The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 118
IV and V recall Edward Lear’s “How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!” (Also: “How delightful to meet the O’Possum”, How to Pick a Possum 3.) TSE alluded to Lear’s poem when writing to Hayward [18 Jan 1937]: “Possibly my taste for Marsala is due to my admiration for Edward Lear, but I do like it, and like Mr. Lear, I never get Tipsy at all.” In The Aims of Education (1950), he cited “runcible hat” from Lear’s poem. The last of TSE’s extension lectures in 1917–18 on Victorian literature was The Laureates of Nonsense—Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and the Makers of Light Verse. On 2 Oct 1932, shortly after arriving at Harvard, he wrote to his secretary asking her to send him a copy of Lear’s poems “with also the Four Little People & the Quangle Wangle’s Hat” (The Story of the Four Little Children who Went Round the World), and he discussed Lear again in The Music of Poetry (1942). When Faber published Holbrook Jackson’s edition of The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear (1947), it was reviewed in the Sunday Times by Richard Jennings, to whom TSE wrote on 24 Nov:
I note in passing that you make no reference to the celebrated McTaggart Theory. You will remember that McTaggart of Trinity (Cambridge) held the preposterous view that runcible meant tortoise‑shell. But the essay I have been intending for years to write—The Concept of Runcibility, or McTaggart Refuted, is still in the womb of time. And meanwhile
“Romantic England’s dead and gone:
It’s with Ed. Leary in the grave.”
(Yeats: “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, | It’s with O’Leary in the grave”, September 1913 7–8.) In later life TSE owned both a drawing by Edward Lear and Augustus John’s etching of Lear (Stephen Spender, New York Times 29 Sept 1963). For Lear’s “Old Man of”, see note to Gerontion 70–72.
Frank Morley recalled Hodgson in 1923 or 1924: “I stood with Hodgson on the steps of St. Paul’s and received his remark: ‘Don’t sell short those compatriots of yours, Pound and Eliot’”, Morley 1966 95.
[Poem I 141 · Textual History II 458]
The Eliots had been introduced to Hodgson on 11 Dec 1931 by Ottoline Morrell. Aurelia Hodgson recorded her husband’s diffidence: “To me he explained later that it was quite possible that TSE might not care to know him” (notes on TSE, Bryn Mawr). Hodgson inscribed a copy of the 1930 reprint of his Poems (1917) “to his dear friend Vivienne Haigh Eliot” (Clodd collection, Maggs catalogue 2004, 876). TSE to Morrell, from Harvard, 10 Apr 1933: “I have a letter from Vivienne, in which she mentions that your comment upon my jingle about Hodgson was that Hodgson must be a very Cruel Man. Of course I know how effectually V. can garble reports, but to be quite sure, I write to say that I have found Hodgson one of the gentlest of men, and the stanza was meant to indicate that.” In 1935 TSE offered Hodgson the opportunity to publish his poems with Faber, and Hodgson replied that “the association would be particularly pleasing” (9 Apr 1935), but Macmillan remained Hodgson’s publisher. As well as their correspondence, Bryn Mawr has a photograph of the two poets together in 1932, each with a pipe and with a dog on a leash (comparable to the drawing of Hodgson by TSE, see notes to IV. Lines to Ralph Hodgson Esqre.). Writing to the Hodgsons on 6 Apr 1962, TSE called himself “a great admirer” of Hodgson’s poems.
I. Lines to a Persian Cat
Title Lines to: TSE’s first use of this unassuming formula, which he adopted for I–V, as also for Lines to an Old Man (originally published as Words for an Old Man). Although TSE intended it as prose, Defence of the Islands was first printed under the heading LINES WRITTEN BY T. S. ELIOT (see headnote).
I 1–2 songsters of the air repair | To the green fields of Russell Square: Horace “now suddenly burst loudly into song, in the hoarse, quavering voice which is used by songsters in the streets of London”, On the Eve (1925); TSE’s authorship uncertain, see Index of Identifying Titles. Blake: “the green woods · · · the air · · · the green hill”, Songs of Innocence: Laughing Song 1–4; “Farewell green fields”, Night 9.
I 2–9 Russell Square · · · the dull brain · · · the quick eyes · · · delay: “One sits delaying in the vacant square · · · The eye retains the images | The sluggish brain · · · dull”, First Debate between the Body and Soul 9, 22–25. the dull brain: Keats, Ode to a Nightingale 34. Shelley: “the dullest brains”, Letter to Maria Gisborne 220.
I 3 Beneath the trees there is no ease: Keats: “There are plenty of trees, | And plenty of ease”, The Gothic looks solemn 13–14 (Archie Burnett, personal communication).
I 5 Woolly Bear: not the caterpillar, but the name of the Persian cat (see headnote to V. Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg).
I 6 There is no relief but in grief: F. A. Paley, footnote on Plato’s Philebus 47e: “though tears give relief in grief, and in this sense ‘there’s bliss in tears;’ yet Plato seems rather to have been thinking of tears of joy”, The Philebus of Plato tr. Paley (1873) 78. “Their faces relax from grief into relief”, The Dry Salvages III 12.
[Poem I 141 · Textual History II 458]
I 7–8, 10 when will · · · When will · · · When will Time: “When will the fountain of my tears be dry? | When will my sighs be spent? | When will desire agree to let me die?” anonymous lyric repr. in 1888 in More Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age ed. A. H. Bullen (Grover Smith 250). In the supplementary scene for Sweeney Agonistes sent to Hallie Flanagan, the old gentleman introduces himself as “Time”, and Sweeney asks him: “When will the barnfowl fly before morning? | When will the owl be operated on for cataracts? | When will the eagle get out of his barrel-roll?” (see headnote, 10. PREMIÈRE IN AMERICA: ENTER AN OLD GENTLEMAN).
I 9–10 Why will the summer day delay? | When will Time flow away: “Children and cats in the alley · · · (Somewhat impatient of delay) | On the doorstep of the Absolute”, Spleen 8, 15–16 (likewise concluding lines). For “delaying” in another March Hare poem, see note to I 2–9.
I 10 When will Time flow away?: Tennyson: “When will the stream be aweary of flowing | Under my eye?” Nothing Will Die 1–2 (Musgrove 89). TSE: “time is time, and runs away”, Song (“If space and time, as sages say”) 7.
II. Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier
“I’ve never done any dogs. Of course dogs don’t seem to lend themselves to verse quite so well, collectively, as cats”, Paris Review (1959). For the Eliots’ first Yorkshire terrier, named Dinah Brooks, see letter to his mother, 23 Apr 1919. Two other Yorkshire terriers, Peter and Polly Louise, can be seen in the photograph album kept by Vivien 1924–29 (Bodleian).
On notepaper from the Emerald Beach Hotel in the Bahamas, in the winter of 1963–64, when in frail health, TSE wrote out Lionel Johnson’s poem Dead: “In Merioneth, over the sad moor | Drives the rain, the cold wind blows · · · lightly down she lies · · · the wind lives and wails · · · A spirit cries Be strong! and cries Be still!” (On a second sheet, he wrote out Kipling’s The Appeal: “Let me lie quiet in that night | Which shall be yours anon · · · Seek not to question other than | The books I leave behind.”) Lionel Johnson’s poem had featured as the last item in A Personal Anthology (1947): “I do not think it is a perfect poem; there are lines in it which I should like to alter, it is a poem which you do not find in anthologies, but which has something in it, a tone, a few lines and phrases, which re-echo in the mind for a lifetime.”
II 2–4 tree · · · In a black sky, from a green cloud | Natural forces shriek’d aloud: John Davidson: “Motionless, leaden cloud, | The region roofed and walled; | Beneath, a tempest shrieked aloud”, Winter Rain 1–4 (Grover Smith 1974 254). TSE: “three trees on a low sky”, Journey of the Magi 24 (Donald Sommerville, personal communication).
II 4–6 Natural forces shriek’d aloud, | Screamed, rattled, muttered endlessly. | Little dog was safe and warm: Poe (in For Annie 19–23, 79–80; see description of ts1 in Textual History), likewise of a dead pet:
The moaning and groaning,
The sighing and sobbing,
Are quieted now,
With that horrible throbbing
At heart · · ·
When the light was extinguished,
She covered me warm
[Poems I 141 · Textual History II 458]
TSE read from Poe’s poem on the BBC in the talk published as “A Dream within a Dream” (1943).
II 4, 10–12 Natural forces shriek’d aloud · · · Pollicle dogs and cats all must · · · Like undertakers, come to dust: Cymbeline IV ii: “Fear no more the heat o’th’Sun, | Nor the furious Winter’s rages · · · Golden lads, and girls all must, | As chimney-sweepers come to dust.”
II 7 cretonne: OED: “French name of a strong fabric of hempen warp and linen woof; applied in England to a stout unglazed cotton cloth printed on one or both sides with a pattern”.
II 7, 12, 15 eiderdown · · · dust · · · sleep endlessly: Herbert: “we can go die as sleep · · · Making our pillows either down, or dust”, Death 21, 24 (see note to final line of Five-Finger Exercises).
II 8–9, 12 cracked and brown · · · dry · · · dust: “drink · · · dry · · · without rain · · · mudcracked · · · If there were water · · · A spring · · · the sound of water”, The Waste Land [V] 335–50. Poe, For Annie 31–40:
And oh! of all tortures
That torture the worst
Has abated—the terrible
Torture of thirst · · ·
I have drank of a water
That quenches all thirst:—
Of a water that flows,
With a lullaby sound,
From a spring but a very few
Feet under ground
cracked and brown: “The wilderness is cracked and browned”, Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service 12.
II 10–11 Pollicle dogs and · · · Jellicle cats: see headnote to The Marching Song of the Pollicle Dogs.
II 13–14 Here a little dog I pause | Heaving up my prior paws: Herrick: “Here a little child I stand | Heaving up my either hand”, Another Grace for a Child (Grover Smith 250). Corbière: “ne pas connaître | Ton écuelle ni ton maître, | Ne jamais marcher sur les mains, | Chien!” [Not to recognise your bowl or your master, never to pad about on my hands, | Dog!], A Mon Chien Pope [To My Dog Pope] 6–9.
II 14 prior: OED specifies “Preceding (in time or order)”.
III. Lines to a Duck in the Park
Ralph Hodgson to Aurelia Bolliger (c/o T. S. Eliot), 8 June 1932: “Ducks, yes, tell Eliot, worms, newts and pretty nearly anything that they can find.” Bolliger, who married Hodgson the following year, was staying with the Eliots at 68 Clarence Gate Gardens.
[Poems I 141–42 · Textual History II 458–59]
III 1 The long light shakes across the lake: Tennyson: “The long light shakes across the lakes”, The Princess: “The splendour falls” (1850) [III ^ IV] 3 (Grover Smith 250).
III 4 no eft or mortal snake: Tennyson: “A bedmate of the snail and eft and snake”, The Holy Grail 569 (Grover Smith 250). eft: OED n.1: “A small lizard or lizard-like animal” (also “newt”).
III 5, 7 duck and drake · · · I have had the Bread and Wine: Yeats: “O’Driscoll drove with a song | The wild duck and the drake · · · The bread and the wine had a doom”, The Host of the Air 1–2, 25 (Grover Smith 250).
III 13–14 the enquiring worm shall try | Our well-preserved complacency: Marvell: “then Worms shall try | That long preserved virginity”, To His Coy Mistress 27–28. enquiring worm: HAMLET: “A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him” (IV iii); see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 113, 116.
IV. Lines to Ralph Hodgson Esqre.
IV 4 Baskerville Hound: Conan Doyle: “an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog”, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) ch. 14.
IV 4–7 Hound · · · tear you limb from limb: Maud Stessor described Hodgson as “an uncouth, untidy man with strange blazing eyes and a shock of hair, invariably escorted on his walks abroad by a retinue of six or seven huge bull terriers”, Bookman 31 Apr 1931. TSE in childhood: “Poor Mosly felt badly at this, when an immense bull-dog came tearing after him. [continued:] The bull-dog ran and catching Mosly’s pants tore a large piece out”, Mosly Wrags: The adventures of a hobo by Gabbee Tahkers, Fireside Nos. 5–6. “Do you wear pants! If so wear NeverRip, fine for hobos! Bulldogs cannot tear them”, Eliot’s Floral Magazine. “I cannot afford yachting, but I should like to breed bull terriers”, Harvard College Class of 1910, Seventh Report (1935) 221.
IV 5–6 from his master | Will follow you faster and faster: Poe: “Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster | Followed fast and followed faster”, The Raven 63–64 (Grover Smith 250).
[Poems I 142 · Textual History II 459–60]
IV 7 tear you limb from limb: Aurelia Hodgson: “Late in the spring he told me he had heard a story of Ralph Hodgson’s once being given 5 summons complaints by the police because a maid had one of the dogs on a[n] elastic Whiteley’s Exerciser instead of a proper leader, and he had gone about attacking people in the dark. We agreed that the story sounded apocryphal. [Footnote: Actually it is true, and there were 7 complaints]”, notes on TSE from his conversation, 1930s.
IV 11 his palate fine: Keats: “him whose strenuous tongue | Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine”, Ode on Melancholy 27–28 (Grover Smith 250).
IV 12 gooseberry tart: to Hodgson, 31 Oct 1934: “The gooseberries in Japan must have an especially sour flavour to make you like this chattering in your delirium”. 11 May 1935: “no use worrying about the future till you get back to Ridgeways and we can fill you up with gooseberry tarts.” Postcard, 4 Nov 1938: “Saddle of mutton arranged, but I cannot promise gooseberry tart.”
IV 15 999 canaries: Vivien Eliot to Aurelia Hodgson, undated: “I got your postcard this morning about the canaries etc” (Beinecke). Kochi Doi, a colleague at Sendai U., recorded that Hodgson was given a roller canary, and bought a second. The two mated and there were soon more than 30 (Robert H. Sykes, Explicator May 1972).
IV 16–17 round his head finches and fairies | In jubilant rapture skim: Grover Smith 250 points to Hodgson:
When flighting time is on I go
With clap-net and decoy,
A-fowling after goldfinches
And other birds of joy.
I lurk among the thickets of
The Heart where they are bred,
And catch the twittering beauties as
They fly into my Head.
The Birdcatcher (1917)
IV 18–19 How delightful to meet Mr. Hodgson! | (Everyone wants to meet him): “You hear everyone remark | Look at him!” Suite Clownesque III 16–17.
V. Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg
“E is for Eliot, a very stern man. | His prose is severe, and his poems don’t scan”, page heading in Faber’s Christmas Books catalogue 1933 (author unknown). In a comic letter to Geoffrey Faber, 7 July 1936, TSE characterises himself: “I would point out that my emoluments from the publishing house of Faber are not only ridiculously inadequate in consideration of the burden of responsibility that I bear, but are only just sufficient to enable me to dress neatly and modestly and to entertain the innumerable bores at whom I should be able to snap my fingers were I not connected with a publishing house.” The poem’s first publication, in the Criterion, used frequent capitals in 18th-century style; see Textual History.
[Poems I 142–43 · Textual History II 460–61]
Title Cuscuscaraway: OED “cuscus” 2: “aromatic root of an Indian grass” + “caraway”: “umbelliferous plant · · · aromatic and carminative”. Also “cuscus” 3: “a genus of marsupial quadrupeds found in New Guinea” (citing H. H. Romilly: “The opossums and cuscus
tribe taste strongly of gum leaves on which they feed”). For TSE, a cur: “I would tell you about our Cus Cus Praps except that I can’t Draw Dogs so well as Cats”, to Tom Faber, 20 Jan 1931. Mirza Murad Ali Beg: author of the historical romance Lalun the Beragun: or The Battle of Paniput (Bombay, 1884). TSE had heard of this “Legend of Hindoostan” from Kipling’s story To Be Filed for Reference within Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), where the dying McIntosh boasts of his writings: “‘What Mirza Murad Ali Beg’s book is to all other books on native life, will my work be to Mirza Murad Ali Beg’s!’” (Grover Smith 250). TSE: “in Plain Tales from the Hills he has given the one perfect picture of a society of English, narrow, snobbish, spiteful, ignorant and vulgar, set down absurdly in a continent of which they are unconscious. What Mirza Murad Ali Beg’s book is to all other books of native life, so is Mr. Kipling’s to all other books of Anglo-Indian life”, Kipling Redivivus (1919). To Hayward, 3 Jan 1941: “Your outline of the old ladies of Wimbledon is very promising, and I hope will be developed in the great work which is to be to Mirza Murad Ali Beg’s book what Mirza Murad Ali Beg’s book is to all other books of native life.” Again, to the Faber committee: “I think it no exaggeration that what Mirza Murad Ali Beg’s book is to all other books, so is this book to Mirza Murad Ali Beg’s”, “All and Everything” by G. Gurdjieff, reader’s report (1949). Kipling retold Beg’s story in his poem With Scindia to Delhi (1890).