The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 138
IV 2 distempered: OED 3: “Disordered, diseased”. 2: “Of the bodily humours · · · disturbed in humour, temper, or feelings · · · vexed, troubled. Obs.” Paradise Lost IX 1128–32: “in subjection now | To sensual appetite · · · from thus distempered breast, | Adam, estranged in look and altered style”.
IV 3–25 bleeding · · · the fever chart · · · fever · · · blood · · · good: Kipling: “Our blood ’as truly mixed with yours—all down the Red Cross train · · · The same old saw-backed fever-chart. Good-bye—good luck to you!” The Parting of the Columns 13–16.
IV 6 disease: to Eleanor Hinkley, 13 Sept 1939: “Psychology may help us to distinguish between disease and sin, but that does not abolish either. To do away with the sense of sin is to do away with civilisation.”
IV 9–10 Adam’s curse | And that, to be restored: Clough: “That to forget is not to be restored”, Adam and Eve XIII 35 (Murray).
[Poem I 190 · Textual History II 498]
IV 11 The whole earth is our hospital: Bach, Cantata 25 (words anon.): “Die ganze Welt ist nur ein Hospital · · · einen quälet in der Brust | Ein hitzges Fieber böser Lust; | Der andre lieget krank | An eigner Ehre hässlichem Gestank; | Den dritten zehrt die Geldsucht ab | Und stürzt ihn vor der Zeit ins Grab. | Der erste Fall hat jedermann beflecket | Und mit dem Sündenaussatz angestecket. | Ach! dieses Gift durchwühlt auch meine Glieder · · · Wer ist mein Arzt, wer hilft mir wieder?” [The whole world is but a hospital · · · For one quakes in his breast with the burning fever of evil pleasure; another lies ill in the putrid smell of his pride; a third is a slave to gold and is thrust before his time into the grave. The first Fall has stained everyone and infected them with the leprosy of sin. Ah! This poison rages so through my limbs · · · Who is my doctor, who will heal me?] (TSE: “the healer’s art · · · Our only health is the disease · · · Adam’s curse · · · the ruined millionaire”, IV 4–12). Bach’s high baroque setting was composed for the 14th Sunday after Trinity 1723, with the prescribed text Luke 17: 11–19, the cleansing of the lepers (Richard Luckett, personal communication). Andrewes: “‘What is man, that Thou shouldest visit him?’ Visit him;—not as ‘the day spring from on high’ doth the earth; but visit him, as if a great prince should go into an hospital”, Sermon of the Nativity 1612 (Grover Smith 269–70). Sir Thomas Browne: “For the world, I count it not an Inn, but an Hospital, and a place, not to live, but die in”, Religio Medici II 12 (Hayward). Pater: “the whole world seemed to present itself as a hospital”, Marius the Epicurean ch. XXV (Janowitz, who also quotes Pater’s essay on Browne: “to Browne the whole world is a museum; all the grace and beauty it has being of a somewhat mortified kind”). For Browne, Raleigh and Pater, see note to Little Gidding III 35–36. Baudelaire, tr. Stuart Merrill: “This life is a hospital”, Anywhere Out of the World in Pastels in Prose.
IV 15 prevents: including OED 4. Theol., etc: “To go before with spiritual guidance and help: said of God, or of his grace, anticipating human action or need. arch.”, citing 1548–49 Bk. of Common Prayer, “That thy grace maye alwayes prevente and folowe us.” An alteration by TSE, from “torments”, made only after first publication in NEW (see Textual History).
IV 16 chill ascends from feet to knees: death of Falstaff: “bade me lay more clothes on his feet: I put my hand into the bed, and felt them, and they were as cold as any stone: then I felt to his knees, and so upward, and upward and all was as cold as any stone”, Henry V II iii. TSE: “upward at the knees · · · from nape to base”, Sweeney Erect 17, 22.
IV 16–24 chill · · · freeze · · · frigid · · · blood: Benlowes: “When blood does freeze to ice of death”, Theophila X xxxv (“modelled on Benlowes” wrote TSE in a copy of G. Jones, alongside the quoted lines 18–20). blood · · · drink · · · bloody flesh · · · food · · · flesh and blood: “food they need; | Christ’s flesh, their meat; blood, drink indeed”, Theophila III lxxxvi. TSE: “I confess myself to a mild partiality to this man’s verse · · · I have spoken of Benlowes · · · in order to show how a versifier of much above the ordinary level · · · can bring a good idiom to such a point that a drastic reform of language is needed”, The Minor Metaphysicals: From Cowley to Dryden (1930). TSE had quoted Theophila I xxxvi–xxxvii in his fourth Clark Lecture (The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 137); see headnote to Four Quartets, 3. COMPOSITION. freeze | And quake in frigid purgatorial fires: Webster: “sweat in ice and freeze in fire”, The Duchess of Malfi IV ii. For Webster’s scene, see note to The Waste Land [II] 117–23.
IV 17 sings in mental wires: William C. Scott: “Poetry essentially consists in · · · those electric trains of thought that kindle admiration and sympathy in their communication—those far-reaching mental wires that come in contact with the beautiful”, Poetry and Religion (1853). Harry Jones: “the mental wires that have been out of tune”, Recreation in Good Words magazine (1881). TSE: “The trilling wire in the blood”, Burnt Norton II 3.
IV 21–25 blood · · · food · · · blood · · · we call: Hopkins: “We scarcely call that banquet food, | But even our Saviour’s and our blood”, Barnfloor and Winepress 31–32. good: OED 8c: “of a day or season observed as holy by the church”, citing Quarles, “One bad good-Friday”, Emblems V vii. East Coker was published in NEW on 21 Mar 1940, the day before Good Friday (Preston 34). In these years, TSE occasionally dated his letters simply “Easter”, “Holy Innocents’ Day”, or used saints’ days, explaining to Kathleen Bliss, 10 Mar 1945 (St. Blanche): “Mary Trevelyan sent me a Belgian diary full of saints I never heard of”.
[Poem I 190 · Textual History II 498]
IV 24 substantial flesh and blood: Glocester Ridley, paraphrasing the 9th-century monk Bertram: “Think not so grossly, as that I will give my substantial flesh and blood to be eaten and drank by you (which indeed were a wicked and ungodly act for you to do)”, Life of Dr Nicholas Ridley (1763) 167. Passages from the sermons of the 16th-century martyr Nicholas Ridley are quoted in the typescript of The Rock submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office (BL), but were later cut. “Flesh and blood is weak and frail, | Susceptible”, The Hippopotamus (Preston 36).
V
V 1–2 So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years— | Twenty years largely wasted: Clough: “Here am I yet, another twelvemonth spent, | One-third departed of the mortal span”, “Blank Misgivings of a Creature moving about in Worlds not realised” 1–2 (Murray). Composition FQ 18: “Eliot’s rueful confession that Blake and Clough kept ‘getting into’ East Coker · · · the opening of Part V might have come straight out of Amours de Voyage.” See headnote to Four Quartets, 4. COMPOSITION. “Here I am”, Gerontion 1 (written twenty years earlier). in the middle way: Inf. I 1: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita” [In the middle of the journey of our life]. TSE: “In the middle, not only in the middle of the way”, II 39. “Britain is the bridge between Latin culture and Germanic culture in both of which she shares. But Britain is not only the bridge, the middle way, between two parts of western Europe; she is, or should be · · · not only European but the connection between Europe and the rest of the world”, A Commentary in Criterion Mar 1928.
V 1–2, 4 here I am · · · having had twenty years— | Twenty years · · · a wholly new start: “I am bidden · · · Twenty years after · · · not wholly inappropriate”, The Cultivation of Christmas Trees ms2 1–3.
[Poem I 191 · Textual History II 498]
V 2 Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres: Léon Daudet, opening paragraph of L’Entre-deux-guerres: Souvenirs des milieux littéraires, politiques, artistiques et medicaux de 1880 à 1905 (1915): “La grande crise qui vient de fonder sur l’Europe, et notamment sur la France, ne changera en rien l’inclinaison de ces modestes souvenirs. Mais il me paraît que ce titre, l’Entre-deux-guerres, caractérise bien la morne période qui va de 1890 à 1904, de l’échec du boulangisme à la fin de la ligue de la Patrie Française. Nous sommes à vingt ans de distance du désastre de 70
–71” [The great crisis which has just fallen upon Europe, and particularly upon France, will not change in the slightest the bent of these modest reminiscences, but it seemed to me that this title, l’Entre-deux-guerres, well characterises the grim period 1890–1904, from the check to boulangisme to the end of the league of the Patrie Française. We are twenty years away from the disaster of 1870–71], (boulangisme = a political movement; 1870–71 = the Franco-Prussian War, for which see note to The Waste Land [I] 8–17). Daudet was among the leaders of l’Action Française. In 1927, TSE unsuccessfully recommended Daudet’s book Le Stupide XIXe Siècle for publication by Faber. TSE to Hayward, 23 June 1940 (enclosing the drafts of East Coker): “I agree that the state of exhaustion which will follow our winning this war is hardly likely to favour the arts of civilisation in our time: yet the last twenty years was not a period which I regard as a specially noble one; and unless things are simply worse, they might be made better.”
“In the last twenty years we have been more unsettled by events, than we could be by two generations of prophets”, The Christian in the Modern World (1935). In 1943: “No generous mind can welcome the task of denouncing the results of twenty years of devoted labour, on the part of such Christian men as the designers of the South India Scheme; no ingenuous heart can fail to be moved by the spectacle of such waste. Twenty patient years to build what is only an elaborate artifice! Twenty years to construct a pantomime horse! Yet, on a longer view, we can assure ourselves that no such efforts are wasted”, Reunion by Destruction 21. “Twenty years and the spring is over”, Landscapes I. New Hampshire 6. l’entre deux guerres: on the outbreak of the Second World War: “The clear formulation of our own aims cannot be arrived at without a deal of hard thinking by our best minds over a considerable period of time. There must be many · · · visited by the suspicion that this expense of spirit, body and natural resources may only lead to another uneasy interim entre deux guerres; there may be many among the enemy who are inspired by no worthier ambition than that of reversing the situation of 1918. We have the obligation to reassure the one group, and to undeceive the other”, Truth and Propaganda (1939) (Ricks 269). TSE on Hayward’s projected book, 11 Sept 1939: “I am happy to think that the Recherche du temps perdu is stirring in your mind. You ought to begin taking notes · · · Anyway, get on with it. Forgotten epochs, l’entre deux guerres.” 9 Nov: “As for the future of civilisation, let us avoid that subject, but do try to train your mind occasionally on the subject of le temps perdu of l’entre deux guerres, of which you are to be the definitive social chronicler.” 29 Nov: “I expect from you something in the way of a permanent document on the age of l’entre deux guerres”. Hayward wrote to Anne Ridler, 28 Feb 1940, that his schooldays were during “the twilight of the sad interim entre deux guerres” (BL Add. ms 71225 fol. 20). TSE: “I think · · · the seventeen volumes of The Criterion constitute a valuable record of the thought of that period between two wars”, A Note on The Criterion (1966).
V 2] In ts1b, TSE wrote, slantwise: “20 yrs / l’entre 2 guerres / 20 yrs. or 600 upwards / Home is where we start from”. The conflicts between England and France known as the Hundred Years’ War began in 1337. (For the Battle of Poitiers, see note to Little Gidding II 67–96 drafts first venture in verse [6].)
V 2–3 Twenty years · · · Trying to learn to use words: “if the work of the last twenty years is worthy of being classified at all, it is as belonging to a period of search for a proper modern colloquial idiom”, The Music of Poetry (1942). It had also been a period of trying to use words instead of weapons (see next note). To Pamela Murray, 4 Feb 1938: “It is perhaps useful to remember that there are three generations of poets alive, each with its own characteristics. The oldest is Mr. Yeats; the middle generation may be represented by Mr. Ezra Pound and myself; and the third by Mr. Auden and Mr. Spender. Of course there are younger poets still, but there has not yet been time for a distinct ‘fourth’ generation to be established. One may take ‘generation’ as meaning a space of about twenty years in age between each. But it is a mistake to treat all the poets of any one generation as if they were very much alike—if they are any good they are very different from each other. And of course they vary according to the forms in which they prefer to express themselves.”
V 2–15 guerres · · · get the better of words · · · raid on the inarticulate · · · Undisciplined squads · · · fight: to the Times Educational Supplement, 26 Oct 1942 (unpublished): “the battle of words often seems to be being fought with words which have not been properly trained for the very difficult military operations which they are expected to carry out”.
[Poem I 191 · Textual History II 498]
V 3–4 Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt | Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure: “As one goes on, writing verse, into middle age, one can only do well by becoming more and more conscious of one’s limitations: of what one can do well, and of what one cannot do; learning to use one’s abilities to the best and to avoid overstraining oneself where weakest. And I think that some of what I have said about the practice of poetry is applicable to the greatest and most general profession of all—that of marriage. For, just as a poet can never be sure that he knows how to write poetry, but must constantly start as if afresh, so, I think, married people must always regard each other as a mysterious person whom they are gradually getting to know, in a process which must go on to the end of the life of one or the other · · · Every moment is a new problem, and you cannot succeed, in the best meaning of ‘success’, unless you approach the new poem, or the familiar husband or wife, with a feeling that there is a great deal for you to learn”, On Poetry (1947), passage omitted from published text (ts Hay Library, Brown U.). a wholly new start: on Symons: “if we can recall the time when we were ignorant of the French symbolists, and met with The Symbolist Movement in Literature, we remember that book as an introduction to wholly new feelings, as a revelation”, The Perfect Critic I (1920).
V 5–6 one has only learnt to get the better of words | For the thing one no longer has to say: “the more your work is praised · · · the more difficult it becomes to write the next thing so that it shall be the thing you have it in you to write, instead of the thing that you know people expect”, On Poetry (1947) 9.
V 8 raid on the inarticulate: Santayana on William James: “His excursions into philosophy were accordingly in the nature of raids”, Character and Opinion in the United States (1920) 67. Jacques Rivière: “‘It is only with the advent of Romanticism that the literary act came to be conceived as a sort of raid on the absolute and its result as a revelation’”, quoted in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 128–29 (Crawford 200).
V 8–9 raid · · · shabby equipment: “There are points, certainly, upon which even I, with an incomparably inferior equipment and ability for theological thinking, would venture to disagree”, Paul Elmer More (1937). To Colin Robinson, 6 Dec 1945: “it seems to me that you are trying to express rather difficult ideas which are just beyond your grasp, with an equipment of vocabulary and prosody which is inadequate for poetic expression.” shabby: Frank Morley urged restoration of the original reading, “worn-out” (see Textual History), but TSE replied, 5 Apr 1940, drawing attention to “worn-out” at II 19: “as for ‘shabby’, well I couldn’t say ‘worn out’ again, having used it once, and I feel that an adjective is necessary there, both for the metre and for the reason that otherwise you get too heavy a stress on ‘equipment’.” (“some worn-out common song”, Portrait of a Lady II 40.)
V 9–10 deteriorating | In the general mess of imprecision of feeling: to Hayward, 12 June 1944, sending a proof of Four Quartets: “Going through them again, I am depressed by a certain imprecision of word and phrase, especially in Burnt Norton, but also in East Coker.” “Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal imprecisions, | Approximate thoughts and feelings”, Choruses from “The Rock” IX 22–23. “Words · · · Decay with imprecision”, Burnt N
orton V 13–16.
[Poem I 191 · Textual History II 498–99]
V 11 Undisciplined squads of emotion: “belief in the undisciplined imagination and emotions”, An American Critic (1916). Given the “disorganized and hysterical state” of Europe in 1918, the League of Nations seemed “to illustrate that exaggerated faith in human reason to which people of undisciplined emotions are prone”, Catholicism and International Order (1933). For the Vita Nuova and “the discipline of the emotions”, see letter to Paul Elmer More, 2 June 1930, quoted in headnote to Ash-Wednesday, 3. AFTER PUBLICATION. “every precise emotion tends towards intellectual formulation”, Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca (1927). Clark Lecture VI (1926): “In Dante, as I have said again and again, you get a system of thought and feeling; every part of the system felt and thought in its place, and the whole system felt and thought; and you cannot say that it is primarily ‘intellectual’ or primarily ‘emotional’, for the thought and the emotion are reverse sides of the same thing”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 182–83. (Bradley: “That which is mainly intellectual · · · would probably be admitted · · · to fall outside religion”, Appearance and Reality ch. XXV, footnote; in his copy TSE underlined “mainly” and wrote: “And you cannot determine at what point it is mainly.” The Sacred Wood, Preface to the 1928 edition: “in criticizing poetry, we are right if we begin, with what sensibility and what knowledge of other poetry we possess, with poetry as excellent words in excellent arrangement and excellent metre. That is what is called the technique of verse. But we observe that we cannot define even the technique of verse; we cannot say at what point ‘technique’ begins or where it ends.”) To A. L. Rowse, 3 Mar 1941: “I am disturbed, I may say, however, by the constant tuffiness that creeps into Auden’s work: an abuse of emphatic adjectives which are impressive on a first reading but after two or three readings comes to appear empty and superfluous. The adjective is always a danger.”