The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  “Tardi”, I cant think of the right word, but it suggests to me that the physical reflexes were not as immediate as they had been.

  Isn’t “bruti” enough, without “of the field”. “You weren’t made to lie down with the animals”.

  “Them” (Ugolino) rather suggests to me that there were more children, but these were all that were with him.

  P.24. Is “Flame” within “my veins” right? Isnt “veins” suggested to you by the preceding? and isnt the collocation of the metaphor and the physiology a little violent?

  I hope you will not consider this sort of comment impertinent. It is the sort that I should like to have myself; and I shall send you my Ash Wednesday, which is merely an attempt to do the verse of the Vita Nuova in English, so that you may have me at your mercy. Any way, I am sure that Praz is right, and I do hope you will some time complete the translation. [H. F.] Cary is painful; Longfellow is weary; and my cousin [Charles Eliot] Norton is dull. And I do not know of anyone living who could translate Dante as well as that. Ezra could do parts, but he will never understand the whole pattern.

  Pound: “One was thankful in 1906 to Dent for the Temple bilingual edtn., it saved one from consulting Witte, Toynbee, god knows whom, but at any rate from painfully digging in with a dictionary, a Dante dictionary etc…. and one (I believe more— I can not believe my experience unique) never got through to the essential fact that it is really THERE ON THE PAGE”, review of Dante’s Inferno translated into English Triple Rhyme by Laurence Binyon (Criterion Apr 1934). TSE offered Binyon comments on his translation of Paradiso XXX and XXXIII in a letter of 7 July 1941 (see note to Choruses from “The Rock” X 32–33). For TSE’s later praise of Binyon’s Dante, see note to II 25–96. TSE wrote to Binyon, 22 Nov 1940, requesting a volume of selected poems for Faber’s Sesame series, but Binyon’s publisher, Macmillan, refused permission. Macmillan also prevented Binyon offering new poems to Faber (TSE to Binyon, 10 Feb 1941).

  4. AFTER PUBLICATION

  To Desmond MacCarthy, 28 Dec 1942: “I do think that the poem shows progress in simplification towards direct statement. How far the slowness and round-aboutness of my movement in this direction may be due to some difficulty in communication in the present age, and how far merely to an initial tangle of knots in my own temperament, I am not in a position to discover. I like to think, in any case, that the difference from Burnt Norton to Little Gidding represents some degree of clarification of thought and feeling.”

  To Montgomery Belgion, 9 Feb 1943: “The best notices of it were in The Tablet and the Catholic Herald! But Desmond MacCarthy, in the Sunday Times, was very laudatory yesterday: so far about 12,000 copies sold.”

  [Poem I 201–209 · Textual History II 511–45]

  To F. O. Matthiessen, 29 July 1943: “The only point that occurs to me—of course, I can only speak of my intentions and am unable to say how far I have succeeded—is the deliberate introduction of a refrain from Juliana of Norwich and a line from the Cloud of Unknowing in the last poems. For one thing, I wanted the poem to escape any suggestion of historical sentimentality about the seventeenth century by this reiterated reference to the fourteenth century and therefore to get more bearing on the present than would be possible if the relation was merely between the present and one particular period of the past. Juliana is also appropriate, of course, because the atmosphere of this poem is intended to be distinctly East Anglian. I don’t want to develop these associations further into anything that might seem wire-drawn and remote.” To E. M. Stephenson, 9 Dec 1942, of V 25: “as you have drawn so much attention to Juliana of Norwich it might be as well to mention that another line ‘With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling’ is taken from a mystical work of the same period of antithetical type, The Cloud of Unknowing.” Julian of Norwich lived c. 1342–c. 1416 and The Cloud of Unknowing, which is anonymous, is thought to date from the late 14th century. (In Schofield’s English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer 99, TSE underlined “The fourteenth century was the age of nationalism.”) “you must expect something in a seventeenth century form but with a fourteenth century spirit”, “The Merry Masque of Our Lady in London Town” (1928).

  To Jean Mambrino, 25 Nov 1946, who had translated the poem into French: “I have also read your translation of Little Gidding which, so far as I am competent to judge, seems to me for the most part accurate, though I regret in places the lack of indication of some of the brusque changes from one metre to another, the effect of which is an important part of the design of the poem. I feel in Part II, for instance, that the effect of the original might be better rendered by taking greater liberties with the literal meaning, and that the more formal rhymed pattern of the first three stanzas might be more effective even at the cost of somewhat altering the content. Then for what follows in this section, a great deal is lost by abandoning the terza rima, the purpose of which was to put the reader in the frame of mind of the Inferno or Purgatorio. I wonder whether a verse might be found best somewhat on the line used by Valéry in Le Cimetière Marin.” TSE sent a copy of Little Gidding to Laurence Binyon c. 1 Dec 1942, inscribed: “I have felt some diffidence about offering this: but any experiment in an English variation of terza rima ought to be submitted to the censure of you who know more about it than any of us!”

  To Mary Trevelyan [14 Feb] 1949: “Little Gidding doit être le nom d’un petit garçon très cher à M. Eliot, says a French critic.”

  A newspaper interview, Eliot on Eliot: “I feel younger than I did at 60” (1958), reported: “He claims not to be conscious of any diminution of his mental faculties and is, in fact, planning to write one more verse play, and some literary or social criticism in prose. ‘I’m curious,’ he adds, ‘to see if I shan’t also want to write a few more poems in a rather different style. I feel I reached the end of something with Four Quartets, and that anything new will have to be expressed in a different idiom.’ · · · the one work with which he is most satisfied is the last of the Four Quartets.”

  Joseph L. Featherstone reports of a reading at Boston College, 4 Dec 1961, that TSE read Little Gidding and referred to it as “my best” (Harvard Crimson 6 Dec 1961). On a similar occasion at Boston College three years before he had explained that every poet considered his most recent poems the best, “though not as good as the ones he is going to write” (Harvard Crimson 15 May 1958).

  [Poem I 201–209 · Textual History II 511–45]

  TSE’s comments on the tr. by André Gide and Madeleine Bosco (Aguedal Dec 1943) are from the copy at King’s and were published by Tilby. To Kathleen Raine, 10 May 1944: “I have just seen and read with mixed feelings the translation of Little Gidding by Gide and Madame Bosco.”

  I

  I 1–16 Midwinter spring · · · The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches · · · The soul’s sap quivers · · · transitory blossom | Of snow: Murder in the Cathedral I:

  Spring has come in winter. Snow in the branches

  Shall float as sweet as blossoms. Ice along the ditches

  Mirror the sunlight. Love in the orchard

  Send the sap shooting.

  “What is the late November doing | With the disturbance of the spring”, East Coker II 1–2. “F. M.”: “this is the essential spring—spring in winter”, Letters of the Moment I (1924) (Loretta Johnson 1988). For Edgar Lee Masters’ “forge of snow white fire · · · ensanguined ice · · · Flaming”, see note to East Coker II 7–17. Midwinter spring · · · brightest, with frost and fire · · · windless cold · · · glare · · · early afternoon · · · transitory blossom: undated jotting by TSE for “F. M.”: “SPRING. The pitiless glare of early morning ushering in a merciless frosty glaring day—exposure of spring · · · this glare · · · cold wind red nose in the country · · · primroses · · · what matters?” (c. 624 fol. 106); see McCue 2016. Midwinter spring is its own season: A Midsummer Night’s Dream II i: “And never since the middle summer’s spring.” TSE: “And cheat the winter into sprin
g”, A Valedictory Forbidding Mourning 19–20. In the Gide/Bosco tr., “Ce printemps, au cœur de l’hiver, est la vraie saison de ces lieux”, TSE queried “Ce” and “de ces lieux”.

  I 1–2 spring · · · Sempiternal: Paradiso XXVIII 116: “primavera sempiterna” [eternal spring] (Robin Kirkpatrick, personal communication). Sempiternal: OED: “everlasting, eternal”, citing North’s Plutarch: “the sempiternall fire”. TSE to Anne Ridler, 3 Apr 1948, on a play for radio: “why ‘sempiternal’—it seems a very heavy word for the occasion?”

  I 2–5 Sempiternal · · · sundown · · · When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, | The brief sun flames the ice: Pater: “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame · · · Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts · · · is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening”, Studies in the History of the Renaissance Conclusion (Janowitz). For Pater’s Conclusion, see note to The Dry Salvages III 38.

  I 8 A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon: Shelley: “a cold glare, intenser than the noon, | But icy cold, obscured with blinding light”, The Triumph of Life 77–79 (Grover Smith 283). TSE: “dark in the afternoon”, East Coker I 16.

  I 10 pentecostal fire: see headnote to IV.

  [Poem I 201 · Textual History II 516–17]

  I 11 In the dark time of the year: Donne: “Christmas · · · that dark time of the year”, Sermon at St. Paul’s, 13 Oct 1622. TSE to Hayward, 26 Oct 1936, parodying Chatterton: “That bird wych in the dark time of the yeerë | Sitteth in dudgeon on the aspen bouwe | And cryeth arsehole arsehole lhoude and cleerë”, (Iman Javadi, personal communication).

  I 12 The soul’s sap · · · earth smell: Donne: “The worlds whole sap is sunke: | The generall balme th’hydroptique earth hath drunk”, A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day, Being the shortest day 5–6 (Grover Smith 282); see note to The Cultivation of Christmas Trees 4, 26. The soul’s sap: Babbitt on Hippolyte Taine: “The word for which he has the greatest predilection is probably sap (sève). What most delights him is the vigorous rising of the sap in the human vegetation”, The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912) 232.

  I 12–13 There is no earth smell | Or smell of living thing: Geoffrey Faber’s notes: “Is this so? (Query not criticism. I do seem to remember a tangy kind of smell.)” TSE to Ottoline Morrell, from Harvard, 14 Mar 1933: “nothing here smells right; especially the countryside lacks that deep damp earthy smell of England.” smell: in the Gide/Bosco tr., TSE twice underlined “parfum”.

  I 13–14 This is the spring time | But not in time’s covenant: Herrick: “give the honour to this Day, | That sees December turn’d to May · · · the Spring-time of the year”, A Christmas Carol 9–13 (Grover Smith 323, pointing out that this verse was quoted by TSE in a printed Christmas card, and that the conceit is common in 17th-century verse). TSE’s earliest draft, msA, begins “Winter scene. May.” At East Coker I 25, “May” turned to “summer” during drafting.

  I 14 time’s covenant: God’s covenant with Noah, Genesis 8: 22: “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease” (Composition FQ 161). hedgerow: beside the Gide/Bosco tr. “qui clôt le jardin”, TSE wrote “no—along the road side”.

  I 14–16 the hedgerow | Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom | Of snow: in Coleridge’s Poetical Works (1907), TSE marked the lines “Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch | Of mossy apple-tree”, Frost at Midnight 68–69 and the four succeeding lines which end the poem. To Hayward, 5 Aug 1941: “Geoffrey found that the comparison of May blossom and snow on the hedges did not ring true: but I am awaiting his written comment which I hope will make clear why he feels thus.” “Late roses filled with early snow”, East Coker II 7.

  I 15–17 transitory blossom · · · neither budding nor fading: Clough: “Budding, unfolding, and falling, decaying and flowering ever · · · the transient blossom of Knowledge”, Amours de Voyage III iv (Murray). transitory: pronounced with four full syllables in TSE’s recording of 1946–47.

  I 15–16, 24 blanched · · · blossom | Of snow · · · White again: Housman: “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now | Is hung with bloom along the bough · · · come again · · · in bloom · · · I will go | To see the cherry hung with snow”, A Shropshire Lad II.

  [Poem I 201 · Textual History II 517]

  I 19–20 the unimaginable | Zero summer: “such a (complete) explanation would not be an explanation of anything; it would be (absolute) zero”, Report on the Relation of Kant’s Criticism to Agnosticism (1913). Russell: “the problem concerning infinity is the same as that concerning continuity and the infinitesimal. For this purpose, we shall find it convenient to ignore the absolute zero, and to mean, when we speak of any kind of magnitudes, all the magnitudes of the kind except zero”, Principles of Mathematics (1903) ch. XXIII. Hayward to TSE, 1 Aug 1941: “Is this an allusive reference to the Absolute Zero of physics? I feel a little uneasy about the epithet—slightly Clevelandish?” OED does not record “zero summer”, though it has “zero hour” (“the hour at which an attack or operation is timed to begin”) from 1917.

  I 19 ^ 20 variant Summer beyond sense, the inapprehensible: this line was present in all typescripts except the last and was printed in NEW. Helen Gardner on ts13a, the typescript sent to the printer of the Little Gidding pamphlet: “It is possible that Eliot overlooked the fact that in this version the line had been omitted and failed to restore it”, Composition FQ 161. Hayward added it to his copy of the final typescript. Yet TSE’s having initially typed “S” for “Summer” and then typed “Zero” over it suggests a deliberate change of mind. inapprehensible: to Ian Cox, 21 Apr 1937: “You have put in a great deal of the inapprehensible and unnameable emotion and feeling which one wants to get in to any work of poetry or imaginative prose”. For this letter see “The End of All Our Exploring”, 3. PUBLISHER AND POET.

  I 23–24 If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges | White again, in May · · · sweetness: Arnold on Clough: “next year he will return, | And we shall have him in the sweet spring-days, | With whitening hedges”, Thyrsis 72–74 (Murray).

  I 24 ^ 25 variant In the may time, the play time: for Hayward’s warning about this “dangerous conjunction”, see Textual History. As You Like It V iii, Song: “In the spring-time, the only pretty ring-time”.

  I 26 like a broken king: Hayward, quoting J. F. M. Carter, Nicholas Ferrar, his Household and Friends (1892) 310: “Charles I, a fugitive from Cromwell, after his final defeat at the battle of Naseby, found temporary refuge at Little Gidding in 1646; ‘Very privately, in the darkness of night, he came once more to Gidding’.” See note to “a king at nightfall”, III 26–27. An armorial window in the church has the inscription “Insignia Caroli Regis qui latitabat apud Ferrarios 2do Maii A.S. 1646” [Arms of King Charles who refreshed himself at the Ferrar house 2nd May 1646] (Composition FQ 62). Richard II II i: “The king’s grown bankrout like a broken man”. For Kipling’s The Broken Men, see note to the title The Hollow Men. In the Gide/Bosco tr., “en roi dépossédé”, TSE underlined “en”, with a tick.

  I 29 behind the pig-sty: “sty of contentment”, Marina 10 (likewise originally spelt “stye”). To Hayward, 16 Oct [1942]: “You did not point out to me, what you will see is the fact, that I did not know how to spell ‘pig-sty’. However, I will forgive you that, in view of your innumerable and much more important benefactions.” OED lists “stye” as an alternative spelling, and it occurs in The Education of Henry Adams ch. III, but TSE misspelt the plural in Mr. Pugstyles: The Elegant Pig 27, changing his 1930s spelling “stys” to the also incorrect “styes” when retyping the poem in 1946 (OED: “sties”). Alongside the Gide/Bosco tr., “l’étable”, TSE wrote “sty ?” dull façade: added to the chapel in 1714.

  I 32 from which the purpose breaks: in the Gide/Bosco tr., “D’où le dessein essentiel ne s’échappe e
n brisant sa coque”, TSE underlined “s’échappe · · · coque”.

  [Poem I 201–202 · Textual History II 517–18]

  I 35–37 other places · · · the sea jaws, | Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city: Hayward: “Although ‘the sea jaws’ recall The Dry Salvages IV 12 [‘the sea’s lips’], they are specifically associated in this passage with the Scottish island of Iona in the Inner Hebrides (cf. Murder in the Cathedral) where St. Columba founded a monastery, and with the island of Lindisfarne off the Northumbrian coast to which St. Cuthbert retired to die. The ‘dark lake’ is lake Glendalough in county Wicklow, Ireland, where St. Kerin (or Coerugen) made a hermitage above the lake which is still a place of pilgrimage. The ‘desert’ is the Thebaid, associated with the Egyptian St. Anthony and other solitaries (cf. Burnt Norton V 19–20). The ‘city’ is Padua, associated with the other St. Anthony.” Expressing regret, 4 July 1940, at having missed C. P. Curran while visiting Dublin to deliver the Yeats Memorial Lecture, TSE recalled his previous stay in the city and “that excursion to Glendalough three years ago”. Writing to Curran on 4 May 1960, he again mentioned the occasion “when we went to see St. Kevin’s cave (to which I later referred in a poem called Little Gidding).”

  I 39 Now and in England: Browning: “In England—now!” Home-Thoughts, from Abroad 8 (Loucks 1993). For “Little Gidding is particularly English”, see letter to F. O. Matthiessen, 19 Aug 1949, in headnote to Four Quartets, 9. TSE ON FOUR QUARTETS.

  I 39 variant Tragedy transcending: Yeats: “Hamlet and Lear are gay; | Gaiety transfiguring all that dread”, Lapis Lazuli 16–17. TSE: “transfigured, in another pattern”, III 16. OED 1: “change in outward form”.