The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  II 67–71 the passage now presents no hindrance | To the spirit · · · two worlds become much like each other · · · In streets: Paul Elmer More: “we are dismayed to find our advance checked at a certain point beyond which this guide cannot take us. Then our perception is deepened. The material world is seen in its naked reality. Two paths are open to us. Either with the followers of the Vedanta we look upon matter as pure illusion · · · or else, with the school of the Sankhya, we deem it eternal and self-existent · · · I do not know how better to express that stage of our spiritual progress when the material world becomes in every aspect a hindrance to us. Whichever way our reason leads us—and the two systems are morally one—beauty to the enlightened mind becomes above all things the most dangerous illusion”, The Great Refusal 6–7. (TSE: “More’s early education was received in the schools and University · · · of St. Louis, Missouri. His religious upbringing, from which he early rebelled, was that of an antiquated and provincial American Presbyterianism. He distinguished himself as a classical scholar, and for several years was a Greek master in a local school. It is possible that one or two elder scholars in St. Louis gave him his first curiosity about Indian philosophy and Sanskrit literature · · · his eventual Anglicanism cannot be evaluated without reference to the process by which he arrived at it”, An Anglican Platonist: The Conversion of Elmer More (1937), anonymously in the TLS.) For More, see notes to III 3–12 and The Waste Land [IV] 314.

  II 67–96 drafts (A–E)

  A) Remember rather the essential moments (first venture in verse)

  [3] The agony and the solitary vigil: The Little Passion: From “An Agony in the Garret” (in March Hare Notebook).

  [3] variant The dark night in the solitary bedroom: “The agony in the curtained bedroom”, “the chilly pretences in the silent bedroom”, The Family Reunion II i, II iii.

  [Poem I 204–205 · Textual History II 525]

  [6] Remember Poitiers, and the Anjou wine: to Edward Forbes 22 May [1911]: “At Christmas I travelled for two weeks in France, and saw several things not often visited—including Poitiers, Angoulême, Toulouse, Albi, Moissac, and other places in the south west.” In Aug 1919 TSE and the Pounds visited the area again, on a walking tour (see TSE to his mother, 3 Sept). Pound to TSE [? 1919]: “Don’t know what to suggest re/ country. unless you try Angers Poitiers. = or environs of Tours will ask Miss Barney · · · Angers only place much nearer than Brantôme, except Tours Poitiers” (Valerie Eliot collection). The Battle of Poitiers (1356) was an English victory in the Hundred Years War. TSE: “Let the Angevin | Destroy himself, fighting in Anjou”, Murder in the Cathedral I. the Anjou wine: to Hayward, 13 July 1939: “Scudamore Griffiths · · · likes to ask us over for a bottle of vin d’Anjou before lunch.”

  [6–8] Anjou wine · · · the smell of varnish | On the clean oar, the drying of the sails: the sonnet Heureux qui, comme Ulysse by Joachim du Bellay (1522–60) ends: “Et plus que l’air marin la douceur Angevine” [And more than the sea air, the softness of Anjou] (Composition FQ 184).

  [14–21] (After many seas and after many lands) · · · nearer · · · faces · · · place · · · grace: “What seas what shores · · · nearer · · · faces · · · place · · · grace”, Marina 1–15.

  [22] He turned away, and in the autumn weather: Hayward to TSE, 1 Aug 1941: “I do not get the significance of autumn? It struck me as having a greater significance than you intended it to have”. TSE, 5 Aug (referring to “She turned away, but with the autumn weather”, La Figlia Che Piange 17): “‘Autumn weather’ only because it was autumn weather—it is supposed to be an early air raid—and to throw back to Figlia che piange (but not having my Poems by me I may be misquoting) but with less point than the children in the appletree [V 35] meaning to tie up with New Hampshire and Burnt Norton (with a touch, as I discovered in the train, of They which I don’t think I had read for 30 years, but the quotation from E. B. Browning has always stuck in my head, and that may be due to They rather than to the Bardess herself).” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s The Lost Bower, about a paradisal spot which the poet can no longer find, was on the syllabus for TSE’s Southall evening classes, 1916 (Schuchard). Its first four lines are quoted in Kipling’s story:

  In the pleasant orchard closes,

  “God bless all our gains”, say we;

  But “May God bless all our losses”,

  Better suits with our degree.

  Helen Gardner notes that TSE had incorporated “our losses” in The Dry Salvages I 22. He turned away: Inf. XV 121, of Brunetto’s return to the infernal flames: “Poi si rivolse” [Then he turned back]. TSE had praised Dante’s image of Brunetto turning back “like one of those who run for the green cloth at Verona” in Tradition and the Individual Talent II (1919) and quoted it in The Post-Georgians (1919), in his fourth Clark Lecture (The Varities of Metaphysical Poetry 122), and in Dante (1929) I. Rather than Brunetto in the Inferno, TSE’s published text (“He left me”) invokes Marco Lombardo in the Purgatorio; see note to II 94–95 below.

  Pound, The Return 8–9:

  And murmur in the wind,

  and half turn back;

  For Pound’s poem see Ricks 2010 197–200, notes to Ash-Wednesday VI 3–4 and Little Gidding V 18.

  [22] variant He turned away, and with his motion of dismissal: for “she turned away” and “dismissal” in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, see notes to La Figlia Che Piange 14–22 and 17–18, 20.

  [Poem I 204–205 · Textual History II 525–27]

  [22–23] He turned away, and · · · I heard a distant dull deferred report: Tennyson: “He spoke; and, high above, I heard them blast | The steep slate-quarry, and the great echo flap | And buffet round the hills, from bluff to bluff”, The Golden Year final three lines.

  B and C) Then, changing face and accent (prose exposition and verse fragment)

  B) msB fol 1. prose

  [6] My alien people: “an alien people”, Journey of the Magi 42.

  [9–10] I fought some evil the darkness: “the evening fought itself awake · · · evil · · · Pointed a ribald finger at me in the darkness · · · chuckled at me in the darkness · · · the darkness”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [10, 15–19].

  C) msB fol 2. verse fragment

  [2] after many seasons: “(After many seas and many lands)”, first venture in verse [14].

  D) Then, changing form and feature (second venture in verse)

  [20–21] even with the true defend the false | And with the eternal truth the local error?: Bradley: “We cannot, on the one hand, accept anything between non-existence and reality, while, on the other hand, error obstinately refuses to be either. It persistently attempts to maintain a third position, which appears nowhere to exist, and yet somehow is occupied · · · error, because it is false, cannot belong to the Absolute; and, again, it cannot appertain to the finite subject”, Appearance and Reality ch. XVI; the whole paragraph scored by TSE, who wrote at the head of the next chapter: “Error and evil imply absolute perfection, but the perfection wh. they imply is not the same as the perfection at which they aim.” And with the eternal truth the local error?: to Bonamy Dobrée, 12 Nov 1927: “if there is no fixed truth, there is no fixed object for the will to tend to. If truth is always changing, then there is nothing to do but sit down and watch the pictures · · · I should say that it was at any rate essential for Religion that we should have the conception of an immutable object or Reality the knowledge of which shall be the final object of that will; and there can be no permanent reality if there is no permanent truth.” eternal truth: “guesses at eternal truths”, Goldfish III 5.

  E) Consider what are the gifts of age— (prose draft of intervening passage, II 76–93)

  [8–11] retrospection of past motives · · · that one was moved while believing oneself to be the mover: “past and future · · · Where action were otherwise movement | Of that which is only moved | And has in it no source of movement”, Ash-Wednesday V 35–39.

  P
ublished text resumes

  [Poem I 204–205 · Textual History II 527–30]

  II 68 spirit unappeased and peregrine: Dante: “che per lo suo splendore | lo peregrino spirito la mira”, Vita Nuova [XLI] final sonnet; tr. Rossetti: “Abash’d, the pilgrim spirit stands at gaze”, The Early Italian Poets 308. Rossetti translates Dante’s commentary: “I then call it a ‘Pilgrim Spirit,’ because it goes up spiritually, and like a pilgrim who is out of his known country.” TSE: “the Divine Comedy has been shown to be closely similar to similar supernatural peregrination stories in Arabic and in old Persian literature”, Dante (1929) III. Pound: “She hath clad her soul in fashions peregrine”, Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (1912), Sonnet XII. Dante’s “persona umile e peregrina” [a lowly and an alien man], Paradiso VI 135, was repeatedly invoked by TSE in self-description: apropos of his role as translator of St.-John Perse (to Marguerite Caetani, 21 Jan 1930); in his Speech at Aix-en-Provence (1947); and in Christ Church, Oxford, Speech (1948). peregrine: pronounced peregryne in TSE’s recording of 1946–47.

  II 68–69 peregrine · · · Between two worlds: on Bradley: “a transmigration from one world to another, and such a pilgrimage involves an act of faith”, Knowledge and Experience 163.

  II 69 Between two worlds: Byron: “Between two worlds life hovers like a star”, Don Juan XV xcix; quoted twice in Byron (1937). Arnold: “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, | The other powerless to be born”, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse 85–86. TSE: “Mr. Clive Bell, lingering between two worlds, one dead, is in some respects the Matthew Arnold of his time”, Potboilers (1918), review. “wanderings in the neutral territory | Between two worlds”, The Family Reunion II iii (Preston 58). Shelley: “Ere Babylon was dust, | The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, | Met his own image walking in the garden. | That apparition, sole of men, he saw. | For know there are two worlds of life and death: | One that which thou beholdest; but the other | Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit | The shadows of all forms that think and live | Till death unite them and they part no more”, Prometheus Unbound I 191–99; quoted by Reilly in The Cocktail Party act II. TSE to D. W. Evans, 23 Sept 1954: “the passage from Shelley is one that had stuck in my mind since I first read Prometheus Unbound at the age of fifteen, and I was startled to find [Charles] Williams making use of it in Descent into Hell” (Faber, 1937) ch. 4. “where two worlds cross, | In every moment you live at a point of intersection”, The Rock 52. Joyce: “Between two roaring worlds, where they swirl, I”, Ulysses episode X (Wandering Rocks) (Shawn Worthington, personal communication). For Barth, “two worlds meet”, see note to The Dry Salvages II V 18–19. two worlds become much like each other: “I have known two worlds, I have known two worlds of death”, The Rock 47.

  II 69, 72 Between two worlds · · · I left my body on a distant shore: Paul Elmer More: “Between the two lies the world of the indifferent, and, I begin to surmise, the world of the artist · · · leaving his body in the new ocean”, The Great Refusal 75–76, 78. For More, see note to II 67–71.

  II 70–71 words I never thought to speak | In streets I never thought I should revisit: Inf. XXVII 61–62: “If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return to the world”; see epigraph to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

  [Poem I 204–205 · Textual History II 530–31]

  II 72 body on a distant shore: see note to II 42. Yeats died in the South of France on 28 Jan 1939 and was buried at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin (exhumed 1948 and returned to Ireland). Virgil, of the shades in the underworld: “Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore” [stretched out hands in yearning for the farther shore], Aeneid VI 314 (Hayward). Tourneur: “Walking next day upon the fatal shore, | Among the slaughtered bodies of their men”, The Atheist’s Tragedy II i, quoted in Cyril Tourneur (1930) (Grover Smith 1950 418). TSE on In Memoriam: “Hallam died young, and died abroad: in the ninth section Tennyson’s thoughts revert to the bringing back of Hallam’s body—‘Fair ship, that from the Italian shore’”, “The Voice of His Time” (1942). (“those who were in ships, and | Ended their voyage on the sand”, The Dry Salvages IV 11–12.)

  II 73 our concern was speech: Lehmann records TSE’s answers to questions after a reading at Bryn Mawr in Oct 1948: Q. “Do you think that the poet can concern himself just with his own feelings? Has he not a responsibility for his country, humanity, etc.?” A. “His responsibility is towards the language.” (It was at Bryn Mawr that in 1905 Henry James had given his address The Question of Our Speech.) See TSE on the artist’s job, “to prevent the language from deteriorating”, in The Writer as Artist (1940) quoted in “The End of All Our Exploring”. speech: “Donne invented an idiom, a language which less original men could learn to talk · · · and Dryden imposed a new way of speech on the next hundred years”, The Minor Metaphysicals (1930). “Of Jules Laforgue · · · I can say that he was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech”, What Dante Means to Me (1950). “But what is overlooked is that an identical spoken and written language would be practically intolerable. If we spoke as we write we should find no one to listen; and if we wrote as we speak we should find no one to read”, Charles Whibley (1931).

  II 73–74 speech impelled us | To purify the dialect of the tribe: Coleridge: “few have guarded the purity of their native tongue with that jealous care, which the sublime Dante in his tract De la nobile volgare eloquenza declares to be the first duty of a poet”, Biographia Literaria ch. XVI (R. Bates, N&Q Nov 1953). In a letter to Madame Elsa Gress, 30 Oct 1946, TSE sent an 80th birthday tribute to Johannes Jørgensen (Danish poet, and biographer of Catholic saints): “The poet is the servant of his own language; yet · · · We have a common task and a common loyalty, transcending our local loyalty · · · the great stream of European tradition. We owe allegiance to a common civilisation, and to its sources in Greece, Rome and Israel; each of us must struggle to preserve, and, if he may, enrich that inheritance. In acknowledgement of your contribution I salute you, the elder master” (“master”, II 39; “common”, II 50).

  II 74 To purify the dialect of the tribe: Mallarmé: “donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu”, Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe (Hayward; also Delmore Schwartz, Matthiessen 192). The Gide/Bosco tr. gives Mallarmé’s own words, beside which TSE wrote “Good!” To William Matchett, 14 June 1949: “I wonder whether a pertinent distinction could be made between allusion and borrowing. The two may somewhat overlap or indeed the same quotation may serve both purposes. In the line taken from Mallarmé, for instance, my direct intention was merely to borrow. It seemed to me a very happy translation of his line and it gave me exactly the words that I wanted to say. The secondary purpose in this case is the allusion. If readers recognize the source, so much the better. One might be able to find other quotations of which the primary purpose is allusion and borrowing the secondary.”

  TSE praised Mallarmé’s poem Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire:

  [Poem I 205 · Textual History II 531]

  L’effort pour restituer la puissance du Mot, qui inspire la syntaxe de l’un et de l’autre et leur fait écarter le sonore pur ou le pur mélodieux (qu’ils pourraient, tous les deux, s’ils le voulaient, si bien exploiter), cet effort, qui empêche le lecteur d’avaler d’un coup leur phrase ou leur vers, est une des qualités qui rapprochent le mieux les deux poètes. Il y a aussi la fermeté de leur pas lorsqu’ils passent du monde tangible au monde des fantômes.

  [The effort to restore the power of the Word, which inspires the syntax of both and makes them set aside resonant purity or melodious purity (that they could both, if they wished, exploit so well)—this effort, which prevents the reader of their prose or verse from gulping it down, is one of the qualities which the two poets have in common. There is also the firmness of their step as they pass from the tangible world to the world of ghosts.]

  Note sur Mallarmé et Poe (1926)

  In Lancelot Andrewes (1926), TSE likened reading Andrewes to “lis
tening to a great Hellenist expounding a text of the Posterior Analytics: altering the punctuation, inserting or removing a comma or a semi-colon to make an obscure passage suddenly luminous, dwelling on a single word, comparing its use in its nearer and in its most remote contexts, purifying a disturbed or cryptic lecture-note into lucid profundity. To persons whose minds are habituated to feed on the vague jargon of our time · · ·” (To the Editor of The Times, 4 Aug 1938, supplementing the obituary of H. H. Joachim: “To his explication de texte of the Posterior Analytics I owe an appreciation of the importance of punctuation.”) Turnbull Lecture III: “In looking at the history of poetry · · · the important poets will be those who have taught the people speech; and the people had in every generation to be taught to speak: the function of the poet at every moment is to make the inarticulate folk articulate; and as the inarticulate folk is almost always mumbling the speech, become jargon, of its ancestors or of its newspaper editors, the new language is never learnt without a certain resistance, even resentment · · · this purification of language is not so much a progress, as it is a perpetual return to the real”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 289–90. “the man of letters, especially if his vehicle is one of the great languages, such as French or English—the man who knows what a precious instrument he possesses, how many centuries have gone to its development, with what difficulty and toil its excellence is maintained, and with what ease its strength and purity may be destroyed, must be concerned with the preservation of his language, rather than with its exploitation”, The Unity of European Writers (1944). Of Twain: “I should place him, in this respect, even with Dryden and Swift, as one of those rare writers who have brought their language up to date, and in so doing, ‘purified the dialect of the tribe’”, American Literature and the American Language (1953). TSE (tr. Iman Javadi): “Naturally the poet has a deep affection for words, he is in love with words; and I feel that he has a duty towards his native language and his own poetic idiom to cultivate this affection. It is his duty, when he can, to offer words that no one knew before, to arouse feelings which hadn’t been discovered before. He must find new ways to use the language and always try to preserve its peculiarity and its purity”, Ein Gespräch mit T. S. Eliot (1964). On Huxley: “I was delighted to find that in his last brief book, Literature and Science, he quotes a line of Mallarmé which had impressed me so deeply that I paraphrased it in Little Gidding: donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu”, Aldous Huxley (1965).