The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 120
To Jean Mambrino, 24 July 1952, on translation into French (perhaps unsent):
I must say that the poems you have chosen strike me as the most untranslatable of all my verse, since they are the most purely lyrical and the effect and meaning depend so very much upon the particular arrangement of syllables which is found in the English. You have, on the whole, made a fairly close literal translation, although it seems to me, especially in the case of the first two, that the value of the poems evaporates completely, and must evaporate completely in any translation.
I note, however, a few small points. In New Hampshire it would be better to put the five verbs at the end in the imperative mood, although in English they have the advantage of ambiguity between the imperative and the indicative. In Virginia, I do not think that “tranquille” quite renders “still”. As one has to select out of the meaning of the word in one language only a part of its meaning for translation, I should say that what should be emphasised is the fact that the hills, in contrast to the river, give the impression of immobility. This poem, by the way, is modelled on the Spanish copla form. For Usk, I think an understanding of this poem depends partly on the immediate evocation of the scenery of The Mabinogion, Welsh tales belonging to the Arthurian cycle. In Rannoch, I do not think that “tendre” is quite the right rendering of “soft”. It might almost be “mou”. As for the birds, these particular varieties of singing sparrows are only known in America, and I do not know what you can do about them as there is probably no French equivalent. All you can do, is to substitute known European song birds for unknown American birds. I have never known what difference there is, if any, between “le goéland” and “la mouette”, both of which are given in the dictionary as the equivalent of “sea-gull”, and I am not quite sure that “bavardage” is right for “palaver”. A “palaver” is more a discussion or conference. You have in French the verb “palabrer”.
Alongside the quotation of II 1–4 in G. Jones (202), TSE wrote “This is a copla”. The Spanish copla is a light song, usually a love song. The word derives from cuplé, a short, often playful song for the stage. (See Margaret Greaves, Journal of Modern Literature Summer 2014.)
Title Landscapes: to Geoffrey Faber, 29 Sept 1952:
The mountains of Vermont are amazingly beautiful · · · and would be so even if they were not now adorned by forest foliage of the most brilliant colours: every shade from light yellow and brown through scarlet to deep heather purple, according to the species of tree. But the towns, the villages and the scattered homesteads are sordid and mesquin [mean]; the country is almost a desert; and you [would] not believe that man could have inhabited a territory for a good three hundred years and made so shallow an impression upon it. He has not improved nature or in any way come to terms with it—as in England or in Italy you feel an intimate relation between the life of nature and the life of the race · · · you feel that every house and sign of human life might be swept away and leave exactly the same inhuman natural beauty that was there before.
To Bonamy Dobrée [28 Oct] 1932: “I envy you · · · your prospect over the mellow fields & mists of Norfolk. The New England landscape is very beautiful in autumn, with its beeches and maples in full blaze and clamour over the rugged hills; but the paysage is, after all, not humanised.”
[Poem I 144 · Textual History II 463–67]
I. New Hampshire
In June 1933 TSE visited Emily Hale in New Hampshire before sailing back to Britain. He returned to New Hampshire on holiday in Sept 1936.
Title New Hampshire: Robert Frost was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his New Hampshire (1923), a collection Jeffrey Hart considered “a rejoinder to the author of The Waste Land” (Sewanee Review Summer 1976). TSE: “it was only in 1915, after I came to England, that I heard the name of Robert Frost”, Ezra Pound (1946). Toast to Robert Frost, Books across the Sea, June 1957: “I have a special weakness—no, I shouldn’t call it a weakness—a special understanding, of a great deal of his work because I also have the New England background. But I think that there are two kinds of local feeling in poetry. There is the kind which makes that poetry only accessible to people who have the same background, to whom it means a great deal; and there is another kind which can go with universality: the relation of Dante to Florence, of Shakespeare to Warwickshire, of Goethe to the Rhineland: the relation of Robert Frost to New England” (transcript by Beatrice Warde, Faber archive). To Glenway Westcott, 24 Mar 1961: “I should have been glad to add my voice to those recommending Robert Frost for the Nobel Prize, but unfortunately I have already put forward another candidate writing in another language from ours, and also suggested that at some future date the name of Mr. Ezra Pound might be considered.”
I 1 Children’s voices in the orchard: Coriolanus III i: “Have I had children’s voices?” Blake: “When the voices of children are heard on the green | And whisperings are in the dale, | The days of youth rise fresh in my mind”, When the voices of children. TSE: “children’s voices, ended in a wail”, First Caprice in North Cambridge 4. “Children’s voices in little corners | Whimper whimper”, The Burnt Dancer 20–21. “Children singing in the orchard”, Ode (“Tired. | Subterrene”) 12. “Et O ces voix d’enfants”, The Waste Land [III] 202.
I 1, 8, 12 Children’s voices in the orchard · · · light-in-leaves · · · apple-tree: Pound: “This is our home, the trees are full of laughter · · · and the Mounts Balde and Riva | Are alive with song, and all the leaves are full of voices”, Three Cantos (I), Poetry June 1917. TSE: “the leaves were full of children, | Hidden excitedly, containing laughter”, Burnt Norton I 40–41. “The voice · · · And the children in the apple-tree”, Little Gidding V 34–35 (see note).
I 2 Between the blossom- and the fruit-time: Swinburne: “between the blossom and the grass”, Laus Veneris 309; one of the Swinburne poems which a volume of selections “should certainly contain”, Swinburne as Poet (1920).
I 3 crimson head: “In New England I missed the long dark river, the ailanthus trees, the flaming cardinal birds”, This American World (1928). The cardinal is the state bird of Virginia.
I 7–8 grieves, | Cover me over, light-in-leaves: Ralph Caldecott: “Till death did end their grief · · · Till Robin-redbreast painfully | Did cover them with leaves”, The Babes in the Wood [1879] (Grover Smith 247).
[Poems I 144 · Textual History II 464]
I 10–12 swing · · · Swing up into the apple-tree: “There, is a tree swinging”, The Hollow Men II 6. “Or I could take sanctuary | In any oak or apple tree”, The Country Walk 33–34.
II. Virginia
II 1 Red river: Charlottesville’s Albemarle clay sometimes stains red the Rivenna River, Virginia. “the river | Is a strong brown god”, The Dry Salvages I 1–2.
II 2, 4, 11 heat · · · heat · · · Iron thoughts: Kipling: “the thoughts that burn like iron if you think”, The Song of the Banjo 68. For lines from the same stanza, see note to Portrait of a Lady I 15–19.
II 5 mocking-bird: to Ralph Hodgson, 11 May 1935: “The Nightingales HAVE been something extra this year · · · though you know my convictions a good mockingbird can beat the nightingale all holler” (see note to Sweeney Among the Nightingales 35).
III. Usk
Introduced as “Usk in Wales”, Chicago Round Table (1950). Hayward: “The Usk · · · is an English river, in Monmouthshire, on the border of Wales, which Eliot visited last summer”, London Letter in New York Sun, 28 Mar 1936. As well as being the Arthurian country of legend, the Usk valley was home to Henry Vaughan, who, in the first poem of Olor Iscanus [Swan of Usk] (1651), bids “all Bards born after me | (When I am ashes) sing of thee!” To the River Isca 35–36. TSE took holidays with the Fabers at their Welsh home, Ty Glyn Aeron, each year from 1933 to 1936 (two sheets of photographs survive; Houghton). To Fr. Mervyn Sweet, 24 May 1949: “As for what you ask about my small poem—which in spite of its slightness is one of my favourites amongst my own work—I am almost never inspired to write anything descr
iptive or evocative on the spot. It is only out of memories that I can do anything of the sort. No, the poem was written in London and probably sometime after I had motored from Cardiganshire back to London through that delightful and rather magical landscape.”
III 3 The white hart behind the white well: Philip Edwards suggests this refers to the beehive-shaped village well, said formerly to have been whitewashed, a hundred yards from the White Hart Inn, Llangybi. The Inn is said to have been used as a local headquarters by Cromwell (see reports, Guardian and Independent 6 Aug 2003).
III 4 lance: Jessie L. Weston: “the Waste Land, the Fisher King, the Hidden Castle with its solemn Feast, and mysterious Feeding Vessel, the Bleeding Lance and Cup”, From Ritual to Romance 3. The lance is prominent in the Arthurian cycle and in the Mabinogion.
III 5 variant mantrams: OED “mantra”, also “mantram”: “A sacred text or passage, esp. one from the Vedas used as a prayer or incantation.” For the Vedic mantra “Shantih”, see note to The Waste Land [V] 433.
[Poems I 145–46 · Textual History II 465]
III 6 Gently dip, but not too deep: George Peele: “Gently dip, but not too deep, | For fear you make the golden bird to weep, | Fair maiden white and red, | Stroke me smooth, and combe my head”, The Old Wives’ Tale 664–67 (Grover Smith 247).
IV. Rannoch, by Glencoe
Introduced as “Rannoch, by Glencoe, in the Scottish Highlands”, Chicago Round Table (1950).
TSE to F. S. Oliver, 3 Nov 1931: “I still hope that I may some day, like Dr. Johnson, pay a visit to your country.” Frank Morley: “On November 10 [1933], Tom and Donald Brace and I went off to Scotland—we were met by George Blake at Glasgow to drive over Rannoch Moor to and from Inverness”, Morley 1966 107. And, recalling the Scottish writer Neil M. Gunn (who became a Faber author in 1939): “Neil Gunn · · · was living at Inverness in the years between the two world wars when George Blake and I, and on one occasion T. S. Eliot, were privileged to stay · · · One item I remember from that between-wars drive from Glasgow to Inverness with Eliot was the pause we made on Rannoch Moor. It was some weeks later that Eliot handed me his short poem, one of the few Landscapes that he cared to preserve, called Rannoch, by Glencoe”, Morley 1980 463. TSE to Hayward, 17 Aug 1942, on an affectionate regard: “I have a peculiar tendre for everything Scotch which psychology may be able to explain but I can’t.” (For “tendre”, see letter to Jean Mambrino, 24 July 1952, in headnote to Landscapes.)
This was the first of TSE’s poems to appear in NEW, for which he wrote often 1934–48 and which was also to publish Words for an Old Man (Lines for an Old Man) and the last three of the Four Quartets. To McKnight Kauffer, 29 Mar 1940: “I did not wish to make you feel that you needed to write to me about the poem—which was why I had it sent to you in that impersonal way wrapt up in the N.E.W. (of which, however, I am a member of the Editorial Committee, and to which I contribute from time to time, sometimes anonymously in the editorial notes—as a rule, you can assume that any note attacking bishops or a bishop is from my Corona [typewriter]).”
Title by: Henry Vaughan’s letter of dedication in Olor Iscanus is subscribed “Newton by Usk”.
IV 1 the crow starves · · · patient: “The starved crow sits in the field, attentive”, Murder in the Cathedral II, opening chorus, added 2nd ed. (1936). the crow · · · the stag: Lucilius: “If thou livest the long years of a stag or crow”, The Greek Anthology IV [389], tr. W. R. Paton (Loeb, 1918).
IV 6 ancient war: the Roman Catholic MacDonalds were overwhelmed by the Protestant Campbells at the Massacre of Glencoe, 1692.
IV 11–12 in the long pass | No concurrence of bone: OED “concurrence” 1: “Running together, confluence, meeting. Obs.” b: “Confluence of people”. c: “meeting of lines, surfaces, etc”, with 1658: “there is a concurrence of sinews and muscles”. 4: “Accordance, agreement”. For “those who opposed · · · and those whom they opposed · · · are folded in a single party”, see Little Gidding III 39–42.
[Poem I 147 · Textual History II 466]
V. Cape Ann
“And finally, Cape Ann in Massachusetts”, Chicago Round Table (1950).
In 1896 TSE’s father built a house at Gloucester, Cape Ann, where the family spent part of each summer. “I have never returned to Cape Ann or to Gloucester Mass. since 1915”, ts note dated 14 Aug 1947 (CompositionFQ 34); TSE did later return to Cape Ann with Valerie Eliot. To Bonamy Dobrée [28 Oct] 1932: “The bird life of New England is the most wonderful in creation, except that since my time the countryside has become infested with Starlings, a sordid and squalid immigrant who is driving out the natives.” On 3 Dec 1935, at Magdalen College, Oxford, TSE read Cape Ann “with great gusto”, commenting that he had written it “to show that I know something about birds” (Tomlin 70).
V 1 O quick quick quick, quick hear the song-sparrow: William Allingham on the thrush: “Be quick! be quick! Here, here, here!” The Lover and Birds 27 (Allingham’s first line, “Within a budding grove”, had been adopted by C. K. Scott Moncrieff for his translation of the second volume of Proust in 1924); see note to V 10. TSE: “Quick, said the bird”, Burnt Norton I 19. “Quickens to recover | The cry of quail and the whirling plover”, Ash-Wednesday VI 15–16.
V 1–3 O quick quick quick, quick hear the song-sparrow, | Swamp-sparrow, fox-sparrow, vesper-sparrow | At dawn and dusk: Frank M. Chapman: “SONG SPARROW · · · Its irrepressible vitality and good spirits in spite of all circumstances are aptly illustrated by the fact that its song may be heard in every month of the year and in all weathers; also by night as well as by day · · · Its alarm note is a simple metallic chip, which is very distinctive once learned. But its merry chant · · · its best-known note · · · it will be found forming a part of a long scattered migrating train that usually includes a number of different species”; “VESPER SPARROW · · · if you quicken your steps and try to overtake him, he will rise and bound on before you · · · Early morning and late afternoon are his favourite hours, but he can be heard at other times”, Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America. Chapman distinguished thirty-one species of sparrow in all, and in his copy TSE checked each of the four named in the poem, plus the yellow-winged sparrow. The volume is inscribed “Thomas Stearns Eliot Sept. 26th 1902” by his mother, with TSE’s identifying note: “In my mother’s handwriting. A much coveted birthday present on my 14th birthday. T. S. Eliot. 18 June 1928.” See the author’s Notes on the Waste Land 356.
V 3–4 dance | Of the goldfinch: Chapman’s Handbook includes a drawing of the weaving flight of the American goldfinch (marked in TSE’s copy).
V 5 Blackburnian warbler: Chapman’s Handbook: “uncommon enough to make us appreciate his unusual beauty · · · in the spring its notes may be likened to wee-see-wee-see, tsee-tsee, tsee, tsee, tsee-tsee, tsee, tsee.”
V 6 With shrill whistle the note of the quail, the bob-white: Chapman’s Handbook: “BOB-WHITE; QUAIL · · · The name ‘Bob-white’ originated in the spring call of the male · · · he whistles the two clear musical, ringing notes Bob-white!” (Marked in TSE’s copy, as is “water-thrush”, 8.)
[Poem I 148 · Textual History II 467]
V 9–10 Greet | In silence the bullbat: Chapman’s Handbook: “NIGHTHAWK; BULLBAT · · · Batlike he flies erratically about, and at more or less regular intervals utters a loud nasal peent · · · after calling several times in close succession the bird on half-closed wings dives earthward with such speed that one fears for his safety · · · At the moment the turn is made one may hear a rushing, booming sound, which · · · can be imitated in tone by blowing across the bung-hole of any empty barrel.”
V 10 variant Some are archaic. Sweet: “‘Some are archaic’ refers to the use of ‘delectable’ and the extinction of the quail; but I am not sure that it does not sound too self-conscious”, note on the envelope sending ts2 to Richards.
V 10 Sweet sweet sweet: Allingham: “Scream’d Chaffinch, ‘Sweet, sweet, sweet!’” The Lover and Birds 9
.
V 13 The palaver is finished: “I have given you speech, for endless palaver”, Choruses from “The Rock” III 7. palaver: OED: “Palavra appears to have been used by Portuguese traders on the coast of Africa for a talk or colloquy with the natives · · · to have been there picked up by English sailors · · · and to have passed from nautical slang into colloquial use.” TSE was aware of the nationality of many in Cape Ann: “witness in New England alone, the Portuguese in the fishing industry”, This American World (1928). To C. S. Lewis, 8 Mar 1943: “I wish that my knowledge of Portuguese was beyond the mere deciphering stage, for I find the Lusiads, even in translation, in some respects more satisfactory [than Paradise Lost]—though also disfigured in at least one episode by absurdity.” (The Lusiad by Luís de Camoens, tr. Richard Fanshawe, 1655.)