The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 92
[V] 364 I do not know whether a man or a woman: Henry Clarke Warren recounts the legend of a saint meeting a husband seeking his wife on the road: “Was it a woman, or a man, | That passed this way? I cannot tell. | But this I know, a set of bones | Is traveling on upon this road”, Buddhism in Translations 298.
[V] 366–72 high in the air · · · lamentation · · · cracked earth · · · the violet air: “the violet air · · · meditation · · · sunbaked · · · the violet sky · · · the evening air”, So through the evening, through the violet air 1–10.
[Poem I 69, 344 · Textual History II 403–404]
[V] 366–76 What is that sound · · · Unreal: TSE’s Notes quote in German the closing words of Die Brüder Karamasoff oder der Untergang Europas [“The Brothers Karamazov”, or the Downfall of Europe] by Hermann Hesse: [Already half Europe, at all events half Eastern Europe, is on the road to Chaos. In a state of drunken illusion she is reeling into the abyss and, as she reels, she sings a drunken hymn such as Dmitri Karamazoff sang. The insulted citizen laughs that song to scorn, the saint and seer hear it with tears.] (TSE to his mother, 6 Jan 1920: “I wonder if America realises how terrible the condition of central Europe is.”) This and two shorter essays make up Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos (1920), which TSE sent to Sydney Schiff in Jan 1922. As Stephen Hudson, Schiff translated the book as In Sight of Chaos (Zurich, 1923). TSE to Scofield Thayer, 27 Mar 1922: “I discovered when in Switzerland a very admirable essay entitled Blick ins Chaos by Hermann Hesse. Mr. Stephen Hudson has made a translation of this and is sending it to you. I think that you will find it an interesting work.” The Dial published a revision of the translation in June and Aug. In a letter of 24 May 1922 from Lugano, TSE invited Hesse to tea. They met on 28 May and Hesse’s Recent German Poetry appeared together with The Waste Land in the first issue of the Criterion in Oct. TSE: “Hermann Hesse, for whose book on Dostoevski Blick ins Chaos I have a great admiration, though I do not agree with his conclusions, regards Dostoevski as the prophet of a new religion”, A Neglected Aspect of Chapman (1924). that sound · · · lamentation · · · swarming | Over endless plains · · · Ringed by the flat horizon: “an endless drift | Of shrieking forms in a circular desert · · · contagion”, The Family Reunion II iii. sound high in the air: Whitman: “musician | Hovering unseen in air”, The Mystic Trumpeter 1–2 (Musgrove 63). For Whitman’s lines see notes to [V] 381–82 and Portrait of a Lady I 34–36.
[V] 368–69 hordes swarming | Over endless plains: Hesse regarded as prophetic Kaiser Wilhelm’s “fear of the Eastern hordes, which · · · might be enrolled against Europe”, In Sight of Chaos 23. Across Mongolian Plains: A Naturalist’s Account of China’s “Great Northwest” was published in New York in 1921. TSE: “fierce Mongolian horde”, Growltiger’s Last Stand 41. “across death’s other river | The Tartar horsemen shake their spears”, The wind sprang up at four o’clock 11–12. For “conquest of vast spaces in Asiatic wastes”, see Preface to Anabasis (in headnote). For “the passing of the horde” [le passage des hordes], see Inoubliable France in note to The Dry Salvages II 56–66, III 3–15.
[V] 369 Over endless plains: “over desert plains”, Bacchus and Ariadne 9.
[V] 369–98 plains · · · horizon · · · mountains · · · black hair · · · bats with baby · · · beat · · · Tolling · · · bells · · · cisterns · · · hole · · · grass · · · crouched: Browning: “grey plain all round: | Nothing but plain to the horizon’s bound · · · What made those holes and rents · · · As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair | In leprosy · · · Will the night send a howlet or a bat? · · · It may have been a water-rat I speared, | But, ugh! it sounded like a baby’s shriek · · · Toads in a poisoned tank · · · A great black bird, Apollyon’s bosom-friend, | Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned · · · All round to mountains · · · those two hills on the right, | Crouched · · · it tolled | Increasing like a bell”, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came IX–XXXIII (A. D., N&Q 8 Dec 1951).
[V] 371–73 over the mountains · · · Falling towers: Isaiah 30: 25: “upon every mountain · · · in the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall.”
[Poem I 69–70, 344 · Textual History II 404]
[V] 372 Cracks · · · reforms · · · bursts: to his Swedish translator Erik Mesterton, 20 Jan 1932: “The three words are intransitive verbs, the city being the subject.” the violet air: Thomas Middleton: “violet air, curious garden, quaint walks, fantastical arbours, three back doors, and a coach-gate!” Your Five Gallants I i. Poetic diction since early 19th century. Dowson: “In the deep violet air”, Chanson sans paroles 1 (Crawford 36). Henry James: “open to the violet air”, The Ambassadors bk. II ii. See note to [III] 215, 220 for “the violet hour” and The Ambassadors.
[V] 373 Falling towers: “When cards and images were brought together, the dance could be brought to life in all its complexity, the Juggler (who symbolizes the beginning of all things), the Hanged Man, the Falling Tower, the Fool · · · each having its proper part in the measure”, TSE’s jacket material for The Greater Trumps by Charles Williams (1954). Drafts of The Rock:
When the towers that you build are fallen,
The bricks made earth again, the streets are traceless,
Your bridges sunken in the bed of Thames
The spiritual City will survive you
And men shall speak of London: that great city.
Bodleian, MS Don. d. 44 fol. 163, pencil addition, final readings
620 Tumbling towers: Edward Carpenter: “the lightning flashes on evil raw places. I stretch uneasily in my grave and tumble the towers of great cities”, Towards Democracy (1912 ed.) 17. Horace: “Towers tumble · · · Thunderbolts strike”, Odes II x, tr. David Watson (1712, rev. Samuel Patrick, 1747). To a Gentleman, Who Desired Proper Materials for a Monody (Poetical Calendar, 1763): “Solemn fanes—and cypress bowers— | Thunder-storms—and tumbling towers” (TSE’s part title, What the Thunder said).
[V] 374 Jerusalem Athens: Shelley: “Athens or Jerusalem”, The Triumph of Life 134 (shortly before the passage which had made “an indelible impression” on TSE: see notes to [I] 48 and 60–63).
622 Vienna, London. Unreal: this single line from the draft becomes two in the published text, leaving “Unreal” on its own line. A word was likewise isolated when TSE quoted from Pericles III i and curtailed the last of three lines in Poets’ Borrowings (1928):
The seaman’s whistle
Is as a whisper in the ear of death
Unheard.
See note to WLComposite 158.
[V] 376 Unreal: throughout TSE. “The Nature of Reality” was the subject of Harvard’s “Seminary in Metaphysics” by Charles Bakewell (1912–13) and by R. F. A. Hoernlé (first half of 1913–14), which prompted TSE’s essay Degrees of Reality (1913). “we never, I think, dispense with the blunt ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ altogether”, Knowledge and Experience 89. “Appearances, appearances, he said, | And nowise real; unreal, and yet true”, Oh little voices of the throats of men 25–26. Murder in the Cathedral I, THE FOUR TEMPTERS: “All things are unreal, | Unreal or disappointing · · · All things become less real, man passes | From unreality to unreality.” (“human kind | Cannot bear very much reality”, Burnt Norton I 42–43.)
[Poem I 69, 344 · Textual History II 404]
[V] 377–78 A woman drew her long black hair out tight | And fiddled whisper music on those strings: Hayward: “One of the ‘daughters of music’ (‘and all the daughters of musick shall be brought low’, Ecclesiastes 12: 4).” Tennyson: “combing out her long black hair”, The Princess IV 257 (Musgrove 88). The Princess was prescribed reading for TSE’s fifth-year class at school (Smith Academy yearbook, 1903–04). TSE: “Compare the description of the agony in In the Same Boat · · · ‘Suppose you were a violin string—vibrating—and someone put his finger on you’ with the image of the ‘banjo string drawn tight’ for the breaking wave in The Finest Story in the World”, Rudyard Kipling (1941) (Crawfor
d 132). “Transmit the Preludes, through his hair”, Portrait of a Lady I 9. fiddled: Fowler: “If the word is, as the OED says, ‘now only in familiar or contemptuous use’, it is matter for regret, & those who defy this canon deserve well of the language · · · Even now She fiddles divinely (as compared with playing the violin in that manner) surely supplies a felt need.” whisper music: see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 52–53.
[V] 377, 379 A woman · · · her long black hair · · · baby faces in the violet light: Browning: “Gorgon on the breast,— | One loves a baby face, with violets there, | Violets instead of laurel in the hair”, Protus 4–6.
[V] 377–84 A woman · · · exhausted wells: adapting So through the evening, through the violet air 13–16, 19–22 (see headnote to that poem).
[V] 377–94 hair · · · crawled · · · down a blackened wall · · · voices · · · out of empty cisterns · · · only the wind’s home. | It has no windows, and the door swings · · · Then a damp gust | Bringing rain: “the window panes · · · Stirred by the morning air · · · shadows crawled and crept · · · crawled · · · on his hair · · · a little damp dead breeze | That rattled at the window · · · human voices in the chimneys”, Oh little voices of the throats of men 37–47.
[V] 379–81 bats · · · Whistled · · · downward down a blackened wall: Tennyson: “the walls | Blackened about us, bats wheeled”, The Princess Conclusion 109–110 (Musgrove 88). Blake: “Every black’ning Church appalls; | And the hapless Soldier’s sigh | Runs in blood down Palace walls”, London (Helen Watson- Williams, English Summer 1955). TSE: “the surface of the blackened river”, Song (“The golden foot I may not kiss or clutch”) 9 (see note). “a blackened street”, Preludes IV 8.
[V] 379–84 bats with baby faces · · · exhausted wells: Hayward: “Mr. Eliot thinks that the imagery of this passage was in part suggested by a picture of the school of Hieronimo Bosch.” (The form “Hieronimo” occurs in several languages; for “Hieronymo’s mad againe”, see [V] 431 and note.) Grover Smith 95 proposed Hell, or The Sinful World (Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam), a panel which includes a bat-like creature with dull human features crawling down a rock wall, but the history of the panel before 1927 is unknown. baby faces · · · light · · · wings · · · towers: Wordsworth: “at dead of night | And the ancient church was filled with light · · · round the sacred places | They guard, with wingèd baby-faces”, The Redbreast 53–57.
[Poem I 69, 344–45 · Textual History II 404]
[V] 381 crawled head downward down a blackened wall: Bram Stoker: “my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle over the dread abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings”, Dracula, ch. III; see note to [V] 384, 388 (Lee J. Richmond, Explicator Nov 1971). Valerie Eliot wrote of her annotation of the drafts: “What I regret omitting, under the impression that it was known, is a reference linking the man (‘bats’ in the received text) who crept ‘head downward down a wall’ · · · with the scene in Dracula where the Count crawls in a similar way”, TLS 18 May 1973. Tennyson: “To drop head-foremost in the jaws | Of vacant darkness”, In Memoriam XXXIV 15–16 (see note to [V] 330). Poe: “o’er the floor and down the wall, | Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall”, The Sleeper 29–30 (the poem immediately preceding The City in the Sea, for which see next note). Poe again, in a story: “soot · · · in the chimney, and (horrible to relate!) the corpse of the daughter, head downward, was dragged therefrom”, The Murders in the Rue Morgue (for which, see notes to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 17 and to Sweeney Erect).
[V] 381–82 crawled head downward · · · wall · · · upside down · · · towers: for John Day, “A roof · · · growing downwards · · · upside-down”, see note to [III] 197. upside down in air were towers: Tennyson: “And solid turrets topsy-turvy in air”, Gareth and Lynette 251 (Musgrove 85). Whitman: “musician | Hovering unseen in air”, The Mystic Trumpeter 1–2. Poe: “pendulous in air, | While from a proud tower · · · Death looks gigantically down”, The City in the Sea 27–28.
[V] 382–83, 387 upside down in air were towers | Tolling reminiscent bells · · · the chapel: “The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned”, Choruses from “The Rock” VII 30. To R. Webb-Odell, 5 Feb 1934, on potential titles for the pageant: “Is The Church Bells of London too flat, or too clumsy, or anything else? ‘Bells’ has a merry sound.”
[V] 383 kept the hours: see note to A Song for Simeon 17–20, “hour of maternal sorrow”.
[V] 384 voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells: Verlaine: “Et ô ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!”, Parsifal. Conrad Aiken: “his loud voice crying from the cistern”, The Jig of Forslin IV iii (1916) (Joseph Warren Beach, PMLA Sept 1954). empty cisterns: Ecclesiastes 12: 6: “Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel be broken at the cistern” (Hayward). Jeremiah 2: 13: “For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water” (Grover Smith 310). Jeremiah 14: 3–4: “they come to the cisterns, they find no water · · · Because of the ground which is dismayed, since there is no rain on the land”, American Standard Version (1901) (Florence Jones, American Literature Nov 1966). cistern: OED 3: “Applied to a pond, or a natural reservoir or depression containing water”, quoting “Cisterns supposed to be in the earth, especially in the mountains”, 1662.
[Poem I 69–70, 345 · Textual History II 404]
630 ^ 631] The infant hydrocephalous, who sat
By a bridge end, by a dried-up water course
And fiddled (with a knot tied in one string)
We come
hydrocephalous · · · water course: OED “hydrocephalus”: “Path. A disease of the brain especially incident to young children · · · with failure of the memory and mental faculties; water on the brain.” The noun is used of the disease, not the patient (known as a hydrocephalic). hydrocephalous · · · fiddled · · · string: “fiddled whisper-music on those strings · · · contorted by some mental blight · · · feverish impulses gathered head”, So through the evening, through the violet air 14, 17, 23 (the poem of 1913/14 being strongly related to The Waste Land). fiddled · · · knot · · · string: “drew her hair out tight | And fiddled whisper-music on those strings”, [V] 377–78. “knots of hair”, Sweeney Erect 13. sat | By a bridge end, by a dried up water course | And fiddled (with a knot tied in one string): “I sat · · · Fishing · · · arid · · · Bridge”, [V] 423–26.
[V] 384, 388 voices · · · the empty chapel: Malory: “Than Sir Galahad com to a mountayne where he founde a chapell passynge olde, and found therein nobody, for all was desolate. And there he · · · harde a voyce”, Morte d’Arthur XIII xiv. Bram Stoker: “an old, ruined chapel”, Dracula ch. IV.
[V] 385–89 decayed hole · · · tumbled graves · · · empty chapel · · · no windows: Hayward: “Vide From Ritual to Romance: the Journey to the Chapel Perilous, an ‘initiation’ ceremony. The macabre décor of the mythical chapel was intended to test the initiate’s courage. The cemetery is associated with the Chapel Perilous in some versions of the Grail legend.” hole: Weston’s ch. XIII, “The Perilous Chapel”, quotes the romance Owain Miles (or The Purgatory of Saint Patrick): “Then with his monks the Prior anon, | With Crosses and with Gonfanon | Went to that hole forthright.”
[V] 390 no one: to Herbert Read, 1 June 1961: “Why will secretaries write no-one for no one?” Fowler recommends the hyphen, though “printers are attached to no one”.
[V] 391 Only a cock stood on the rooftree: Hayward: “The cock as the dispeller of evil spirits. (Cf. ‘It faded on the crowing of the cock’, Hamlet I i and also ‘The strain of strutting Chanticleer | Cry, Cock-a-diddle-dow’, The Tempest I ii).” rooftree: OED: “the main beam or ridge-pole of a roof�
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[V] 391–92 Only a cock stood on the rooftree | Co co rico co co rico: French equivalent of cock-a-doodle-doo. In Edmond Rostand’s Chantecler, the cockerel Chantecler believes that it is his cries that cause the sun to rise. The play was a hit in Paris in 1910 and was performed in Boston in 1911; TSE recalled it in Whether Rostand Had Something about Him (1919) (Timothy Materer, N&Q Oct 1977). Hope Mirrlees: “One often hears a cock | Do do do mi i i”, Paris 6. rico: pronounced as in ricochet in TSE’s recordings.
[V] 393–94, 399 a damp gust | Bringing rain · · · Then spoke the thunder: Conrad: “the air full of heat, odorous and sickly, was pierced by a sharp gust of wind, bringing with it the fresh, damp feel of the falling rain · · · there was a short period of formidable immobility above and below, during which the voice of the thunder was heard”, An Outcast of the Islands IV v; with “tree-tops” (TSE: “rooftree”, [V] 391) (Unger 1956 234–36).
[V] 395 Ganga: pronounced with two hard g’s in TSE’s recordings. Hayward: “Reference to the earliest Aryan beliefs in fertility. Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata are Sanskrit words.” TSE of Tristan Tzara: “at times he becomes difficult to follow: ‘Bonjour sans cigarette tzantzanza | ganga | bouzdouc zdouc nfounfa mbaah’”, Reflections on Contemporary Poetry IV (1919).
[V] 397 Himavant: Warren 8: “The Himalaya mountains. Himālaya and Himavant are Sanskrit words of almost identical signification. The former means ‘snow-abode,’ and is a compound of hima, ‘snow,’ and ālaya, ‘settling-down place,’ or ‘abode.’ Hima-vant means ‘snow-y’.”
[Poem I 70, 345 · Textual History II 404–405]
[V] 398 The jungle crouched, humped in silence: to his French translator Pierre Leyris, 3 Dec 1945 on this “intentional ambiguity”: “Humped here can be taken either as predicate or adjective and partakes of both.” The jungle crouched: James: “Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle”, The Beast in the Jungle ch. II (Grover Smith 1983 117).