The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 116
32–33 O hidden under the dove’s wing · · · breast, | Under the palmtree at noon: see note to Coriolan II. Difficulties of a Statesman 32–33, “O hidden under the … Hidden under the”.
[Poem I 131–32 · Textual History II 453]
34 At the still point of the turning world: Conrad Aiken: “I seek the unmoving centre— | But is it moveless or are all things turning?” The Jig of Forslin (1916) 120. Karl Barth: “Faith · · · is the affirmation of resurrection as the turning-point of the world”, The Epistle to the Romans, tr. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (1933) 39 (Ben de la Mare, personal communication). “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless”, Burnt Norton II 18. “The world turns and the world changes”, Choruses from “The Rock” I 60.
35–36 temple · · · the sacrifice. | Now come the virgins bearing urns, urns: Keats: “Who are these coming to the sacrifice? · · · altar · · · priest”, Ode on a Grecian Urn 31–32.
37–39, 48–50 Dust | Dust | Dust of dust, and now · · · Give us a light? | Light | Light: Poe’s Ulalume has line-endings “dust · · · dust · · · dust” (st. 6) followed by “Light! · · · Light!” (st. 7). TSE commended Poe’s poem for its “power of incantation”, “A Dream within a Dream” (1943).
42–45 how many eagles! and how many trumpets! | (And Easter Day · · · we took young Cyril to church · · · And he said right out loud, crumpets: “Mr. Symons seems to us like a sensitive child, who has been taken into a church, and has been entranced with the effigies, and the candles, and the incense. Such rugs and jugs and candle lights! · · · a Roman”, Baudelaire in Our Time (1927), quoting Edward Lear’s The Daddy Long-legs and the Fly 22. eagles: for use as a military ensign, see note to A Cooking Egg 29–30. Cyril · · · a bell: Tennyson: “Cyril, with whom the bell-mouthed glass had wrought”, The Princess IV 137. they rang a bell: bells that have been silent since Holy Thursday are sounded again during the Easter Vigil. a bell · · · crumpets: a Wellesley College examination paper of 1936 using this poem included a note: “on the streets of London itinerant peddlars of crumpets push little carts with an attachment which rings a bell”—against which TSE wrote: “O Montreal” (King’s). (Samuel Butler’s Psalm of Montreal, with its refrain “O God, O Montreal!”, satirises cultural ignorance.) To Elizabeth Manwaring, 26 Feb 1936: “I was · · · horrified by the examination paper you sent. I hope I am not too much influenced by the fact that I should be unable to answer most of the questions, and that I was irritated by the examiner’s remark about the Sacring Bell, and by his ignorance of crumpet sellers. No, what horrifies me is that your young people should actually be set to study contemporary verse in qualification for the degree of B.A. [Footnote: But I am to believe that the same thing goes on here.] They ought to be reading Aristophanes.” (The Sacring Bell is rung when the Host is elevated during High Mass.) Grover Smith 1996 80: “The bell, recalling the crumpet-man’s clanging in the street, arouses a reflex as in I. P. Pavlov’s · · · Conditioned Reflexes (1927) and Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes (1928).” (Smart 110 quotes John Hayward: “The muffin man, one of the relics of old London, has just passed · · · jangling his bell”, New York Sun 23 Mar 1935.) eagles! · · · trumpets! · · · crumpets: “where are the eagles and the trumpets? · · · buttered scones and crumpets”, A Cooking Egg 29–31 (for TSE’s letter to I. A. Richards, acknowledging this allusion, see headnote, 2. AFTER PUBLICATION).
44–47 young Cyril · · · sausage · · · He’s artful: Dickens, of his young pickpocket: “Dodger, take off the sausages”; “The Artful’s a deal too artful”, Oliver Twist ch. VIII, XXXIX. For “artful Dodger” and Julius Caesar see “Other Verses”, Dearest Mary | Je suis très affairé 8, with note to 14–15.
[Poem I 132 · Textual History II 453–54]
46–47, 51 Don’t throw away that sausage, | It’ll come in handy · · · Et les soldats: in 1920, Lt.-Col. Charles à Court Repington published his Great War memoirs under the controversial title The First World War, implying that there might be a need to fight again, and that weapons should not be thrown away but kept at hand. OED: “first” a. 2a. 1931: “what a dear dead · · · colonel preferred to call the First World War”. In 1936 TSE placed Coriolan among the poems that are “Unfinished”. throw · · · sausage: sausage gun = Minenwerfer, literally mine thrower (“28,000 trench mortars”, 15). “There is a sausage gun | Over the way. | Fired by a bloody Hun | Three times a day. | You should see the Tommies run | When they hear the sausage gun”, to the tune of There is a Happy Land Far Far Away. come in handy: “Some years ago I wrote a poem called Triumphal March. In it I included a list of war material · · · It was prose, certainly, but it came in very handily for my purpose”, transcript of tape for the interview Talking Freely (1961) (Valerie Eliot collection); for Ludendorff’s term “war material”, see note to 13–23. Before publication of the interview, TSE changed “handily” to “effectively”. To Polly Tandy, Ash-Wednesday [26 Feb] 1936: “If you any needs sistance to help keep the Ole Man peaceable you say the word, sister, say the word, and Ill be along with a mighty powerful monkey-wrench I got handy.” come in: Ludendorff, The Coming War (see note to 8–9, “come · · · come · · · coming”).
48–50 Give us a light? | Light | Light: Louis MacNeice: “lights a cigarette · · · Give me a cigarette, another cigarette”, Homo Sum (1929) 4, 16 (the last line). Jack London: “‘Hey, Bo, give us a light,’ some one calls to you. Now this is an advertisement that that particular man has tobacco on him”, The Road, 1907. TSE: “Lights, lights”, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 27. “Light of Light, very God of very God”, Nicene Creed (to Paul Elmer More, 17 Feb 1932: “your preference for the Apostles Creed over the Nicene does not seem to me wholly justified”). “Darkness now, then | Light. | | Light”, The Rock 48 (closing lines of Part I); “the lifting light, | | Light | | Light | | The visible reminder of Invisible Light”, Choruses from “The Rock” IX 41–43. “Light | Light | Light of light | | Gone”, Burnt Norton V 39 variant (see Textual History).
[Poem I 132 · Textual History II 454]
51 Et les soldats · · · ILS LA FAISAIENT: Matthiessen 82–83 points to Charles Maurras, L’Avenir de l’Intelligence (1905):
Un écrivain bien médiocre, mais représentatif, est devenu presque fameux pour ses crises d’enthousiasme toutes les fois qu’un membre de la République de lettres se trouve touché, mort ou vif, par les honneurs officiels. Tout lui sert de prétexte, remise de médaille, érection de statue, ou pose de plaque. Pourvu que la cérémonie ait comporté des uniformes et des habites brodés, sa joie naïve éclate en applaudissements.
‘Y avez-vous pris garde? dit-il, les yeux serrés, le chef de l’État s’était fait représenter. Nous avions la moitié du Conseil des ministres et les deux préfets. Tant de généraux! Des régiments avec drapeau, des musicians et leur bannière. Sans compter beaucoup de magistrates en hermine et des professeurs, ces derniers sans leur toge, ce qui est malheureux.—Et les soldats faisaient la haie?—Ils la faisaient.—En armes?—Vous l’avez dit.—Mais que disait le peuple?—Il n’en croyait pas ses cent yeux!
[A writer, fairly mediocre but representative, has become almost famous for his crises of enthusiasm every time a member of the Republic of letters finds himselftouched dead or alive by official honours. Everything serves him as a pretext, the award of a medal, the raising of a statue, or the installation of a plaque. Provided that the ceremony calls for uniforms and braided costumes, his naive joy bursts out in applause.
—Have you spotted what’s over there? he says, with serried eyes, the head of state has had himself portrayed. We had half of the Council of Ministers and the two Prefects. How many generals! Regiments with flags, musicians and their colours. That’s without counting the magistrates in ermine and the professors, though they were not in their robes, which is a pity.—And the soldiers, were they lining the streets?—They were lining the streets.—Armed?—You’ve said it.—But what did people say?—A hundred e
yes, and they couldn’t believe them!]
Alongside TSE’s lines, Valerie Eliot wrote in VE 1951: “c.f. first essay in L’Avenir de l’Intelligence by Charles Maurras. (TSE)”. The essay’s title is “L’Illusion”, these being the opening paragraphs. TSE to Dudley Sheppard, 11 Mar 1935: “The final line in French about which you ask is a quotation from a passage · · · concerned with an ironic description of the public funeral of a distinguished man of letters. I believe there is some other colloquial shade of meaning attached to ‘Ils la faisaient’, but I have forgotten what it is, and it does not matter for my purposes.” L’Avenir de l’Intelligence had been reprinted in Maurras’s Romantisme et révolution (1922), and TSE listed it among several books likely to clarify his assertion that “there is a tendency—discernable even in art—toward a higher and clearer conception of Reason, and a more severe and serene control of the emotions by Reason”, The Idea of a Literary Review (1926).
[Poems I 132–35 · Textual History II 454–55]
II. Difficulties of a Statesman
Title Difficulties of a Statesman: “What I want to read you is the second section, which is called Difficulties of a Statesman—a subject of interest to everybody”, Chicago Round Table (1950). Noting that in his “brilliant book The Endless Adventure”, Frederick Scott Oliver had approvingly quoted “a sentence attributed to Disraeli: ‘Real statesmen are inspired by nothing else than their instinct for power and love of country’”, TSE asked: “In the difficulty that I have stated, that the Christian cannot accept the world as it is · · · should he not withdraw from the world altogether?” The Christian in the Modern World (1935). Statesman: to A. L. Rowse, 11 Apr 1931: “how many great statesmen have been great men?” Charles Whibley: “Politics is the profession of the second-rate. The man of genius strays into it by accident. We do not need the fingers of both hands to count the statesmen who have served England since the seventeenth century · · · It is not an extravagant claim that they should have some mastery of literary expression. Words are the material of their craft”, The Trimmer in Political Portraits: Second Series (1923). Quoting this, TSE wrote: “the relation of a statesman’s statesmanship to his prose style is not negligible; we can find interesting laboratory material in the writing of Mr. [Ramsay] MacDonald, Mr. Lloyd George, and particularly Mr. Winston Churchill”, Charles Whibley (1931). Under the heading “The Conditions of Statesmanship”: “what people want from their statesmen · · · is not merely energy, efficiency and ability, but a right sense of values; they do not want the values of a class to which they do not themselves belong, or even merely those of the class to which they do belong, but of the nation as a whole. These should not be values imposed by the power of a personality or the doctrines of a ‘party’, but elicited by a kind of representative character; and should have reference not necessarily to what people think they want, but to what they really want and what they can recognise that they ought to want—to people not always just as they are, but as they would like to be. The late King George V came to have some of this representative character: so that the humblest individual could imagine himself almost as in the same position—but not doing the job so well. Mr. Churchill has gained something of this authority”, Christian News-Letter 14 Aug 1940. On Keynes: “And at last the brilliant man · · · was transformed into the great statesman. Perhaps the word ‘statesman’ is too near the word ‘politician’ for my purpose; but the word ‘public servant’ on the other hand connotes the official and the pro-consul”, John Maynard Keynes (1946). “The obvious secularist solution for muddle is to subordinate everything to political power: and in so far as this involves the subordination of the money-making interests to those of the nation as a whole, it offers some immediate, though perhaps illusory relief: a people feels at least more dignified if its hero is the statesman however unscrupulous, or the warrior however brutal, rather than the financier”, The Idea of a Christian Society 41–42. “great statesmen will somehow typify the whole nation, at the same time that they surpass it”, Letter from T. S. Eliot 29 July 1944, a paper for The Moot. To Desideria Pasolini, Italian translator of The Elder Statesman, 9 July 1952: “There is in the English title an ironic intimation, since my hero had hardly distinguished himself to the degree necessary to justify the title [added: of Statesman which is much more dignified than ‘politician’].” The letter then turns to a speech by Mrs. Cargill in act II:
You wanted to pose
As a man of the world. And now you’re posing
As what? I presume, as an elder statesman;
And the difference between being an elder statesman
And posing successfully as an elder statesman
Is practically negligible.
The New Statesman, to which TSE had contributed often before 1920, was known as “the Statesman”. Pound, reviewing Prufrock and Other Observations: “Mr Appolinax’ laughter ‘submarine and profound’ transports him from the desiccated new-statesmanly atmosphere of Professor Channing-Cheetah’s”, Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot in Egoist June 1917.
[Poem I 133 · Textual History II 454–55]
1–2 CRY what shall I cry? | All flesh is grass: Isaiah 40: 6–8: “The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever” (Grover Smith 1965 165). TSE to Marguerite Caetani, 29 Sept 1931: “The only point that I should like to make to any possible translator is that the refrain at the beginning, which is from Isaiah · · · should be translated into the usual French version.” For “the post-Peace world”, see headnote to Coriolan, 1. COMPOSITION. “To cry for peace, but ignore the causes of war that are capable of being dealt with by intelligence alone, is worse than folly”, The Christian in the Modern World (1935). CRY what shall I cry?: Beddoes: “A bodiless childfull of life in the gloom, | Crying with frog voice, ‘What shall I be?’”, Death’s Jest-Book III iii 329–30, Isbrand’s Song; quoted in The Three Voices of Poetry (Grover Smith 316). Swinburne had turned Beddoes’s words against him as a description of Death’s Jest-Book (Essay on the Poetical and Dramatic Works of George Chapman, prefixed to Poems and Minor Translations, 1875, xxxv). For Beddoes’s song, again at the beginning of a poem by TSE, see note to Animula 1. CRY: matched in Later Poems by capitalising of the first word of Triumphal March (as also some other poems).
3 Companions: Coriolanus: “such Companions”; “You Companion!” (IV v, V ii).
3–4 Knights of the British Empire · · · Honour: to Laurence Binyon, 16 May 1930, on his Dante translation: “‘Old honoured father’: should one not give more the allusion to the pietas of Aeneas? I confess that ‘honoured’ has to me the devilish suggestion of a K.B.E. or something of that sort.” (“honour stains”, Little Gidding II 90.) Cavaliers, | O Cavaliers!: Whitman: Pioneers! O Pioneers! (title) in Birds of Passage (Musgrove 10). Cavaliers · · · of the Legion of Honour: members of the highest rank in France’s Légion d’honneur, which Napoleon based loosely on the Roman legions.
5 Order of the Black Eagle: highest order of chivalry in the former Kingdom of Prussia, which had come to an end in 1918. For Roman and Napoleonic eagles, see note to A Cooking Egg 29–30.
6 Order of the Rising Sun: Japanese order of chivalry, established 1875.
8–18 form the committees · · · standing committees, select committees and sub-committees · · · secretary · · · committees · · · commission · · · commission: to the Bishop of Brechin, 5 July 1939, on the book committee of the Church Literature Association: “I acted as secretary of the committee · · · the committee was reorganised in a somewhat elaborate scheme, in such a way—if I remember rightly—that I remained secretary of the general committee · · · the inmost committee was really handled by Dr. F. L. Cross · · · I believe that you are still chairman of the whole committee, and I
suppose that I am still secretary.” To Mary Trevelyan [29 June] 1942: “In my father’s family is an hereditary taint, going back for centuries, which expresses itself in an irresistible tendency to sit on committees.” “We have seen so many Boards, Commissions and Conferences already”, A Commentary in Criterion Jan 1932. “one can hardly be expected to brighten at the suggestion of setting up more ‘fact-finding commissions’”, A Commentary in Criterion Oct 1936. “not to be accomplished by appointing commissions to do our thinking for us”, The Christian Conception of Education (1942). “I have given you my Law, and you set up commissions”, Choruses from “The Rock” III 8.
13 one pound ten a week · · · thirty shillings: in each case, “thirty bob”. John Davidson: “I’m a clerk at thirty bob as you can see · · · To come the daily dull official round”, Thirty Bob a Week st. 1, 3. TSE: “I am sure that I found inspiration in the content of the poem · · · The personage that Davidson created in this poem has haunted me all my life, and the poem is to me a great poem for ever”, John Davidson (1961). The poem was one of ten TSE chose for A Personal Anthology (1947).
[Poem I 133 · Textual History II 454–55]