The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  III 29 the hither and the farther shore: the Buddha calls desire and nirvana the two shores: “The man for whom there is neither this nor that shore, nor both—him, the fearless and unshackled, I call indeed a Brahman”, Dhammapada Upanishad, tr. Irving Babbitt, ch. XXVI st. 385 (Grover Smith 323). For TSE on “works like the Dhammapada”, see note to The Waste Land [V] 433. “Attain at length the farther shore”, Airs of Palestine, No. 2 34.

  III 33–44 “on whatever sphere · · · time of death” · · · field of battle: Gita 8. 5–8: “Whosoever at the time of death thinks only of Me, and thinking thus leaves the body and goes forth, assuredly he will know Me. On whatever sphere of being the mind of a man may be intent at the time of death, thither he will go. Therefore meditate always on Me, and fight; if thy mind and thy reason be fixed on Me, to Me shalt thou surely come. He whose mind does not wander, and who is engaged in constant meditation, attains the Supreme Spirit”, The Geeta tr. Shri Purohit Swami (Faber, 1935). Preston 44: “Arjuna is required to engage in battle against a hostile but related clan; but at the sight of his near relatives in the opposing army he hesitates to begin the fight, and is recalled to a sense of duty by Krishna · · · The way of salvation, he says, lies in action performed in fulfilment of duty, but action performed in complete freedom from personal desires or interest.” For the significance, see Composition FQ 56–57, and on TSE’s fusion of many verses from the Gita see Kearns 248–50.

  Asked to offer a comment for Authors take sides on the Spanish War (1937), TSE declined: “While I am naturally sympathetic, I still feel convinced that it is best that at least a few men of letters should remain isolated, and take no part in these collective activities.” His demurral was itself printed in the section headed “Neutral”. “Now an ideally unprejudiced person, with an intimate knowledge of Spain, its history, its racial characteristics, and its contemporary personalities, might be in a position to come to the conclusion that he should, in the longest view that could be seen, support one side rather than the other. But so long as we are not compelled in our own interest to take sides, I do not see why we should do so on insufficient knowledge: and even any eventual partisanship should be held with reservations, humility and misgiving. That balance of mind which a few highly-civilized individuals, such as Arjuna, the hero of the Bhagavad Gita, can maintain in action, is difficult for most of us even as observers, and, as I say, is not encouraged by the greater part of the Press”, A Commentary in Criterion Jan 1937 (“of the press”, The Dry Salvages V 12).

  [Poem I 197–98 · Textual History II 508]

  III 34–35 the mind · · · the time of death: “Who knows, Mrs. Chamberlayne, | The difference that made to the natives who were dying | Or the state of mind in which they died?” The Cocktail Party III.

  III 38 do not think of the fruit of action: Gita 2.47: “But thou hast only the right to work, but none to the fruit thereof. Let not the fruit of thy action be thy motive; nor yet be thou enamoured of inaction” (Hayward, quoting Purohit Swami’s translation. Hayward: “It is perhaps relevant to recall that the poet devoted two years at Harvard to the study of Sanskrit and Hindu metaphysics”). Pater: “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end”, Studies in the History of the Renaissance Conclusion. (In 1929, TSE collated editions of this final chapter of Pater on Montgomery Belgion’s behalf.)

  III 42 real destination: “to what purpose were we born? For what destination do we die? What is the end of man?” The Church’s Message (1937) broadcast text (the printings omitted the second question). “working by means of mathematical symbols · · · we start at a real place and arrive at a real place but haven’t been in real places on the journey”, Comments on Mannheim’s Letter (1944).

  III 43 Arjuna: stressed on the first syllable in TSE’s recording of 1946–47.

  III 44–45 Not fare well, | But fare forward: Thomas Hodgkin: “When the blessing was given, the youth said: ‘Farewell.’ ‘Not farewell, but fare forward’ answered Severinus”, Theodoric the Goth: The Barbarian Champion of Civilisation (1891) 99 (footnote: “L. Vale = farewell; Vade = fare forward”).

  Hayward’s Queries: “Fare forward?—Browning”. TSE to Hayward, 4 Jan 1941:

  I had quite forgotten the Browning, and I don’t even remember it now. I was thinking of the words of the sibyl to Alaric (wasn’t it?) on his way to Rome: “not fare well but fare forward”. This point bothers me.

  Hayward to TSE, 7 Jan 1941:

  As to the Browning “canard” (as it turns out to be) I hasten to put your mind at ease. It’s the old story of a half-remembered and unchecked tag floating in and out of one’s memory. The hortatory phrase “Fare Forward” struck, as they say, a chord—or what I took to be a chord. I recalled at once the familiar Epilogue to Asolando, but recalled it inaccurately, thinking the last words were: “Cry ‘Speed,—fight on, fare forward | There as here’”. Browning in fact wrote “Fare ever” · · · I apologize.

  Not fare well, | But fare forward, voyagers: TSE: “Unable to fare forward or retreat”, Animula 26. “Fare forward to the end”, Murder in the Cathedral I (Kenner 237). “VII. Decision to fare forth”, Anabasis Preface, original summary of the sections.

  IV

  [Poem I 198 · Textual History II 508]

  IV 1 Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory: on 14 June 1947 Charles Olson sent Pound a postcard of the life-size statue of the Lady which stands atop the Church of Our Lady of Good Voyage, Gloucester, with right arm outstretched and a fishing vessel nestling in her left hand, suggesting that she was the original “Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory”. Presumably it was sent to TSE and so to Hayward, for it is now at King’s, with a note by TSE, 14 Aug 1947: “Mr. Olson or Olsen is in error. I have never returned to Cape Ann or Gloucester Mass. since 1915. Presumably this statue tops the facade of the R.C. church in Gloucester. I do not think it was there in my time: anyway I had no knowledge of its existence when I wrote The Dry Salvages. But I thought that there ought to be a shrine of the B V M [Blessed Virgin Mary] at the harbour mouth of a fishing port.” According to Henry Eliot’s widow, TSE did not revisit the Gloucester area until 1960. Boyd points out that the original church burnt down in 1914, and that TSE might have seen this statue on the new church in 1915, but Levy 121 reports TSE as saying on 12 Mar 1961: “Notre Dame de la Gard [Marseilles] is the church I had in mind when I wrote that line.” promontory: pronounced with four full syllables in TSE’s recording of 1946–47.

  IV 2–5 all those who are in ships, those | Whose business has to do with fish · · · And those who conduct them: Psalm 107: 23: “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters” (Cook). Revelation 18: 17: “And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea.” TSE: “princes paid in currency of fish”, Anabasis IV x.

  IV 9 Figlia del tuo figlio: Paradiso XXXIII 1: “Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio” [Virgin mother, daughter of thy son]. The pronoun “suo”, in TSE’s drafts and earliest printings, is the polite form of address (usually capitalised) in modern Italian (in Dante’s day, “vostro”). No edition of the Commedia prints “suo”. “for some years, I was able to recite a large part of one canto or another to myself, lying in bed or on a railway journey”, What Dante Means to Me (1950). In his copy of The Student’s Chaucer, alongside “Thou mayde and mooder, doghter of thy sone” (Seconde Nonnes Tale 36), TSE wrote in 1908–09: “from Dante”.

  IV 10 Queen of Heaven: Paradiso XXXI, 100–101: “la Regina del cielo, ond’i’ ardo | tutto d’amor” [the Queen of heaven for whom I am all burning with love] (Hayward).

  IV 11–13 those who were in ships, and | Ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea’s lips | Or in the dark throat: Harriet Monroe:

  In ships they went down to the sea.

  And the sea had a million lips

  And she laughed in her throat for glee.

  And the floor of the sea was strewn

  With tempest trophies drea
d

  The Ocean Liner 35–39 in You and I (1914)

  IV 14 wherever cannot reach them the sound of: Hayward’s Queries (of “cannot reach”): “c.r. inversion”.

  IV 14–15 the sea bell’s | Perpetual angelus: Whitman: “the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang”, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d 43 (Musgrove 73) (TSE: “Clangs | The bell”, I 47–48). angelus: Roman Catholic devotions at morning, noon and sunset, beginning “Angelus domini nuntiavit Mariæ” and commemorating the Incarnation; also the bell rung to announce these.

  V

  [Poem I 198–99 · Textual History II 508–509]

  V 1–12 To communicate with Mars · · · features of the press: Faber had an active list of titles such as Healing Ritual (1935); Moons, Myths and Man (1936); This World and That: An Analytical Study of Psychic Communication (1940); Astrology in Everyday Life (1940); Magic and Divination (1941). TSE, “Vers un Nouveau Prophetisme” [Toward a New Prophetism] by Raymond Abellio, reader’s report (1955); quoted in Monteith:

  I yield to no one in my relish for signs and wonders, omens, portents, sibylline utterances, prophecies, the Flood, rains of blood, loess and frogs, powers & principalities, leprechauns & kelpies, undines, kobolds, apsaras, yakshinis, Hiram Abiff, Rosy Crosses, catharism, the Great Pyramid, Zen, Sufism, Lemuria, Atlantis, janmas, yugas, samsara, Cyril Connolly, the Loch Ness Monster, giants, dwarfs, cynocephali, jettatura, doppelganger, the evil eye, divination by cards, sand or knucklebones, cheiromancy, necromancy, little green men swarming out of flying saucers in North Dakota talking Japanese, and such like, but I like ’em one at a time.

  (“Never has the printing-press been so busy, and never have such varieties of buncombe and false doctrine come from it”, After Strange Gods 61.)

  V 1–19 To communicate with Mars · · · Pastimes · · · the press · · · When there is distress · · · time: the year after The Dry Salvages, TSE took an interest in “a recent correspondence in The Times concerned with the increased addiction to astrology and divination—always a tendency in times of stress”, Christian News-Letter 8 July 1942. On behalf of the London Spiritualist Alliance, Arthur Conan Doyle had written to The Times on 26 July 1928 claiming that “mediums are essential · · · for the conduct of our Churches” and again on 6 Aug 1928, suggesting Parliament “sweep away the obsolete Fortune-Telling Act”.

  V 2 To report: Hayward’s Queries: “(Tó) Report” (suggesting that the first word be omitted). behaviour: Hayward to TSE, 5 Mar 1941: “I prefer the original ‘appearance’ · · · It is always the appearance of the Loch Ness monster and its fellows that excites the vulgar mobile.”

  V 3 haruspicate: not in OED, although it has “haruspex”: “One of a class of ancient Roman soothsayers, of Etruscan origin, who performed divination by inspection of the entrails of victims, and in other ways.” (For “mactations, immolations, oblations, impetrations”, see note to Coriolan II. Difficulties of a Statesman 42.) To Adrienne Monnier, 29 Apr 1925: “Que les haruspices soient favorables à votre revue!” [May the omens be favourable for your review!] To John W. Nance, 19 Dec 1929, “I must record my disgust with the foul word modernist” (see note to Cousin Nancy 8–10). Nance replied, 20 Dec, apologising and regretting that the better word “Futurist” would have been misleading: “Cras ingens haruspex—that is what you are.” (For Horace’s “Cras ingens”, see note to East Coker V 37.) TSE to Hayward, 11 Aug 1939: “So far as the augurs, soothsayers and haruspices can determine, assisted by all the arts of geomancy, horoscopy, the entrails of birds and Old Moore, the autumn season should open · · · on September 10th.” scry: OED: “To see images in pieces of crystal, water, etc. which reveal the future or secrets of the past or present.”

  V 3 variant horoscope, haruspicate with sand: Hayward’s Queries: “haruspicate—coscinomancy” (= divination by the turning of a sieve). TSE to Hayward, 4 Jan 1941: “‘Haruspicate’. Gross carelessness on my part. I wonder whether haruspicate with guts would do. I dont think it would.” Hayward to TSE, 7 Jan 1941: “No I don’t think ‘with guts’ is quite nice! Is’nt it a pleonasm anyhow? I should not like to lose the conjunction of horoscope-haruspicate · · · I should like to keep ‘sand’ (or sieves).”

  [Poem I 199 · Textual History II 509]

  V 3–8 Describe the horoscope · · · evoke | Biography · · · fiddle with pentagrams: to Theodore Spencer, 19 July 1948, of requests to view the TSE collection at Eliot House: “Theresa has at least wisely refused permission to a lady, I believe of the usual foreign origin, who said she wanted access to the collection to make a psycho-analytic study of my work. I should particularly wish the exclusion of psycho-analysts, casters of horoscopes and other practitioners of magic.”

  V 3, 6, 15–16 Describe the horoscope · · · release omens · · · in the Edgware Road. | Men’s curiosity searches past and future: “consulting the oracles and having our horoscopes cast in the Tottenham Court Road · · · There are, of course, two futures: there is the future of the present · · · and there is the future of the future · · · omens · · · ominous · · · If this is of the future, then the future is, as it very likely is, of the barbarians. But this is the future in which we ought not to be interested”, Charleston, Hey! Hey! (1927).

  V 4 disease in signatures: to C. A. Bodelsen, 19 Dec 1958: “I was not thinking of Shakespeare’s signature or that of anyone else, but was using the word in a much more obscure and possibly not permissible sense. The definition is found in the large Oxford Dictionary as no. 4 of the meanings of signature [‘A distinctive mark, a peculiarity in form or colouring, etc., on a plant or other natural object, formerly supposed to be an indication of its qualities, esp. for medicinal purposes’], and I would quote this example which is given there. 1697 ‘Whether men, as they say of plants, have signatures to discover their nature by, is hard to determine.’ Another example from 1748, ‘There are some which think that herbs the fittest for curing those parts of man’s body, to which they bear some sort of resemblance, commonly called a signature’.” (TSE slightly misquotes OED, which reads “that think those Herbs” and “a Man’s Body”.)

  V 7 sortilege: OED: “casting lots in order to decide something or to forecast the future; divination”. Laforgue: “O géraniums diaphanes, guerroyeurs sortilèges” [O diaphanous geraniums, prophetic warriors] (first line); quoted in The Metaphysical Poets (1921).

  V 9 barbituric acids: used as hypnotic and sedative drugs. barbituric: stressed on the third syllable in TSE’s recording of 1946–47.

  V 10 recurrent: pronounced as in recur at this point in TSE’s recording of 1946–47, but as in current at Little Gidding II 27.

  V 11–12, 32 explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams · · · features of the press · · · The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation: “The Incarnation was to him an essential dogma · · · a word half understood · · · some alien or half-formed science, as of psychology · · · the dogmas of sciences of which we have read in the newspapers”, Lancelot Andrewes (1926).

  V 12 Pastimes: pronounced with short a in TSE’s recording of 1946–47.

  V 14 distress of nations and perplexity: Luke 21: 25: “And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity” (Grover Smith 280) (“horoscope”, 3).

  [Poem I 199 · Textual History II 509]

  V 15 Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road: “whether in Argos or in England”, The Family Reunion II i chorus. “It is not immediately obvious that events in places so remote as Tinevelly and Dornakal may have consequences in every parish in England”, Reunion by Destruction: Reflections on a Scheme for Church Union in South India (1943) 2. Asia: pronounced Aisha in TSE’s recording of 1946–47. the Edgware Road: to Bonamy Dobrée, Monday [Sept 1927?]: “walk smartly up Brompton (or is it The Brompton, like The Edgware?) Road”. TSE and Vivien lived near Edgware Road underground station, 1916–20. For “the Tottenham Court Road”, see note to V
3, 6, 15–16.

  V 15–18 Asia · · · past and future · · · timeless: to Frederic Prokosch, 9 Feb 1938, of an ode submitted to the Criterion: “I am a bit bothered by ‘the infinite magic of human memory’ in connexion with Asia · · · indifference to time seems more characteristic of the past of Asia than memory.”

  V 16 Men’s curiosity: “What has since happened to M. Bourget, in fact, has been the disappearance of the sense of curiosity. Curiosity is suppleness, it is tolerance, it is the source of unbiased judgment as well as of enthusiasm and feeling”, M. Bourget’s Last Novel (1917). In Revelation (1937), TSE quoted Gerald Heard’s prediction that “Humanity will be bored” while deploring his opinion that curiosity might save it: “Curiosity the finest of the passions! Vanity of vanities!” For Milton’s “unprofitable Sin of Curiosity”, see note to Little Gidding IV three-stanza ts drafts [10, 12–14]. OED “curiosity” 5a: “undue or inquisitive desire to know or learn. Obs.” c: “Inquisitiveness in reference to trifles or matters which do not concern one.” 8: “A desire to make trial or experience of anything novel · · · Obs.”

  V 18–19 The point of intersection of the timeless | With time: Karl Barth: “In this name two worlds meet and go apart, two planes intersect · · · The point on the line of intersection at which the relation becomes observable and observed is Jesus”; “In such knowledge men love God, not before or after, but in the ‘Moment’ which is no moment in a series, and which is the meaning of every moment in time”, The Epistle to the Romans (tr. Edwyn C. Hoskyns, 1933) 29, 319. (TSE had a particular interest in this Epistle. His copy of A. E. Garvie’s Romans: Introduction, Authorized Version (1901) is at Harvard.)