The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 93
[V] 399–422 Then spoke the thunder: TSE’s Notes refer to the fable of the Thunder in the Upanishads. Daiches 80 points to the translation by TSE’s Sanskrit teacher, C. R. Lanman, of the end of “the Great Forest Upanishad”, 5.2:
Three kinds of children of Praja-pati, Lord of Children, lived as Brahman-students with Praja-pati their father: the gods, the human beings, the demons [asuras, an order of deities].—Living with him as Brahman-students, the gods spake. “Teach us, Exalted One.”—Unto them he spake this one syllable Da. “Have ye understood?”—“We have understood,” thus they spake, “it was dámyata, control yourself, that thou saidest unto us.” “Yes,” spake he, “ye have understood.”
Then spake to him human beings, “Teach us, Exalted One.”—Unto them he spake that selfsame syllable Da. “Have ye understood?”—“We have understood,” thus they spake, “it was dattá, give, that thou saidest unto us.”—“Yes,” spake he, “ye have understood.”
Then spake to him the demons. “Teach us, Exalted One.”—Unto them he spake that selfsame syllable Da. “Have ye understood?”—“We have understood,” thus they spake, “it was dáyadhvam, be compassionate, that thou saidest unto us.” “Yes,” spake he, “ye have understood.”
This it is which that voice of god repeats, the thunder, when it rolls “Da Da Da,” that is, dámyata dattá dáyadhvam. Therefore these three must be learned, self-control, giving, compassion.
Hindu Law and Custom as to Gifts in Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kittredge (1913)
[Poem I 70, 345 · Textual History II 405]
(These translated paragraphs are prominent as opening not only Lanman’s essay, but the entire festschrift of some 45 papers written for the Harvard teacher.) Lanman: “Old as it all is, there is an amusing touch of modernity, and the thunder is still rolling.” See note to [V] 432 and headnote to The Dry Salvages III.
TSE’s Sanskrit copy of The Twenty-Eight Upanishads (Bombay, 1906), was given to him by Lanman on 6 May 1912. Into it is tipped a manuscript key by Lanman to “Pages of Paṇaçtkaris ed.”, in which item 11 reads “Bṛhadāraṇyaka, 220 (vo 1, 2, 3), Da-da-da = dāmyata datta dayadhvam”. Gordon 85: TSE “acquired a catalogue of books on Vedanta and, in August and October 1913, bought two books by Paul Deussen, Upanishads des Veda and Die Sûtras des Vedânta.” In being transliterated, Sanskrit is distinct from the European languages quoted in The Waste Land, including the Greek of the epigraph. Southam 132: “Eliot’s model for introducing Sanskrit and Pali into The Waste Land was Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia (1879).” Of this “long epic poem on the life of Gautama Buddha”, TSE recorded: “I must have had a latent sympathy for the subject-matter, for I read it through with gusto, and more than once. I have never had the curiosity to find out anything about the author but to this day it seems to me a good poem”, What is Minor Poetry? (1944). To Marco Pallis, 28 Nov 1939, regarding Tibet: “At one time I had even conceived the ambition of studying the language in order to be able to read certain Buddhist texts which are not otherwise available.”
“I admit that I am always prejudiced by books about Brahmanism, Buddhism etc. by people who are presumably quite ignorant of the original languages · · · The author does not appear to be acquainted with the Proceedings and Texts of the Pali Text Society”, “Studies in the Middle Way” by Christmas Humphreys, reader’s report (1940).
[V] 402 My friend: against “Mon ami” in the ts of Menasce’s French translation, TSE wrote “amie” (last letter underlined three times). My friend, blood shaking my heart: Dante, Vita Nuova [XVI] tr. Rossetti: “blood seems as shaken from my heart”, The Early Italian Poets 252. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) lectures XVI and XVII, “Mysticism” (on which TSE took notes while at Harvard), William James quotes: “‘Every man,’ says the Sufi Gulshan-Râz, ‘whose heart is no longer shaken by any doubt, knows with certainty that there is no being save only One.’”
648 My friend, my friend: Dryden: “My friend, my friend | What endless treasure hast thou thrown away”, All for Love IV i (Crawford 2015 399).
[V] 402–404 shaking my heart | The awful daring of a moment’s surrender | Which an age of prudence can never retract (variant cannot retract): on Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness:
His nearest approach to those deeper emotions which shake the veil of Time is in that fine speech of Frankford which surely no men or women past their youth can read without a twinge of personal feeling:
O God! O God! that it were possible
To undo things done; to call back yesterday …
Thomas Heywood (1931), quoting IV vi
(Mermaid text; commonly IV v)
[Poem I 70, 345 · Textual History II 405]
For “the temptation to attempt to retrace one’s steps · · · and make a different choice”, see headnote to Burnt Norton, 2. GENESIS.
William James quotes J. Delbœuf: “whatever may be done, something remains that can never be reversed”, Some Problems of Philosophy ch. IX. TSE: “decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 48. “for the man the act is eternal · · · something is done which can not be undone”, Eeldrop and Appleplex I (1917).
To Paul Elmer More, 10 Aug 1930: “The man who disbelieves in any future life whatever is also a believer in Hell. For in this life one makes, now and then, important decisions; or at least allows circumstance to decide; and some of these decisions are such as have consequences for all the rest of our mortal life. Some people find themselves consequently in circumstances such that the whole of their mortal life must be a torment to them. And if there is no future life then Hell is, for such people, here and now; and I can see nothing worse in a Hell which endures to eternity and a Hell which endures until mere annihilation; the mere stretch of endless time, which is the only way in which we can ordinarily apprehend ‘immortal life’, seems to me to make no difference.” (“I find it difficult to separate the notion of ‘conscience’ from · · · the inestimable benefit and terror of eternity”, Letter from T. S. Eliot 29 July 1944, a paper for The Moot.) In his copy of the Lambeth Conference Encyclical Letter (1930), in a passage on fornication, TSE underlined “Things can never be the same again” (93) with marginal “x”. Valéry: “les âges · · · cette prudence infinie qui lui permet les plus folles hardiesses” [the ages · · · that infinite prudence which permits the wildest daring], La Crise de l’esprit (1919), letter II. See A Note on “The Tower” (1963), quoted in headnote to Sweeney Agonistes, 11. BRITISH PERFORMANCES.
[V] 403 a moment’s surrender: “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality · · · And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done”, Tradition and the Individual Talent I, III (1919). “selflessness and self-surrender. | For most of us there is only the unattended | Moment, the moment in and out of time”, The Dry Salvages V 22–24. “un instant de puissance et de délire”, Dans le Restaurant 14.
[V] 403, 405 a moment’s surrender · · · By this, and this only, we have existed: “It is in fact in moments of moral and spiritual struggle depending upon spiritual sanctions, rather than in those ‘bewildering minutes’ in which we are all very much alike, that men and women come nearest to being real”, After Strange Gods 42. In Tradition and the Individual Talent II (1919), TSE quoted eleven lines of Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy III iv (giving neither title nor author), including
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?
Quoting the last of these lines again in his review of Allardyce Nicoll’s edition of Tourneur, TSE commented: “(Bewildering is the reading of the ‘Mermaid’ text; both Churton Collins and Mr. Nicoll give bewitching without mentioning any alternative reading: it is a pity if they be right, for
bewildering is much the richer word here)”, Cyril Tourneur (1930). Swinburne had quoted the speech with the correct word, “bewitching”, adding a footnote on the metre (The Age of Shakespeare, 1908, 279–80); TSE on Swinburne’s book: “contains no information and conveys no clear impression of the dramatists discussed. A few notable quotations”, Studies in Contemporary Criticism II (1918). For The Revenger’s Tragedy see note to Gerontion 22. For other variations from the texts of 17th-century drama, see notes to Gerontion 54–56 and epigraph. To Stephen Spender, 9 May 1935: “you don’t really criticise an author to whom you have never surrendered yourself. Even just the bewildering minute counts: you have to give yourself up, and then recover yourself, and the third movement is having something to say, before you have wholly forgotten both surrender and recovery. Of course the self recovered is never the same as the self before it was given.” For “writers to whom it is worth while completely to succumb for a time”, see The Hollow Men, note to epigraph on the section-title page.
[V] 404 age: to his Swedish translator Erik Mesterton, 20 Jan 1932: “means any long period of time with the suggestion of bringing one into old age.”
[V] 405 By this, and this only, we have existed: “We should say: This and this is what we need”, The Death of the Duchess II 44. we have existed: “So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good; so far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist”, Baudelaire (1930) (Ricks 220). (“Essential moral preoccupation. Evil is rare, bad is common. Evil cannot even be perceived but by a very few · · · Real Evil is to Bad just as Saintliness Heroism to Decent Behaviour”, Lecture Notes as Norton Professor (1933) fol. 37.)
[Poem I 70, 345 · Textual History II 405]
[V] 406–407 obituaries | Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider: TSE’s Notes quote from Webster, The White Devil V vi:
O men
That lie upon your death-beds, and are haunted
With howling wives, ne’er trust them; they’ll re-marry
Ere the worm pierce your winding sheet: ere the spider
Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.—
The verse speech ends as prose: “we lay our souls to pawn to the Devil for a little pleasure, and a woman makes the bill of sale. That ever man should marry!” Webster again: “flattery in the epitaphs, which shows | More sluttish far than all the spiders’ webs | Shall ever grow upon it”, The Devil’s Law Case II iii, with “what a small room” ten lines later (TSE: “empty rooms”, [V] 409) (Friend). Hayward: “‘What will the spider do, | Suspend its operations · · · ?’ Gerontion 65–66.” beneficent spider: Angelo de Gubernatis: “In the Mahâbhâratam we find two women that · · · weave upon the loom of the year with black and white threads, i.e. they spin the days and the nights. We, therefore, have a beneficent spider and a malignant one”, Zoological Mythology (1872) II 164. (For Penelope the weaver, day and night, see note to The Dry Salvages I 35–41, “unweave, unwind, unravel”.)
[V] 407–13 memories · · · I have heard the key | Turn in the door · · · We think of the key: Bergson: “ce sont les nécessités de l’action qui ont déterminé les lois du rappel; elles seules détiennent les clefs de la conscience” [it is the needs of action which determine the laws of recall; they alone hold the keys of consciousness], L’Energie spirituelle ch. V (Philip Le Brun, RES May 1967). “Memory! | You have the key · · · at the door”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 72–77.
[V] 408 under seals broken by the lean solicitor: in Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Jekyll’s solicitor, Utterson, of Gaunt Street, is described in the first sentence as “lean”, and breaks several seals. “Utterson locked the door of his business room · · · and set before him an envelope addressed by the hand and sealed with the seal of his dead friend”, ch. 6 (Sumanya Satpathy, Papers on Language and Literature Summer 1995).
[V] 411, 432 Dayadhvam: pronounced Dye-it-vahm in TSE’s recordings.
[V] 411–14 I have heard the key · · · Thinking of the key: TSE’s Notes quote Inf. XXXIII 46–47: “ed io sentii chiavar l’uscio di sotto | all’ orribile torre” [and below I heard the outlet of the horrible tower locked up]. Temple ed. noted: “When Guido of Montefeltro took command of the Pisan forces in · · · 1289, the keys of the prison were thrown into the river and the captives left to starve.” Geoffrey Carter suggests that TSE was misled by this note and supposed that the Italian verb “chiavare” was related to “chiave”, key, whereas Ugolino actually hears the door being nailed up (N&Q Oct 1977). TSE: “Some wicked and heretical old sinner | Perhaps, who had been walled up for his crimes”, A Fable for Feasters 17–18. Under the heading “The True Church and the Nineteen Churches”: “To one who, like the present writer, passes his days in this City of London (quand’io sentii chiavar l’uscio de sotto) the loss of these towers · · · will be irreparable”, London Letter in Dial June 1921 (“towers”, [V] 382). See both notes to [III] 264, “Magnus Martyr”.
[Poem I 70, 345 · Textual History II 405–406]
[V] 411–14, 420 the key | Turn in the door once and turn once only · · · the key · · · the key · · · a prison: “I did enter you in my heart | Before ever you vouchsafed to ask for the key · · · her back turned”, The Death of the Duchess II 23–25 (following the lines that became The Waste Land [II] 108–10).
[V] 413 each in his prison: TSE’s Notes quote Bradley, Appearance and Reality 346. In his copy TSE scored (and partly underlined) the following passages: “But there is a natural mistake which, perhaps, I should briefly notice. Our inner worlds, I may be told, are divided from each other, but the outer world of experience is common to all; and it is by standing on this basis that we are able to communicate. Such a statement would be incorrect. My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings · · · So much seems clear, but it is not true that our physical experiences have unity, in any sense which is inapplicable to the worlds we call internal · · · In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul. But, if on the other hand, you are considering identity of content, and, on that basis, are transcending such particular existences, then there is at once, in principle, no difference between the inner and the outer.” TSE quoted from the passage in Leibniz’s Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centres (1916). TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934) includes Bertrand Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World (1914). Pater: “Experience · · · is ringed round for each of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced · · · each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner in its own dream of a world”, Studies in the History of the Renaissance Conclusion. Where I. A. Richards wrote “Communication · · · takes place when one mind so acts upon its environment that another mind is influenced, and in that other mind an experience occurs which is like” (Principles of Literary Criticism ch. XXI), TSE underlined “like” and asked “proof?” TSE: “Beyond the circle of our thought she stands”, On a Portrait 12. “Within the circle of my brain”, The Burnt Dancer 30. “I could not touch the handle. | Why could I not walk out of my prison?” The Cocktail Party I iii.
[V] 416 a broken Coriolanus: Coriolanus IV v: “broke | And scarred”. TSE: “Broken and scarred”, Interlude: in a Bar 11. See note on the title Coriolan.
[V] 418–19] Hayward: “Cf. ‘Frisch weht der Wind’, 31—the happy moment in Tristan and Isolde’s life. T. S. Eliot was, in his youth, a keen and practised amateur yachtsman—a biographical fact which has some bearing on his use of, and delight in, sea-imagery.” W. G. Tinckom-Fernandez on TSE in the Harvard class of 1910: “I used to descend on him at his summer home in East Gloucester on my way to Maine · · · He used to take me sailing in his catboat, and he could handle a sheet with the best in Gloucester”, Harvard Advocate Dec 1938.
[V] 419 expert: with stress expèrt in TSE’s recordings. expert with sail and oar: Purg. XII 5–6: �
�chè qui è buon con la vela e coi remi, | quantunque può ciascun, pinger sua barca” [for here ’tis well that with sail and with oars, each one urge his bark along with all his might] (Friend).
[V] 420 The sea was calm: Arnold: “The sea is calm tonight”, Dover Beach 1. TSE: “The sea is calm, the sea is still”, The Columbiad st. 26.
[Poem I 70–71, 346 · Textual History II 406]
[V] 420–22 your heart would have responded | Gaily, when invited, beating obedient | To controlling hands: “my heart beneath his feet. | I’d give my life to his control”, Convictions 25–26 (“my heart | Under my feet”, The Waste Land [III] 296–97). Aristotle: “it is not clear whether the soul may not be the actuality of the body as the sailor is of the ship”, De Anima bk. II ch. 1. TSE wrote in his copy of the Greek: “This comparison holds only in that the sailor directs the ship as the mind directs the body.” Nevertheless: “It is better to go to the De Anima than to the Purgatorio for a theory of the soul”, Reflections on Contemporary Poetry II (1917).
[V] 422–24 controlling hands | | I sat upon the shore | Fishing: TSE’s Notes refer to From Ritual to Romance ch. IX. The Fisher King was “a being semi-divine, semi-human, standing between his people and land, and the unseen forces which control their destiny”.
[V] 423–25 I sat upon the shore | Fishing · · · Shall I at least set my lands in order?: Edward Carpenter: “I, the King, am come to dwell in my own lands · · · Here on this rock in the sun, where the waves obedient wash at my feet, where the fisherman passing spreads his net on the sands, | I the King sit waiting”, Towards Democracy (1912 ed.) 337 (TSE: “obedient”, [V] 421).