The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 97
As the sides are chosen and all submit
To the chance of the lot that shall make them “It”.
(Singing) “Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo!
Catch a nigger by the toe!
If he hollers let him go!
Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo!
You—are—It!”
(For a source shared by TSE and Kipling, Whitman’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, see note to Portrait of a Lady II 1.) Kipling narrates the prehistory and history of the world, and compares the children’s game in which “the player who has the task of catching or touching the others” is “It” (OED “it” B. 1f) to the momentum of war and enlistment through the ages.
Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, and Mo
Were the First Big Four of the Long Ago · · ·
But the development of “the Tribes” into “the Nations” has made no difference, for the Big Four of the Versailles Treaty in 1919 (Britain, France, America and Germany) had also “watched the mess” and “Pitied Man in his helplessness”.
Thus it happened, but none can tell
What was the Power behind the spell—
Fear, or Duty, or Pride, or Faith—
That sent men shuddering out to death— · · ·
(refrain)
The men went out who would rather not,
And fought with the Tiger, the Pig and the Ape,
To hammer the world into decent shape.
(refrain)
Nothing is left of that terrible rune
But a tag of gibberish tacked to a tune
That ends the waiting and settles the claims
Of children arguing over their games;
For never yet has a boy been found
To shirk his turn when the turn came round;
Nor even a girl has been known to say
“If you laugh at me I shan’t play.”
For— “Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo,
(Don’t you let the grown-ups know!)
You may hate it ever so,
But if you’re chose you’re bound to go,
When Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo
Make—you—It!”
V 1–4 Here we go round the prickly pear · · · At five o’clock in the morning: nursery rhymes:
Here we go round the mulberry bush,
The mulberry bush, the mulberry bush.
Here we go round the mulberry bush,
So early in the morning.
[Poem I 83 · Textual History II 420]
and “Here we go gathering nuts in May · · · At five o’clock in the morning”. In ch. IX of The Ebb-Tide by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne (1894), Huish sings “’Ere we go round the mulberry bush on a cowld and frosty mornin’”. (For the novel—which TSE praised in The Defects of Kipling (1909) as “a triumph”—and for its influence on this poem, see Ricks 2001.) Frazer: “how often with the decay of old faiths the serious rites and pageants of grown people have degenerated into the sports of children”, The Golden Bough IV 77. Crawford 154–55: “It was ten years since Eliot had been interested in Ecstasy and Dance Hypnosis among the American Indians, and had read about the lively ‘moonlight dances’ of Bushmen” (in Irving King’s The Development of Religion, 1910). prickly pear: a cactus, but with an edible, fleshy fruit. prickly: pronounced as two syllables not three in TSE’s recordings. five o’clock in the morning: hour of the Resurrection (Jones 111).
V 1–4, 28–31] The element of sing-song is audible in TSE’s recordings.
V 5–6 Between the idea | And the reality: Bradley, Appearance and Reality ch. XVI: “We must take our stand on the distinction between idea and reality” (TSE scored the margin shortly before and after this, and the whole of the previous paragraph). Closing words of ch. XXIV: “only a view which asserts degrees of reality and truth, and which has a rational meaning for words such as ‘higher’ and ‘lower’—it is only such a view which can do justice alike to the sides of idea and existence” (beneath which TSE wrote: “In Reality idea and existence coincide: each idea is its own existence, each existence its own idea. This means that both idea and existence are falsified”).
V 5, 8 Between the idea · · · And the act: Bergson: “la conscience · · · c’est · · · la distance de l’acte à l’idée” [consciousness · · · is · · · the distance between the act and the idea], L’Evolution créatrice ch. II.
V 7–8 Between the motion | And the act: in A Brief Introduction to the Method of Paul Valéry (1924), TSE quotes from Valéry’s Le Cimetière marin [The Cemetery by the Sea], writing of the line “Entre le vide et l’événement pur” [Between the void and the pure event] that it “suggests so strongly though accidentally Brutus’s ‘Between the acting of a dreadful thing | And the first motion, all the interim is | Like a phantasma or a hideous dream’” (Grover Smith 102).
V 9 Falls the shadow: Ernest Dowson, Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae 1–2, 30–31 (title from Horace IV i):
Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed · · ·
· · · But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine
TSE quoted from the poem in The Last Twenty-Five Years of English Poetry (1939). To the editor of the TLS: “In the interesting review of Ernest Dowson’s Poems in your last issue, your reviewer suggests that I caught the phrase ‘Falls the shadow’ from Dowson’s Cynara. This derivation had not occurred to my mind, but I believe it to be correct, because the lines he quotes have always run in my head, and because I regard Dowson as a poet whose technical innovations have been underestimated”, Dowson’s Poems (1935); see note to the title The Hollow Men. Crawford 151, quoting half a dozen Dowson poems: “It is a landscape like Dowson’s, ‘Hollow Lands’ where, in ‘the twilight of the year’, ‘dead people with pale hands | Beckon’ by a ‘weary river’, ‘where pale stars shine’, where, at passion’s enactment, ‘There fell thy shadow’.”
V 9–10 Shadow | For Thine is the Kingdom: the Lord’s Prayer: “For Thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory”. 1 Chronicles 29: 11–15: “thine is the kingdom · · · our days on earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.”
V 16 Life is very long: contesting the aphorism ars longa, vita brevis. Conrad: “‘you are young yet. Life is very long’”, An Outcast of the Islands I iv (Vilas Sarang, N&Q Feb 1968).
[Poem I 83–84 · Textual History II 420]
V 21–22 Between the essence | And the descent: Jain 1991: “In Platonic philosophy the essence is the ideal which finds material expression in its descent to the lower, material plane of reality.”
V 25–27 For Thine is | Life is | For Thine is the: Lennard 201: “the speakers make a desperate attempt to incorporate the Prayer into the text proper, moving the sequence of right-justified lines to the left margin, and resetting them in romans. But in the process the lines are truncated, and do not have the power to prevent the return of the spine-chilling parody” (of the nursery rhyme). For various forms of iteration in TSE, see note to The Waste Land [III] 277–78, 290–91, 306.
V 28 This is the way the world ends: “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be: world without end. Amen”, Gloria, B00k of Common Prayer.
V 28–31 This is the way the · · · whimper: among many such formulaic rhymes, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes has “This is the way the ladies ride · · · This is the way the gentlemen ride · · · This is the way the farmers ride”. After the child has been bounced up and down, the song ends with a fall. Here we go round the mulberry bush (see V 1–4) incorporates acting-out lines: “This is the way we clap our hands”, etc. A sheet of “OBJÊTS TROUVÉS” which TSE sent to John Hayward, 24 May 1937, includes a cutting with the four lines V 28–31 with “ENTRANCE FEE: £1” (King’s). “This is the way to the temple, and we so many crowding the way”, Coriolan I. Triumphal March 6. the way the world ends | Not wi
th a bang but a whimper: “children’s voices in little corners | Whimper whimper through the night | Of what disaster do you warn us · · · The destiny that may be leaning | Toward us from your hidden star”, The Burnt Dancer 20–27 (“Leaning”, I 3). “children whimpering in corners”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [5]. On Danny Deever in Rudyard Kipling (1941):
when the climax comes—
“What’s that that whimpers over’ead?” said Files-on-Parade,
“It’s Danny’s soul that’s passin’ now,” the Colour-Sergeant said.
(the word whimper being exactly right) the atmosphere has been prepared for a complete suspension of disbelief.
Adapting Coleridge: “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (Biographia Literaria ch. XIV).
For the Gunpowder Plot, which ended not with a bang, see notes to the epigraph and I 10. To Philip Mairet, 24 Aug 1945, of Victory in Japan Day, ten days previously: “I have been away · · · depression caused by the hollow gaiety of the public celebrating the Japanese Holiday, after the atom bomb · · · (it is curious that fireworks, just because they are not intended to be lethal, are now more immediately jarring to the nerves than the real bombs seemed at the time)”. To Mary Trevelyan, 5 May 1946, after a report from the British Council of Churches: “I wonder what you will think of the B.C.C. Report on Atomic Bombs—to my mind it gets you just nowhere.” Thanking her for a copy of the letters of Madame de Sévigné on 16 Sept, he wrote: “Nothing could take one farther away from the Christian News Letter and the atomic bomb”, before parodying his own lines in a postscript:
[Poem I 84 · Textual History II 420]
This is the way the world ghosh
This is the way the world ghosh
Never to droit but always to ghosh
And not with a bang but incessant letters
to the Principal of Leicester College, David
Cecil, and any people I know in American
universities.
(Fr. droit = right; ghosh = Fr. gauche = left. Dr. J. C. Ghosh had edited Otway’s works in 1932, and when his lectureship at Leeds U. came to an end after the Second World War, TSE wrote dozens of letters to find him a new post. The Principal of University College, Leicester was Frederick L. Attenborough. The biographer Lord David Cecil was a fellow of New College, Oxford.) TSE had commented on a draft of the report by the B.C.C.’s Commission on the Era of Atomic Power (see J. H. Oldham to TSE, 26 Apr 1946, Texas). TSE to Anne Ridler, 10 Aug 1948: “after Hiroshima, when the Daily Express pointed out, in a headline, that ‘not with a bang but a whimper’ was mistaken (but I am not convinced, because nobody in Hiroshima heard any bang—perhaps I am right after all) I say after that, I am not easily shaken”. Henry Hewes reports TSE’s saying that he no longer liked The Hollow Men very much, “because it represents a period of extreme depression about his future work · · · When asked whether he would still write his famous prophecy · · · Mr. Eliot admits he would not. One reason is that while the association of the H-bomb is irrelevant to it, it would today come into everyone’s mind. Another is that he is not sure the world will end with either. People whose houses were bombed have told him they don’t remember hearing anything. The original meaning, he explains, ‘Was a subjective dissatisfaction with the pettiness of life. When one is young, the expression of that mood is simply an effusion of one’s individual situation’”, Eliot on Eliot: “I feel younger than I did at 60” (1958), with Kipling evoked in the next paragraph. (While at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study, TSE inscribed a copy of The Cocktail Party to Oppenheimer, the nuclear weapons scientist: “to J. Robert Oppenheimer from the author: the play incubated at the Institute. T. S. Eliot, 6.iii.50”.) Interviewed by T. S. Matthews in 1958: “I don’t often read The Hollow Men when I give readings; it’s not bad but I think its mood is rather too despairing” (Mademoiselle May 1965). OED “bang” 2b: “With allusion to T. S. Eliot’s line” (also quoting Aldington, Michael Innes, and The Times); OED “whimper” 2: “not with a bang but a whimper”.
[Poem I 84 · Textual History II 420]
V 31 Not with a bang: Santayana on Dante’s Commedia: “As in some great symphony, everything is cumulative: the movements conspire, the tension grows, the volume redoubles, the keen melody soars higher and higher; and it all ends, not with a bang, not with some casual incident, but in sustained reflection, in the sense that it has not ended, but remains by us in its totality, a revelation and a resource forever”, Three Philosophical Poets (1910) 133 (Sencourt 94). This was perhaps the “echo” suggested by Edward J. H. Greene, to whom TSE wrote, 19 Apr 1940: “I certainly read his Three Philosophical Poets, and indeed I think I listened to the Harvard lectures · · · As I remember, the essay on Lucretius seemed to me much the best of the three. I certainly read the one on Dante, but if there is an echo, it was quite unconscious.” To Ants Oras, 27 July 1932: “I think · · · you are quite right about Santayana, although the idea had never struck me before · · · I always rather disliked Santayana personally, quite without justice. I dislike his style of writing which I find very hard to read · · · However he was very much of a figure in my time, and I read some of his books when I was very young and impressionable indeed, and the influence is more than likely.” To Daniel Cory, 28 Sept 1934: “I should be delighted to have a contribution from Mr. Santayana” (for the Criterion). See note to Gerontion 69. with a bang: OED “click” v.1 1d: “1926 Amer. Speech I. 436/2 [Show-business slang]. A turn is said to click when it proves to be successful, or in the vernacular, ‘gets across with a bang’.” (Earlier: “The program · · · went off with a ‘bang’”, The Rotarian Aug 1916.) See note to After the turning of the inspired days 13 variant, “The show was ended”. TSE to Sally Cobden-Sanderson, 29 Aug 1932: “I should very much like to see a copy of your son’s poem. It certainly starts off with a bang.” To Laurence Binyon, 28 Apr 1941: “no translation of it can come with such a bang as to satisfy the reader” (see note to Ash-Wednesday VI 30–33). whimper: “‘Whatever you do,’ I wish someone had said to me then, ‘don’t whimper but take the consequences’”, Address by T. S. Eliot, ’06, to the Class of ’33 (1933) (Bush 4).
[Poem I 84 · Textual History II 420]
Ash-Wednesday
1. Sequence of Publication 2. Composition 3. After Publication
1. SEQUENCE OF PUBLICATION
Like The Hollow Men, Ash-Wednesday was written in Parts, some of which were first published separately (with what became II appearing earlier than I). All five Parts were completed or in draft by Oct 1928 (see Textual History description of ts2).
I: Commerce (Paris) Spring 1928, with title “PERCH’IO NON SPERO …” on preceding recto, and a facing translation by Jean de Menasce. (Distribution of Commerce had been “taken over” by the Hogarth Press: Leonard Woolf to TSE, 24 July 1926.) On 3 Oct 1929, Walter de la Mare requested permission to reprint Perch’io non spero in the anthology that became Desert Islands. TSE replied, 18 Oct: “This is merely to tell you that the other directors see no more objection than I do to your reprinting the whole of Perch’io non spero in Islands. I should be glad if you would omit that title, and if possible print it without any title, because I am reprinting the poem later without that title, merely as no. 1 of a sequence of six which I have called provisionally Six Poems, but think of calling Ash Wednesday Music (but I should like very much to have your frank opinion of that title, about which I feel doubtful).” De la Mare responded, 21 Oct: “In itself I like the title Ash Wednesday Music. There is a covert poetic nuance between Ash and music. My only hesitation is its ironical tinge.”
II: Saturday Review of Literature (NY) 10 Dec 1927 as Salutation. (Frank Morley was an editor of the journal, which he had helped to found.) Announced in Faber’s list for Autumn 1927 for publication in the Criterion “in the near future”, and printed there Jan 1928. Reprinted in Twentieth-Century Poetry ed. John Drinkwater, Henry Seidel Canby and William Rose Benét (Boston, 1929). TSE to Harold
Monro, 4 June 1929, replying to a request for anthology permissions: “Would you care to consider either the Salutation which was published only in the Criterion, or a better poem called Perch’io non Spero, which was published only in Paris? You are welcome to either of these · · · which I intended to keep back for a sequence I am preparing.” (Harold Monro had run the Poetry Bookshop, 1913–26. Penelope Fitzgerald to Richard Garnett, 8 May 1978: “T. S. Eliot · · · told me that the Poetry Bookshop staircase made an appearance in Ash Wednesday”, So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, ed. Terence Dooley, 2008.)
III: Commerce (Paris) Autumn 1928, with title “SOM DE L’ESCALINA” on preceding recto, and a facing translation by Jean de Menasce. (Contents page reads “T.‑S. Eliott”, and the name below both the English and the French reads “T. S. Eliott”.)
IV, V and VI: within Ash-Wednesday (1930), when this title was first used.
[Poem I 85–97 · Textual History II 421–31]
The first edition, published by Faber on 24 Apr 1930, was limited to 600 numbered copies printed at the Curwen Press, of which 200 were for Great Britain and 400 for the United States. The Faber trade edition was published on 29 Apr, and the American trade edition by Putnam on 26 Sept. The poem was reset for a second British edition, 1933, then appeared in 1936+, Sesame and Penguin / Sel Poems. Putnam were to prove awkward in 1936, when they were reluctant to allow the poem to appear in Harcourt, Brace’s edition of Collected Poems 1909–1935 because their stock had not sold out (Frank Morley to Geoffrey Faber, 3 Feb 1936, Faber archive; on the American copyright, see TSE to Faber, 23 Aug 1930).