The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  II 60–62 We appreciate this better | In the agony of others · · · than in our own: after reading TSE’s description of Shakespeare’s struggle “to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange”, in Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca (1927), Geoffrey Faber wrote to TSE, 15 Sept 1927: “I often suspect that storm and stress exhaust the desire, if not the power, to write greatly; and that an imaginative apprehension of other men’s distress, rather than a distressful life of his own, is the real qualification of the great Dramatist.”

  II 63 the currents of action: Hamlet III i: “their currents turn awry | And lose the name of action” (Blamires 102).

  II 66 the agony abides: to Geoffrey Faber, 21 Jan 1941: “Neither religious nor artistic treatment of past agony is · · · a pain killer”; see headnote, 2. “THE RIVER IS WITHIN US, THE SEA IS ALL ABOUT US”.

  II 67 Time the destroyer is time the preserver: Shelley: “Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; | Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!” Ode to the West Wind 13–14 (Blamires 99).

  II 68 Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops: “At such times, it carries down human bodies, cattle and houses”, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1950), Introduction. “The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, | Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends | Or other testimony of summer nights”, The Waste Land [III] 177–79. “in this deadwater where floats a dead ass · · · river”, Anabasis IV ix. negroes: to Frank Morley, 19 July 1943, on receipt of the first American ed. of Four Quartets: “I don’t know why you spell negroes with a capital N: that’s the only error I have so far detected.” To Robert Beare, 10 Mar 1953: “One difference between editions at least, arises from a difference in practices in English and American typography. In the United States, I understand that ‘negro’ always appears with a capital ‘N’. In this country, ‘negro’ is always in lower case.”

  II 69 the bite in the apple: Hayward: “The apple is used as a symbol of the Fall.”

  [Poem I 196–97 · Textual History II 507]

  II 70–75 the ragged rock in the restless waters · · · a seamark · · · is what it always was: Dryden: “Far in the Sea, against the foaming Shoar, | There stands a Rock; the raging Billows roar | Above his Head in Storms; but when ’tis clear, | Uncurl their ridgy Backs, and at his Foot appear. | In Peace below the gentle Waters run · · · The mark to guide the Mariners aright · · · Then round the rock they steer”, Aeneid V 164–73. “Round and round the rugged rock | The ragged rascal ran”, tongue-twister, The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book (1955). TSE: “No light to warn of rocks which lie below, | But let us yet put forth courageously”, To the Class of 1905 3–6. a seamark: Coriolanus V iii: “Like a great sea-mark standing every flaw | And saving those that eye thee!” (Blamires 101). lay a course: see TSE to Hayward, 4 Jan 1941, in note to the title The Dry Salvages. what it always was: Hayward’s Queries: “Abrupt end to sect. II?” The Family Reunion II ii: “John will recover, be what he always was.”

  II 72 halcyon day: OED “halcyon” 1: “A bird of which the ancients fabled that it bred about the time of the winter solstice in a nest floating on the sea, and that it charmed the wind and waves so that the sea was specially calm during the period: usually identified with a species of kingfisher, hence a poetic name of this bird”, with Shenstone: “So smiles the surface of the treach’rous main | As o’er its waves the peaceful halcyons play.” 2: “Calm, quiet · · · (Usually qualifying days.)” TSE to Hayward, 6 June 1937: “exhilarated this afternoon by the halcyon weather”.

  III

  Hayward: “Part III, which is mainly concerned with the right end of action, recalls the famous dialogue in the Bhagavad-Gita between Krishna, the God, an avatar of Vishnu, and Arjuna, his warrior-disciple, on the field of battle. ‘There Arjuna is concerned with the problem of the innate sinfulness of human action, and Krishna replies to his doubts by insisting on the necessity of disinterestedness’” (Gardner 173). When TSE took Charles Lanman’s Harvard course “Elementary Sanskrit” in 1911–12, the Gita was assigned reading. His earliest copy (tr. Lionel D. Barnett, Temple Classics, 1905) is signed on title page “T. S. Eliot Cambridge 1912” (see headnote to I am the Resurrection and the Life). “My own scholarship is very slender, but I learnt to distrust people who talk about the Bhagavad Gita without mentioning that it is a syncretism of half a dozen philosophical systems”, “The Poems of Dadu”, reader’s report (1926). TSE called the Gita “the next greatest philosophical poem to the Divine Comedy in my experience”, Dante (1929) II.

  [Poem I 197 · Textual History II 507]

  To A. Frank-Duchesne, 5 Nov 1945: “I have been sometimes told, however, that the influence of Indian thought and sensibility in my poetry has sometimes led me at least very near the edge of heterodoxy.” To Egon Vietta, 23 Feb 1947: “Long before I was a Christian, I was a student of Indian philosophy, and of the Buddhist scriptures in Pali: both from study of some original texts, under teachers of Indic philology and philosophy at Harvard, and from an early interest in Schopenhauer and Deussen also in connexion with Sanskrit. I have thought that as the scholastics, notably St. Thomas, incorporated Aristotelianism into Christian thought, so the task remains for some still more encyclopaedic scholar (who would need also an encyclopaedic imagination) to reconcile and incorporate Eastern religious thought into that of Christianity. So far, most students of the East have known little, and cared less about their own western tradition of thought; or else have started from the assumption that the East had nothing to teach us. The result is, that we have largely learned the wrong things. (The late Dr. Coomaraswamy had some qualifications and much learning, but he approached the synthesis from an Indian point of view). This is outside of my competence, and I have little learning; but I do think that some of my poetry is peculiar in a kind of poetic fusion of Eastern and Western currents of feeling.” (See TSE to I. A. Richards, 9 Aug 1930, quoted in headnote to “Poems (1920)”, 5. TSE’S PROFICIENCY IN FRENCH.) TSE’s jacket copy for Purohit Swami and Yeats’s translation of The Ten Principal Upanishads (1937) referred to “that body of literature which is as important for the study of the religion of India as the Old Testament is for Judaism and Christianity”.

  Against the suggestion in the ts of Beare that The Dry Salvages quoted “from the Yeats–Purohit translation”, TSE wrote: “nonsense! Do you suggest that I had never read the Gita until I published Purohit Swami?” (ts, U. Maryland). Yet he wrote to Beare, 17 Nov 1955: “while it is true that I knew the Bhagavad-Gita long before Purohit Swami made his translation, and did indeed, at one time read it in the original (I have long since even forgotten the alphabet), I should mention that when I came to quote from the Bhagavad-Gita in The Dry Salvages, I quoted from the Swami’s translation. It seemed to me a good translation, which is the reason why we published it, and it was the translation which I had to hand.” For the Upanishads, see note to The Waste Land [V] 399–422.

  III 2, 4 one way of putting the same thing · · · wistful regret · · · regret: to George Barker, 24 Jan 1938: “the same · · · the same thing · · · one does not feel the same about something as one did yesterday; feelings disappear from which we part with regret” (see headnote to Four Quartets, 4. “NOT MERELY MORE OF THE SAME”). “That was a way of putting it”, East Coker II 18.

  [Poem I 197 · Textual History II 507]

  III 3–4 a Royal Rose or a lavender spray | Of wistful regret: Ibsen, tr. William Archer: “the rooms all seem to smell of lavender and dried rose-leaves · · · It reminds me of a bouquet—the day after the ball”, Hedda Gabler act II. In a letter to Virginia Woolf, [28 Dec] 1939, TSE described reading Archer’s Ibsen. Royal Rose: not a specific variety of plant. To William Matchett, 14 June 1949, on Four Quartets: “‘Rose’ when spelt with a capital has always some reference to Charles the 1st. There is in the background certainly the memory of the Wars of the Roses, but its primary context is the seventeenth century” (see headnote to
Little Gidding, 1. HISTORY OF LITTLE GIDDING).

  In the Wars of the Roses, Henry VII of the House of Lancaster won the throne when Richard III of the House of York was killed at Bosworth Field on 22 Aug 1485, the red rose succeeding the white. To Anne Ridler, 19 Aug 1949, anticipating the opening of The Cocktail Party: “I hope it is not ominous that the play should open on the anniversary of Bosworth; and I hope that I shall not have bad dreams before the battle; but I shall saddle white Surrey and try to get the white rose that I habitually wear on that day, and pray for the soul of King Richard as usual.” (Richard III V iii, RICHARD: “Saddle white Surrey for the field tomorrow.”) King Henry later united the two roses by marrying Princess Elizabeth of the House of York. Charles MacFarlane, on their son Henry VIII: “Popular songs magnified the exploits of the Henries and Edwards, his royal predecessors, and anticipated his own great victories. ‘· · · And save this flower which is our king, | This Rose, this Rose, this royal Rose’”, The Great Battles of the British Army (1833, new ed. 1860) 45–46. TSE to Henry Sherek, 27 July 1954: “I have always been a stout supporter of the Yorkist cause in general and of Richard III in particular, and for some years have made a point of hearing Mass on the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth.” To Geoffrey Curtis, 19 Aug 1943: “Say a Hail Mary on Sunday for Richard III.” See note to Little Gidding III 46–50 3rd draft [1–2].

  III 5 yellow leaves: Shakespeare: “That time of year thou mayst in me behold | When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang | Upon those boughs which shake against the cold”, Sonnet 73.

  III 5–7 msA [7] For what alters the past to fit the present, can alter the present to fit the past: “Whoever has approved this idea of order · · · will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past”, Tradition and the Individual Talent I (1919).

  III 6 the way up is the way down: Hayward: “Vide epigraph to Burnt Norton”. Heraclitus: “The road up and the road down is one and the same”, frag. 69 (Elizabeth S. Dallas, Comparative Literature Summer 1965). TSE: “Reality, though I should judge one at bottom, divides itself into a Cartesian dichotomy—the way up, consciousness, and the way down, matter”, Inconsistencies in Bergson’s Idealism (1913) (Childs 151). D. H. Lawrence on Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast: “The way up, and the way down. The strange ways of life”, Studies in Classic American Literature ch. 9.

  III 7 this thing is sure: Hayward’s Queries: “this is certain (too many monosyllables at present)”.

  III 9–19 When the train starts, and the passengers are settled | To fruit, periodicals · · · letters · · · sleepy rhythm · · · not escaping from the past · · · terminus · · · the drumming liner: Clough: “we travel along in the railway-carriage, or steamer, | And, pour passer le temps, till the tedious journey be ended, | Lay aside paper or book · · · terminus · · · did we really believe that the Present indeed is the Only!” Amours de Voyage III vi (Murray). passengers · · · Their faces relax from grief into relief: Herbert: “till the grief | Of pleasures brought me to him, ready there | To be all passengers’ most sweet relief”, Christmas. TSE: “There is no relief but in grief”, Five-Finger Exercises I. Lines to a Persian Cat 6.

  III 12–13 grief into relief · · · sleepy: Coleridge: “drowsy, unimpassioned grief · · · relief”, Dejection 22–23 (for TSE’s marked copy of this poem see notes to Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think? 1 and Little Gidding II 3–16).

  III 13 To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours: “I know that a poem, or a passage of a poem, may tend to realize itself first as a particular rhythm before it reaches expression in words, and that this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and the image”, The Music of Poetry (1942) (“passengers”, 9). “He was stifled and soothed by his own rhythm. | By the river”, The Death of Saint Narcissus 8–9. “In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light · · · We are children quickly tired: children who are up in the night · · · we sleep and are glad to sleep, | Controlled by the rhythm of blood and the day and the night and the seasons”, Choruses from “The Rock” X 36–39. “Keeping the rhythm in their dancing”, East Coker I 40. Of the river: “Keeping his seasons · · · the machine · · · His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom · · · April · · · autumn · · · winter”, The Dry Salvages I 8–14. “hammered and hummed · · · The machine · · · the engine · · · I lay in bed · · · endless geological periods · · · the machine”, The Engine I, II. “And the rhythm that governs the repose of our sleepingtime, | The breathing in unison”, A Dedication to my Wife 3–4.

  [Poem I 197 · Textual History II 507–508]

  III 14–31 Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past | Into different lives · · · While time is withdrawn, consider the future | And the past: “put forth courageously. | | As colonists embarking from the strand | To seek their fortunes on some foreign shore | Well know they lose what time shall not restore”, To the Class of 1905 6–9. time is withdrawn: MacNeice: “I am glad to have known them, | The people or events apparently withdrawn”, Autumn Journal xxi; “Time was away and somewhere else”, Meeting Point in Plant and Phantom (1941).

  III 14, 26, 39, 45 Fare forward: see note to III 44–45.

  III 16 You are not the same people: “The I who saw the ghost is not the I who had the attack of indigestion”, Knowledge and Experience 121. To Stephen Spender, 9 May 1935: “Of course the self recovered is never the same as the self before it was given” (see note to Gerontion 65–66 for this letter). “You would have found that she was another woman | And that you were another man”; “What we know of other people | Is only our memory of the moments | During which we knew them. And they have changed since then · · · at every meeting we are meeting a stranger”, The Cocktail Party I i, I iii. “I’m not the same person as a moment ago”, The Elder Statesman I. Introducing his Morris Gray Poetry Reading Harvard, 13 May 1947: “one becomes rather out of touch with one’s very early work. It’s not as if it were written by somebody else; that would be comparatively easy. But it seems to have been written by a young person with whom one is intimately and rather embarrassingly associated and of whom one is slightly ashamed. Furthermore as time goes on, one sees more and more flaws in one’s early work, which it’s too late to repair because one isn’t enough the same person to have the right to tamper with the early poems.” See headnote to Sweeney Agonistes, 9. AFTER PUBLICATION, for “when time lapses before a work is completed you change in the meantime”. “F. M.”: “I am not the same person who once played—as it seems to one—a leading part in those spring fantasies”, Letters of the Moment I (1924). On a draft, TSE had written: “was it really me in those past springs” (c. 624 fol. 28v).

  III 16–37 You are not the same people who left that station | Or who will arrive at any terminus · · · ‘the past is finished’ · · · in any language · · · fructify in the lives of others: on Valéry’s remark “L’Europe est finie”: “something will remain operative, on the further generations · · · every language, to retain its vitality, must perpetually depart and return · · · We have to return to where we started from, but the journey has altered the starting place: so that the place we left and the place we return to are the same and also different · · · Now the journey has to be taken by new travellers · · · it is by this perpetual departure and return that the great languages of Europe can be kept alive; and if they can be kept alive, then Europe is not finished”, “Leçon de Valéry” (1946).

  III 19 the deck of the drumming liner: D. H. Lawrence: “I hear the steamer drumming”, A Bad Beginning; quoted by John Middleton Murry in Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence (1931), which TSE reviewed in Criterion July 1931 (C. E. Baron, Cambridge Quarterly Spring 1971).

  III 19–20 the deck · · · Watching the furrow that widens behind you: Clough: “far behind · · · the deck · · · watch below | The foaming wake far widening as we go”, Where lies the land to which the ship would go?

  [Poem I
197 · Textual History II 508]

  III 19, 29–31 drumming · · · the hither and the farther shore | While time is withdrawn, consider the future | And the past with an equal mind: Clough: “from the tumult escaping, ’tis pleasant, of drumming and shouting, | Hither, oblivious awhile, to withdraw · · · Yield to the calm”, Amours de Voyage III ix (Murray).

  III 21–22 You shall not think “the past is finished” | Or “the future is before us”: Bradley on time: “It is taken as a stream, and past and future are regarded as parts of it, which presumably do not co-exist, but are often talked of as if they did”, Appearance and Reality ch. IV.

  III 26, 31, 35 voyaging · · · with an equal mind · · · death: Dryden: “With equal Mind, what happens, let us bear, | Nor joy, nor grieve too much for Things beyond our Care. | Like Pilgrims, to th’appointed Place we tend; | The World’s an Inn, and Death the Journeys End”, Palamon and Arcite III 885–88. with an equal mind: Horace: Æquam mentem (Odes II iii). Arnold: “Nature, with equal mind, | Sees all her sons at play”, Empedocles on Etna I ii.