TSE on Conrad: “He is, for one thing, the antithesis of Empire (as well as of democracy); his characters are the denial of Empire, of Nation, of Race almost, they are fearfully alone with the Wilderness”, Kipling Redivivus (1919). “No periodical which professes a devotion to literature could neglect to associate itself with the general regret at the death of a writer who was beyond question a great novelist, and who possessed the modesty and the conviction which a great writer should have. Conrad’s reputation is as secure as that of any writer of his time”, A Commentary in Criterion Oct 1924. “Importance of Conrad James is [added: consciously] on several levels—that of Kipling or Wells on one only. These are writers to whom it is worth while completely to succumb for a time. No author final enough to succumb to completely · · · Prose more developed than verse during this period. Modern versifiers (Pound self) more nourished on prose than verse. Verse only beginning to reprendre son bien [recover its wellbeing]”, Lecture Notes as Norton Professor (1933) fol. 38. To John Hayward, 12 July 1943: “I remember in my youth being offered £25 by Secker to write a critical life of Joseph Conrad.”
[Poem I 79–81 · Textual History II 418]
Epigraph A penny for the Old Guy: for Guy Fawkes, see notes to I 10 and I 15. Iona and Peter Opie’s The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) 280–83 has various versions of this, but none simply giving “the old guy” (Southam). TSE declined the dedication of Herbert Read’s Collected Poems 1913–1925 (Faber, 1926), which appeared shortly after his own Poems 1909–1925, writing on 11 Dec 1925: “For the purpose of implanting the right ideas in the public mind, is an obvious intimacy a good thing or does it raise the spectre of a Gunpowder Plot?” (Kieron Winn, personal communication).
In a letter of 7 Jan 1943, A. S. T. Fisher suggested that those who were “Gathered on this beach of the tumid river” (IV 9) were the shades unable to pay Charon the ferryman a penny fare for their passage across the Styx. TSE concurred, 19 Jan: “I certainly had the Styx in mind and perhaps with a rather more antique than Dantesque association but it is not intended to be a very precise reference.” (When Dante sees “so long a train of people, that I should never have believed death had undone so many”, Inf. III 55–57, the river across which Charon is carrying them is the Acheron. For these lines of Dante, see note to The Waste Land [I] 60–63.) To Fisher’s suggestion that “guy” might be slang, TSE replied: “I was certainly using the word ‘guy’ wholly in the English and not in the American sense. The American meaning of ‘guy’ is too imprecise to be of much use.”
I
I 2 stuffed men: to his Italian translator, Roberto Sanesi, 28 Oct 1960: “I was thinking when I said ‘stuffed men’ rather definitely of scarecrows stuffed with straw, and I think it likely that the image of the Stravinsky ballet of Petrouchka was in my mind. I think, however, that you already hold the right stick to beat the old guy with.” (Pétrouchka, 1911.)
I 2–4 stuffed men · · · filled with straw: Lewis Carroll: “the wisps of straw, that bristled all about him, suggested that he had been originally stuffed with it”, Sylvie and Bruno ch. V (immediately following the Gardener’s Song: see I thought I saw a elephant and note). Jessie L. Weston: “in Lausitz, women with mourning veils carry a straw figure, dressed in a man’s shirt, to the bounds of the next village, where they tear the effigy to pieces”, From Ritual to Romance 51. Virginia Woolf: “to me Dr. Watson is a sack stuffed with straw”, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, a talk printed as Character in Fiction in Criterion July 1924 and reviewed there by “F. M.” in Jan 1925. filled with straw: military: “Bayonet Practice · · · The figure is of stuffed straw”, Popular Mechanics Aug 1917.
I 3–4 Leaning together · · · filled with straw: “they lean against each other, like sheaves · · · The people leaning against another”, The Death of the Duchess II 3, 15. “evil houses leaning all together”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [15]. “Three women leaning forward”, WLComposite 541.
I 4 Alas!: pronounced in TSE’s recordings as if rhyming with “farce”.
I 4, 8 Headpiece · · · As wind in dry grass: Corbière: “Les herbes au vent seront tes cheveux” [The wind-blown grass will be your poll], Petit mort pour rire [Little dead one for fun]. TSE quoted the whole of the poem—one of the Rondels pour après—in his final Clark Lecture (The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 218). TSE: “the speech of the living is wind in dry grass”, Little Gidding I 51 ^ 52 variant. “Not the cicada | And dry grass singing”, The Waste Land [V] 353–54. “the grass is singing”, The Waste Land [V] 386. See note to Rhapsody on a Windy Night 54, “hair of the grass”.
I 4–9 Alas! | Our dried voices · · · dry · · · glass: Christina G. Rossetti: “tiring-glass · · · dried-up violets and dried lavender · · · Nor need she cry Alas!” Passing and Glassing 10–16. TSE on her Old and New Year Ditties III (“Passing away, saith the World”): “What emerges triumphantly from the reserved autobiography of her poems is a surrender to the will of God, an inspired passivity, which is perfectly expressed in her best known, and one of her finest poems”, Types of English Religious Verse (1939).
[Poem I 81 · Textual History II 419]
I 4–16 Alas! · · · grass · · · broken glass · · · eyes · · · souls: Swinburne: “the grass · · · eyes blind as glass, | My body broken · · · stricken ere it saith Alas!”, Laus Veneris 61–64, one of the Swinburne poems that a volume of selections “should certainly contain”, Swinburne as Poet (1920). Swinburne again: “grass · · · Seeing each our souls in last year’s glass, | Félise, alas!” Félise 12–15, a later stanza having “hollower · · · dead men’s speech”, rhyming with “beach” (TSE: “speech | Gathered on this beach of the tumid river”, IV 8–9).
I 5 dried voices: Hope Mirrlees: “Hark to the small dry voice”, Paris (Hogarth Press, 1919) 18. For Mirrlees’s poem, see headnote to The Waste Land, 1. COMPOSITION.
I 5–9 voices · · · dry grass · · · broken glass: “children’s voices, ended in a wail. | | Bottles and broken glass, | Trampled mud and grass”, First Caprice in North Cambridge 4–6. “the song · · · walking across the grass · · · a bottle’s broken glass”, Hidden under the heron’s wing 2–7.
I 5, 14, 16 our dried voices · · · eyes · · · souls: Numbers 11: 6: “our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes.”
I 9–10 rats’ feet over broken glass | In our dry cellar: David E. Lantz: “Even old cellars may be made rat-proof at comparatively small expense. Rat holes may be permanently closed with a mixture of cement, sand, and broken glass”, How to Destroy Rats (1909); see note to II 12–17. “Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year by year”, The Waste Land [III] 195. “The rats are underneath the piles”, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 22.
I 10 dry cellar: the Roman Catholic conspirators led by Robert Catesby and Guy Fawkes rented a cellar below Parliament and filled it with gunpowder. They were discovered on the night of 4–5 Nov 1605 and executed for treason.
I 11 Shape without form: “Aris. conception of real: to be real means to be a self-subsistent stable entity; and this is to be either form without matter (not abstracted from matter) or pure actuality”, Oxford notes on Aristotle (1914–15) fol. 74. Conrad: “a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain”, Heart of Darkness pt. 3 (Drew 122).
I 11–12 Shape without form, shade without colour · · · gesture without motion: in A Brief Introduction to the Method of Paul Valéry (1924), TSE quoted “Servantes sans genoux, | Sourires sans figures” [Servants without knees, smiles without faces] from Valéry’s Cantique des Colonnes [Canticle of the Pillars], commenting: “The indefinable difference is the difference between the fluid and the static: between that which is moving toward an end and that which knows its end and has reached it; which can afford to stand, changeless, like a statue” (Grover Smith 102). “In 1910, when I had my first introduction to literary Paris · · · Valéry, if known at all, was known only as a minor, late Symbolist poet
whose work was represented in the standard anthology of Symbolist verse, Poètes d’Aujourd’hui of Van Bever and Léautaud”, Contemporary French Poetry (1952). A flyer for the Criterion edition of Valéry’s Le Serpent called him “beyond question the most important French poet of our time” (see note to V 7–8). “no beginning, no movement, no peace and no end | But noise without speech, food without taste”, Choruses from “The Rock” I 117–18.
I 11, 14 Shape without form, shade without colour · · · death’s other Kingdom: Paradise Lost II 666–73, of Death: “The other shape, | If shape it might be called that shape had none · · · Or substance might be called that shadow seemed · · · Kingly”. TSE: “death’s other river”, The wind sprang up at four o’clock 11. “O ombre vane, fuor che nell’aspetto!” [O shades empty save in outward show!] Purg. II 70.
[Poem I 81 · Textual History II 419]
I 12 Paralysed force: Corbière: “Des nerfs,—sans nerf. Vigueur sans force” [Of nerves—without nerve. Of vigour without strength], Épitaphe 10 (Grover Smith 1950). A line of Corbière’s poem had given TSE the title Mélange Adultère de Tout.
I 14 Kingdom: to A. S. T. Fisher’s suggestion that the repetitions of this word evoke “the obsession with Nationalism that possessed the world during the years that followed the treaty of Versailles”, TSE replied, 19 Jan 1943: “There was certainly nothing in the way of political criticism in my mind at the time of writing the poem but that is no reason why the reader should not make that application.”
I 15 Remember us—if at all: Ecclesiasticus 44: 8–9: “There be of them, that have left a name behind them, and that their praises might be reported. And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born, and their children after them.” (For “And some there are who”, see Anabasis closing Song.) Remember us: “Please to remember | The Fifth of November, | Gunpowder, treason and plot”, rhyme for Guy Fawkes’ Night (Southam).
I 15 ^ 16 variant Waters of tenderness | Sealed springs of devotion: Song of Solomon 4: 12–15: “a spring shut up, a fountain sealed · · · a well of living waters”.
II
II 1–5 Eyes I dare not meet in dreams | In death’s dream kingdom · · · eyes are | Sunlight: Symons 18, of Gérard de Nerval: “The sun, as he mentions, never appears in dreams; but, with the approach of night, is not every one a little readier to believe in the mystery lurking behind the world? ‘Crains, dans le mur aveugle, un regard qui t’épie!’ [Dread, in the blind wall, a look that spies upon you!] he writes in one of his great sonnets; and that fear of the invisible watchfulness of nature was never absent from him” (referring to Vers dorés [Golden Verses] 9). TSE in 1926: “In so baffling a poet as Gérard de Nerval, about whom I have never yet been able to make up my mind, there are passages obviously of the daydream type · · · as well as the line so admired by Arthur Symons · · · which seems to me consciously of the double-world type”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 153–54 (Clark Lecture V).
II 2–5 In death’s dream kingdom | These do not appear: | There · · · sunlight: on 26 May 1947, TSE was asked whether “there” means “In death’s dream kingdom” or some other place, and about the colon after “appear”. He replied: “I suppose I meant that in ‘death’s dream kingdom’ ‘eyes are sunlight on a broken column’, but you might be right in interpreting it another way” (Mattingly).
II 2, 5–6 In death’s dream kingdom · · · broken · · · swinging: Daniel 2: 44, divining and interpreting the king’s dream kingdom: “the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms” (see note to Journey of the Magi 40–42). TSE: “Swinging between life and death | Here, in death’s dream kingdom”, The wind sprang up at four o’clock 3–4.
II 5 Sunlight on a broken column: see notes to Burnt Norton V 19, 21, 33 and V 32–33.
[Poem I 81–82 · Textual History II 419]
II 6–8 a tree swinging | And voices are | In the wind’s singing: W. O. E. Oesterley: “a tree, swayed by the wind, moved; therefore it was alive”, The Sacred Dance: A Study in Comparative Folklore (1923), reviewed by TSE in The Beating of a Drum (1923) (Crawford 152). Conrad: “He had no restraint, no restraint—just like Kurtz—a tree swayed by the wind”, Heart of Darkness pt. 2 (Grover Smith 106).
II 8–9 More distant and more solemn | Than a fading star: TSE in 1947: “I can’t see why a fading star should be any more solemn or more distant than any other kind of star” (Mattingly). For “the star fades” and John Hayward’s objection, see note to East Coker I 47.
II 12–17] Southam: “Frazer discusses dressing in animal skins for ritual purposes and making divine effigies from straw, the origins of the scarecrow and the country custom of hanging up the bodies of vermin or birds that damage the crops in order to scare off any other of the same species” (see The Golden Bough VIII ch. XV, “The Propitiation of Vermin by Farmers”).
II 19–21 that final meeting | In the twilight kingdom | With eyes I dare not meet in dreams: Purg. XXX 76–78, on re-encountering Beatrice: “Mine eyes drooped down to the clear fount; but beholding me therein, I drew them back to the grass, so great a shame weighed down my brow” (Drew 123). twilight: see note to Little Gidding II 38, “waning dusk”.
II 21 With eyes I dare not meet in dreams.: in printings of the full “suite” of The Hollow Men in TSE’s books from 1925 onwards, this part has ended with II 20,
In the twilight kingdom
making it the only part not to conclude with a full stop. This anomaly confirms that Part II should end as it had done in the Criterion and Dial:
With eyes I dare not meet in dreams.
The omission of the line from 1925 was probably accidental (see McCue 2012, Proposal 6).
III
III 1 dead land: see note to The Waste Land [I] 1–4.
III 3–5, 13 stone images · · · receive | The supplication · · · prayers to broken stone: F. B. Jevons: “The ex-totemist, therefore, who retains nothing of his forefathers’ beliefs and rites but the idea that it is possible to appease a supernatural being by offering sacrifices ‘to’ him, may gravely mislead the historian of ‘primitive’ religion · · · To imagine that his inherited habit of offering sacrifices to stones and rocks is a primitive practice out of which religion has sprung, while the truth is that the worship of stones is a degradation of a higher form of worship”, An Introduction to the History of Religion (1896, rev. 1902) 142 (Southam). TSE studied the book at Harvard.
III 6 twinkle of a fading star: “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”, nursery rhyme The Star by Jane Taylor (Crawford 154).
[Poem I 82 · Textual History II 419]
III 11–13 Trembling with tenderness | Lips that would kiss | Form prayers to broken stone: Romeo and Juliet I v: “Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer” (Grover Smith 102). James Thomson: “Singing is sweet; but be sure of this, | Lips only sing when they cannot kiss”, Art III; TSE quoted the second line in the final paragraph of The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Grover Smith 101). Inf. V 135–36: “questi, che mai da me non fia diviso, | la bocca mi baciò tutto tremante” [he, who shall never be divided from me, kissed my mouth all trembling]; quoted in Dante (1929) I.
IV
IV 5 broken jaw of our lost kingdoms: see note to II 2, 5–6.
IV 9 Gathered on this beach of the tumid river: see note to epigraph.
IV 13 Multifoliate rose: to A. S. T. Fisher, 19 Jan 1943: “I do not think that I can justify ‘multifoliate rose’ rather than single rose except that the succession of long and short syllables of ‘multifoliate’ suited my purpose at the moment, but there is, of course, an allusion to the rose mentioned in the Litany of the Blessed Virgin” (for “the recitation of a litany”, see note to V). The Temple Classics prefatory note to Paradiso XXXI begins: “The redeemed are seen, rank above rank, as the petals of the divine rose” (see notes to Ash-Wednesday II 28 and II 32–33).
IV 15 The hope only: Pearce 54: “There is a clear ambiguity here in the placing of ‘only’, a word for whose placing there are no adequate rules”: nothing but the hope of / the hope of none but / the only hope of. In 1926 Fowler devoted three columns to the placing of “only”.
V
To Michael Redgrave, who had asked advice for a BBC reading, 5 Dec 1930: “Referring to section five of The Hollow Men, the first and the last quatrains should be spoken very rapidly, without punctuation in a flat monotonous voice, rather like children chanting a counting-out game. The intermediate part, on the other hand, should be spoken slowly although also without too much expression, but more like the recitation of a litany.”
Asked about reading in a monotone: “A great deal of the melodic arrangement is intuitive. As for chanting verse, for me the incantatory element is very important. So far as possible, the reciter should not dramatize. It is the words that matter, not the feeling about them. When I read poetry I put myself into a kind of trance and move in rhythm to the rhythm of the piece in question”, T. S. Eliot Answers Questions (1949).
[Poem I 81–82 · Textual History II 419–20]
Two years before The Hollow Men concluded TSE’s Poems 1909–1925, Kipling concluded Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923) with A Counting-Out Song:
What is the song the children sing
When doorway lilacs bloom in Spring,
And the Schools are loosed, and the games are played
That were deadly earnest when Earth was made?
Hear them chattering, shrill and hard,
After dinner-time, out in the yard,
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 96
