The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  I 45 to kneel: against the Gide/Bosco tr., “tomber à genoux”, TSE wrote: “? over-stresses the physical attitude”.

  I 45–46 to kneel | Where prayer has been valid: Levy 41–42 reports TSE, 29 June 1953: “What I mean is that for some of us, a sense of place is compelling. If it is a religious place, a place made special by the sacrifice of a martyrdom, then it retains an aura · · · I am aware that not all persons have a sense of place (as I describe it), nor is it necessary for it to exist to make prayer valid.” George Every recalled TSE describing the impression made on him by seeing people praying: “He suddenly realised that prayer still went on and could be made. It wasn’t simply of historic and cultural interest. People did pray and he might”, Eliot as a Friend and a Man of Prayer (unpublished), quoted Spurr 37.

  I 48 or the sound of the voice praying: in The Spiritual Letters of Dom John Chapman (1935) 120, TSE scored a passage about prayer: “The strangest part is when we begin to wonder whether we mean anything at all, and if we are addressing anybody, or merely using a formula without sense. The word ‘God’ seems to mean nothing. If we feel this, we are starting on the right road.”

  I 49–51 what the dead had no speech for, when living · · · beyond the language of the living: Levy 128–29 reports TSE, 2 Jan 1962: “I had chiefly in mind that we cannot fully understand a person, grasp the totality of his being, until he is dead. Once he is dead, the acts of his life fall into their proper perspective and we can see what he was tending toward. Also, with the living presence removed, it is easier to make an impartial judgment, free of the personality of the individual.” (See TSE on A. R. Orage’s mysticism in note to III 40–41.)

  I 50 They can tell you, being dead: Yeats: “But now she knows it all, being dead”, Purgatory (1938) (Grover Smith 1996 164). MacNeice: “Our mind, being dead, wishes to have time die · · · ghosts”, August in Poems (1935) (TSE: “timeless”, 52). TSE: “come from the dead, | Come back to tell you all”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 94–95. Hebrews 11: 4: “he being dead yet speaketh”.

  [Poem I 202 · Textual History II 518–19]

  I 50–51 the communication | Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living: Conrad: “as mute as the faces of the dead who are possessed of a knowledge beyond the comprehension of the living”, Amy Foster (Unger 1956 242). Auden: “The words of a dead man | Are modified in the guts of the living”, In Memory of W. B. Yeats (1939) 22–23 (Grover Smith 1996 106). TSE: “No dead voices speak through the living voice; no reincarnation, no re-creation. Not even the saturation which sometimes combusts spontaneously into originality”, Reflections on Contemporary Poetry IV (1919). For “saturation”, see note to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 7–12. tongued with fire: for Acts 2: 1–6, see headnote to Little Gidding IV. Hayward: “Fire is used variously throughout the poem as a symbol for Pentecost, for Purgatory, for Hell, and for Divine Love.” Hawthorne: “These fathers · · · lacked · · · the Tongue of Flame”, The Scarlet Letter ch. XI.

  I 51 variant touched with fire: Tennyson: “If the lips were touched with fire from off a pure Pierian altar”, Parnassus 17. (Isaiah 6: 6–7: “Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal · · · laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips.”)

  I 51 ^ 52 variant the speech of the living is wind in dry grass: “wind in dry grass · · · And voices are | In the wind’s singing”, The Hollow Men 8, 25–26. “the grass is singing”, The Waste Land [V] 386.

  I 52 the intersection of the timeless moment: see note to The Dry Salvages V 18–19.

  I 53 England and nowhere. Never and always: Edward Marsh’s Rupert Brooke: A Memoir (1918) printed fragments of a projected long poem which Brooke described as being “about the existence—and non-locality—of England”, including the lines “She is not here, or now— | She is here, and now, yet nowhere—” (Loucks 1993).

  II

  II 1–4 Ash · · · Dust in the air suspended | Marks the place where a story ended: on 10 May 1941 London was choked with burning paper from two bombed warehouses of books, including Hayward’s editions of Donne and Swift (Phyllis Rowell, Dr Johnson’s House During the War 21; Hayward to Frank Morley, May 1941). The raid of 29 Dec 1941 destroyed five million books in Paternoster Row. The possibility of a pun on “storey” is supported by TSE’s uncertainty about spelling in letters to Hayward: “the second story ?storey bedrooms” (27 June 1941) and “It is one story above the lift” (9 Mar 1943).

  II 1–8 Ash · · · suspended · · · the death of air: Levy 15 reports TSE, 26 July 1948, describing his firewatching duties at Faber: “During the Blitz the accumulated debris was suspended in the London air for hours after a bombing. Then it would slowly descend and cover one’s sleeves and coat with a fine white ash. I often experienced this effect during the long night hours on the roof.” Faber’s register has no record of TSE firewatching at Russell Square before 12 Nov 1942, by which time Little Gidding was written (pub. 1 Dec), but he had undertaken such duties in Kensington, writing to Polly Tandy, 3 July 1940: “I have just ’listed for a Air Warden”. (Housman: “I ’listed at home for a lancer”, Last Poems VI.) Levy 14 reports TSE’s recollection: “We had to watch the fires and report them as quickly as they occurred. You will be interested to know that the lines from Little Gidding came out of this experience.” On 24 Aug 1972, David Jones recalled TSE’s telling him “that he had a system whereby he could get through several books while watching” (Thomas Dilworth in Sewanee Review Winter 1994).

  [Poem I 202–203 · Textual History II 519]

  II 1–24 Ash · · · water and fire: Heraclitus frag. 76 (tr. Bakewell): “Fire lives the death of air, and air the death of fire; water lives the death of earth, and earth the death of water.” See epigraphs at head of Burnt Norton.

  II 2 all the ash the burnt roses leave: “isolating culture from religion, politics and philosophy we seem to be left with something no more apprehensible than the scent of last year’s roses”, The Idea of a Christian Society 77. Hayward to TSE, 1 Aug 1941: “Compared with the other lines in the stanza this one seems to me to have too much weight at the end. The heavy stress on ‘burnt’ could be lightened by omitting the definite article and this would lay a shade more stress on ‘roses’. As it is, this line takes something from the essential ‘airiness’ of the stanza—dust, breath, air: the death of air—as if the ash of burnt roses was not an imponderable but a tombstone.” TSE, 5 Aug: “I am also unhappy about the first two lines of Part II (lyric).”

  II 3–16 suspended · · · hope · · · without mirth · · · earth: Coleridge: “hope · · · earth · · · rob me of my mirth · · · Suspends”, Dejection 80–85, quoted in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 68: “one of the saddest of confessions that I have ever read.” In Coleridge’s Poetical Works (1907), TSE marked Dejection 87–90.

  II 6 the wainscot and the mouse: Tennyson: “the mouse | Behind the mouldering wainscot”, Mariana 63–64. “the wainscot where the field-mouse trots”, East Coker I 12. wainscot: pronounced wainsk’t in TSE’s recording of 1946–47. The spelling “wainscote”, used by TSE in msA, is given by OED as 16th–17th century.

  II 6, 18 The wall, the wainscot and the mouse · · · The town, the pasture and the weed: H. W. Heckstall-Smith wrote to TSE, 15 Jan 1943, comparing these lines to Herbert Trench’s line “The vine, the woman, and the rose” (Requiem of Archangels for the World, collected 1919). TSE, 22 Jan: “it is possible to find similar constructions much earlier than in the work of Herbert Trench. There is, for instance, the line ‘the viol, the violet and the vine’ which I think is Edgar Poe” (The City in the Sea 23).

  II 8–9 the death of air · · · flood and drouth: Milton: “Summer drouth, or singèd air | Never scorch thy tresses fair”, Attendant Spirit’s song in Comus (928–31) with “flood · · · mud” (water and earth, completing the four elements). TSE: “the desert | Of drouth”, Ash-Wednesday V 35–36.

  II 9–10 drouth ·
· · in the mouth: Tennyson: “I thirsted for the brooks, the showers: | I rolled among the tender flowers: | I crushed them on my breast, my mouth; | I looked athwart the burning drouth | Of that long desert to the south”, Fatima 10–14 (Musgrove 88). Swinburne: “in his mouth, | Made of grave’s mould and deadly drouth”, After Death 3–4; “drouth, | And as the air which is death · · · The breath came forth of her mouth | And the fire came forth of her breath”, Atalanta in Calydon 1978–82 (TSE: “the air”, “inbreathed”, “death of air”, “and fire”, 3, 5, 8, 17).

  II 10–11 the mouth, | Dead water and dead sand: “dead mouths · · · thirst and drunk the waters of the sands · · · dead waters”, Anabasis I xii, xiii, xvi (with “deadwater”, IV ix).

  [Poem I 202–203 · Textual History II 519]

  II 11–16 Dead water and dead sand · · · The parched eviscerate soil · · · This is the death of earth: on dearth from the death of earth: “the organisation of society on the principle of private profit · · · is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources · · · immediate benefits leading to dearth and desert”, The Idea of a Christian Society 61 (Ricks 256).

  II 14–16 toil · · · without mirth · · · earth: Kipling: “They take their mirth in the joy of the Earth—they dare not grieve for her pain. | They know of toil and the end of toil”, Dedication from “Barrack-Room Ballads” (in TSE’s A Choice of Kipling’s Verse).

  II 17–27 variant Water and fire succeed · · · the pasture · · · fire · · · scarred foundations · · · fire · · · skeletons · · · Fire without and fire within · · · This is the place where we begin: “In my beginning · · · In succession | Houses rise and fall · · · or in their place | Is an open field · · · old timber to new fires, | Old fires to ashes · · · Bone”, East Coker I 1–6.

  II 19–24 Water and fire deride | The sacrifice that we denied. | Water and fire shall rot | The marred foundations we forgot, | Of sanctuary and choir, | This is the death of water and fire: in the 1920s, the planned demolition of nineteen City churches was prevented by protestors (see Commentary on The Waste Land [III] 264), but ten Wren churches were ruined by the Blitz on 29 Dec 1940 alone. What was not burnt was often irreparably soaked. A documentary film called it “almost like the day of judgment.” deride | The sacrifice that we denied: “the Commission on Christian Doctrine [1938] · · · devoted fifteen pages to the concept of Sacrifice: the present Bishop of Truro, in a recent pamphlet entitled The Gospel for To-morrow, giving a page to the Communion Service, dismisses the matter with the words: ‘absurd notions about sacrifice have crept in, notions which discredit both God and man’”, Reunion by Destruction (1941) 16.

  II 23 sanctuary: OED 1: “A building or place set apart for the worship of God”, 2b: “Eccl. That part of a church round the altar”. Pronounced with four full syllables in TSE’s recording of 1946–47. TSE had written of the City churches as refuges “to receive the solitary visitor at noon from the dust and tumult of Lombard Street”, London Letter in Dial June 1921 (“Or I could take sanctuary | In any oak or apple tree”, The Country Walk 33–34).

  II 25–96] Hayward: “The setting of this Dantesque section is a street in the Kensington district of London just before dawn and after a bombing attack. The narrator is on duty as an air-raid warden. There are allusions throughout to Dante’s meeting with Brunetto Latini, Inf. XV.” The recognition scene combines this with two of Dante’s other encounters: with the shades of Guido Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel (Purg. XXVI), and with that of Forese Donati (Purg. XXIII). For Brunetto, see note to East Coker I 12; for Arnaut Daniel, see note to title Ara Vos Prec in headnote to “Poems (1920)”, 7. PUBLICATION OF ARA VOS PREC. C. H. Grandgent:

  Just as, in Hell, Dante’s old master, Brunetto Latini, scorched almost beyond recognition, suddenly greets his former disciple with the exclamation “Qual maraviglia!” [“What a wonder!” XV 24] so · · · in Purgatory one of the souls [Forese] · · · reveals himself by the cry “Qual grazia m’è questa?” [“What grace is this to me?” XXIII 42].

  [Poem I 203–205 · Textual History II 520]

  (TSE: “I should like to mention one book which has been of use to me: the Dante of Professor Charles Grandgent of Harvard”, Dante (1929) Preface. TSE’s mother had sent him Grandgent’s address in Cambridge on 23 Aug 1922.) TSE to Eudo C. Mason, 23 Jan 1946: “I am surprised by the opinion of Dr. Leavis and your friend in Basel. They seem to me to have come to the conclusion that that particular passage is the same sort of thing as Henry James’ The Jolly Corner. Your interpretation is in my opinion nearer to the truth. There is, of course, as I am aware, a certain confusion about his status because the literary landscape is for the most part that of Brunetto Latini, whereas at the end it becomes that of Arnaut Daniel. However, the reference to Hamlet’s ghost may help and it is, I hope, clear enough that the figure appears not from hell but from Purgatory, and therefore is by no means condemned nor rejected. You can find in his features, if you like, some traces of Yeats, Swift, Mallarmé and Poe, and there are as well touches of humanist teachers who have less to do with poetry.”

  On the Commedia: “the simple style of which Dante is the greatest master is a very difficult style. In twenty years I have written about a dozen lines in that style successfully; and compared to the dullest passage of the Divine Comedy, they are ‘as straw’. So I believe that it is difficult”, Dante (1929) II (paragraph omitted in Selected Essays), alluding to Job 41: 27: “He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood” (Ricks 2003 33–34). Lehmann records TSE’s reading at Bryn Mawr in Oct 1948, when, asked about The Waste Land, he replied that Part V had been written quickly, and went on: “Little Gidding II, where I used Dante’s terza rima, was the hardest piece of work I’ve ever written. It had to be done in a straightforward manner, the wrong word showed up so much in that style.” Also on the poetic challenge: “Twenty years after writing The Waste Land, I wrote, in Little Gidding, a passage which is intended to be the nearest equivalent to a canto of the Inferno or the Purgatorio, in style as well as content, that I could achieve. The intention · · · was to present to the mind of the reader a parallel, by means of contrast, between the Inferno and the Purgatorio, which Dante visited, and a hallucinated scene after an air-raid. But the method is different: here I was debarred from quoting or adapting at length—I borrowed and adapted freely only a few phrases—because I was imitating. My first problem was to find an approximation to the terza rima without rhyming · · · This section of a poem—not the length of one canto of the Divine Comedy—cost me far more time and trouble and vexation than any passage of the same length that I have ever written. It was not simply that I was limited to the Dantesque type of imagery, simile and figure of speech. It was chiefly that in this very bare and austere style, in which every word has to be ‘functional’, the slightest vagueness or imprecision is immediately noticeable. The language has to be very direct; the line, and the single word, must be completely disciplined to the purpose of the whole; and, when you are using simple words and simple phrases, any repetition of the most common idiom, or of the most frequently needed word, becomes a glaring blemish”, What Dante Means to Me (1950) (“every word is at home”, V 4). “when I came to attempt one brief imitation of Dante I was fifty-five years old and knew exactly what I was doing”, To Criticize the Critic (1961) 128.

  [Poem I 203–205 · Textual History II 520]

  To Bonamy Dobrée, 23 Aug 1961: “I call my tercets terza rima simply because this alternation of weak and strong endings is, in my opinion, the closest equivalent to terza rima possible in English. I am familiar with several translations of Dante in terza rima, of course, especially Binyon’s, which is the best I know. But I feel very strongly that rhymes in English are too emphatic, and in a passage of any length this form of verse becomes tiring. In Italian the rhymes seem to come quite naturally and lightly. This cannot be reproduced by English rhymes.” Robert Bridges h
ad alternated feminine and masculine endings, in combination with full rhyme, in another cityscape of night into morning, London Snow (1880; included in Faber’s Selected Poems of Robert Bridges, 1941). His first five lines end “flying | brown | lying | town | failing” (Ricks 2010 195–96). TSE on Bridges: “it is certain that his experimentation has served a valuable purpose. It has helped to accustom readers of verse to a more liberal conception of verse technique, and to the notion that the development of technique is a serious and unceasing subject of study among verse writers”, A Commentary in Criterion July 1930. Recalling his own early days, in Paris Review (1959): “One really ignored poet laureates as such, the Robert Bridges.”

  The Dantesque vision is in some ways a re-imagination of First Debate between the Body and Soul, constituting TSE’s final such debate (“As body and soul begin to fall asunder”, Little Gidding II 81).

  First Debate Little Gidding

  The withered leaves (6) the dead leaves (II 30)

  5wind is shambling down the street (1) the urban dawn wind (II 35)

  The eye (22) the eyes (II 42)

  pure (15) purify (II 74)

  sense (26) sense (II 78)

  a shabby square (39) the shabby road (II 94 variant)

  dies (15) dying (II 83 variant)

  patience · · · turpitude · · · fact impatience · · · turpitude · · · fact

  · · · nature (5, 12, 25, 41) · · · nature (prose draft)

  The encounter in the street with “A blind old man” in First Debate between the Body and Soul may suggest Milton and Joyce within the “familiar compound ghost”. A memory of the earlier quatrains rhyming on –ations may have contributed to Little Gidding, where the ms drafts have as line-endings “revelation”, “observation”, “desolation”, “expectation” and “salutation” (plus, within lines, “desolations”, “precipitation” and “preparation”). However, the only such ending in the final version of Little Gidding II, “laceration”, was suggested by Hayward. Coleridge: “But oh! each visitation | Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, | My shaping spirit of Imagination”, Dejection 84–86. For TSE on Dejection see note to II 3–16.