: “Was it De Gama or Magellan—the latter, I think in his tragic voyage around the world—who was so alarmed by the new aspect of the southern sky as he sailed southward”, The Great Refusal 77. For this passage see note to [IV] 314, “the profit and loss”. stimulated: of Leibniz: “The fact that he could receive stimulation from such various sources and remain so independent of the thought of his own time indicates both the robustness and the sensitiveness of genius”, Leibniz’s Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centres (1916). The sequence of TSE’s Notes here records his own stimulation from various sources: Chapman’s Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America, then Shackleton’s South, then Hermann Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos. (To Mary Hutchinson, [9 July? 1919], on Pound: “I daresay he seems to you derivative. But I can show you in the thing I enclose [Gerontion] how I have borrowed from half a dozen sources just as boldly as Shakespeare borrowed from North. But I am as traditionalist as a Chinaman, or a Yankee.”)
[V] 361–63 when I look ahead up the white road | There is always another one · · · Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle: TSE’s Notes on the Tarot pack, [I] 46, adduce the journey of the disciples to Emmaus; Luke 24: 13–16: “And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs. And they talked together of all these things which had happened. And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them. But their eyes were holden that they should not know him.” Hayward: “The return of the god—or perhaps no more than an illusion?”
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 91
