The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  Lines for an Old Man

  Published in NEW 28 Nov 1935, then 1936+. No recording known. The private printing as Old Man’s Song (“Salzburg”, “1936”) is a later forgery by Prokosch. Copy “alpha” (Sotheby’s, 1–2 May 1972) contains a note by Prokosch: “In the typescript which Eliot sent me this poem was titled (in pencil) Old Man’s Song.” No such typescript has been found.

  Frederick Tomlin discussed the poem with TSE and Michael Cullis on 3 Dec 1935: “First, what was the exact meaning of the title? Was it ‘Lines in the mouth of an old man’? ‘Yes.’ Secondly, what did ‘writhing in the essential blood’ mean? · · · Michael recalls him as saying that the notion was suggested by a detective story by R. Austin Freeman, which concerned a negro knocking his brow against a bar, so that the blood issuing forth was ‘essential’. Michael: ‘A Homeric epithet, in other words’. Eliot (with some deliberation and slowly crumbling his cake): ‘Yes, you could say that.’ My recollection was that the detective story was one of E. Phillips Oppenheim’s, and that it concerned a horrific murder whereby the victim was, so to speak, liquefied and poured down the sink, so that the ‘essence’ of him was thus disposed of · · · Our last question concerned ‘inaccessible by the young’; and Eliot replied that, according to the OED, ‘by’ was a permissible use with ‘inaccessible’ as well as ‘to’, and in his opinion its presence in the last line sounded better”, Tomlin 66–67.

  [Poems I 148–49 · Textual History II 467]

  Title an Old Man: frequent in TSE’s poems, with four iterations of “an old man” in Gerontion; Tiresias twice in The Waste Land [III] 219, 228; “an old man’s mouth drivelling”, Ash-Wednesday III 10; “Ash on an old man’s sleeve”, Little Gidding II 1. Also: “blind old man”, First Debate between the Body and the Soul 2; “drunken old man”, The Death of Saint Narcissus 29; “laughter · · · Like the old man of the sea’s”, Mr. Apollinax 8–9. “old men on winter evenings”, Ash-Wednesday VIII 32; “the wisdom of old men”, East Coker II 44; “Old men ought to be explorers”, East Coker V 31.

  Unadopted dedication to Stéphane Mallarmé: both ts1 and ts2 derive two lines at the end of the poem from a sonnet by Mallarmé: “Garlic and sapphires in the mud | Clot the bedded axle-tree” (see Textual History; also Burnt Norton II 1–2 and note). “Hopkins can be called a difficult poet, but not, as is Mallarmé, an opaque poet”, Types of English Religious Verse (1939).

  1 The tiger: to Philip Mairet, 1 Jan 1936: “P.S. I wasn’t thinking of the younger generation at all. I was thinking about the tiger at Whipsnade.” (For the zoo, see note to Choruses from “The Rock” II 16 and note.)

  1–2, 10 The tiger · · · Is not more irritable than I · · · youth: Wordsworth: “He was a lovely youth! I guess | The panther in the wilderness | Was not so fair as he”, Ruth 37–39 (in The Golden Treasury). Tennyson: “The lion on your old stone gates | Is not more cold to you than I”, Lady Clara Vere de Vere 23–24 (Grover Smith 1996 157).

  1–2, 12 The tiger · · · than I · · · my golden eye: Blake: “Tyger Tyger, burning bright · · · Burnt the fire of thine eyes!” The Tyger. Tennyson: “golden · · · golden · · · burning eyes”, The Poet 1–2, 39. TSE: “the serpent’s golden eyes”, Choruses from “The Rock” X 10 (G. Jones 229). “The golden vision reappears | I see the eyes”, Eyes that last I saw in tears 4–5.

  5–6 Writhing · · · essential blood · · · tree: for “F. M.” and “bursting · · · misshapen bloom · · · the essential spring”, see note to A Song for Simeon 1–2.

  8–11 variant My hate is more than hate of hate, | More bitter than the love of youth: Tennyson: “The poet in a golden clime was born, | With golden stars above; | Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, | The love of love”, The Poet 1–4 (with “Youth”, 28). From his addition to ts1, TSE retained in ts2 “the love of youth”, and, at 12, adopted Tennyson’s “golden”, while dropping “hate of hate”.

  14 Tell me if I am not glad: to Ralf Rudeloff, 2 Oct 1956, on this line and Burnt Norton II 1–2: “As for Garlic and Sapphires, that is a conscious adaptation of a line of Mallarmé, Tonnerre et rubis aux moyeux!; just as another line from the same sonnet is adapted at the end of a short poem of mine called Lines for an Old Man: Dire si je ne suis pas joyeux!” See note to Burnt Norton II 1–2.

  [Poem I 149 · Textual History II 467–68]

  Choruses from “The Rock”

  “I say that the consummation of the drama, the perfect and ideal drama, is to be found in the ceremony of the Mass · · · And the only dramatic satisfaction that I find now is in a High Mass well performed.”

  (“E.” in A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry, 1928)

  1. “If I were a Dean” 2. The Commission 3. Authorship of the Pageant 4. Composition 5. Performance 6. Apropos of Performance and Publication 7. Afterwards

  Section introduced, with half-title, 1936+.

  The Rock was published 31 May 1934, after which all ten choruses were printed in 1936+ and Guild. In 1940, Sesame printed only Choruses I and X (numbering the latter II). Choruses I–III, VII, IX and X were included in Penguin / Sel Poems. None of the other contents of Penguin / Sel Poems (first published in 1948) were more recent than 1930 (Ash-Wednesday and Marina), and without any of the Choruses, there would have been fewer than a hundred pages of verse. Yet to maintain sales of his Collected Poems 1909–1935, TSE was concerned to restrict the proportion of them represented in selection (perhaps particularly when it was in the hands of another publisher). Similarly he was concerned to exclude Four Quartets from his collected poems, adding them only in 1963.

  In Sept 1955 TSE recorded X 17–46; released by Caedmon, 1955 (US), 1960 (UK).

  1. “IF I WERE A DEAN”

  A contribution by TSE to the Chichester Diocesan Gazette May 1931:

  My first thought of “If I were a Dean” is not of what I should want to do, but of what I should not want to do: and I make no apology. I have nothing but admiration and pity for those Deans who have toiled unceasingly, made appeals and collected subscriptions year after year, for—what? Merely to keep their minsters from tumbling about their ears. To me a cathedral is primarily a place of worship, the focus of devotion of its diocese, and not a National Monument: but I think—the State being already so far Socialised, and the position of the Church in the State being what it is—that the structural repair of cathedrals, and perhaps also of all those churches which have historic and architectural importance, ought to be at the cost of the State · · · The nation as a whole, I contend, should be made to pay for their mere preservation, rather than that part of the nation for which they are primarily places of worship and devotion.

  I am quite well aware of all the difficulties involved in carrying out such a drastic proposal; and if I were a Dean under the settlement I suggest, I dare say I might in the end prefer to be buried by the collapse of the roof of my own cathedral, rather than buried under a mass of correspondence, memoranda and instructions from the Office of Works, to say nothing of the visits of committees and inquisitory officials. To my irresponsible vision, however, these difficulties are details to be settled by ingenious compromise; the point is that in my Utopian deanery there will be no anxiety about the framework of the cathedral.

  [Poem I 151–76 · Textual History II 469–81]

  I should thus hope to be free to collect, and to use, funds not for the mere preservation of the bones of my cathedral, but for the interior beautification of its living body. And I should try to avoid the fault of making my interior a period piece, of being overawed by the designs of its remote builders. I have seen old and beautiful churches which modern hands seemed afraid to touch, and which therefore remained mere remains; and I have also seen modern churches in which the decorator seems fearful of departing by a decade, in the least ornament or altar cloth, from the period style in which the church was built. I prefer rather a church which shows the loving attempts of generation after generation, each according to its own notions of beauty, to leave visible t
estimony of its devotion. I should like to be able to encourage the best contemporary artists in stone, metal, paint and wood, to apply themselves to the decoration of my cathedral; and the best musicians to make music for its offices · · ·

  My cathedral, then, would be richly decorated inside: with tapestries (as, for example, they hang round the bases of columns in the cathedral of Toulouse), with modern religious paintings, with memorial tablets (but only to good churchmen), with chapels and church furniture. I hold also the theory, that it is chiefly in the life of such a centre as a cathedral that art can vitally affect us. Who, except the technical expert, can really enjoy a visit to an art museum or an evening in a concert room? · · · a cathedral where art—not merely archaeology—is dedicated to God, seems to me the best place in which art can flourish · · ·

  I should devise as many cathedral ceremonies as possible · · · I should pay particular attention to the performance of religious drama. I do not underrate the beauty of our mediaeval religious drama, and I should try, not I hope, to “revive” it, but to keep it alive; but at the same time I should still more encourage the composition and the performance of plays by contemporary authors. Some people maintain that a good religious play cannot be written nowadays; I believe, as I believe of religious painting and sculpture, that if the opportunity is given, the work will be done. We must expect that the early attempts will be imperfect; but I am sure that in time poets and dramatists, as well as painters and sculptors and artisans, will not be lacking.

  But in no two cathedrals would or should conditions be quite the same; and, wherever my deanery is situated, I should wish to encourage and stimulate first the local spirit of that part of England · · · And for such activities as religious drama, I should want to have them performed, as far as possible, within the cathedral itself.

  But besides all these interests and duties · · · I maintain that a Dean should have sufficient continuous leisure to be able to apply himself to some considerable work of scholarship or of original theological and philosophical writing · · · There is a book which I have never been able to buy, and which I have never had room to accommodate even could I buy it, and which I have never had the time to read even could I buy it and house it. If I were a Dean, I should hope that I might be able to have it, to have shelves for it, and to read as much of it as one man can reasonably expect to read in a lifetime: it is Migne’s Patrologia Latina et Graeca.

  (J. P. Migne’s collection of the Latin and Greek writings of the Church Fathers was published in 161 volumes, 1857–66.)

  After writing The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral (1935), TSE considered Charles Williams’s latest novel: “The plot is a good enough one: the production of a new poetic drama (a great one, so the author must be either Williams or myself, I cant make out which, perhaps both; anyway he is a very wise and fine character named Stanhope and he is what would be the local squire except that the place has become a London suburb) by a local amateur society”, “Descent into Hell” by Charles Williams, reader’s report (1937).

  [Poem I 151–76 · Textual History II 469–81]

  2. THE COMMISSION

  TSE discussed The Coming of Christ, John Masefield’s festival play for Canterbury, in his Commentary in Criterion June 1928: “We venture to counsel our spiritual pastors, that they should see to it either that they employ artists who are definite in their theology, or else who are really good artists.”

  As president of the Religious Drama Society (formed 1929), George Bell wrote to TSE in 1932 inviting him to a conference on the subject. TSE sent his regrets on 12 July: “I am leaving for America on September 17 and shall not be back until next May.” E. Martin Browne, the society’s director of religious drama, later recorded that the impulse for The Rock came in Mar 1933 from the Rev. R. Webb-Odell, director of the Forty-Five Churches Fund, which aimed to build and endow new churches in the rapidly growing suburbs in the diocese of London (Browne 3). On 9 Mar 1933, Webb-Odell wrote to TSE offering the fee of a hundred guineas for his “invaluable service” and recommending sources for the study of Bishop Blomfield and Peter the Hermit.

  TSE to Webb-Odell, 5 Feb 1934:

  I think that Mr. Browne and I shared the desire, even before we had begun to discuss the matter, to escape as far as possible from the conventional conception of an “historical pageant”. I mean that a pageant which should merely be a brilliant review of the more picturesque or impressive episodes in the history of London church-building, however pleasing to the old or instructive to the young, was never in question. The past is employed only because of its relevance to the present, and to bring the attention to the very urgent and anxious problems with which the Church to-day is concerned. There is no problem of a community to which the presence or absence of a church is irrelevant: and he who is concerned that a church should be built is committed to a concern with all the problems of the community which the church is intended to serve. The problem of church-building is integral with the problem of more and better housing in general. The employment of men for building churches suggests the whole problem of unemployment. There are many who will say that “in these times” the money and the labour might be put to better purpose, or at least to satisfy more pressing needs; and, while repudiating the assumptions on which such objections are made, we must assert that these needs are all one need, and that they can all be satisfied. There is sufficient stone, clay, lime, and other materials in the country for all the building of every kind that is wanted; there is sufficient unemployed labour. The world is ready enough to employ money for the purpose of making more money, or for the purpose of destroying competition: it needs more non-productive activity.

  In the ordinary sense, the pageant is true enough to the pageant form in having no “plot”; it endeavours to get its coherence from a significance such as I have tried to suggest above; while the separate scenes, it is hoped, will be enjoyed also for their own sake. A continuity of tone is aimed at through the recurrence of the Chorus and the symbolic figure of The Rock; while the modern and the historical scenes are purposely juxtaposed and blended to enhance the effect of contemporaneity. I have not been so ambitious as to hope that what I contribute might be great poetry, but I have tried to write efficient verse of a kind simple and straightforward for the stage, and I think I have succeeded in writing something that is at least wholly lucid and understandable, and have not spared the use of rhetorical devices of great antiquity.

  [Poem I 151–76 · Textual History II 469–81]

  To Michael Roberts, 14 Jan 1935: “I should be glad to think that the writing of occasional poetry is a justifiable activity, because that is all that the choruses in the Rock can pretend to be.” To Mary Dunlop, 30 Nov 1943: “The fact is that from the beginning I had no intention of allowing the full text of The Rock to remain in print: all that I wanted to preserve were the choruses which are in my Collected Poems, and as for the rest of the text, it was merely a bit of hack-work for a special occasion according to a design which was given to me to complete. I do not consider it of any value whatever and even at the time it only contained a few gags which I thought amusing.”

  3. AUTHORSHIP OF THE PAGEANT

  To Webb-Odell, 5 Feb 1934: “I do not wish to be described as the Author of this Pageant. I am the writer of the Words, so far as these are original, and compiler of the speeches of certain historical personages out of their own works. I have written the choruses, the song, and some modern dialogue. I do not wish to disclaim responsibility, but to give credit where it is due. And, having no experience of writing for the theatre, I am very grateful to have had the opportunity of this collaboration; which also has made it possible for me to concentrate upon the problem, new to me, of trying to write a kind of verse which should produce the intended effect when declaimed from a stage to an audience unfamiliar with it.”

  Although the original title page and jacket of The Rock specified “Book of Words by T. S. Eliot”, the volume was listed as being by TSE and a part o
f the Faber poetry list, for instance on the jacket to Spender’s Vienna (1934). Faber’s regular advertisement on the front cover of New Verse was devoted in June 1934 to a single book:

  The Rock is the text written by Mr. Eliot for a pageant produced at Sadler’s Wells on behalf of the Forty-Five Churches Fund of the Diocese of London. In form it approximates to a play. It contains nearly eight hundred lines of verse, mostly choruses. The dialogue is chiefly in prose, and consists of scenes ancient and modern, with a continuity provided by three bricklayers.

  Peter du Sautoy to Helene Ritzerfeld of the German publishers Suhrkamp Verlag, 15 Feb 1965: “about republication of The Rock · · · the parts of the play which are really Mr. Eliot’s are already in the Collected Poems, namely Choruses from “The Rock”, whereas a great deal of the rest of the play was not written by him but contributed by various people. He never felt that the play as a whole was his and that is why he didn’t want it reprinted as part of his collected work.”

  [Poem I 151–76 · Textual History II 469–81]

  4. COMPOSITION

  To Paul Elmer More, 7 Nov 1933: “I am working on something which amuses me more: the writing of some verse choruses and dialogues for a sort of play to be given to advertise the campaign for raising money for 45 new churches in London diocese. If I have a free hand I shall enjoy it. I am trying to combine the simplicity and immediate intelligibility necessary for dramatic verse with concentration, under the inspiration of, chiefly, Isaiah and Ezekiel.” The same day, TSE wrote to the Archbishop of York, about a memorandum on the Church’s social policy: “it seems to me that while any greater relief for the unemployed is unlikely, and will be said by politicians to be impossible—as in the present state of things it may be—the important point is to gain an admission of the fact that the unemployed ought to be better looked after than they are.” Enclosed were his notes: “I do not feel satisfied with the gospel of leisure as preached for instance by the disciples of Major Douglas. It seems to me that the proportion of time that the vast majority of human beings can well occupy in amusement, games, hobbies, self-education etc. is very limited; and that we need a new conception of ‘work’. What every one needs, surely, is to be able to feel that his activity is of a special character: that his work has some other function, from his own point of view, than merely to support him; and that, if he has much spare time, that time may be spent for some larger purpose than merely to occupy his own body and mind. What the unemployed need is not merely occupation, but occupation useful to society.” The Social Credit system advocated, from 1919, by Major C. H. Douglas aimed to overcome problems of unemployment caused by mechanisation and the consequent imbalance between increased output of goods and falling income to pay for them. Douglas had been promoted by Pound since 1920, and TSE considered one of his books for Faber in 1932. (In the three years following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, unemployment in Britain had risen dramatically.) TSE to Donald Main, 14 Mar 1934: “It would be interesting if you would develop your ideas about Major Douglas, with whom, so far as I understand his ideas, I do not think I can agree.” To Social Credit, 27 Aug 1934 (pub. 7 Sept): “While I do not pretend that I understand Major Douglas’s theory yet, I cannot see that his opponents are in a strong position, so long as they support a system which simply does not work.” To John Maynard Keynes, 5 Apr 1934, after declining to comment on Social Credit: “it would · · · weaken my case if I attached it to any particular vision of economic paradise · · · I venture to hope that you may come to see my church pageant at Sadler’s Wells in June. I have taken the liberty of engaging two of my characters · · · in a discussion concerning yourself” (The Rock 33).