The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  I 19 Quick, said the bird: Stevenson 80 reports TSE as explaining, 24 Nov 1943, that this represents “the quick movement of birds to be instantly on the spot and as quickly gone.” TSE: “O quick quick quick, quick hear the song-sparrow”, Landscapes V. Cape Ann 1 (see note to I 42, below).

  [Poem I 179 · Textual History II 488]

  I 21–22 our first world · · · our first world: J. E. Adamson’s The Individual and the Environment (1921) proposed a division into “the physical world · · · the first world”, “the second world, the social fabric”, and “the third world, the moral order”. Vaughan: “Happy those early days! · · · Before I understood this place | Appointed for my second race · · · my first love”, The Retreat 1–8. Quoting Vaughan’s opening, TSE wrote: “I think it is a reference to some particular experience or experiences at some early period; just as I think that very different work, the New Life of Dante, also refers to a particular experience of childhood”, Mystic and Politician as Poet (1930) (Bush 189).

  I 22 deception of the thrush: among the thrushes are mocking birds: “When tamed, he mocks every sound he hears, with equal exactness, and it is often very amusing to witness the effect of this deception”, J. L. Comstock, Natural History of Birds (1850). “But sound of water over a rock | Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees | Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop | But there is no water”, The Waste Land [V] 355–58.

  I 22–27 thrush · · · music hidden in the shrubbery: Whitman: “in secluded recesses, | A shy and hidden bird is warbling · · · Solitary the thrush, | The hermit withdrawn to himself · · · Sings by himself a song”, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d 18–22 (Musgrove 67).

  I 24–26, 40 over the dead leaves | In the autumn heat · · · the bird called · · · for the leaves were full of children: Kipling: “the wood was so full of noises of summer (though the birds had mated) that I could not at first distinguish these from the tread of small curious feet stealing across the dead leaves”, “They”. See note to I 30–38.

  I 27 unheard music: Keats: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard | Are sweeter”, Ode on a Grecian Urn 11–12. music hidden: “in the early plays of Shakespeare there are only occasional hints of what I may call the hidden music, the under and overtones”, The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse (1937).

  I 28 unseen eyebeam crossed: Donne: “Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred | Our eyes, upon one double string”, The Extasie 7–8 (Grover Smith 256). TSE: “as for the threading of the eyes like buttons on a double thread, one thread proceeding from each eye to the other, it not only fails to render the sense of losing oneself in an ecstacy of gazing into the eyes of a loved person, it actually aggravates the difficulty of finding out what it is all about”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 109–10 (Clark Lecture III).

  I 28–29 the unseen eyebeam · · · the look of flowers that are looked at: alongside these lines in VE’s 1951, Valerie Eliot wrote Mallarmé’s “Rien, ni les vieux jardins reflétés par les yeux | Ne retiendra ce cœur” [Nothing—not old gardens reflected in the eyes—will keep back this heart], Brise Marine [Sea Breeze], attributing the comparison to F. R. Leavis. D. H. Lawrence: “the very flowers, in the shops or parks | are being deflowered by being looked at by so many unclean eyes”, Shows in Last Poems (1933). TSE: “in the awareness of the observing eye”, WLComposite 339. A childhood memory: “Once I entered the school yard before the last girls had left. When I looked in a school window and saw a girl looking out at me, I fled out of there in a hurry”, TSE to Mary Institute, St. Louis, 11 Nov 1959, quoted in St. Louis Post-Dispatch 12 Nov 1959 (Walter J. Ong, American Literature Jan 1962).

  [Poem I 179–80 · Textual History II 488]

  I 30–38 There they were · · · and they · · · The surface glittered out of heart of light, | And they were behind us: to his French translator Claude Vigée, 1 Feb 1946: “They. They has no expressed antecedent. It is used almost as if it was a substantive. You may recall that there is a short story by Kipling called They and my use of the word here will present less difficulty to readers who know that story. They are undefined wraiths or presences of persons of former times who had known the garden and for whom it was sufficiently associated with their emotions to have left impressions of them upon it. I think that scintillait is nearer to the image in my mind. I agree that this is a very difficult line to translate.” (Scintiller: to sparkle, glitter.) For the story, see Burnt Norton headnote, 2. GENESIS. accepted and accepting · · · pattern · · · sunlight: “the kind of pattern which we perceive in our own lives only at rare moments of inattention and detachment, drowsing in sunlight”, John Marston (1934) (Moody 164). See note to V 32–33, and for “retire into a sunlit stupor” see note to Portrait of a Lady I 1–14. accepted and accepting: Lancelot Andrewes: “Let us then make this so accepted a time in itself twice acceptable by our accepting, which, He will acceptably take at our hands”, Christmas Sermon 1610, quoted in Lancelot Andrewes (1926) (Matthiessen 194).

  I 36 the lotos rose: OED “lotus” (also “lotos”) 3a: “The water-lily of Egypt and Asia” (Nymphæa lotus). H. Bourne: “Some species · · · expand the flower about sunrise in the morning, while floating on the surface of the water, and close it at an early hour in the afternoon · · · consecrated by the Egyptians to Isis and Osiris, or the Sun and Moon”, Flores Poetici (1833) 122–23. Sir William Jones: “on the placid waters blooming · · · An opening lotos rose”, To Bhavani 11–13.

  Often confused with the lotos of Homer’s Odyssey IX and Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters (OED 1: “The plant yielding the fruit which was the food of the Lotophagi · · · producing in those who ate it a state of dreamy forgetfulness”, with first citation from Sir Thomas Elyot). Bourne: “supposed to have been the Sugar-Cane · · · because those were said · · · to lose relish for every thing else, who had once tasted of the Lotus.” quietly, quietly: Browning: “Quietly, quietly the evening through”, Andrea del Sarto 17 (Blamires 14).

  I 37 glittered out of heart of light: Paradiso XII 28: “del cor dell’una delle luci nuove” [from out of the heart of one of the new lights] (Hayward). Henry James: “out of the heart of which a light flashed”, The Wings of the Dove bk. IV ii (Christopher Ohge, personal communication). heart of light: Conrad (title): Heart of Darkness; the story was the source of the first epigraph to The Hollow Men.

  I 37, 39 heart of light · · · Then a cloud passed: “Light of light | | Gone”, Burnt Norton variant after the closing lines of V (see Textual History).

  I 37, 40, 42–43 heart of light · · · children · · · human kind | Cannot bear very much reality: “We are tired children · · · and can endure only a little light”, Choruses from “The Rock” X ms draft [42–44]. “Pascal’s disillusioned analysis of human bondage is sometimes interpreted to mean that Pascal was · · · incapable of enduring reality”, The “Pensées” of Pascal (1931). “Looking into the heart of light, the silence”, The Waste Land [I] 41 (see note). human kind | Cannot bear very much reality: Murder in the Cathedral II, THOMAS: “Human kind cannot bear very much reality” (Hayward). “the spectacle of the whole of human stupidity · · · is more than any human mind can endure”, Views and Reviews in NEW 6 June 1935. human kind | Cannot: “The insupportable shirt of flame | Which human kind cannot remove”, Little Gidding IV 8–14, 2nd draft [5] variant.

  I 40 Go · · · children: alongside this line quoted in G. Jones (130), TSE wrote “Engraving ‘Cache-cache’ on my mother’s mantelpiece”. (Fr., hide and seek.)

  [Poem I 180 · Textual History II 488]

  I 42 Go, go, go: “Twit twit twit | Jug jug jug jug jug jug”, “Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop”, “Co co rico co co rico”, The Waste Land [III] 205–06, [V] 358, 392; “Quick quick quick quick”, “Sweet sweet sweet”, Landscapes V. Cape Ann 1, 10 (see note to Cape Ann V 1 for Allingham: “Be quick! be quick! Here, here, here!”)

  II

  II 1–2 Garlic and sapphires in the mud | Clot the bedded axle-tree: a
longside these lines, Valerie Eliot wrote in VE’s 1951: “omitted from Words for an Old Man”. These two lines formed the ending in the first drafts of that poem (which became Lines for an Old Man), “Garlic” having initially read “Thunder” (see Textual History). TSE told Raymond Preston that he had in mind Mallarmé’s “Tonnerre et rubis aux moyeux” [Thunder and rubies at the axles], from the sonnet M’introduire dans ton histoire [To introduce myself into your story] (Preston 16). In his second Turnbull Lecture he returned to this sonnet:

  It is a mistake to suppose that a simile or a metaphor is always something meant to be visible to the imagination; and even when it is meant to be visible, that all its parts are meant to be visible at once. Examine a sonnet by a modern poet · · · and you will find in the fourteen lines four or five images which it is quite impossible to imagine or conceive simultaneously, and at least one which cannot be visualized at all:

  Dis si je ne suis pas joyeux

  Tonnerre et rubis aux moyeux

  De voir en l’air que ce feu troue

  Avec des royaumes épars

  Comme mourir pourpre la roue

  Du seul vespéral de mes chars.

  “Thunder and rubies up to the wheel hub” is just as difficult to figure out as the career of Crashaw’s tear; and it is only when you have an impression of the sonnet as a whole that it comes into place, and has meaning. The poet’s business is to know what effect he intends to produce, and then to get it by fair means or foul. There is the element of rationality, the element of precision, and there is also the element of vagueness which may be used; and we must remember that one distinction between poetry and prose is this, that in poetry the word, each word by itself, though only being fully itself in context, has absolute value. Poetry is incantation, as well as imagery. “Thunder and rubies” cannot be seen, heard or thought together, but their collocation here brings out the connotation of each word.

  The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 271–72

  [Poem I 180 · Textual History II 489]

  [Mallarmé: Say if I am not glad, thunder and rubies at the axles, to see, in the air pierced by this fire, with scattered kingdoms, as if dying in purple the wheel of the only vesperal one among my chariots]. TSE: “Roses and bitumen, gift of song, thunder and fluting in the rooms”, Anabasis preliminary Song iii. Perse: “Bitumen et roses, don du chant! Tonnerre et flûtes dans les chambres!” (“fluting in the room” might be heard or seen, but Fr. “flûte” does not have the architectural sense).

  In Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu: Albertine Disparue (1925), the narrator’s farewell letter to Albertine quotes Mallarmé’s sestet “which you said you could not understand” (Composition FQ 80); in Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust it remained in French (XI 54). TSE on Mallarmé: “he called attention to the fact that the actual writing of poetry, the accidence and syntax, is a very difficult part of the problem. Mallarmé gets his modernity, his sincerity, simply by close attention to the actual writing”, Modern Tendencies in Poetry (1920). TSE to Philip Mairet, 31 Oct 1956: “‘Garlic and Sapphires in the mud’ is an echo of a line in a sonnet by Mallarmé · · · with probable recollection also of Charles Péguy’s description of the Battle of Waterloo.” Péguy: “Alors la bataille a commencé trop tard. Des fondrières, quoi · · · Alors il y avait de la boue, de la boue ordinaire, de la boue comme il y en a tous les jours, jusqu’aux essieux” [So, the battle began too late. Pot-holes, eh? · · · So there was mud, ordinary mud, mud as there always is, up to the axles], À nos amis, à nos abonnés [To Our Friends, To Our Subscribers (tr. eds)]. (For this passage see note to A Cooking Egg 25, 29.) TSE described Péguy as “one of the most illustrious of the dead who have fallen in this war”, Charles Péguy (1916). See Jean Verdenal’s letter to TSE of mid-July 1911 in Letters 1 and note to the dedication of Prufrock and Other Observations. In his notes for the translation of Four Quartets by Pierre Leyris, Hayward pointed also to Mallarmé’s “bavant boue et rubis” [slobbering mud and rubies] from Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire. TSE to Pound, 2 Apr 1936: “you do hide your gems in about as much muck of disorderly mss. as Possible and a neat ms. is better than rubies”. (Rubies and sapphires are often found together, embedded in sediments, at the same sites.) sapphires in the mud: TSE on Donne’s prose: “There is no question of · · · digging jewels out of mud”, Prose and Verse (1921). in the mud | Clot the bedded axle-tree: Edgar Lee Masters: “sons amid the rolling thunder | Of cannon stand in trenches where the dead | Clog the ensanguined ice”, O Glorious France (1916). Masters’ “rolling thunder” as well as Mallarmé’s “Tonnerre” contributed not only to the earlier form of the lines, “Thunder and sapphires”, but to the astrological reprise at the start of part II of East Coker (see notes there to II 7–17 and II 8–9, and McCue 2014a). Wilfred Owen: “much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels”, Strange Meeting 34 (wr. 1918, pub. 1919). TSE to Emily Hale, 6 Oct 1930, on Owen: “he belonged to no group, and his interesting technical innovations are all his own, though he may have known the work of Gerard Hopkins.” Again: “there is one poem of his at least, Strange Meeting, which is of permanent value and, I think, will never be forgotten, and which is not only one of the most moving pieces of verse inspired by the war of 1914–18, but also a technical achievement of great originality”, A Tribute to Wilfred Owen (1964). mud | Clot: OED (“blood” VI) has “blood-clot” from 1859.

  II 1 variant, 2, 15 Thunder · · · axle-tree · · · reconciled: Chapman’s Bussy speaks in successive speeches of “The burning axletree · · · thunder” (see note to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 7–12) and “be reconciled | With all forgiveness”, Bussy d’Ambois V i (Mermaid ed., commonly V iii).

  II 1, 3 sapphires in the mud · · · blood: Lovelace: “Flowing both through soul and blood · · · ’Tis a diamond in mud”, To Lucasta: Ode Lyric 18–20.

  [Poem I 180 · Textual History II 489]

  II 2–3, 12 Clot · · · trilling wire in the blood | Sings below inveterate scars · · · the sodden floor: the entertainer Harry Lauder was said to have raised funds for 12,000 Great War troops. An advertisement for his book A Minstrel in France was illustrated with “German barb-wire with a bit of Scotch tartan held fast in deadly prongs”. The text told how he “sang to the soldiers · · · in the mud and blood soggy trenches”, The Rotarian May 1918. trilling wire in the blood | Sings: Knickerbocker Nov 1852: “trilling wires of a telegraph”. Poe: “The trembling living wire”, Israfel 21–22. TSE: “the fever sings in mental wires”, East Coker IV 17. For TSE in 1930 to Laurence Binyon on “‘Flame’ within ‘my veins’” as a violent “collocation of the metaphor and of the physiology”, see headnote to Little Gidding, 3. DANTE. inveterate scars · · · wars: “after the last war · · · inveterate sin”, Reunion by Destruction (1943) 7. The Rotarian July 1918: “French war veterans · · · to be our guests · · · so that these battle-scarred veterans might be made to feel at home”. inveterate: pronounced inveterert in TSE’s recording of 1946–47.

  II 3–5, 12–13 blood · · · inveterate scars · · · wars · · · And hear upon the sodden floor | Below, the boarhound and the boar: Chapman: “One drop of his most precious blood · · · Descending to that noisome sink, | Where every hour hell’s horrid Boar | Lies plunged, and drown’d · · · Raze, Lord, my sins’ inveterate scars · · · see my will’s sharp wars”, Petrarch’s Seven Penitential Psalms II iii–v (John Shand, Nineteenth Century Sept 1944). the sodden floor: Ford Madox Ford: “that clutter of sodden corses | On the sodden Belgian grass— | That is a strange new beauty”, Antwerp III 13–15; TSE of this poem, published in The New Poetry: An Anthology ed. Harriet Monroe (1917): “Mr. Hueffer [Ford] is well illustrated by the only good poem I have met with on the subject of the war”, Reflections on Contemporary Poetry III (1917).

  II 5 Appeasing long forgotten wars: OED “appease” 1: “To bring to peace, pacify, quiet, or settle”. Frazer: “to perpetuate the memory or to appease the ghosts of large numbers of
men who had perished on the field of battle”, The Golden Bough IV 95 (Mark Thompson, personal communication). OED “appeasement” 4: “Freely used in political contexts in the 20th century.” Often with the sense of soothing or assuaging. Churchill: “I counsel prudence and appeasement” (1920). The Times: “The policy of international appeasement must of course be pressed forward · · · With the policy of appeasement must go the policy of preparation—preparation not so much for war as against war” (1938). However, OED continues: “since 1938 often used disparagingly with allusion to the attempts at conciliation by concession · · · before the outbreak of war with Germany in 1939.” TSE to his mother, 2 Oct 1919: “It is obviously a bad peace, in which the major European powers tried to · · · appease or ingratiate as far as possible the various puppet nationalities”. Reginald Snell, reviewing Four Quartets: “the only significant alteration from the pamphlet form of the poems · · · is the appearance of the word ‘appeasing’ instead of ‘reconciling,’ in connection with ‘forgotten wars’—a risky change, considering the emotional overtones to which the newer word now gives rise”, NEW 14 Dec 1944. (The change avoided the repetition “reconciling · · · reconciled”, II 5, 15.) TSE: “He is quite correct, and correct also in suggesting that one of the changes was of doubtful value”, NEW 25 Jan 1945. No further change was made. appeasing · · · forgotten: TSE “distasteful as a story of suffering which is past, as an inventory of grief which cannot now be appeased, and therefore might as well be forgotten”, The Dark Side of the Moon (1946), Preface. The book, which was anonymous, is “a history of the relations between Poland and the U.S.S.R. from 1939 to 1945”.