The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 150
TSE on Corbière: “when he describes the procession of mendicants and cripples to the shrine of the Virgin, and says: ‘Là, ce tronc d’homme où croît l’ulcère, | Contre un tronc d’arbre où croît le gui’ the phrase burns itself in like the cotto aspetto of Dante’s Brunetto Latini”, Modern Tendencies in Poetry (1920); during the Blitz, firemen were known as “heroes with grimy faces” (TSE: “scorched brown”, variant; also “scorched eviscerate soil”, II 13 variant). Thomas Hood: “His cheek was baked and brown”, The Sub-Marine 2. James Hook: “whose face he recollected Pen had compared to a brown baked pie-crust”, Pen Owen (1822) III 407. For “an old, weatherbeaten, pitted as if worm-eaten, brown face”, see note to Burnt Norton I 12.
II 41 Both one and many: “At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means? It is both one and many”, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1950), Introduction.
II 42 familiar compound ghost: to Hayward, 20 Feb 1943: “Perhaps your visitor who spotted the Dante allusions had been reading a painstaking article in the Cambridge Magazine which went into that very thoroughly [probably D. W. Harding, Scrutiny Spring 1943]. But why the phrase ‘compound ghost’ ‘both one and many’ should still leave people convinced that the stranger was one particular person, I don’t understand.” Poe: “the tones in the voice of the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings · · · in the well-remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed friends”, Shadow—A Parable (end).
TSE to Henry Eliot, 25 Mar 1943: “There is in the end of the section an allusion to a late poem of Yeats—‘you wonder much that lust and rage | should dance attendance on my old age’ or something like that, and the word ‘laceration’ is intended to remind of Swift, of whom of course Yeats was much aware, but the words ‘one and many’ and ‘compound ghost’ are intended to prevent the identification of the figure with any one person.” On Swift’s epitaph, see note to II 82–84. Yeats’s The Spur reads, in full:
You think it horrible that lust and rage
Should dance attendance upon my old age;
They were not such a plague when I was young:
What else have I to spur me into song?
(Last Poems, posthumous, 1939)
Quoting this, TSE commented: “The tragedy of Yeats’s epigram is all in the last line”, Yeats (1940) (Composition FQ 186). To Donald Hall, 16 Apr 1959: “Of course I had met Yeats many times. Yeats was always very gracious when one met him and had the art of treating younger writers as if they were his equals and contemporaries.” To Kristian Smidt, 25 Sept 1961: “I must confess I was not thinking of Robert Browning when I refer to a ‘familiar compound ghost’. I was thinking primarily of William Yeats, whose body was of course brought back to Ireland after the war. I also had in mind Swift, as the word ‘laceration’ suggests, and naturally Mallarmé, whose line I translated [see note to II 74]. But the body on the foreign shore was William Yeats’s.”
[Poem I 204 · Textual History II 523]
Other writers are spectrally present. For Milton and Joyce, see note to II 25–96. Ralph Pendrel’s ghostly encounter with the portrait at the end of bk. II of James’s The Sense of the Past is compared in bk. III with Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables and with “poor Hamlet”. See notes to II 47 and Burnt Norton I 13. To Charles Williams, 24 Dec 1942: “You are right about Latini but of course it is also Arnaut Daniel, Yeats and Swift and you will not have missed the point of one line referring to Mallarmé and Edgar Poe. However, if anybody is well acquainted with Juliana and The Cloud of Unknowing it must be yourself.” compound: pronounced cumpound in TSE’s recording of 1946–47.
II 42 variant a vague familiar ghost: Shakespeare: “that affable familiar ghost”, Sonnet 86 (Grover Smith 286). TSE: “gardens have long memories; | Like houses, have familiar ghosts”, A Valedictory Forbidding Mourning 46–47. (“unfamiliar gust”, WLComposite 526.)
II 42, 44 ghost · · · a double part: to Richard de la Mare, 7 Feb 1941, on TSE’s alteration to the text of W. H. Auden’s New Year Letter, previously published in the US as The Double Man: “please have it altered to read ‘So condition his ears as to keep the Song | That is not a sorrow from the invisible twin’.” (Auden’s line originally ended “the Double Man”.) To Auden, 19 Apr: “You gave me · · · no end of trouble over the doubleness of your man. I understand that you have returned the proof without comment on my substitution of ‘the invisible twin’, a small forgery of which I was rather proud · · · If you ever want somebody to ghost poetry for you, I think I could fill the position satisfactorily, for a suitable fee.”
II 42, 47 ghost · · · myself yet · · · someone other: TSE at Milton Academy: “it occurred to me that as I had to talk to somebody, I would take more or less a metaphorical figure and make him as real as I could—that is, it occurred to me to say a few words to the ghost of myself at the age of seventeen or thereabouts, whom we may suppose to be skulking somewhere about this hall”, Address by T. S. Eliot, ’06, to the Class of ’33 (1933).
II 43–47 Both intimate and unidentifiable · · · Knowing myself yet being someone other: Bergson: “la fausse reconnaissance peut ébrauler la personalité entière · · · Celui qui l’éprouve est souvent en proie à une émotion caractéristique; il devient plus ou moins étranger à lui-même” [false recognition may disturb our whole personality · · · Whoever experiences it is often the prey of a characteristic emotion becoming more or less a stranger to himself], L’Energie spirituelle ch. V.
[Poem I 204 · Textual History II 523]
II 44–48 I assumed a double part, and cried | And heard another’s voice cry: “What! are you here?” | Although we were not. I was still the same, | Knowing myself yet being someone other— | And he a face still forming: Clough: “She spoke, nor speaking ceased, I listening; but | I was alone—yet not alone—with her | As she with me · · · As at the first, and yet not wholly · · · The fusion and mutation and return | Seemed in my substance working too”, Adam and Eve Scene XIV 29–35 (Murray). I assumed a double part, and cried | And heard another’s voice: Shelley’s meeting with the ghost of Rousseau: “ere he could resume, I cried: | ‘First, who art thou?’” The Triumph of Life 198–99 (TSE: “I cried”, II 44 variant). These were among thirty consecutive lines of Shelley’s poem quoted by TSE in What Dante Means to Me (1950); see note to The Waste Land [I] 60–63. John Buchan: “I seemed to be another person, standing aside and listening to my own voice”, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) IV (George Simmers, personal communication). An unpublished poem by “F. M.” (c. 624 fol. 10) has “I met my own eyes | In another face”, Perque Domos Ditis Vacuas (TSE: “first-met · · · eyes · · · face”, [II] 38–48). “perque domos ditis vacuas” [through the empty halls of Dis], Aeneid VI 269.
II 45 heard another’s voice cry: alongside the Gide/Bosco translation, “j’entendis une autre voix crier”, TSE wrote: “ambiguous”. For Dante, “as pleased Another”, see note to WLComposite 475–557. “What! are you here?”: Blake: “Pliny & Trajan! what are you here?” I will tell you what Joseph of Arimathea 3. TSE to Bonamy Dobrée, This Tuesday after the 9th Sunday after Trinity [1927]: “Italics are bad in poetry. Abused by M. Arnold.”
II 45 variant And heard my voice: “Are you here, Ser Brunetto?”: the works of the 13th-century Florentine scholar Brunetto Latini greatly influenced Dante. In Brunetto’s Tesoretto, he condemned sodomites as “contra natura”, yet it is among them that Dante encounters him. Brunetto bids Dante farewell: “‘sieti raccomandato il mio Tesoro, | nel quale io vivo ancora; e più non cheggio.’ | Poi si rivolse” [“let my Treasure, in which I still live, be commended to thee; and more I ask not.” Then he turned back], Inf. XV 119–21. TSE to Hayward, 27 Aug 1942: “I think you will recognise that it was necessary to get rid of Brunetto for two reasons. The first is that the visionary figure has now become somewhat more definite and will no doubt be identified by some readers with Yeats though I do not mean anything so prec
ise as that. However, I do not wish to take the responsibility of putting Yeats or anybody else into Hell and I do not want to impute to him the particular vice which took Brunetto there. Secondly, although reference to that Canto is intended to be explicit, I wished the effect of the whole to be Purgatorial which is much more appropriate.” (To Peter du Sautoy: “I had rather be damned in the company of Yeats, Hofmannsthal, Claudel and Cocteau than praised by this extraordinary American”, “The Death of Tragedy” by George Steiner, reader’s report [1961]. Faber published the book.)
Inscribing a copy of Ara Vos Prec for Emily Hale, dated “5. ix. 23” (Sotheby’s, 20 Oct 2011), TSE quoted Brunetto: “sieti racommendato il mio tesoro | nello qual vivo ancor e non più chieggio. | Poi si rivolse”. This does not match the Temple Classics text, but is similar to the inscription in a copy of the Hogarth Press ed. of The Waste Land which TSE presented to Geoffrey Faber, dated “27. v. 25” (within days of their first meeting): “‘Sieti racommendato il mio tesoro | Nel quale io vivo ancor—’” (Bonhams, 20 Sept 2005).
II 45–46 “What! are you here?” | Although we were not: “I was not there, you were not there, only our phantasms”, The Family Reunion II ii.
[Poem I 204 · Textual History II 523]
II 46–47 I was still the same, | Knowing myself yet being someone other: “dans ma préface, peux-je dire que St. J. Perse et St. Leger Leger, l’auteur d’Anabase et l’auteur d’Éloges, sont identiques, ou voulez-vous garder votre anonymat fragile?” [in my preface, may I say that St. J. Perse and St. Leger Leger, the author of Anabase and the author of Éloges, are identical, or do you wish to preserve your fragile anonymity?] (“And no identity”, II 50 variant.) Lucien Fabre had reviewed Anabase in Les Nouvelles Littéraires Aug 1924: “Saint-Leger Leger a disparu; et son fantôme ne semoie pas trop inquiéter Saint-John Perse. Réunissons donc Saint-Leger Leger et Saint-John Perse dans la même admiration” [Saint-Leger Leger has disappeared, and his ghost does not seem to be causing St.-John Perse any uneasiness. So let us reunite Saint-Leger Leger and Saint-John Perse in the same admiration]. TSE used Fabre’s (separate) “note” in his own Preface to Anabasis (1930) and had it translated so as to print it in the final edition (1959).
II 47 Knowing myself yet being someone other: James: “‘The point is that I’m not myself.’ · · · ‘I’m somebody else’”, The Sense of the Past bk. III. See note to II 42 above. yet being someone other: Jean de Bosschère: “Et dans chaque ville il est un autre personnage” [And in each town he is another person], quoted in Reflections on Contemporary Poetry II (1917); see headnote to Mélange Adultère de Tout. “I was someone else”, The Family Reunion I ii.
II 48–49 he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed | To compel the recognition they preceded: Purg. XXIII 43–45 (Forese): “Mai non l’avrei riconosciuto al viso; | ma nella voce sua mi fu palese | ciò che l’aspetto in sè avea conquiso” [Never had I recognised him by the face, but in his voice was revealed to me that which was blotted out in his countenance] (Griffiths and Reynolds 320).
II 49 To compel the recognition they preceded: to Natalie Clifford Barney, 11 May 1923: “April is indeed the cruellest month, and the fact follows the word.” To Hayward, 7 Sept 1942: “I am inclined to stick to ‘preceded’, because the words you suggest [predicted, portended] convey a different meaning from what I want. I mean, to be aware that it is someone you know (and to be surprised by his being there) before you have identified him. Recognition surely is the full identification of the person.” Writing to Robert Sencourt, 19 Jan 1967, John Betjeman recorded that TSE had been “very amused by · · · things like mistaken identity”.
II 51–52 variant cross of purpose | In: Macbeth II ii: “Infirm of purpose.”
II 51–53 Too strange · · · meeting nowhere: Harold Monro’s volume of poems Strange Meetings (1917) preceded the writing of Wilfred Owen’s poem Strange Meeting. See note to Burnt Norton II 1–2.
II 51, 69 Too strange to each other for misunderstanding · · · Between two worlds become much like each other: “a world too strange for”, The Burnt Dancer 9, repeated in 10.
II 54 trod · · · pavement · · · dead patrol: Paul Elmer More: “shadows of night drift past us on the silent pavement · · · souls of the generations before us who trod this same way in their life”, The Great Refusal 128. TSE to Hayward [22 Sept 1942] (after ts13): “Read ‘trod the pavement’ for ‘strode together’. The idea of togetherness is, I think, in the word ‘patrol’, so that ‘together’ is superfluous, whereas a reminder of the surface of the Cromwell Road is timely.” dead patrol: in the Gide/Bosco tr., TSE underlined the last three words of “patrouilles de la mort”. dead: OED 2b: “deathlike, insensible, in a swoon. Obs.” 16: “Without vigour or animation”. 26: “Of calm or silence: Profound, deep”.
II 55–56, 67 easy · · · ease · · · as the passage now presents no hindrance: replying to a suggestion of Hayward’s, 9 Sept 1942: “‘Easeful’ will never be any use until Keats’s trade‑mark has worn off. Also it means something else. There was nothing ease‑giving about this transit.” (Keats: “half in love with easeful Death”, Ode to a Nightingale 52.)
II 57 I may not comprehend, may not remember: in the Gide/Bosco tr., “Je ne pourrai ni comprendre”, TSE inserted “peut-être” after “pourrai”, with “!”
[Poem I 204 · Textual History II 523–24]
II 57–60 remember · · · you have forgotten · · · their purpose: Hamlet III iv, GHOST: “Do not forget. This visitation | Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose” (after “Remember” repeatedly in I v).
II 58 And he: : Alan Seeger: “And he:” Dante. Inferno, Canto XXVI (five lines after “‘Master,’ I said”). The translation is in Seeger’s Poems (1916), which TSE reviewed; see note to Whispers of Immortality 19.
II 58 variant I am not eager to recall: “Ugolino found his greatest grief in recalling past error and sin”, Mr. Middleton Murry’s Synthesis (1927), quoting Inf. XXXIII 4–6.
II 60–65 These things have served their purpose · · · last year’s words belong to last year’s language: “There are a great many words in the English language · · · and a great many of these words are now dead, have served their purpose and will not come into use again”, The Writer as Artist (1940). For “no more apprehensible than the scent of last year’s roses”, see note to II 2.
II 61–62 pray they be forgiven | By others, as I pray you to forgive: the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.”
II 63, 65–66 Last season’s fruit · · · last year’s words belong to last year’s language | And next year’s words await another voice: Hayward: “Oderisi of Gubbio’s lament for the transitoriness of human fame” (Purg. XI 97–101: “one Guido hath taken from the other the glory of our tongue; and perchance one is born who shall chase both from the nest. Earthly fame is naught but a breath of wind”). TSE: “What we want is · · · To point out that every generation, every turn of time when the work of four or five men who count has reached middle age, is a crisis · · · the intelligence of a nation must go on developing, or it will deteriorate; and that every writer who does not help to develop the language is · · · a positive agent of deterioration”, Observations (1918). In the final issue of the Criterion: “If a similar review is needed, then it will be far better for someone else to start a new review with a new title. New conditions will very likely require new methods and somewhat different aims”, Last Words, Jan 1939. “My language is finished, for me, when I have come to the end of my resources, in endeavouring to extend and develop that language (and for a poet, his language represents his country, and Europe too). For an artist who comes at the end of a period, art ends with himself · · · I hope, in any case, that something will remain operative, on the further generations who will have different criteria, and who will adapt verse to different purposes”, “Leçon de Valéry” (1946); see note to V 16–18. “let me | Resign my life for this life, my speech for tha
t unspoken”, Marina 30–31.
[Poem I 204 · Textual History II 524–25]
To the Rev. Luke Turner, 16 Feb 1943: “I hope I shall not seem ungrateful for your · · · flattering notice of Little Gidding in the Blackfriars literary supplement · · · but I am moved to express my distress at your referring to English as a dying language. Some centuries hence if the English language has in the meantime actually died, a philologist of the future may be in a position to look back and give reasons for believing that in the year 1942 the English language was indeed moribund, but I don’t see why we should make that assumption so long as the language has any life left and therefore must be believed capable of being restored to full animation. I am quite aware of all the degeneration which has taken place and of the further decline which is likely to set in if all the mad reformers of education have their way, but I believe that to allow readers to assume that the language is dying may be to accelerate by inviting acquiescence a process we deplore.” (See note to III 36–45, “cannot revive”.) “The symptom of approaching death of a language and a civilisation is when men go on writing poetry in a style and vocabulary which has become meaningless to their less learned contemporaries”, The Last Twenty-Five Years of English Poetry (1939).