The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  [Poem I 101–102 · Textual History II 433–34]

  Lancelot Andrewes, Christmas Sermon 1622 (on Matthew 2: 1–2):

  For they sat not still gazing on the star. Their vidimus begat venimus; their seeing made them come, come, a great journey. Venimus is soon said, but a short word; but many a wide and weary step they made before they could come to say Venimus, Lo, here “we are come;” come, and at our journey’s end. To look a little on it. In this their coming we consider, 1. First, the distance of the place they came from. It was not hard by as the shepherds—but a step to Bethlehem over the fields; this was riding many a hundred miles, and cost them many a day’s journey. 2. Secondly, we consider the way that they came, if it be pleasant, or plain and easy; for if it be, it is so much the better. 1. This was nothing pleasant; for through deserts, all the way waste and desolate. 2. Nor secondly, easy either; for over the rocks and crags of both Arabias, specially Petræa, their journey lay. 3. Yet if safe—but it was not, but exceeding dangerous, as lying through the midst of the “black Tents of Kedar,” [Cant. 1: 5], a nation of thieves and cut-throats; to pass over the hills of robbers, infamous then, and infamous to this day. No passing without great troop, or convoy. 4. Last we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, “the very dead of winter.” Venimus, “we are come,” if that be one, venimus, “we are now come,” come at this time, that sure is another.

  And these difficulties they overcame, of a wearisome, irksome, troublesome, dangerous, unseasonable journey; and for all this they came. And came it cheerfully and quickly, as appeareth by the speed they made. It was but vidimus, venimus, with them; “they saw,” and “they came;” no sooner saw, but they set out presently. So as upon the first appearing of the star, as it might be last night, they knew it was Balaam’s star; it called them away, they made ready straight to begin their journey this morning. A sign they were highly conceited of His birth, believed some great matter of it, that they took all these pains, made all this haste that they might be there to worship Him with all the possible speed they could. Sorry for nothing so much as that they could not be there soon enough, with the very first, to do it even this day, the day of His birth · · · And we, what should we have done? · · · Our fashion is to see and see again before we stir a foot, specially if it be to the worship of Christ. Come such a journey at such a time? No; but fairly have put it off to the spring of the year, till the days longer, and the ways fairer, and the weather warmer, till better travelling to Christ.

  Seventeen Sermons on the Nativity (1887)

  In Lancelot Andrewes (1926), where he quoted from this passage from “It was no summer progress” to “‘the very dead of winter’”, TSE used the 1887 edition and recommended it. Andrewes’s Christmas Sermon 1620 has a similar passage, again with emphasis on “a new light kindled in Heaven”, the star which TSE markedly does not ever mention. For TSE on Andrewes’s sermons, see note to Little Gidding V 29–37.

  To John Hayward, 11 May 1931, thanking him for Peter Hall’s ed. of Andrewes (Pickering, 1828): “I feel I did not succeed in expressing my pleasure at your gift of Pickering Preces Privatae; I never do appear very appreciative, I fear. I shall truly treasure it; but the next time you come I want you to write my name in it, please.” To Mrs. Stuart Moore, 30 Sept 1931: “I hardly feel that I know enough about Lancelot Andrewes to write any more about him. Indeed I fear that the one essay which I have written appears to lay claim to a much more profound knowledge than I possess.”

  Speech on modern religious drama, after a performance of Charles Williams’s The Seed of Adam in Brentford, 9 Dec 1936: “Of course what people do today must be very different from the work of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It cannot be so simple, but then our religious faith is not such a simple thing. It has to have a certain surface simplicity, in order to be good drama at all; but when it is sincere it will have under the surface all the complexity of feeling that we experience ourselves · · · And so I think we must see the Nativity story with a consciousness of everything that has happened in the 1900 odd years since. We have to put ourselves there, and we have to see those events here”, quoted in John Hayward’s London Letter in New York Sun 23 Jan 1937.

  [Poem I 101–102 · Textual History II 433–34]

  After the war, an ephemeral Cambridge publication, Oasis 1, printed Journey of the Magi with eight poems by other authors. In Hayward’s copy (King’s), TSE added alternative titles:

  Yeats: For Anne Gregory – Or, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

  Auden: Culture – Or, Gentlemen Prefer Cricketers [emending the line “May warm each other with their wicked hands” to “wicket hands”].

  Spender: Regnum Ultima Ratio – Or, Gentlemen Prefer Apprentices

  Day Lewis: Newsreel – Or, Gentlemen Prefer Jill

  MacNeice: Bagpipe Music – Or, Old Gentlemen are Tired

  Graves: No More Ghosts – Or, Ghosts Prefer Ghosts

  [Dylan] Thomas: Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred – Bards Prefer Centenarians

  Henry Reed: Naming of Parts – Privates Prefer Parts

  Eliot: Journey of the Magi – Or, Old Gentlemen Prefer Silken Girls

  Title Journey of the Magi: Among the paintings in the National Gallery marked by TSE in his Baedeker 174 is “Giorgione, Adoration of the Magi”.

  1–5 “A cold coming · · · winter”: to his French translator Paul Gilson, 6 Mar 1928: “the first five lines which I have enclosed in inverted commas are taken from a sermon on the Nativity preached by Bishop Andrewes before James Ist of England” (see headnote).

  2–3 Just the worst time of the year · · · journey: to John Hayward, 9 Dec [1938]: “Why on earth am I going away again for a weekend, and just at the time of year when I am worried to death with the problems of Christmas cards and what not.” To E. M. W. Tillyard, 26 Oct 1947: “I have got to go to Aix and Marseilles and Rome early in December (just the worst time of the year for a journey and such a long journey): I had to postpone this from June which might have been pleasant.”

  3–6 such a long journey · · · sore-footed: to Paul Elmer More, 3 Aug 1929: “Most critics appear to think that my catholicism is merely an escape or an evasion · · · it [is] rather trying to be supposed to have settled oneself in an easy chair, when one has just begun a long journey afoot.” On More: “What is significant to me · · · is not simply the conclusions at which he has arrived but the fact that he arrived there from somewhere else; and not simply that he came from somewhere else, but that he took a particular route · · · the stages of the journey · · · analogy with my own journey · · · It was possibly Irving Babbitt himself in 1927 or 1928, in a conversation in London, during which I had occasion to indicate the steps I had recently taken, who first made me clearly cognizant of the situation · · · The English Church was familiar with the backslider, but it knew nothing of the convert—certainly not of the convert who had come such a long way”, Paul Elmer More (1937).

  6 the camels galled: Kipling: “the camels shall not gall”, The Man Who Would be King (W. R. Childe, in Kenneth Muir, N&Q Sept 1954). See notes to 12 and 21.

  8, 10 we regretted · · · the silken girls: Conrad: “He regretted the clink of sabre and spurs on a fine afternoon, the barrack-room witticisms, the girls of garrison towns”, An Outpost of Progress I (Unger 1956 232–33, quoting from Conrad’s story two further uses of OED’s first sense of “regret”: “To remember, think of (something lost), with distress or longing”).

  [Poem I 101 · Textual History II 433]

  9–10 The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, | And the silken girls bringing sherbet: “with our scented girls clad in a breath of silk webs, | we set in high places our springes for happiness · · · a crossing of ligh
ts to the corners of terraces”, Anabasis VI i–iv. Of this passage: “I am aware of being influenced by the Anabase of St.-John Perse”, Excerpts from Lectures 1932–1933 (for TSE on Perse’s influence on his own subsequent work, see Anabasis headnote, 4. ANABASE TO ANABASIS). Greene 136: “Eliot lui-même qui m’a signalé le rapprochement entre son poème et celui de Perse” [Eliot himself indicated to me the parallel between his poem and Perse’s]. TSE to Frank Morley, 22 Mar 1946: arranging to visit New York “before the publishing world melts away under the heat and retires to its summer palaces on slopes”. terraces: OED 4: “The flat roof of a house, resorted to for coolness in warm climates. Obs.” (but with quotations from 1572 to 1892). And the silken girls bringing sherbet: Pound: “And the vermilioned girls getting drunk about sunset”, Exile’s Letter (1915) 50 (Michael Roberts, Critique of Poetry, 1934, 116). As TSE begins five lines with “And the”, so Pound begins his line, as likewise his 51 (“And the water”), 45 (“And the girls singing back at each other”), and 56 (“And the wind lifted the song”). TSE included Exile’s Letter in Pound’s Selected Poems. silken girls: Grim, The Collier of Croydon IV i: “These silken girls are all too fine for me”, in A Select Collection of old English Plays ed. W. Carew Hazlitt (1874).

  12 wanting their liquor and women: Kipling: Dan and Peachey agree not to “look at any Liquor, nor any Woman”, The Man Who Would be King (Childe, in Muir, N&Q Sept 1954).

  14 cities hostile: Kipling: “Up along the hostile mountains · · · future cities”, The Explorer 45, 49.

  20, 35 folly · · · were we led all that way: Lawrence: “Glad as the Magi were when they saw the brow | Of the hot-born infant bless the folly which had | Led them thither”, Red Moon-Rise (1912) 19–21.

  21 we came down to a temperate valley: Kipling: “a big level valley all among the mountains”, The Man Who Would be King (Childe, in Muir, N&Q Sept 1954). For the family camp of TSE’s youth, see notes to Dear Charlotte, Hoping you are better (“Other Verses”).

  22 below the snow line: Kipling: “Till I camped above the tree-line”, The Explorer 15.

  [Poem I 101 · Textual History II 433–34]

  23–27 water-mill · · · Six hands at an open door dicing: “certain images recur · · · six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction where there was a water-mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell”, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 148. See Marina 3–4 and note. Henry James on a woman novelist: “These opportunities consisted in her having once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience · · · she converted these ideas into a concrete image”, The Art of Fiction (1884). TSE: “In some minds certain memories, both from reading and life, become charged with emotional significance”, Lecture Notes as Norton Professor (1933). For “impressions and emotions”, see note to East Coker III 33–35. Tradition and the Individual Talent II (1919): “Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality”; in TSE’s copy of the first American edition of Selected Essays (Magdalene), he scored the entire paragraph with a jagged line. darkness · · · sky · · · hands at an open door dicing: Rupert Brooke: “sky · · · playing cards, or standing in the doorway · · · darkness”, Fragment 2–5.

  24 three trees on the low sky: to Paul Gilson, 6 Mar 1928: “When I say ‘Three trees on the low sky’, I mean that three trees are outlined against the sky on the top of a very low hill.” “The three trees are an anticipation of Golgotha”, Excerpts from Lectures 1932–1933. Conrad Aiken: “Three crosses toss and rise | Black and little against the skies”, The Jig of Forslin (1916) 95.

  25 an old white horse: Revelation 19: 11–14: “I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True · · · and his name is called The Word of God. And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses” (Hands). Kristian Smidt reported TSE saying the white horse was part of a remembered French landscape with no mythic significance (Aftenposten, Oslo, 25 Sept 1963).

  27 Six hands at an open door: to Gilson, 6 Mar 1928: “you say ‘Six mains, près d’une porte ouverte’. What I mean is that the six hands are around a table inside the door and are seen through the door. Your translation seems to me to suggest that the hands were outside the door.” hands · · · pieces of silver: Matthew 26: 15, 27: 35 : “And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver · · · And they crucified him, and parted his garments, casting lots.”

  28 empty wine-skins: Matthew 9: 17 (Revised Version): “Neither do men put new wine into old wineskins.”

  31 (you may say): to Gilson, 6 Mar 1928: “when I say · · · ‘you may say’, it is more ‘perhaps’, or ‘pour ainsi dire’. A certain doubt is left.” (you may say) satisfactory: OED 1: “Eccl. and Theol. Serving to make satisfaction or atonement for sin.” To H. B. Vaisey, 14 Jan 1937: “It is a relief · · · that you should have found my words on the whole satisfactory.” After quoting a line of Poe: “We cannot admit that a poem which must have recourse to nonsense to convey its meaning is altogether satisfactory”, Poetical and Prosaic Use of Words (1943). TSE’s secretary to Nancy Pearce, 11 Dec 1958: “He has asked me to say · · · that he does not regard it as unsatisfactory that several people should disagree about the meaning of the word ‘satisfactory’ in The Journey of the Magi.”

  33–35 but set down | This set down | This: Andrewes: “Secondly, set down this; that to find where He is, we must learn of these to ask where He is”, Christmas Sermon 1622.

  34–35, 37 set down | This · · · I had seen birth and death: OTHELLO, about to kill himself: “Nor set down aught in malice · · · Set you down this”, V ii (Grover Smith 313). “the true mystic is not satisfied merely by feeling, he must pretend at least that he sees · · · The poet does not aim to excite · · · but to set something down”, Dante (1920).

  [Poem I 101–102 · Textual History II 434]

  37 I had seen birth and death: “We have seen births, deaths and marriages · · · A fear like birth and death, when we see birth and death alone”, Murder in the Cathedral I. Birth and death in other Ariel Poems: A Song for Simeon 37: “this birth season of decease”; Animula 37: “Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth”; Marina 7, 29: “Death · · · this life”; The Cultivation of Christmas Trees 1, 21: “Christmas · · · the awareness of death”.

  37–38 I had seen birth and death, | But had thought they were different: R. B. Cunninghame Graham: “‘Fate has deprived me of the joy of being present at the birth of him the star announced; I can at least be present at his death · · · and birth and death are not so very different, after all’”, The Fourth Magus in Hope (1910) (Neil Taylor, N&Q Aug 1982).

  38–39 this Birth was | Hard and bitter agony: on a contributor to NEW: “when he speaks of ‘agony and passion’ he is transferring to the Incarnation two terms · · · properly applicable to the Atonement”, The Theology of Economics (1934).

  40–41 We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, | But no longer at ease here: “That though again they see their fatherland | They there shall be as citizens no more”, To the Class of 1905 11–12.

  40–42 these Kingdoms · · · alien people · · · their gods: Daniel 2: 44: “shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom · · · the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms.” Kingdoms · · · an alien people: “an alien reign”, Ash-Wednesday I 8 variant. an alien people: Pound: “among some | Alien people!” The Plunge (1912) 19–20 (included by TSE in Pound’s Selected Poems). TSE: “My alien people”, Little Gidding II 67–93, prose synopsis [6], also second venture in verse [14]. “We are certainly a
minority, even in what are called Christian countries; we find the minds of the people about us growing more and more alien, so that on vital matters we often find we have no common assumptions”, The Christian in the Modern World (1935).

  41 dispensation: frequent in Andrewes’s Christmas Sermon for 1623 (on Ephesians 1: 10), which devotes two paragraphs to the word. Also Ephesians 3: 2: “the dispensation of the grace of God which is given me to you-ward.”

  43 I should be glad of another death: to Paul Gilson, 6 Mar 1928: “in the English text I think it is quite clear to the readers that the speaker of the verses means that he would be glad to die himself. As I read your translation I cannot call it incorrect, but it would seem to me, if I did not know the original, that the speaker would be glad if somebody else died. The whole point is that in his state of indecision he would be glad if his own death came to settle it.” “Birth, and copulation, and death. | I’ve been born, and once is enough”, Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of an Agon 36–37.

  A Song for Simeon

  Published separately Sept 1928, with a drawing by E. McKnight Kauffer. A signed, limited edition on large paper was issued in Oct 1928; repr. in The Modern Muse: Poems of To-day British and American (1934; not in Gallup), then 1936+ and Penguin / Sel Poems.

  Recorded, 13 May 1947, Harvard, as part of the Morris Gray Poetry Reading. Second: May 1947, for the Harvard Poetry Room; released by Harvard Vocarium Records, 1948. Third: 28 Sept 1955, London; released by Caedmon 1955 (US), 1960 (UK).