The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 132
[Poem I 180 · Textual History II 489]
II 5, 8 forgotten wars · · · stars: Wordsworth: “Wreck of forgotten wars · · · stars”, Sonnet Composed among the Ruins of a Castle in North Wales (Shawn Worthington, personal communication).
II 6 The dance along the artery: Sir John Davies: “those blew vaines · · · Observe a daunce” and “Love daunceth in your pulses and your vaines”, Orchestra st. 52, 106 (Schmidt 2007). See note on the dancing in East Coker I 25–45.
II 6, 8 dance · · · stars: Inside the gloom initially imagined Ursa Major as “The dancing bear” (13 variant).
II 7 The circulation of the lymph: Rimbaud: “La circulation des sèves inouïes” [The circulation of unheard-of saps], Le Bateau ivre 39 [The Drunken Boat] (Iman Javadi, personal communication). For Rimbaud’s poem, see note to Mr. Apollinax 10–12. lymph: OED 2: “Bot. A colourless fluid in plants; the sap.” Obs., citing Cowper: “That moved | The pure and subtle lymph | Through th’ imperceptible meand’ring veins | Of leaf and flow’r”, The Task VI 136. OED 3: “Phys. A colourless alkaline fluid, derived from various tissues and organs of the body, resembling blood but containing no red corpuscles.”
II 8 drift of stars: fig. 10 of Richard A. Proctor’s Other Worlds than Ours (NY, 1870; often repr.) illustrates the “Drift of the Stars in the Constellations Cancer and Gemini”. TSE: “death and the raven drift above”, Sweeney Among the Nightingales 7. “It is not essential that the allegory or the almost unintelligible astronomy should be understood—only that its presence should be justified”, Dante (1920).
II 8–15 stars · · · above · · · the figured leaf · · · floor | Below · · · stars: Clough: “the figured ceiling overhead, | With cunning diagrams bestarred”, Uranus 10–11. figured leaf: In Memoriam XLIII: “that still garden of the souls | In many a figured leaf enrolls | The total world since life began” (Musgrove 89).
II 9–13 tree · · · tree · · · boarhound: see note to “the boarhound slain between the yew trees”, Animula 36.
II 13–15 boarhound and the boar · · · among the stars: see note to WLComposite 519, “Hyades”. “The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit”, Choruses from “The Rock” I 2.
II 16 At the still point of the turning world: Aristotle: “all animals move by pushing and pulling, and accordingly there must be in them a fixed point, like the centre in a circle, and from this the motion must begin”, De Anima III ch. 10 (Kenner 254). See note to V 27–28.
[Poem I 180–81 · Textual History II 489]
II 16–21 At the still point of the turning world · · · Except for the point, the still point, | There would be no dance, and there is only the dance: Hayward: “The image was suggested to the poet by the description of the dance of the Tarot figures in the novel, The Greater Trumps, by Charles Williams (1932). It is, incidentally, the aim of all magic to find the still centre or point of equilibrium.” Williams: “imagine that everything which exists takes part in the movement of a great dance—everything, the electrons · · · everything that changes, and there is nothing anywhere that does not change. That change—that’s what we know of the immortal dance”, ch. 7. TSE told Helen Gardner too that Williams was the source of the image (Composition FQ 85). TSE wrote the jacket copy for Faber’s “standard edition” of Williams’s novels (1954). movement · · · fixity · · · movement: “in a healthy society there must be an element of fixity and an element of mobility”, Education in a Christian Society (1940). See note to Ash-Wednesday I 39. there the dance is · · · There would be no dance, and there is only the dance: “So with walking or running: our purpose is to get to a destination. The only value of our movement has been to achieve some end that we have set ourselves. But the purpose of the dance is the dance itself. Similarly with poetry: the poem is for its own sake”, TSE’s Introduction to The Art of Poetry by Paul Valéry (1958). A great dancer “is a being who exists only during the performances · · · a personality, a vital flame which appears from nowhere, disappears into nothing and is complete and sufficient in its appearance · · · a being which exists only in and for the work of art which is the ballet”, Four Elizabethan Dramatists (1924).
II 28 Erhebung: the Higher (Ger.); Hegelian terminology. See the synonym—elevation—“Emporheben”, used of mountaineering, Mélange Adultère de Tout 11.
II 28–30 concentration | Without elimination, both a new world | And the old made explicit: “interesting oneself in new subjects in the outside world · · · to gain concentration”, to George Barker, 24 Jan 1938 (see headnote to Four Quartets, 4. “NOT MERELY MORE OF THE SAME”).
II 31–32 ecstasy · · · horror: “the intensity of the vision of its own ecstasies or horrors”, Cyril Tourneur (1930).
II 35 Protects mankind from heaven and damnation: to Geoffrey Curtis, 14 Feb 1936: “don’t imagine that the ‘fear of Hell’ is not capital in my theology. It is only balanced by that ‘fear of Heaven’ so well expressed in one of Newman’s Oxford sermons.” (Newman: “If then a man without religion (supposing it possible) were admitted into heaven, doubtless he would sustain a great disappointment · · · Nay, I will venture to say more than this;—it is fearful, but it is right to say it;—that if we wished to imagine a punishment for an unholy, reprobate soul, we perhaps could not fancy a greater than to summon it to heaven. Heaven would be hell to an irreligious man · · · And so heaven itself would be fire to those, who would fain escape across the great gulf from the torments of hell”, Parochial and Plain Sermons, 1834, I.)
II 41 smokefall: OED, “after NIGHTFALL rare”. TSE as sole citation, glossed with Helen Gardner’s “the moment when the wind drops and smoke that had ascended descends”.
III
III 1–37] Hayward: “The setting of this section is the London Tube.” Kenner 256–57: “its locale, Eliot noted, sharing a private joke with his brother in Massachusetts, is specifically the Gloucester Road Station”, near TSE’s home in Emperor’s Gate. Composition FQ 86: “Eliot travelled daily from Gloucester Road Station, whose two means of descent, by the stairs or by the lift, suggested to him the movement down and the ‘abstention from movement’ [III 35], while being carried down.” The staircase is a spiral. As well as the Piccadilly Line, which TSE took to Russell Square, Gloucester Road station is on what was informally known as the Inner Circle (since 1949, the Circle Line).
[Poem I 181–82 · Textual History II 489]
III 3 in a dim light: “the crowd in Hell who peered at him and his guide under a dim light”, Dante (1929) I. Milton: “Casting a dim religious light”, Il Penseroso 160. (The Rock II, MRS. POULTRIDGE: “What is that lovely line of Keats, dim religious light? Or is it George Herbert?”)
III 10 plenitude: pronounced pleenitude in TSE’s recording of 1946–47, despite the OED’s short e.
III 10–12, 14 a flicker | Over the strained time-ridden faces | Distracted from distraction by distraction · · · no concentration: “It is not true that the craving which has possessed most peoples at most times, for seeing human actions represented with mime and voice, is simply a craving for amusement and distraction. I think that the cinema comes nearer to pure distraction, to ‘taking our minds off …’ the things they ought to be on as well as the things they need at times to be taken off from”, Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern (1937). “We tire of distraction or concentration · · · We thank Thee”, Choruses from “The Rock” X 38. “that perpetual distraction from God”, The Church’s Message (1937); see note to III 13–21. time-ridden · · · Distracted from distraction by distraction: “time · · · Time can only distract”, The Dry Salvages III 5–7 msA [5].
III 12, 13 Distracted from · · · empty of meaning: “Distracted from · · · but not with human meaning”, The Burnt Dancer 6, 28. “Distraction · · · of the mind”, Ash-Wednesday III 19 and note.
III 12, 14, 31–32 Distracted · · · no concentration · · · fancy · · · spirit: for Donne on being distracted from prayer, see note to V 13–22.
II
I 13 Filled with fancies: Johnson’s Dictionary: “FANTASIED adj. Filled with fancies or wild imaginations.”
III 15 Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind: against this line quoted by G. Jones, TSE wrote: “tube-station of course, as the train approaches. Cf. W. Lewis: ‘the cold tube wind’” (perhaps pointing to The Enemy of the Stars: “A gust, such as is met in the corridors of the tube, makes their clothes shiver or flap”, Blast 1 60).
III 17 of unwholesome lungs: John Bascom: “God gives a pure atmosphere to the inhalation of the most unwholesome lungs”, A Philosophy of Religion (1876). TSE to H. W. Heckstall-Smith, 7 Oct 1947: “it is not always possible to give a cogent reason for the use of what may be literally not the right word. A more curious case than ‘refracted’ is the phrase ‘unwholesome lungs’ in Burnt Norton. I knew at the time that I should obviously have written unhealthy, but that seemed to me to have undescribable associations which the uncorrect ‘unwholesome’ escaped. I think that unhealthy seemed to limit the associations too closely to mere physical health.” (For “unwholesome”, see note to East Coker V 26–31. For “refracted”, see note to East Coker I 21.)
III 19 Eructation: pronounced ear-uctation in TSE’s recording of 1946–47.
III 21–23 hills of London, | Hampstead · · · Ludgate: Blake, Jerusalem ch. 4, pl. 84 1–5:
“Highgate’s heights & Hampstead’s, to Poplar, Hackney & Bow,
“To Islington & Paddington & the Brook of Albion’s River.
“We builded Jerusalem as a City & a Temple; from Lambeth
“We began our Foundations, lovely Lambeth. O lovely Hills
“Of Camberwell”
[Poem I 182 · Textual History II 489]
III 22–23 Hampstead · · · Ludgate: “7 hills”, noted by Hayward in his copy of 1944 (suggesting comparison with Rome). Campden: not the London borough of Camden (created 1965, named after Camden Town), but Campden Hill in Kensington. To Edith Sitwell, 8 July 1935: “I have to go to an event of the same kind on Campden Hill.”
III 23–24 Highgate · · · twittering: “Francis Bacon, Earl of Verulam and Viscount St. Albans, whose life twittered out at Highgate in 1626”, The Genesis of Philosophic Prose (1929). Not here | Not here the darkness, in this twittering world: “Not here, O Ademantus, but in another world”, WLComposite 348. the darkness, in this twittering world: Hayward: “Cf. the description of the twittering ghosts in Hades. Homer, Odyssey XXIV 5–9”. George Musgrave tr. (1865), XXIV 10–16: “as when in the inmost cavernous depths | Of some mysterious cave the flitting bats | Twitter in air · · · The shades of the defunct · · · With murmurs shrill but voiceless.” Hayward to TSE, 14 Oct 1941: “civil-service typists · · · keeping up an incessant aimless twitter”. TSE to Hayward, 20 Feb 1943: “that strange gathering of twittering ghosts and goblins on Saturday night”. Edgar Lee Masters: “To twitter amid cold winds and falling leaves!” Thomas Trevelyan in Spoon River Anthology (TSE: “cold wind”, III 15).
III 25–26 Descend lower, descend only | Into the world of perpetual solitude: Inf. IV 13: “‘Or discendiam quaggiù nel cieco mondo’” [“Now let us descend into the blind world here below”] (Servotte and Grene).
III 25–32 Descend lower · · · Internal darkness, deprivation | And destitution · · · Desiccation of the world of sense, | Evacuation of the world of fancy, | Inoperancy of the world of spirit: St. John of the Cross: “God here purges the soul according to the substance of its sense and spirit, and according to the interior and exterior faculties, the soul must needs be in all its parts reduced to a state of emptiness, poverty and abandonment and must be left dry and empty and in darkness”, Dark Night of the Soul II VI 4. TSE: “the only poetry that I can think of which belongs to quite the same class as Herbert—as expression of purity and intensity of religious feeling, and, as I am told by those who can appreciate Spanish literature more accurately than I, for literary excellence—is St. John of the Cross. Although, of course, both in their racial and in their personal temperaments the two men are very different”, Mr. T. S. Eliot on “George Herbert” (1938). To Paul Elmer More, 17 Feb 1932: “perhaps the best subject for discussion which we could begin when you come over here in the spring is St. John of the Cross. I really feel that you are over-bold in your criticism of one who is crowned with so much authority.” For St. John of the Cross, see notes to the second epigraph to Sweeney Agonistes and to Ash-Wednesday I 1–3, 5.
III 27 that which: five times within Four Quartets; characteristically philosophical, occurring in TSE’s Oxford notes on Aristotle (1914–15).
III 30 Desiccation of the world of sense: Bertrand Russell: The World of Physics and the World of Sense, lecture IV of Our Knowledge of the External World (1914). TSE: “I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch”, Gerontion 59. “First, the cold friction of expiring sense”, Little Gidding II 78.
[Poem I 182–83 · Textual History II 489]
III 32 Inoperancy of the world of spirit: “The spreading potency of the unclean; the inoperancy of the holy are sorrowfully acknowledged by Haggai”, Report on the 46th Annual Meeting of the Church Congress (1906) 399 (Archie Henderson, personal communication). Inoperancy: not in first ed. of OED but later added with this line as sole citation.
III 33–34 This is the one way, and the other | Is the same: Herakleitos: “ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή” [The way up and the way down are one and the same]; the second epigraph at the head of Burnt Norton. St. John of the Cross: “For, upon this road, to go down is to go up, and to go up to go down, for he that humbles himself is exalted and he that exalts himself is humbled”, Dark Night of the Soul II XVIII 2 (Preston 20).
III 36 appetency, on its metalled ways: “an adumbration of the universe of material atoms regulated by laws of motion · · · there is quite naturally no place in Hobbes’s universe for the human will · · · mechanistic psychology. There is a modern theory, closely akin · · · I cite · · · one of the most acute of younger psychologists: ‘Anything is valuable which will satisfy an appetency without involving the frustration of some equal or more important appetency’”, John Bramhall (1927), quoting I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1926) ch. VII. (TSE’s secretary returned Richards’s Practical Criticism and Principles of Literary Criticism to the London Library in Oct 1933.) appetency: OED: 1: “strictly, The state of longing for, desiring, craving; appetite, passion”; 2: “Instinctive inclination or propensity.” 3: “Of things inanimate: Natural tendency, affinity.” 4: “Metaph. Suggested term including both desire and volition, as distinguished from cognition and feeling.” Stressed on the first syllable. Corresponding to Aristotle’s ὄρεξις (Grover Smith 260), and frequent in the translation of De Anima by R. D. Hicks (1907), where it is contrasted with intelligence and used twenty times in III ch. 10.
IV
IV 1–2 Time and the bell have buried the day, | The black cloud carries the sun away: adapting the proverbial “Bell, To bear (or carry away) = to be first”, Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs. Mark Reinsberg adduced “The bailey beareth the bell away” from an anonymous lyric (American Literature Nov 1949), but when Genesius Jones cited this, TSE underlined “based on a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century lyric” and wrote “?” (G. Jones 131). Richard Barnfield: “you have lost your light; | The Sunne and Moone, beare witnesse of my mone: | The cleere is turnd to clouds; the day to night · · · When Bounty liv’d, I bore the Bell away”, The Complaint of Poetrie, for the Death of Liberalitie st. I–II. For Barnfield, see note to The Waste Land [II] 98–104.
IV 3–5 Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis | Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray | Clutch and cling: Tennyson, The Window 21–27:
Vine, vine and eglantine,
Clasp her window, trail and twine!
Rose, rose and clematis,
Trail and twine and clasp and kiss,
Kiss, kiss; and make her a bower
All of flowers, and drop me a flower,
[Poem I 183 · Textual History II 489]
(TSE to I. A. Richards, 23 July 1936: “I am extremely happy to have your commendation of Burnt Norton. You are quite right about Tennyson. I had to reread Tennyson in the autumn in order to do a preface to a Nelson cheap edition, and I expanded this into an essay included in Essays Ancient and Modern.”) TSE: “there the clematis droops over the lintel”, Coriolan II. Difficulties of a Statesman 35. “clings · · · and clutch”, Whispers of Immortality 7, 11.
IV 3, 7, 8 clematis · · · yew · · · kingfisher’s wing: alongside IV 8–9 quoted in G. Jones, TSE wrote “On the Trent, near Kelham” (headquarters of the Society of the Sacred Mission). Composition FQ 38: “on a hot day in the summer of 1935 when Eliot was staying at Kelham he saw a kingfisher on a stream running into the Trent by Averham Church · · · there is a yew in the churchyard there and masses of clematis in the rectory garden.”
IV 8–9 After the kingfisher’s wing | Has answered light to light: Paradiso XII 23–24: “sì del cantare e sì del fiammeggiarsi | luce con luce gaudiose e blande” [alike of song and flashing light with light, gladsome and benign] (Preston 21). Bush 204–205 compares, from the previous year, “O Greater Light, we praise Thee for the less · · · our little light” (Choruses from “The Rock” X 19, 42), where a distinction is made by capitalisation (as Ash-Wednesday V distinguishes “the word” from “the Word”). Tennyson: “The splendour falls · · · The long light shakes across the lakes · · · echoes flying · · · answer, echoes · · · answer, echoes · · · answer, echoes, answer”, The Princess III ^ V (TSE’s Lines to a Duck in the Park begins “The long light shakes across the lake”).