The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 106
31 viaticum: OED 1: “Eccl. The Eucharist, as administered to or received by one who is dying”; 2: “A supply of money or other necessaries for a journey · · · travelling expenses.”
[Poem I 105–106 · Textual History II 436]
32, 33, 36 Guiterriez · · · Boudin, blown to pieces · · · Floret: to Dudley Fitts, 6 June 1940: “Certainly the name I had in mind was Gutiérrez, and I cannot give any reason for having altered it. Like some other names, it just came into my head that way, and down it went. The figure, of course, is meant to be a type, but I did, as with the man blown to pieces, have a particular person in mind: a writer I used to know who was interested in politics and also had a passion for high-powered racing cars and motor cycles. But in this case, as in some others, identification would only obscure instead of clarifying”. To Morris Gilbert, 10 Sept 1942: “if you have identified two persons alluded to in Animula you have preceded me in so doing because in neither line did I have any particular person in mind. Floret, I am afraid, is a pure piece of dream imagery not related to any person whom I know. As for Boudin and Guiterriez, they do not [for do] represent personal friends of mine, but the identification could neither throw light upon the poem nor add any pleasure to the reading of it. I must explain that at the time of writing the poem I was unaware that boudin is the French for black pudding. This is to me a nauseous dish, eaten in Scotland and in parts of France, and I have also observed it eaten in a Swedish restaurant-car with a sauce of stewed fruit. I regret very much that I chose such an unlucky name for a friend who was a very fine person and a gallant non-commissioned officer.” (To Grover Smith, 4 July 1949: “You are right in saying that Boudin means black pudding in French. My only comment on this is that I did not know it at the time and if I had known it I would have made up some other name, because the last thing I wished to do was to associate this particular man with a black pudding.”) To E. M. Stephenson, 25 May 1945: “As for the references about which you ask · · · I don’t believe in inventing answers to satisfy people who ask the wrong questions, nor could any answer I gave really help the readers of that poem. The third of these figures is so entirely imaginary that there is really no identification to be made though perhaps it may suggest not wholly irrelevantly to some minds certain folklore memories. Of the first two, it is only necessary to say that they represent different types of career, the successful person of the machine age and someone who was killed in the last war.” Victor Boudon’s memoir of Charles Péguy, reviewed by TSE in Charles Péguy (1916), described how “At Villeroy, near Meaux, about 25 kilos. from Paris, he was killed; death was supposed to have been instantaneous—a bullet through the head”; see note to A Cooking Egg 25, 29.
36 by the boarhound slain between the yew trees: to John Hayward, 27 Apr 1930, on Ash-Wednesday: “Perhaps the yew does not mean so much as you suppose. It happened to occur in two or three dreams—one was a dream of ‘the boarhound between the yewtrees’; and that’s all I know about it.” (“among the birch-trees”, Mr. Apollinax 3.) by the boarhound slain: Actæon the hunter was torn to pieces by his own hounds after he saw Diana bathing; Adonis was killed by a wild boar.
Marina
Published separately 25 Sept 1930, with drawings by E. McKnight Kauffer. A signed, limited edition on large paper was issued later the same month. Published in the US in The New Poetry ed. Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson (rev. ed. 1932) and repr. in An “Objectivists” Anthology, ed. Louis Zukofsky (1932). Repr. in Britain in The Modern Muse: Poems of To-day British and American (1934; not in Gallup), then 1936+, Sesame and Penguin / Sel Poems.
Recorded May 1933, Columbia U. Second: 1946, Levy’s Sound Studios, London for the Writers Group of the Society for Cultural Relations between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the USSR. Third: 23 May 1947, Washington DC. Fourth: 26 Sept 1955, London; released by Caedmon 1955 (US), 1959 (UK).
[Poems I 106–108 · Textual History II 436–39]
In John Ford (1932), TSE discusses The Lover’s Melancholy in relation to “the Recognition Scene, so important in Shakespeare’s later plays, to the significance of which as a Shakespeare symbol Mr. Wilson Knight has drawn attention. In Shakespeare’s plays, this is primarily the recognition of a long-lost daughter, secondarily of a wife; and we can hardly read the later plays attentively without admitting that the father-and-daughter theme was one of very deep symbolic value to him in his last productive years: Perdita, Marina and Miranda share some beauty of which his earlier heroines do not possess the secret.”
In 1919: “Years of patient labour have so purified, transmogrified, and debased Shakespeare that several of his plays can be produced before audiences of the most civilized householders and shareholders in the world. And, of course, everyone knows that Shakespeare is not responsible for Pericles”, “The Duchess of Malfi” at the Lyric: and Poetic Drama (1919/20). Despite its publication in 1609 as Shakespeare’s, Pericles was not in the First Folio. It was staged at the Old Vic in 1921.
TSE on Shakespeare’s late plays:
The less popular plays are sometimes produced, and for Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and even Timon, there has been a small but enthusiastic public. I should say that in these plays there is as good dramatic verse as any Shakespeare ever wrote, and I would make that claim even for The Winter’s Tale and Pericles · · ·
· · · To compare Perdita or Miranda or Imogen or Marina, with, for instance, Juliet, to call them by comparison insipid or unreal, is to use a wholly irrelevant standard. They belong in a world from which some emotions have been purified away, so that others, ordinarily invisible, may be made apparent. To my mind the finest of all the “recognition scenes” is Act V, sc. i of that very great play Pericles. It is a perfect example of the “ultra-dramatic”, a dramatic action of beings who are more than human. Shakespeare’s consummate dramatic skill is as bright as ever; his verse is as much speech as ever: only, it is the speech of creatures who are more than human, or rather, seen in a light more than that of day.
I am a maid
My lord, that ne’er before invited eyes,
But have been gazed on like a comet: she speaks,
My lord, that maybe hath endured a grief
Might equal yours, if both were justly weighed.
The two voices, Pericles and Marina, are perfectly harmonized:
Now, blessing on thee! rise; thou art my child.
Give me fresh garments. Mine own, Helicanus:
She is not dead at Tarsus, as she should have been,
By savage Cleon.
The “Give me fresh garments” emphasised presently by “Give me my robes” has great significance. The scene becomes a ritual; the poetic drama developed to its highest point turns back towards liturgy: and the scene could end in no other way than by the vision of Diana.
The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse (1937)
[Poem I 107–108 · Textual History II 437–39]
G. Wilson Knight’s Myth and Miracle: On the Mystic Symbolism of Shakespeare (1929; collected in The Crown of Life, 1946) compares the works of Dante and Shakespeare to “that mystic truth from which are born the dogmas of the Catholic Church · · · the temptation in the desert, the tragic ministry and death, and the resurrection of the Christ”. TSE in the Introduction to Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire (1930): “I like a definite and dogmatic philosophy, preferably a Christian and Catholic one · · · It happened, fortunately for myself, that when I read some of his papers, I was mulling over some of the later plays, particularly Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale; and reading the later plays for the first time in my life as a separate group, I was impressed by what seemed to me important and very serious recurrences of mood and theme.”
Wilson Knight: “That Eliot’s response to Myth and Miracle had been more than courtesy was witnessed during the same year, 1930, when he sent me his Marina, inscribed ‘for’ me as ‘with, I hope, some appropriateness’”, T. S. Eliot: Some Literary Impressions in Ta
te ed. 247. TSE to Wilson Knight, 30 Oct 1930: “Thank you very much for your letter: few people would take the trouble to analyse a little poem like Marina so carefully, and few, I dare say, will care for it. I rather wanted you to like it, as you know the reference so well; I suspect that few persons in my acquaintance can remember Pericles at all clearly. I do not know whether you understand that the quotation is from Seneca’s Hercules Furens; and that I wanted a crisscross between Hercules waking up to find that he had slain his children, and Pericles waking up to find his child alive. I did not add the reference Hercules Furens for fear of misleading people who had not read the play itself.” TSE wrote to M. E. Cameron Watson, 29 June 1939, that the only criticism he knew of Marina specifically was by Wilson Knight, referring to “A Note on T. S. Eliot” in The Christian Renaissance (1933), which had “interested me very much”.
To Michael Sadler, 9 May 1930, enclosing drafts of Marina for the Bodleian Library. “I intend a crisscross between Pericles finding alive, and Hercules finding dead—the two extremes of the recognition scene—but I thought that if I labelled the quotation it might lead readers astray rather than direct them. It is only an accident that I know Seneca better than I know Euripides.”
To E. McKnight Kauffer, 24 July 1930: “I was relieved to hear from [Richard] De la Mare that he had confided my Marina to you. I had meant to ask him to do so, before he went away, and was afraid that it had gone elsewhere. Yours is the only kind of decoration that I can endure · · · The theme is paternity; with a crisscross between the text and the quotation. The theme is a comment on the Recognition Motive in Shakespeare’s later plays, and particularly of course the recognition of Pericles. The quotation is from Hercules Furens, where Hercules, having killed his children in a fit of madness induced by an angry god, comes to without remembering what he has done. (I didn’t give the reference for fear it might be more distracting than helpful to the reader who did not grasp the exact point: the contrast of death and life in Hercules and Pericles). I wonder whether this sort of explanation is useful or rather a bother to the artist? The scenery in which it is dressed up is Casco Bay, Maine. I am afraid no scenery except the Mississippi, the prairie and the North East Coast has ever made much impression on me.” (For Maine, see note to 3 ^ 4 variant “Roque Island”.)
To Kauffer, 8 Aug 1930: “Since I wrote to you I have seen your illustrations, which I like very much, except for the one point about which I spoke to de la Mare. It seems to me a pity that de la Mare did not shew me the drawing when he received it, as it might have saved you considerable trouble. My criticism was not of the drawing at all, but merely meant that I don’t want what I write to have The Waste Land stamped upon it” (see Textual History).
[Poem I 107–108 · Textual History II 437–39]
To Kauffer [end of Sept 1930]: “I am delighted to have the beautiful drawing, with the inscription, and shall have it framed to match the other (Simeon) which I appropriated. I had not seen the original when in de la Mare’s hands and was surprised by the difference. I must say that I like the colouring of the drawing you have given me very much better than that of the printed Marina. I wish that the poem had been printed according to this one.” In June 1938, TSE opened an exhibition of advertising by Shell-Mex and BP, where Kauffer was a leading designer, and in 1940 he wrote what became Defence of the Islands to accompany an exhibition organised by Kauffer in New York. Asked to contribute to a profile of Kauffer in 1949, he wrote: “I think it was at the end, or shortly after the end of the first World War that I met McKnight Kauffer, who was already, I think, better known and remarked among the younger artists than I was amongst the men of letters. He was in appearance very much the same figure that he is to-day: tall, slender and elegantly-dressed, and wearing whatever he wore with a grace that would make the best of the best efforts of the best tailor. (I cannot venture to say much about his appearance, because there is said to be a facial resemblance between Kauffer and myself—at any rate, when I have asked for him at the building in which he lives, several successive porters have taken for granted that I was his brother).”
On 28 Oct 1958, TSE wrote to F. D. Hoeniger (editor of the second Arden ed. of the play, 1963): “Yes, Marina was suggested by the recognition scene in Shakespeare’s Pericles and has to do, of course, with the same father–daughter relationship. I had no daughter, but the relationship interested me and, of course, recognition, in my experience, is something that comes repeatedly in life. [Added note: One can have fresh ‘recognition’ of the same person.] (A fresh recognition of the familiar would be an interesting theme, but perhaps impossible to express in terms of the theatre). The quotation from Seneca was intended to express the reverse. As you know, Hercules, in the play of Seneca, came to his senses to see his children dead in front of him, before he realized that they were dead by his own hand. That is merely an antithetical form or recognition. I think that an interest not only in Pericles but in all Shakespeare’s late plays has increased during the last twenty years. Some of the merit for calling attention to the beauty of the later plays is due, I think, to Professor Wilson Knight. The old assumption that Shakespeare was merely trying to adapt himself to a changing taste and compete with Beaumont and Fletcher is, I should imagine, now generally rejected.”
To Hayward, 29 Nov 1939: “I have no family, no career, and nothing particular to look forward to in this world. I doubt the permanent value of everything I have written; I never lay with a woman I liked, loved or ever felt any strong physical attraction to; I no longer even regret this lack of experience; I no longer even feel acutely the desire for progeny which was very acute once.”
Frank Herrmann recorded how in the late 1950s his wife would leave their infant daughter outside Faber. “After a particularly prolonged visit on a wintery day, Patricia came down stairs to find the pram missing! Panic! Miss Swann was endlessly on the phone. ‘Where has the pram gone?’ Patricia finally shouted. ‘Oh’, said Miss Swann, ‘Camilla had kicked off all her blankets when Mr. Eliot came by on his way out to lunch. So he tucked her up and is pushing the pram round the Square.’ TSE was gone for forty-five minutes while Patricia went back into the office. Pram pushing was not a role in which one easily envisaged Mr. Eliot. We often wondered whether the experience was a vicarious substitute for unfulfilled parenthood”, Faber’s Forty-Five Years Ago part III in Antiquarian Book Monthly Review Nov 1992.
In 1932: “He also told me that Marina is the poem that he likes best of all he has written”, Aurelia Hodgson notes on TSE from conversations (Bryn Mawr).
[Poem I 107–108 · Textual History II 437–39]
Title Marina: PERICLES: “my gentle babe Marina, | Whom, for she was born at sea, I have named so, | Here I charge your charity withal” (III iii).
Epigraph] [What place is this? what region? or of the world what coast?], Seneca, Hercules Furens 1138; tr. Jasper Heywood (1561); see note to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 7–12. To John Hayward, 30 Oct 1930: “I wonder if the reference at the head of the poem to the Hercules Furens (Hercules coming to and finding that he has killed his children) gets over to the few people who have read either Euripides or Seneca.” In conversation with William Empson, 12 May 1959: “Seneca isn’t in the school syllabus, so all the classical men were caught out”, reported in Argufying 365. Empson: “Hercules’ first words in Seneca when he is recovering from the madness in which he has killed his children: a madness sent from heaven, through no fault of his own, after a successful descent into hell and a successful killing of his enemies”, Argufying 360.
1 What · · · what · · · what · · · what: Pericles V ii: “What pageantry, what feats, what shows, | What minstrelsy and pretty din” (Jason Harding, EinC Apr 2012). TSE, ms contribution to Letters of the Moment I (1924) by “F. M.”: “What happy meetings, what luminous conversations in twilight rooms filled with the scent of hyacinths, await me now?” (c. 624 fol. 100). What · · · shores: Pericles V i: “What countrywoman? | Here of these shores?”
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br /> 1–4 What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands · · · What images: Whitman: “What widens within you Walt Whitman? | What waves and soils exuding? | What climes? · · · What rivers are these? what forests and fruits are these? | What are the mountains call’d that rise so high in the mists?” Salut au Monde! 5–12 (Musgrove 27).
1, 5, 21 What seas what shores · · · what islands · · · O my daughter · · · where all the waters meet: From the same year Moody 114 points to:
O my people what have I done unto thee
In this pool all the waves are silent
In this pool all the seas are still
All the waves die against this island
Our life is in the world’s decease
Our peace
In his will.
Suffer me not to be separated
O my people
Ash-Wednesday VI 19–35 variant
3–4 the woodthrush singing through the fog | What images return: “Why, for all of us, out of all that we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird”, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 148. woodthrush singing: see Burnt Norton I 22–27 and note on Whitman.
3 ^ 4 variant Roque Island: to Robert L. Beare, 25 Oct 1955: “The place to which you refer as ‘Rogue Island’ is presumably ‘Roque Island’ not far from Jonesport, Maine. The localisation is certainly something that I did well to omit from the final version.” (The word is not clearly written in ms, and Grover Smith made the same error.)