The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  To Erich Alport, 5 Oct 1929, on Hofmannsthal: “I have long had the idea myself of trying to translate one of his Jacobean plays into more or less Jacobean English; but I don’t know when I could get that done.” To Herbert Read, “Friday” [6 Dec 1929] (with specific reference to Hofmannsthal’s Die Hochzeit der Sobeide and Die Frau im Fenster): “I feel emboldened to try my hand at translating one or two of Hofmannsthal’s Jacobean verse plays back into Jacobean. Do you think it is possible and worth while?” To Read, 20 Mar 1936: “It is true that I have always had a high opinion of Hofmannsthal, and that I did at one time entertain the notion of translating one of his plays · · · It seems to me the sort of occupation that we might well take up after we are seventy. That of course is the dilemma about such works of translation, that the most suitable people to do them are also the people who ought not to spend the time on them · · · I am all for postponing it for another 20 or 25 years.”

  *

  Unadopted epigraphs] (See headnote to Textual History of Sweeney Agonistes, description of drafts. Junius: The Letters of Junius Letter 7. Faber published C. W. Everett’s edition in 1927 (Schuchard 219). In a letter to the TLS, 6 Dec 1926, TSE apologised for having mistaken the 17th-century scholar Francis Junius “who was only a name in an obscure corner of my memory for a Junius with whom I am on more intimate terms”, the 18th-century author whom he ranked among the “masters of English prose”. St. John of the Cross: see note to second epigraph of final text. Measure for Measure: III i, with “seem” for Shakespeare’s “be”. From the same speech by the Duke, disguised as a Friar, as the epigraph to Gerontion. LES CHOEPHORES: see note to first epigraph of final text. Casey Jones: see headnote 6. THE SUPERIOR LANDLORD.

  [Poems I 113–27 · Textual History II 449–52]

  Title Sweeney Agonistes: since 1932. Agonistes: “In Greek the word can mean a contestant in the games · · · or a champion · · · and in the Christian tradition · · · ‘saint’ or ‘martyr’”, note to Samson Agonistes in Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (rev. ed. 1997). In 1930, Nevill Coghill staged Milton’s play in Oxford and invited TSE, who replied on 17 May: “It is very thoughtful of you to offer me tickets for your production of Samson Agonistes—a play which I admire immensely, and which—if there ever has been a performance before—I have never had the opportunity of seeing—and I wish indeed that I could come; but the latter part of May and the beginning of June finds me very rushed indeed · · · I shall have to content myself with reading any accounts of the performances afterwards.” To Hugh Gordon Porteus, 5 Nov 1931: “I was very much pleased, particularly because you mentioned one piece of mine which I very much like, and which everybody ignores, that is the two fragments which I now call Sweeney Agonistes. You perhaps remember the quotation ‘at the mill with slaves’?” (Milton: “Ask for this great Deliverer now, and find him | Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves, | Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke”, Samson Agonistes 40–42.) To Marcus S. Crouch, 15 May 1939: “if a play is not intended to be produced, it is not worth writing”. Milton, prefacing Samson Agonistes: “Division into act and scene referring chiefly to the stage (to which this work was never intended) is here omitted”, Of that Sort of Dramatic Poem which is Called Tragedy.

  Subtitle Aristophanic Melodrama: Smith 1963 58: “His play is Aristophanic in that it combines a comic surface of social satire with the ritualistic celebration of death and rebirth which Cornford found to underlie comedy · · · It is melodramatic in the older sense of the term, a play combining music and drama, because it is in the music hall tradition, but it is also melodramatic in another sense.” Melodrama: OED (“Gk. song, music + F. drame”) 1: “In early 19th c. use, a stage-play (usually romantic and sensational in plot and incident) in which songs were interspersed”.

  [Poem I 113 · Textual History II 450]

  First epigraph] TSE gave Paul Mazon’s French translation of these two Greek lines as the epigraph to “FRAGMENT OF A MELOCOMIC MINSTRELSY”, one of two typescript titles on a separate leaf (see headnote to Textual History, drafts from King’s: 2. TYPESCRIPT TITLES). Choephoroi: Iphigenia, the daughter of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, has been sacrificed by him to the gods, to secure favourable winds to Troy. On his return from Troy, Agamemnon is killed by Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Orestes, the son of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, is urged by Apollo to avenge his father, and so kills his mother as well as Aegisthus. Lemprière: “Orestes is tormented by the Furies, and exiles himself to Argos, where he is still pursued by the avengeful goddesses.” Aeschylus’ trilogy, Oresteia, depicts in Agamemnon the king’s return and his murder; in Choephoroi (The Libation Bearers), the return of Orestes avenging his father; and in Eumenides (The Kindly Ones, meaning the Furies), the pursuit and prosecution of Orestes by the Furies, and his final acquittal. The Family Reunion I i: HARRY: “Look there! | Can’t you see them? You don’t see them, but I see them, | And they see me.” To Hayward, 2 May 1935, when Vivien was desperate to see her husband again: “I have not yet got over the feeling of being hunted: in my sleep I am pursued like Orestes, though I feel with less reason than that hero · · · I don’t know how much ground there is for this feeling, but it is something plus fort que moi, of the character of nightmare, and I have to give way to it.” 25 Feb 1936: “I have more than one kind of nightmare: hence my interest in Orestes.”

  Second epigraph] St. John of the Cross: Ascent of Mount Carmel I IV 1. Apparently TSE’s own translation from J. P. Migne’s French as quoted in Gonzague Truc, Les Mystiques espagñols: Saint Térèse—Jean de le Croiz [1921] (Jennifer Formichelli, personal communication). TSE recommended Truc’s book at the end of his first Clark Lecture (The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 65). See note to Ash-Wednesday I 1–3, 5. “During the sixteenth century, Spain experienced an extraordinary outburst of mysticism: in other words, she produced at least three great mystics and saints, and probably several hundred pathological ecstatics. The greatest were St. Theresa, and St. John of the Cross, both Carmelites. I think that St. John was the greater writer, or rather that his writings are very much more important than St. Theresa’s; but probably Theresa had the greater influence”, Thinking in Verse (1930). TSE had made a note of St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, in 1914 (Harvard index cards); see note to Burnt Norton III 25–32. He acknowledged a copy of William Force Stead’s book The Shadow of Mount Carmel on 13 Nov 1926. For St. John of the Cross and the doctrine that “one must divest oneself of the love of created beings”, see note to East Coker III 35–46. TSE, contributing for the first time to Christendom: “But unless this humanity is considered always in relation to God, we may expect to find an excessive love of created beings, in other words humanitarianism, leading to a genuine oppression of human beings in what is conceived by other human beings to be their interest”, Catholicism and International Order (1933). For the Buddhist text “he becomes divested of passion, and by the absence of passion he becomes free”, see note to The Waste Land part title “III. The Fire Sermon”.

  To Geoffrey Faber, 10 May 1936: “I quite agree that the exaltation of love (which is only incidentally but necessarily ‘physical’) is an illusion, in being the illusion of a unity of two persons as well as the transient identification of sensation in two bodies. Between any two people (and the more intimate their relations the more important this becomes) there is always an unresolvable element of hostility which may be only further incubated by the dominance of one over the other. A man in love has moments at least when he feels his condition, with resentment, to be one of slavery rather than of self‑realisation. (It is I think, a coming to terms between the elements of attraction and repulsion that constitutes permanent affection, but I am not talking about affection) · · · I’ve tried to express something of my belief at the end of Burnt Norton. I mean that the ‘illusion’ of love is something to pass forward through, not to dash into and out of again, like a bath. You will have to put up with a little mystical theology—I can’t help that, because
I can’t talk about the subject without bringing it in. The ‘illusion’ is merely a degree of reality, then, essentially different from hallucination; and love of created beings should lead us to the only love that is wholly satisfactory and final, the love of God—even though for 99% of parsons this is only a stock phrase: it is ciò che per l’universo si squaderna” [the scattered leaves of all the universe], Paradiso XXXIII 87.

  [Poems I 113 · Textual History II 450]

  Fragment of a Prologue

  From a ms by TSE relating to a sketch by Vivien Eliot (“Felice at the Card Table”), c. 1924: “Felise gives parties as a stimulant to stir up her own sluggish torpor. The party: Fanny, her brother Horace, a dago, an American, a German, the central figures ( Fresca). Play a mad kind of bridge. Fanny Horace, with a little whisky (they are abstemious people) whip themselves up into a kind of frenzy in which they develop the most witty conversation gestures, malapropisms with several meanings” (U. Maryland).

  Characters] Given at the head of Fragment of an Agon. WAUCHOPE: Charles Ware Waughop, Joseph Louis Swarts and Louis Frederick Klipstein were contemporaries of TSE’s at Smith Academy (Smith Academy Yearbooks, Washington U.; Stayer). Lt. Gen. Sir Arthur Wauchope was High Commissioner for Palestine, 1931–38. (TSE’s Wauchope is a Lieutenant.) HORSFALL: perhaps horseplay + pratfall (OED: “Theatr. A comedy fall”, from 1939) (Stayer). KLIPSTEIN. KRUMPACKER: Otto H. Schwarz to TSE, 5 Mar 1950, recalling their schooldays: “I know there is only one source from which you get the name Klipstein, the football player at Smith, what a character” (see note to Fragment of a Prologue 128, “Klip”). TSE to Schwarz, 20 Apr: “you were right about Klipstein, I remember him well, and how he looked the part. Krumpacker was a name and character I collected later at Harvard.” To Lewis Morris, 24 Oct 1929, on a contemporary who had died: “but for my stout Anglo-Saxon constitution I suppose I should be in a box too. Krumpacker too: well, well.” SWARTS. SNOW: Smith 1963 61: “entertainers brought in to provide jazz song and dance routines so popular at parties in the nineteen-twenties”. The Superior Landlord specifies: “Lincoln Snow Negro Jazz Drummer” and “Milton Swarts Jewish Jazz Drummer”. (Ger. Schwarze = negro.) DORIS: for “Doris, towelled from the bath”, see note to Sweeney Erect 41. The subtitle of The Superior Landlord is A Dream. For Doris’s Dream Songs, see headnote to The Hollow Men. DUSTY: Partridge: “Penniless; lower classes’, from ca. 1870”.

  Stage direction (ts1) Doris playing patience: asked by Auden why he liked playing patience, TSE replied: “Because it’s the nearest thing to being dead” (Spender 240). TSE: “He is skilful at solitaire patience”, How to Pick a Possum 19 (in Noctes Binanianæ), and note.

  1 Pereira: Bishop Henry Horace Pereira, Hon. Chaplain to Queen Victoria, died in Jan 1926 and was remembered in an obituary and correspondence in The Times. In 1905 he had published both Intemperance and Intemperance as a Hindrance to Spiritual Life (Jayne). Robert Speaight recalled reading Sweeney Agonistes in Colombo (Ceylon), “where practically everyone is called Pereira, and where the banyan trees composed an embarrassing background”, Braybrooke ed. 78. Jonathan Pereira helped to pioneer pharmacology, publishing the standard Elements of Materia Medica in 1839. (“a medicine made from the bark of a Brazilian tree and used to mitigate or remove fever”, Grover Smith 1963 65.)

  21–27 Ting a ling ling · · · That’s Pereira | Yes that’s Pereira · · · Pick up the receiver: the technology did not allow the caller to be identified until he or she spoke.

  [Poem I 115–16 · Textual History II 450]

  31 Miss Dorrance’s flat: the italics perhaps mark a distinction from an “apartment” (Michael Field, American Literary History Spring 1992); or perhaps, since Pereira is not obviously American, from rooms for entertaining gentlemen on business. “Grishkin has a maisonnette”, Whispers of Immortality 24. For a change by “F. M.” from “Ellison & Antony lived in a flat”, to “Ellison and Antony lived in ‘Mansions’ · · · It was not apparently sordid, any more than all ‘Mansions’ are sordid”, see McCue 2016.

  43, 52, 61 She’s got her feet in mustard and water · · · Sweeney · · · Mrs. Porter: “The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring | Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. | O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter | And on her daughter | They wash their feet in soda water”, The Waste Land [III] 199–201 (see note). Footbaths of mustard and water were recommended for everything from bunions to dyspepsia, sometimes together with “Female corrective mixture”. Soda-water was solely for drinking.

  49 Now I’m going to cut the cards for to-night: Vivien Eliot, for a story by “F. M.” with songs, dancing and record-playing: “For two months Sibylla and Felice stayed in the high up sea-side flat · · · They cut the cards at all hours to discover their fortunes for the day, for each other, and for everyone they knew. Sibylla took great stock of the results” and “‘Draw a card’ said Felice, spreading out the other pack on her lap. Sibylla drew one. ‘Nine of diamonds,’ said Felice, ‘you’re in luck.’ ‘Let me see what does that mean?’ ‘Good luck, prosperity or business success’, Felice replied promptly” (c. 624 fols. 62, 109).

  97 coincidence (as also interested Fragment of an Agon 102): “F. M.”: “‘Come and try these excellent strawberries and cream under the apple-tree,’ he boomed · · · ‘Per-fectly enchanting,’ said the critic”, Fête Galante (1925). For words partially italicised in Alfred Kreymborg’s Lima Beans, see note to Sweeney Among the Nightingales 18–20.

  110–14 KNOCK · · · KNOCK: see note to Fragment of an Agon 161–73. OED knocking-shop: “slang. A brothel” (1860).

  116 How come? how come?: OED “how” 19: “colloq. (orig. U.S.) phr.: how did (or does) it come about (that)?” with this as first citation from a British publication. The sense of this Canadian speaker, though, appears closer to “What’s up?” Joel Chandler Harris: “‘How come, Brer Rabbit—how come?’” Nights with Uncle Remus (1883) ch. XLVII. Janet Adam Smith records that TSE’s visits to Michael Roberts’s family were marked by “the pleasant ritual of reading Uncle Remus” (Olney ed.).

  124, 128 Loot · · · Cap: Lieutenant (pronounced loo-tènant, as opposed to the British lef-tènant), Captain.

  125 the Canadian Expeditionary Force: with more than half a million men enlisting, the Canadian Corps were, in Lloyd George’s words, “marked out as Storm Troops”, the élite of the allied forces.

  126–28 KLIPSTEIN · · · Klip: “Sir Ferdinand | | Klein. Who clipped”, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 28–29 (pronunciation of -stein being variable).

  [Poem I 116–19 · Textual History II 450–51]

  129 Yes we did our bit, as you folks say: OED “bit” 4h: “to do one’s bit: to make one’s contribution to a cause or the like, esp. by serving in the armed forces” (1915), with “Every man beyond the military age can and should do his ‘bit’”, Ladies’ Home Journal, 1917. OED then quotes Galsworthy and TSE’s line.

  130 I’ll tell the world we got the Hun on the run: C. B. Elderkin’s song We’ve Got the Hun on the Run was published in 1918, but the phrase was common.

  137, 158–59 We hit this town last night for the first time · · · Sam of course is at home in London, | And he’s promised to show us around: “Now for a peek about the town · · · When you’re out for an afternoon | Find somebody with money to spend”, Suite Clownesque II 12, 15–16.

  156 real live: OED “live” 1c: “frequent in jocular use, esp. in ‘a real live —’”, from 1887. 2b: “(orig U.S.). Of persons: Full of energy and alertness; ‘wide-awake’, up-to-date”, with first British citation from 1932. In The Superior Landlord Part II, Sweeney and Mrs. Porter share a “plane of vitality”, and after her resurrection Mrs. Porter “returns as lively as ever”. Britisher: Fowler: “a word made in America, but now discountenanced in American dictionaries as ‘in jocose use only’ or as ‘almost disused’; if these phrases give the actual & not merely the desirable American usage · · · it is time that British writers reconciled themselves to relinqui
shing the word in its convenient function of announcing that the user of it is American.”

  Fragment of an Agon

  Vassar College performance programme: “When the curtain rises the company is seated in a shabby kitchen, in front of a refectory table. Sweeney, wearing a mask of an old man which makes him appear young, is scrambling an egg in a chafing dish. The time is 9:46 by the Exchange clock” (see headnote, 10. PREMIÈRE IN AMERICA: ENTER AN OLD GENTLEMAN). Yet Flanagan 84, recalling the première: “As the illustrations indicate, there was no shabby flat, no refectory table, and no chafing dish. The egg, however, was present in the setting itself and Mr. Eliot found it a satisfactory egg.”

  1–39] From his early years, TSE adopted the Tennysonian tradition of idealising exotic islands: “Ligarcia Huskchobornza the great plant. This fine flower was discovered in the South Sea Islands by a convict, ‘Mickey’ Dennisson, sent there for murder”, Eliot’s Floral Magazine (Houghton). To Conrad Aiken, 31 Dec 1914: “Come, let us desert our wives, and fly to a land where there are no Medici prints, nothing but concubinage and conversation.” See note to To Walter de la Mare 2.