The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  III 20, 23–24 this place · · · peculiar genius · · · a common genius: OED “genius” 3c: “Of a language, law, or institution: Prevailing character or spirit”; d: “With reference to a place: The body of associations connected with, or inspirations that may be derived from it”.

  III 20–25 I think, again, of this place, | And of people, not wholly commendable · · · But some of peculiar genius · · · United: “A wholly Christian society · · · communal · · · a community of men and women, not individually better than they are now, except for the capital difference of holding the Christian faith · · · the religious life · · · given its due place”, The Idea of a Christian Society 60. not wholly commendable: Bernard Blackstone’s doctoral dissertation, for which TSE acted as a “referee”, revealed the “singularly unpleasant” behaviour of John Ferrar’s wife, Bathsheba (see Blackstone’s Discord at Little Gidding in TLS 1 Aug 1936). commendable: Hamlet I ii: “’Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet” (Blamires 166). (But in TSE’s recording of 1946–47 pronounced commèndable, not as Shakespeare’s còm’ndable.) Underlining the Gide/Bosco tr. “peu louables”, TSE wrote: “too strong”.

  III 22 kin or kindness: Hamlet I ii: “A little more than kin, and less than kind”, (Blamires 166).

  III 26 king at nightfall: when Charles I (“a broken king”, I 26) reached Little Gidding in secret in May 1646, it was “the very last place where this most unfortunate Prince was in the hands of those whom he might safely trust” (P. Peckard, Memoirs of the Life of Mr. Nicholas Ferrar, 1790, 232–33). TSE: “Only at nightfall · · · a broken Coriolanus”, The Waste Land [V] 415–16. TSE informed Pound in a letter of 19 Feb 1937 that the “day you wrote on was properly speaking CHARLES KING & MARTYR”—and used the phrase to date letters in 1930, 1939 and 1940. In a ms, Vivien Eliot wrote: “there is no Jacobite like your Bostonian”, and TSE added: “Descendants of complacent rebels, bourgeois revolutionists against taxations, they mourn annually for the martyred Charles” (misc. c. 624 fol. 112). Walter Graeme Eliot 12: “Being members of the Established Church of England at the period of Cromwell’s accession to power, and when Roundhead intolerance had become as oppressive as had previously been the Romish influence, it would not be surprising if the Eliots had found emigration · · · necessary.”

  III 27–29 three men, and more · · · here and abroad: Hayward: “Charles I, Archbishop Laud, and the Earl of Strafford, amongst other Royalists condemned to execution by Cromwell’s party during the Civil War.” Grover Smith 289: “He remembers Ferrar, King Charles here and in his death, Laud, Strafford, and even perhaps Sir John Eliot, who was imprisoned before the Civil War for contumacy of the King; he remembers others such as Crashaw, who died abroad.”

  [Poem I 206 · Textual History II 535–36]

  III 30–38, 44 one who died blind and quiet · · · old factions · · · old policies · · · an antique drum · · · defeated: “Milton in old age, blind and poor, having given his best years to a cause which was partly defeated and partly out of date”, “The Voice of His Time” (1942; this passage in ts only, Texas). Hayward (of Milton): “‘Hee dy’d’, according to his nephew, John Phillips, ‘in a fitt of the Gout, with so little pain or Emotion, that the time of his expiring was not perceiv’d by those in the room. And though hee had bin long troubl’d with that disease · · · yet was hee not ever observ’d to be very impatient.’” (The author is now thought to be Cyriack Skinner.)

  III 33–34 not · · · Nor: to John Hayward, 31 May 1943, on redrafting a lecture: “I have not chosen good illustrations, nor have I made their pertinence clear, or just on what grounds I was criticising them (this seems to me a sentence in which the construction not … nor is permissible).”

  III 33–38 to ring the bell backward · · · We cannot revive old factions · · · an antique drum: OED: “to ring bells backward: to ring them beginning with the bass bell, in order to give alarm of fire or invasion, or express dismay” (from c. 1500). (Not possible with a single bell: see Composition FQ 204–205.) Walter Scott: “Dundee he is mounted, he rides up the street, | The bells are rung backward, the drums they are beat”, Bonny Dundee II. For the Jacobite Viscount Dundee, see Clerihews IV. (Where III 33–34 were quoted in G. Jones (144), TSE wrote “Cf. Bonnie Dundee”.) To Henry Eliot, 25 Mar 1943: “‘ring the bells backward’ refers to Bonnie Dundee and incidentally but not intentionally Bonnie Dundee suggests the parody of it at the end of Alice Through the Looking-Glass, which takes one back to the deliberate reminder of Alice in Wonderland at the beginning of Burnt Norton—where, also, I had been affected, I think, by Kipling’s They.” (Through the Looking-Glass ch. IX: “To the Looking-Glass world it was Alice that said, | ‘I’ve a sceptre in hand, I’ve a crown on my head’”.) Charles Lamb to George Dyer, 20 Dec 1830, on arson: “the great fire was blazing last night · · · a bonfire visible to London, alarming her guilty towers, and shaking the monument · · · Alas! can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?” Beaumont and Fletcher: “like bells rung backwards, | Nothing but noise and giddiness”, Wit without Money IV i. Marianne Moore: “If in Ireland | they play the harp backward at need”, Spenser’s Ireland in What Are Years (1941).

  III 35 summon the spectre of a Rose: when Pierre Leyris, in an introductory note to his translation of Little Gidding, associated this passage with the Wars of the Roses, TSE wrote in the margin: “He seems to have missed the Rose of Charles KM” (King and Martyr). Rose: To Bonamy Dobrée, 6 Aug 1941: “There are really three roses in the set of poems: the sensuous rose, the sociopolitical Rose (always appearing with a capital letter) and the spiritual rose: and the three have got to be in some way identified as one.”

  [Poem I 206 · Textual History II 536]

  III 35–36 summon the spectre of a Rose · · · old factions: Hayward to TSE, 9 Nov 1940: “MADAME RAMBERT · · · is also in these parts, persuading the youth of East Anglia to put on tights and chase the Spectre of the Rose.” Hayward, 17 Feb 1941: “cf. Sir Th. Browne · · · ‘nor in ye bed of Cleopatra raise up the ghost of a rose’.” (Browne: “Nor will the sweetest delight of Gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dulnesse of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the Bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a Rose”, Garden of Cyrus antepenultimate paragraph). Hayward again, 1 Aug: “I can’t resist expressing a regret that, having quoted so far, you did’nt follow Sir T. B. and put ‘raise up the ghost of a rose’. I do wish you would consider making this alteration. It is an exquisite evocation.” TSE, 5 Aug, referring instead to Le Spectre de la Rose, which he had seen Nijinsky dance: “Damn Sir T. Browne, a writer I never got much kick from: I suppose it is a reminiscence, though I was thinking of the Ballet and perhaps it would be better to go all out for the quotation, as the reference back to the Royal Rose [The Dry Salvages III 3] must be retained because of the two or three other rose connotations.” To Bonamy Dobrée, 6 Aug: “John had called my attention to the Browne pinch, of which I had been cheerfully unconscious: I am now thinking that perhaps I had better go all out and take Sir Thomas’s phrase directly—‘raise up’ instead of ‘summon’.” (For TSE in 1925 to Herbert Read, “does it raise the spectre of a Gunpowder Plot?”, see note to the epigraph to The Hollow Men.) Sceptical of “any attempt in prose that appears to strive toward the condition of ‘poetry’”, TSE associated Browne with Raleigh and Pater: “I only wish to take the precaution of looking upon the Monna Lisas of prose, the drums and tramplings of three conquests, the eloquent just and mightie deaths [Urn Burial ch. V], with a suspicious and interrogating eye, and making quite certain what, if any, solid and genuine bit of life they have pounced upon and raised to the dignity of poetry”, Prose and Verse (1921).

  [Poem I 206–207 · Textual History II 536]

  III 36–45 We cannot revive old factions · · · taken from the defe
ated | What they had to leave us: Arnold: “our sentiment for beauty and sweetness, our sentiment against hideousness and rawness, has been at the bottom of our attachment to so many beaten causes, of our opposition to so many triumphant movements. And the sentiment is true, and has never been wholly defeated, and has shown its power even in its defeat. We have not won our political battles, we have not carried our main points, we have not stopped our adversaries’ advance, we have not marched victoriously with the modern world; but we have told silently upon the mind of the country, we have prepared currents of feeling which sap our adversaries’ position when it seems gained, we have kept up our own communications with the future”, Culture and Anarchy (1869) I; quoted by TSE as “eloquent of the importance which Arnold has for the present time”, A Commentary in Criterion Jan 1925. (See Defence of the Islands [15–22].) Arnold on Oxford: “Beautiful city! · · · Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties”, Essays in Criticism First Series (1865). TSE: “Bolingbroke would stand higher with posterity and deserve far more of his country had he been prepared to stick to a lost cause”, Augustan Age Tories (1928). “I have myself no great taste for lost causes. I mean that if I believe in a cause I find it impossible to believe that the cause is lost. If it really appears to me to be lost, then I must stop and examine, whether I have really cared purely for its essence, or whether I have attached myself as much to an impermanent form”, A Commentary in Criterion July 1932. “I think that the phrase ‘lost cause’ is itself wrong. There are such things as dead issues. But there is no such thing as a lost, or as a securely gained cause”, Christ Church, Oxford, Speech (1948). cannot revive: on Cecil Sharp’s hope for a native ballet: “you cannot revive a ritual without reviving a faith. You can continue a ritual after the faith is dead—that is not a conscious, ‘pretty’ piece of archæology—but you cannot revive it”, The Ballet (1925). “I am not, certainly, in favour of attempting to revive a language which is nearly dead. By the time that it is preserved only among a few country peasantry, the culture which it represents is unlikely to be more than a mutilated relic”, Cultural Diversity and European Unity (1945); see note to II 63, 65–66.

  III 38 antique: pronounced an-teek by TSE in his recording of 1946–47 (as opposed to the Elizabethan antic).

  III 40–41 opposed | Accept: of A. R. Orage’s mysticism: “while it was something that I think should be opposed if he were still alive, it is something that I think we should, in a fashion, accept now that he is dead”, A Commentary in Criterion Jan 1935.

  III 41 the constitution of silence: Virginia Woolf: “To combine new words with old is fatal to the constitution of a sentence”, Craftsmanship (1937; see note to V 4–11, and note to East Coker I 2–4).

  III 42 ^ 43 variant The victory no longer a victory: “The dangerous militarism of the present time is that which believes, either from natural ‘aggressive instinct’ or from sheer exhaustion of patience, that communism can be put an end to by a victorious war against Russia (still, probably, cherishing a long out-of-date notion of ‘victory’)”, “Education for Peace” by Herbert Read, reader’s report, Sept 1948.

  III 44 the defeated: Auden: “History to the defeated | May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon”, closing lines of Spain. (Auden’s poem of 1937 was the printers’ model for the Four Quartets pamphlets.)

  III 46 perfected: pronounced with stress on the second syllable in TSE’s recording of 1946–47 (as opposed to the Elizabethan pèrfected, which TSE used at the end of his recording in 1950 of The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse).

  III 46–50 3rd draft [1–2] The damaged crown on the thornbush | The Duke with his iron shutters: Richard III and Duke of Wellington. Composition FQ 209–10: “The chroniclers report that the crown which Richard III wore on the battle field at Bosworth was found with the spoil of battle by Lord Stanley, who crowned the victor, Henry Tudor, there and then. The legend that the crown was found hanging in a thornbush arose in the sixteenth century. In a television programme on Eliot his friend Miss Hope Mirrlees reported that he always wore a white rose on the anniversary of Bosworth “‘in memory of ‘the last English king’ · · · I suppose Eliot thought of Bosworth as ‘the end of the Middle Ages’ and of Richard as representing an old order that was passing. In the same way, Wellington, with the windows of Apsley House twice broken by the London mob, which regarded him as the chief opponent of the Reform Bill, represented pre-industrial England.” For TSE on how his America “ended in 1829”, see headnote to The Dry Salvages, 2. “THE RIVER IS WITHIN US, THE SEA IS ALL ABOUT US”.

  [Poem I 207 · Textual History II 536–38]

  III 49 purification of the motive: “About Donne there hangs the shadow of the impure motive”, Lancelot Andrewes (1926). To George Hoellering, 30 Oct 1944, on a speech added to Murder in the Cathedral for the film version: “I have endeavoured to give it a flavour of pride and arrogance and impurity of motive” (“To purify the dialect · · · motives late revealed”, II 74, 87). The speech begins “My Lord the King, I am guilty of no treason”, The Film of “Murder in the Cathedral” (1952) 25 (Iman Javadi, personal communication).

  III 50 In the ground of our beseeching: Juliana of Norwich: “in the sweet words where he saith full merrily, ‘I am ground of thy beseeching.’ For truly, I saw and understood in our Lords meaning, that he shewed it”, final paragraph of the last of her Revelations (see IV 8 and note).

  after III 50, msA [1–4] Soul of Christ · · · incinerate them: adapted from the first four lines of the prayer Anima Christi sanctifica me (Composition FQ 69). See Textual History.

  IV

  To the Rev. Arthur MacGillivray, 4 Feb 1946: “I did not know that my Pentecost poem had been reprinted in the New York Times Book Review · · · This section of Little Gidding certainly stands more by itself than any other section of the poem”. Selecting a reading for broadcast: “I choose the fourth section out of Little Gidding as the one I think the best”, Chicago Round Table (1950).

  Acts 2: 1–6: “And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance · · · Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.”

  IV msA draft [2] crepitative: OED “crepitation” 1: “A crackling noise; crackling.”

  IV msA draft [5–7] expectation, doubt, despair · · · never resting feet · · · aspirations: Henry James Pye, parodying Gray’s Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College: “Ambition · · · And false report that glides along | With never-resting feet”, Ode on Ranelagh 71, 79–80.

  IV msA draft [6, 8] never resting feet · · · watery: “through the water · · · shine the unoffending feet”, Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service 13–14.

  IV msA draft [12] votary of Soledos: Composition FQ 213: “It may be that Eliot who did not know Spanish wrote ‘Soledos’ for ‘Soledad’, solitude.” Gongora: “Hangs as votive rod | In the dank temple of the ocean god”, Las Soledades (1612–13) I 464–65, tr. Edward Meryon Wilson as The Solitudes of Don Luis de Gongora (1931). (A Fragment from the Solitudes appeared in the Criterion in July 1930.) A note to the second of the Soledades (that “of the Shores”) reads: “The daughters might be either land or sea nymphs, votaries of Diana or Tethys.”

  IV msA draft [12] variant thanatos: OED: “death-instinct”, with first citation (referring to Freud) from 1935. OED does not record TSE’s first thought, “athanatos” [immortal].

  IV msA revised draft [4–5] pay the dues · · · beneath the line: OED “line” n.2 17d: “In phrases indicating the boundary between a debit and a credit in one’s account” (the first citation, from
1940, has “below the line” in quotation marks).

  [Poem I 207 · Textual History II 538–40]

  IV three-stanza ts drafts [8] variant Till death shall bring the audit in: MacNeice: “To-night we sleep | On the banks of the Rubicon—the die is cast; | There will be time to audit | The accounts later”, Autumn Journal xxiv.

  IV three-stanza ts drafts [10, 12–14] Unprofitable Sin · · · The assets that we think to win | By Prudence, and by Worldly Cares | Figure as gilt-edged stocks and shares: Milton: “with Gaine, Pride and Ambition · · · unprofitable Sin of Curiosity”, Letter to a Friend (1633). TSE: “It reads like the prospectus for a company flotation: and indeed that is what the South India Church, in its initial stages, is—a holding company, framed to control the shares in three distinct operating companies”, Reunion by Destruction (1943) 12.

  IV 1 The dove descending: to Hayward, 5 Aug 1941: “I am especially puzzled about Part IV. It may be that the attempt to give a XVII century flavour is a mistake (having previously done it successfully) but I feel that some explicit attack on the Descent of the Dove of the Holy Ghost (which is an undertone throughout) is necessary at this point”. Matthew 3: 16: “And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him.” John 1: 32: “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove.” (In the Middle Ages, many churches had a “Holy Ghost hole” in the vault, through which at Pentecost the figure of a dove could be lowered.) Herbert: “Listen sweet Dove unto my song, | And spread thy golden wings in me · · · Where is that fire which once descended | On thy Apostles?” Whitsunday. Herbert’s poem was read by TSE as part of the address printed as Mr. T. S. Eliot on “George Herbert” (1938). Charles Williams: “and there was communicated to that group of Jews, in a rush of wind and a dazzle of tongued flames, the secret of the Paraclete”, The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church (1939) 3, reviewed by TSE in A Lay Theologian (1939). TSE to Bonamy Dobrée, 12 Nov 1927: “The Dove dove down” (see “Improper Rhymes”). George Meredith’s The Lark Ascending inspired Vaughan Williams’s piece, which had its première in 1921 (Moody 256).