The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

[Poem I 107 · Textual History II 438]

  3, 15, 22 pine · · · singing · · · pine, and the woodsong · · · Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat: Kipling: “hemp and singing pine for to stand against the brine · · · Our paint is flaked · · · no vigil at the bow”, The Second Voyage 6, 10, 15.

  5 O my daughter: ms reading also of the final line. Pericles: “O royal Pericles”, “O let me look!”, “O my lord” (all V iii); “O, attend, my daughter” (II iii) (Stephen Matthews 151). Cymbeline V v: “yet (Oh my daughter)”.

  5–6 daughter · · · sharpen the tooth: KING LEAR (to his daughter Goneril): “sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is | To have a thankless child!” (I iv). sharpen the tooth: “toothed · · · shark”, Ash-Wednesday III 11 (see note). Pericles I iv: “so sharp are hunger’s teeth”.

  6–7 who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning | Death: dog-fighting was outlawed in England and Wales in 1835. “Men! polish your teeth on rising and retiring; | Women! polish your fingernails: | You polish the tooth of the dog and the talon of the cat · · · Death”, Choruses from “The Rock” VI 14–16, 18. “Who clipped the lion’s wings | And flea’d his rump and pared his claws”, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 29–30.

  6, 8, 10, 12 Those who · · · Those who: “those who collect quails in the wrinkled land, those who hunt among the furze for the green-speckled eggs, those who dismount to pick things up”, Anabasis X vii (Abel).

  6–13 meaning | Death · · · meaning | Death: Romans 6: 23: “The wages of sin is death” (Grover Smith 132). TSE: “an accumulation of old buildings, however beautiful, means death unless we can also make beautiful new buildings”, A Commentary in Criterion Oct 1934.

  7, 9, 11, 13 Death: “death” occurs seven times at line-endings in Pericles. TSE of Donne’s The First Anniversary and The Second Anniversary: “nowhere did he rise to greater heights of verbal and metrical beauty · · · Compare, for instance, the funeral sermon in which recurs so persistently the word ‘DEAD’, as a musical bar by itself · · · with the recurrence in variation in the First Anniversary of ‘Shee, shee is dead; she’s dead: when thou know’st this, | Thou know’st how lame a cripple this world is … Shee, shee is dead; shee’s dead: when thou know’st this, | Thou know’st how ugly a monster this world is’”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 157–58 (Clark Lecture V). Donne: “When you shall find that hand that had signed to one of you a Patent for Title, to another for Pension, to another for Pardon, to another for Dispensation, Dead: That hand that settled Possessions by his Seale, in the Keeper, and rectified Honours by the sword, in his Marshall, and distributed relief to the Poore, in his Almoner, and Health to the Diseased, by his immediate Touch, Dead · · · Dead · · · Dead · · · dead”, Sermon on the death of King James, 26 Apr 1625 (Sermons ed. Pearsall Smith, 57–58).

  8 glitter with the glory of the hummingbird: Mayne Reid: “Listen to his whirring wings, like the hum of a great bee. It is from that he takes his name of ‘humming-bird.’ See his throat, how it glitters—just like a ruby!” The Boy Hunters 140 (Crawford 21–22).

  8–9 glitter · · · the hummingbird, meaning | Death: D. H. Lawrence quotes Crèvecoeur on hummingbirds: “They often fight with the fury of lions, and one of the combatants falls a sacrifice and dies”, adding “they start and flash their wings like little devils, and stab each other with egoistic sharp bills”, Studies in Classic American Literature ch. 3.

  [Poem I 107 · Textual History II 438]

  10 sty: Pericles IV vi (Quarto; the brothel scene): MARINA: “most ungentle Fortune have plac’t mee in this Stie.” TSE on his own spelling, to Robert L. Beare, 25 Oct 1955: “sty is misspelt in every edition. Pig’s sty is s-t-y, and it is curious that I gave it the extra ‘e’ which gives the word an entirely different meaning.” See Textual History to Mr. Pugstyles: The Elegant Pig 27 and to Little Gidding I 29 for “sty” again misspelt and corrected.

  10–12 the sty of contentment, meaning | Death · · · the animals: Irving Babbitt quoted Sainte-Beuve: “never be able to treat man in exactly the same way as plants or animals”, followed at once by Emerson on scientific materialism: “one lives in a sty of sensualism, and would soon come to suicide”, The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912) 246.

  13–15 Death · · · unsubstantial, reduced by a wind, | A breath: OED “unsubstantial” 2: “Having no bodily or material substance”, begins with Shakespeare: “Shall I beleeue that unsubstantiall death is amorous?” (Romeo and Juliet V iii) and “Welcome then, | Thou unsubstantiall ayre that I embrace” (King Lear IV i). Likewise, “insubstantial” 1: “Not existing in substance or reality”, begins with Shakespeare: “And like this insubstantiall Pageant faded | Leaue not a racke behinde” (The Tempest IV i). TSE: “My life is light, waiting for the death wind”, A Song for Simeon 4. See note to WLComposite 175–76, “Carrying | Away the little light dead people”.

  14–21 reduced by a wind, | A breath of pine · · · nearer than the eye · · · between leaves and hurrying feet | Under sleep: Pound: “All night, and as the wind lieth among | The cypress trees, he lay · · · light as leaves | And closer me than air”, Speech for Psyche in the Golden Book of Apuleius (1911); included by TSE in Pound’s Selected Poems. breath of the pine: Vachel Lindsay: “Yea, from the breath of the pine!”, The Black Hawk War of the Artists 12, 54 in Poetry July 1914. woodsong: OED has no definition but three citations: “Fall to your wod-songs” (1601); “The sweet wood-song’s penetrating flow” (Felicia Hemans, 1834); and TSE.

  16 variant The world in chase: OED “chase” n.1 e: “in chase is said both of the chaser and of the chase”.

  16–17 this grace · · · place · · · face: Herbert: “The soldiers also spit upon that face, | Which Angels did desire to have the grace | And Prophets once to see, but found no place”, The Sacrifice 181–83. Kipling: “Not for Prophecies, Visions, Gifts, or Graces”, rhyming with “places” and “faces”, The Supports (TSE: “Given”, 19). Kipling’s poem speaks of the ocean, a ship, a bulkhead, fathers, our children, and the shore.

  17 face, less clear and clearer: 1 Corinthians 13: 12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face” (Jain 1991).

  18 The pulse in the arm: Pericles V i: “But are you flesh and blood? | Have you a working pulse?” (Grover Smith 313).

  19 Given or lent: Tennyson: “God gives us love. Something to love | He lends us”, To J. S. 13–14. Alice Meynell: “Given, not lent, | And not withdrawn—once sent”, Unto us a Son is Given 1–2 (Grover Smith 132). Kipling: “Our loves are not given, but only lent”, The Power of the Dog 27 (Jennifer Formichelli, personal communication).

  [Poem I 107 · Textual History II 438–39]

  19–20 more distant than stars and nearer than the eye · · · feet: Tennyson: “Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet · · · the eye of man cannot see”, The Higher Pantheism 12, 17 (TSE: “breath”, 15). TSE: “More distant and more solemn | Than a fading star”, The Hollow Men II 9–10.

  20 small laughter between leaves: Pound: “The laugh they wake amid the border rushes. | This is our home, the trees are full of laughter”, “and all the leaves are full of voices”, Canto I (first version, Poetry June 1917) 58–59, 128. This canto quotes and names Pericles (William Harmon, Yeats Eliot Review Spring 1978). TSE: “the leaves were full of children, | Hidden excitedly, containing laughter”, “hidden laughter | Of children in the foliage”, Burnt Norton I 40–41, V 35–36. laughter between leaves and hurrying feet: John Davidson: “the tread; | Burst of laughter from the shuffled leaves”, November III. laughter · · · and hurrying feet: Conrad Aiken: “clamor of music and hurrying feet”, The Jig of Forslin (1916), V vi. TSE: “weary feet, | Forever hurrying”, On a Portrait 2–3.

  20–21 Whispers and small laughter between leaves · · · sleep, where all the waters meet: “Laughter and apple-blossom floating on the water, | Singing at nightfall, whispering”, Murder in the Cathedral I.

  20–2
1 variant in a new world: “O brave new world”, The Tempest V i.

  22 Bowsprit: pronounced by TSE in his 1933 recording as in rainbow (the English manner), but in 1955 as in bough. The Columbiad had rhymed “bowsprit” with “cowshit”. At the end of his Lines Addressed to Geoffrey Faber Esq. TSE makes comic play where “avow | bow” turns out to be only an eye-rhyme because the meaning is longbow. cracked with ice · · · cracked with heat: Baudelaire: “La glace qui les mord, les soleils qui les cuivrent, | Effacent lentement la marque des baisers” [the ice’s tooth, the suns that burn them bronze, gradually efface the stigmata of kisses], Le Voyage I 15–16 (Kenner 234). “Where’s a cocktail shaker, Ben, here’s plenty of cracked ice”, WLComposite 554.

  27 unknown, my own: Pericles V i: “rise: thou art my child: | Give me fresh garments. Mine own, Helicanus”, quoted by TSE in The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse (1937) (Iman Javadi, personal communication).

  28 The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking: in his Life of Dryden, Dr. Johnson deplored Dryden’s use of “nautical language” in Annus Mirabilis 581–92, the description of repairs after the battle at sea. He italicised a dozen words in the dozen lines, including calking-iron and seams and commented: “I suppose here is not one term which every reader does not wish away.” (Johnson’s objection was disputed in an essay, Poetic Diction of English Classicists, by Raymond Dexter Havens, in the Harvard Festschrift for George Kittredge: see note to The Waste Land [V] 399–422.) For the garboard-strake and Kipling see note to WLComposite 501: “And then the garboard-strake began to leak”. TSE: “the mizzen top-gallant shrouds had been repeatedly belayed to the fore staysail, and the flying jib-boom cleared, and lashed to the monkey-rail”, A Tale of a Whale (1905). caulking: Pericles III i: “we have a chest beneath the hatches, caulked and bitumed ready”.

  30–31 a world of time · · · Resign my life for this life: “the hand of time · · · Unable to resign or to insist”, Animula 24, 26 variant. Resign my life: Titus Andronicus I i: “Tomorrow yield up rule, resign my life” (Jason Harding, EinC Apr 2012).

  [Poem I 107–108 · Textual History II 439]

  32 The awakened: believing her dead, Pericles commits his wife Thaisa to the sea during the storm, but when her casket comes ashore she revives (III ii). TSE to Virginia Woolf, 28 Dec 1939, on reading William Archer’s translation of Ibsen’s When we Dead Awaken: “(Why does Archer say ‘awaken’ instead of ‘awake’?) (I thought that awaken was transitive).” See note to Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of an Agon 160, “you waked up”.

  33–34 What seas what shores what granite islands · · · fog: Roy Campbell’s hundred-line Tristan da Cunha has “mist · · · An island of the sea · · · suns that sink and shores that fade · · · granite”. TSE praised the poem on publication: “His control of the metre is remarkable, and his language stronger and less flamboyant than in some of his earlier work”, Tristan da Cunha (1927). In 1930 he became its publisher when Campbell collected it in his first Faber book, Adamastor (McCue 2014d).

  The Cultivation of Christmas Trees

  Published separately in distinct editions in New York (8 Oct 1954) and London (26 Oct 1954), with no variants. British ed. illustrated by David Jones (see end of notes). American ed. with “Typography, binding and decorations by Enrico Arno”. Added to “Ariel Poems”, 1963+ (the only poem ever added to an existing section). No recording known.

  Written in 1952 (see letter to Curtis quoted below) and “more or less to order” (Columbia reading, 28 Apr 1958, Columbia U. Forum Fall 1958, 14).

  “I do not consider it very well executed, but I hope that the idea is a right one”, Levy 53. Inscribed copies: “for Anne Ridler | an F. & F. pot boiler— | the doctrine is better | than the verse. | T. S. Eliot | 1954” (Blackwell’s catalogue, 2010); “to Martin d’Arcy S. J. | —Perhaps not poetry, but—I hope—sound. | T. S. Eliot | Christmas 1954” (Berg).

  Moody 361: “In Eliot’s own collection of photographs as preserved in the Hayward Collection [King’s] there is a faded poor snapshot of a Christmas tree.”

  Speech on modern religious drama, after a performance of Charles Williams’s The Seed of Adam, 9 Dec 1936: “Religious drama is not there to give you the effect of the mass-manufactured plaster saint, or the comfortable deadness of the second-rate religious Christmas card. Religious drama ought to supply something in the religious life of the community that cannot be supplied in any other way and when it is fine drama and poetry, it can have a missionary power that is incalculable”, quoted in Hayward’s London Letter in New York Sun 23 Jan 1937.

  [Poems I 108–110 · Textual History II 439–47]

  To Geoffrey Curtis, 21 Dec 1944: “The non-religious observances of Christmas, except when one can be among little children—little Christian children, I mean, for with children there is a seemly congruity between the religious and the non-religious—become harder to bear, require more patience, every year as I grow older.” To Curtis, 24 Nov 1953: “your note reminded me of a set of verses I wrote a year ago · · · I shall be interested to know whether you think I have brought the same idea which you make clear in your note, i.e. the implication of the parousia [Second Coming] in the Incarnation.” He was referring to a review of The Coming of the Lord by A Religious of C.S.M.V. (the Community of St. Mary the Virgin), in which Curtis wrote: “We are shown the Second Coming in relation to the whole, and made to realize that there is but ‘One Coming; in the Incarnation, in the Spirit, in the Sacraments, in the Judgement; and that a Coming to heaven’” (Books: An Occasional Paper for Church People, Mowbray, Autumn 1953). On 28 Dec TSE wrote again, enclosing the second carbon of ts7: “In clearing up papers, I discovered an early draft of the verses which I mentioned to you—which will, presumably, be an ‘Ariel Poem’ for 1954—and send it herewith. Please, this is not a good enough poem, so don’t show it to anyone.” When the poem was published, he inscribed a copy: “My dear Geoffrey I hasten to send you the final version” (Christie’s, 23–24 Nov 2009).

  Bold line numbering refers to the draft text printed in the Textual History.

  1, 4, 9, 18, 22, 29 attitudes towards Christmas · · · The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight) · · · The child wonders at the Christmas Tree · · · the reverence and the gaiety (first full draft: the proper levity) · · · piety · · · annual emotion: of mediaeval religious drama: “I suppose that their feeling was a fusion of piety with the excitement of the child’s annual Christmas pantomime, and the larking spirit of a bank holiday · · · recover the right attitude · · · using the word ‘amuse’ in a wide sense, and one in which the notion of merriment need not enter · · · levity—and perhaps unusual seriousness as well—are unsuitable to the twentieth century”, Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern (1937).

  1–4 attitudes towards Christmas · · · The social, the torpid, the patently commercial, | The rowdy: to Godfrey Childe, 17 Dec 1928: “with the responsibilities, the business interruptions, and the pagan ceremonies which turn Christmas into a hideous farce, I cannot make any engagements till after the festival is behind us”.

  4, 26 midnight · · · St. Lucy: “the exquisite line which ends Donne’s Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day: ‘Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is’”, George Herbert (1962) 32.

  8 not only a decoration, but an angel: “It ought to be explained for the benefit of the reader to whom angels mean little more than Christmas cards, that M. Maritain’s view · · · is equally tenable whether you believe in the existence of angels or not”, Three Reformers (1928). To Edward J. H. Greene, 19 Apr 1940: “I think that I first heard of Maritain about 1925, when I think I came across Art et Scholastique · · · I first met him in July 1926.”

  14 delight in new possessions: to Polly Tandy, 23 Dec 1941: “I know that the pleasure of unwrapping the parcels is almost greater, while it lasts, than that of having the contents.”

  21 ts6 variant to the final Tree: Herbert: “Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree; | The tree of life to
all, but only me”, The Sacrifice 202–203. (For Herbert’s poem, see note to Marina 16–17.)

  [Poem I 109 · Textual History II 440–47]

  26 St. Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire: Hands: “In Sweden (the home of the Christmas tree) St. Lucy (Lucia) is the saint associated with Christmas. She underwent many tortures which she miraculously survived, among them being burnt alive: the flames did not consume her but formed a crown of fire upon her head.” Her Saint’s Day is 13 Dec. In 1948 TSE was in Stockholm to collect his Nobel Prize. To Marion Cushing Eliot, 18 Dec: “That was the 13th—St. Lucy’s Day, which is celebrated in Sweden with peculiar ceremonies. While I was shaving · · · I heard a chorus of young female voices piping a carol in the corridor.” TSE inscribed a copy of the poem “for Lucia Praz for St. Lucy’s Day and for Christmas T. S. Eliot 1954”. crown of fire: “the crowned knot of fire”, Little Gidding V 45.

  32 When fear came upon every soul: Acts 2: 42–44: “And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers. And fear came upon every soul: and many wonders and signs were done by the apostles. And all that believed were together, and had all things common.”

  40–41 ms2 Is this the kind of message you want to send? | Is it the kind that you care to receive?: “people are often disappointed if they don’t get what they expect, even if they don’t want it”, reported Wellesley College News 8 May 1947 (see headnote to La Figlia Che Piange). To his brother Henry, 1 Jan 1936: “As for my address to the Unitarian clergy of Boston, I did not want to address them at all, and I only acceded to repeated invitation. I gave them exactly what I was asked for, and I did not get fair treatment either.” Of Kipling the moralist: “He was well aware that the moral is unwelcome, and must be insinuated, or conveyed (as we say nowadays) subliminally”, “The Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling” (1959).