The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 135
I 22 dahlias: pronounced daylias in TSE’s recordings of 1946–47, as endorsed by Fowler and OED (though the formal pronunciation, after the botanist Dahl, is also mentioned by OED).
I 24–25 If you · · · On a summer midnight: Kipling: “Yet, if you enter the woods | Of a summer evening late”, The Way Through the Woods 13–14 (Raine 105). TSE praised the poem in Rudyard Kipling (1941). If you do not come too close · · · you can hear the music: “if it is a great play, and you do not try too hard to hear them, you may discern the other voices too”, The Three Voices of Poetry (Ricks 259).
I 25–45 On a summer midnight · · · daunsinge · · · Feet rising and falling: Sir John Davies:
Dauncing (bright Lady) then began to be,
When the first seedes whereof the world did spring,
The Fire, Ayre, Earth and Water did agree,
By Loves perswasion, Natures mighty King,
To leave their first disordered combating
Orchestra, or a Poeme of Dauncing st. 17
[Poem I 185–86 · Textual History II 495]
In his Introduction to Some Longer Elizabethan Poems (1903), A. H. Bullen quoted these lines as an example of Davies’s debts to Jasper Mayne’s tr. of Lucian. (The epigraph to Mr. Apollinax, in Greek, is from Lucian. For Orchestra see notes to Gerontion 67–71, Ash-Wednesday V 8 and Burnt Norton II 6.) Paradise Lost I 781–87: “faerie elves, | Whose midnight revels, by a forest side | Or fountain some belated peasant sees, | Or dreams he sees · · · they on their mirth and dance | Intent, with jocund music charm his ear” (Grover Smith 35). Helen Gardner: “as the Ordnance Survey map shows, there is an ancient dancing circle”, Composition FQ 42. midnight · · · music · · · dancing around the bonfire · · · betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire | Leaping through the flames · · · Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter · · · country mirth · · · Keeping time, | Keeping the rhythm · · · man and woman: Poe: “merriment · · · musically wells · · · harmony · · · clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire · · · Leaping higher, higher, higher · · · What a world of solemn thought their monody compels! | In the silence of the night · · · neither man nor woman · · · Keeping time, time, time”, The Bells. TSE to Rolf Gardiner, 6 Apr 1942: “I am as keen about the ‘cultural’ (and even religious, in a wider and even more fundamental sense than people are accustomed to use the word) aspects of ‘agrarianism’ as anybody; but · · · I am aware of a stubborn resistance and persistence in regarding such ideas as fantastic. They immediately suggest ‘folk-dancing’—or what the ordinary person ridicules under that title.”
I 28–33 The association · · · concorde: Sir Thomas Elyot, The Governour (1531) bk. I xxi (Sweeney 1941):
It is diligently to be noted that the associatinge of man and woman in daunsing, they bothe obseruinge one nombre and tyme in their meuynges [movings], was nat begonne without a speciall consideration, as well for the necessarye coniunction of those two persones, as for the intimation of sondry vertues, whiche be by them represented. And for as moche as by the association of a man and a woman in daunsinge may be signified matrimonie, I coulde in declarynge the dignitie and commoditie of that sacrament make intiere volumes, if it were nat so communely knowen to all men, that almoste euery frere lymitour carieth it writen in his bosom · · · In euery daunse, of a moste auncient custome, there daunseth to gether a man and a woman, holding eche other by the hande or the arme, which betokeneth concorde.
[Poem I 186 · Textual History II 495]
(TSE to Theodore Spencer, 21 July 1941: “there is an admirable piece of detective research into East Coker by one J. J. Sweeney in the Southern Review. Only he is under the delusion that I have read all the works of Sir T. Elyot, and he is ignorant of Chas. Williams’s The Greater Trumps.”)
To R. P. de Menasce, OP, 31 May 1940: “The lines in archaic spelling have the public purpose of localising in time the fairy-like vision. They have also the private association of being quoted from The Governour of Sir Thomas Elyot, published I believe in 1531. He is not personally associated with the village, but was a grandson of Simon Eliot of that place. I think that it is right to translate them into language of a Renaissance flavour.” To Frank Morley, 9 Apr 1940: “Now as to the antic spelling, that is not, as you suppose, an Ezra touch. The situation is much more like that between Geoffrey and Bruce. Geoffrey wanted all old spelling modernised; Bruce [Richmond] didn’t want to. So they compromised by chucking Sir. T. Elyot out. But I won’t, because it is a quotation: The Governour is always printed with that spelling, even in the Everyman edition. Public justification: to put the visionary scene at some definite historical period: and I think the Early Tudor helps to make it definite. Private: T. Elyot was a grandson of Simon E. of East Coker. You may say all this doesnt matter; but it does to me. (ob. 1546 … ob. 1946? beginning & end of A epoch).” Morley in Tate ed. 111: “I gathered there had been a row about it · · · Tom yielded, but it rankled.” (TSE yielded only by changing the spelling of “aresse”, 13; Sir Thomas’s spelling was retained.) The prose recommendations in TSE’s Syllabus: Elizabethan Literature (1918) begin: “Sir Thomas Elyot’s Gouvernour, Edward VI.’s Prayer Books, are in the ‘Everyman’ edition.” To Hayward on 27 Feb 1940, TSE quoted “And for as moche · · · his bosome”, adding: “The public intention is to give an early Tudor setting, the private, that the author of The Governour sprang from E. Coker (apparently born in Wilts. but his father was the son of Simon E. of E.C.)” To I. A. Richards [4] June 1940: “it AIN’T Chaucerian: it is quoted direct from a book published in 1531 (The Governour) and I hoped that that bit would help to give the imagery in that section a local habitation in time. And the book has a certain relation to the place—which is not, as some have thought, in Massachusetts, but in Somerset.” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream V i: “imagination · · · gives to airy nothing | A local habitation and a name”. Theseus goes on to ask “what dances shall we have · · ·?” TSE: “summer midnight”, I 25.) TSE: “The ideals of The Governour, the ideals of John Locke, those of Thomas Arnold, are all equally exhausted and inapplicable to any future Christian society”, Education in a Christian Society (1940).
I 29 daunsinge: pronounced simply dancing in TSE’s recordings of 1946–47.
I 30] For TSE to Hayward on this line, see Textual History I 46 ^ 47.
I 33–34 Round and round · · · circles: “Round and round the circle | Completing the charm”, The Family Reunion final speech. “Here we go round the prickly pear · · · Here we go round the prickly pear”, The Hollow Men V 1, 3.
I 34–36 Leaping · · · Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes: Auden: “The shuffling couples in their heavy boots, | The young men leaping”, Letter to R. H. S. Crossman, Esq. 13–14, in Auden and MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland (1937; the first of these lines repeated as caption to a photograph). TSE: “Shall we lift up our feet among perpetual ruins?” Choruses from “The Rock” III 43.
I 37 country mirth: Dryden: “With wholesome Food and Country Mirth”, From Horace, Epod. 2d. 95 (Grover Smith 1996 157–58).
I 38–39 those long since under earth | Nourishing the corn: Kipling “aims I think to give at once a sense of the antiquity of England, of the number of generations and peoples who have laboured the soil and in turn been buried beneath it, and of the contemporaneity of the past”, Rudyard Kipling (1941). “our temporal reversion nourish · · · The life of significant soil”, The Dry Salvages V 48–50 (see note).
I 42–46 The time of · · · Eating and drinking: Ecclesiastes: see note to I 9–11.
I 44 the coupling of man and woman: “the love of man and woman · · · is only explained and made reasonable by the higher love, or else is simply the coupling of animals”, Dante (1929) III. “Baudelaire has perceived that what distinguishes the relations of man and woman from the copulation of beasts is the knowledge of Good and Evil”, Baudelaire (1930). “to ravish a woman · · · coupling of beasts”, Anabasis X viii.
[Poem I 186 · Text
ual History II 495]
I 47 Dawn points: F. R. Leavis: “The ‘points’ clearly come from the French (poindre and point du jour). It is a trouvaille because of the suggestion · · · of the regularly punctuating recurrences of time”, Scrutiny Summer 1942. Milton: “Or ere the point of dawn”, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity 86 (Williamson 218).
I 47 variant points and the star fades: to Hayward, 27 Feb 1940: “Star fades. You are right.” Composition FQ 99: “Probably Hayward pointed out that the morning star does not fade at dawn.”
I 48–49 Out at sea the dawn wind | Wrinkles and slides: Purg. I 115–17: “The dawn was vanquishing the breath of morn which fled before her, so that from afar I recognised the trembling of the sea” (Servotte and Grene). Paradise Lost XI 842–43: “a keen north-wind, that blowing dry | Wrinkled the face of Deluge” (for the same passage, see note to Silence 3–4). Tennyson: “The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls”, The Eagle 4. Symons: “The fountain wrinkles under a faint wind”, From Paul Verlaine: Fêtes Galantes V: À la Promenade 5 in Knave of Hearts (1913). TSE: “breakers of camp in the little dawn wind, seekers of watercourses over the wrinkled rind of the world”, Anabasis I xv. “the urban dawn wind”, Little Gidding II 35.
I 49–50 I am here | Or there, or elsewhere: “Everyone knows a passage from a sermon of Donne’s, which is given by Mr. Pearsall Smith under the title of ‘I am Not all Here’”, Lancelot Andrewes (1926). Donne: “I am not all here, I am here now preaching upon this text, and I am at home in my Library considering whether S. Gregory, or S. Hierome, have said best of this text, before. I am here speaking to you, and yet I consider by the way, in the same instant, what it is likely you will say to one another, when I have done, you are not all here neither; you are here now, hearing me, and yet you are thinking that you have heard a better Sermon somewhere else”, Sermons ed. Logan Pearsall Smith 3–4. See note to Burnt Norton V 13–22. TSE: “We stand before a beautiful painting, and if we are sufficiently carried away, our feeling is a whole · · · The feeling is neither here nor anywhere”, Knowledge and Experience 20. For “Here or there”, see note to V 30, 32.
II
To Montgomery Belgion, 19 July 1940: “I don’t know whether it strikes a reader (what I intended) that the first passage of section II is meant to be a kind of parody of the earlier Yeats influenced by Blake (some of his poems are very much so); but that at the same time I use the word ‘parody’ only because I can think of no other: the effect of a very small pinch of irony is not intended to be comic, and in any case the irony is not directed against Yeats—is not literary criticism—but a part of something going on within my own mind at that point.” To Geoffrey Curtis, 31 Dec 1940: “The first movement of part II is a serious kind of parody of early Yeats under the influence of Blake. Otherwise I should have thought that Yeats was chiefly apparent in the references to old age (with a difference).”
II 1 What is the late November doing: Blake: “What are those golden Builders doing | Near mournful ever-weeping Paddington”, Jerusalem Plate 27, To the Jews, 25–26. For Blake’s lines, see note to A Cooking Egg 27–32.
[Poem I 186 · Textual History II 495–96]
II 1–7 What is the late November doing · · · summer heat · · · Late roses filled with early snow: temperatures in England in Nov 1938 reached a record-breaking 70 °F. Snow then fell from 17 Dec until Christmas. To his brother, 23 Dec: “The weather has been phenomenal for London: it snowed this week for three days on end.” Late roses filled with early snow: Campion: “like rose-buds fill’d with snow”, There is a garden in her face 10 (Grover Smith 323).
II 1, 13 November · · · Leonids: OED: “a group of meteors which appear to radiate from the constellation Leo.” Under the heading “November Leonids”, The Times 15 Nov 1929 told readers: “During the next few years we may reasonably anticipate increasing numbers of these November meteors and they ought to be interestingly abundant about 1933, 1934, and 1935”, and explained: “The meteors owe their origin to a periodical comet which visits our parts of space every 33 years · · · they are generally bright, and leave streaks of glowing light along their paths. Of all the displays which gild our nocturnal skies the November Leonids have perhaps furnished the grandest spectacles.” The Times 14 Nov 1931: “The date of the earth’s passage through the stream becomes slowly later”; accordingly the “Stars of the Month” columns of 1 Nov 1937 and 1 Nov 1939 expected the comets to be especially visible in “late November” (II 1).
II 7–17 snow? | Thunder rolled by the rolling stars · · · fights · · · Comets · · · Hunt the heavens · · · that destructive fire | Which burns before the ice-cap reigns: Edgar Lee Masters: “You have become a forge of snow white fire · · · Your sons are stars · · · meteor changes · · · the rolling thunder | Of cannon stand in trenches where the dead | Clog the ensanguined ice · · · Flaming to heaven”, O Glorious France. Masters’s poem appeared in Songs and Satires, which TSE reviewed in Mr. Lee Masters (1916). See Burnt Norton II 1–2 and note, and McCue 2014a. Aerial warfare during the Great War had included the bombing of London and the use of anti-aircraft guns. (MacNeice: “searchlights probe the heavens”, Autumn Journal, 1938, vii.) TSE and his wife sheltered in a cellar (see her letter to Charlotte Eliot, 22 Oct 1917, in Letters 1). For TSE in 1933 recalling “the time of the air-raids in London”, see headnote to Sweeney Among the Nightingales.
II 8–9 Thunder rolled by the rolling stars | Simulates triumphal cars: Mallarmé: “Tonnerre et rubis aux moyeux · · · Du seul vespéral de mes chars” [Thunder and rubies at the axles · · · of the only vesperal one among my chariots], M’introduire dans ton histoire [To introduce myself into your story] 10, 14 (Composition FQ 101). See note to Burnt Norton II 1–2 for TSE quoting Mallarmé’s sonnet. (“drift of stars · · · among the stars”, Burnt Norton II 8, 15.) rolling stars: Cicero on the nine spheres: “one is the celestial · · · in which are fixed the sempiternal courses of the rolling stars”, Somnium Scipionis, cited in a discussion of Dante’s cosmology in A Triad of Great Poets [Aeschylus, Dante, Milton], Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine Oct 1853, 584 (tr. probably by the article’s author). Cicero was among TSE’s Latin school texts for several years both at Smith Academy and at Milton Academy. triumphal cars: for the four-horse chariot of the triumphator in a Roman triumph, see headnote to Coriolan I. Triumphal March. OED “chariot” 1b: “a triumphal car · · · Now chiefly poet., and applied fig. to the car in which the sun, moon, night, etc., are represented as pursuing their course.”
[Poem I 186–87 · Textual History II 496]
II 8–19 stars · · · constellated · · · the heavens · · · That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory: | A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion: to Ian Cox, 21 Apr 1937, on his Desire Provoketh: “one ought to be able to look at what you have set down out of the margins of one’s eye · · · just as one can count more of the Pleiades on a clear night when one is not looking directly at them. This is a periphrastical way of putting it · · · published just as it is, it would fall into a category of literature · · · very much below its level of intensity; that of the quiet meditative observation of nature plus reflection, say.” For this letter see “The End of All Our Exploring”, 3. PUBLISHER AND POET.
II 11 Scorpion fights against the Sun: the sun is in Scorpio from about 23 Oct to 21 Nov.
II 16–17 fire | Which burns before the ice-cap reigns: Newman: “thou tell’st of space, and time · · · Of fire, and of refreshment after fire · · · As ice which blisters may be said to burn”, The Dream of Gerontius §4 152–54, 157. TSE: “Moving alone through flames of ice”, The Family Reunion II iii.
II 18 a way of putting it—not very satisfactory: “a very satisfactory intimacy · · · Not a happy way of putting it”, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 112. “it was (you may say) satisfactory”, Journey of the Magi 31.
II 20–21 the intolerable wrestle | With words and meanings: “the word is not merely the sound with a meanin
g; the word becomes interesting for its meaning elsewhere as well as for its meaning in the context; for its own meaning as well as what the writer means to mean by it”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 272–73 (Turnbull Lecture II).
II 21 The poetry does not matter: “but a poem is not poetry”, A Note on War Poetry 15 (see note). For “poetry · · · with nothing poetic about it”, see Four Quartets headnote, 7. MUSIC. does not matter: on Kipling: “There are deeper and darker caverns into which he penetrated—whether through experience or through imagination does not matter”, Rudyard Kipling (1941). On the Victorian attitude to evolution: “It is an attitude of vague hopefulness which I believe to be mistaken. But that does not matter: what matters is that Tennyson felt it and gave it expression”, “The Voice of His Time” (1942). “One positive contribution towards poetry is all that one can hope to make; beyond that it does not matter whether one is Shakespeare or Jules Laforgue; whether one is ‘original’ or ‘derivative’”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 289 (Turnbull Lecture III). “neither division nor unity | Matters”, Ash-Wednesday II 53–54.
II 22–26 (to start again) · · · the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us, | Or deceived themselves: “some of us devote our later years to trying to express the same ideas better · · · Alas! if there is no truth that has not been discovered by our ancestors, then there is also no possible error by which they have not been deceived”, The Three Voices of Poetry (1954; preliminary remarks omitted from On Poetry and Poets). And the wisdom of age: Browning: “The wisdom of age and the folly of youth, at once”, The Flight of the Duchess XI. See note to II 43–44.