Temple ed. with sidenote: “The form of the universe”.
(Literally, nodo = knot.) Quoted by TSE, with one further tercet and slightly emended translation, in Dante (1929) II. (The “eternal rose” and “a white rose” are introduced at Paradiso XXX 124 and XXXI 1.)
[Poem I 209 · Textual History II 544–45]
V 45 crowned knot of fire: The Cloud of Unknowing ch. 47: “knit the ghostly knot of burning love betwixt thee and thy God, in ghostly onehead and according of will” (Drew 239). crowned knot: a crown is “a knot formed by tucking the strands of a rope’s ends over and under each other to lock them and prevent them unravelling”, The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea. OED “crown” v.1 14 (Naut.) does not specify three strands, but E. M. Stephenson may have consulted TSE before she wrote: “The crowned knot, used by sailors, has the particular significance of three strands representing the Trinity”, Stephenson 92.
V 46 And the fire and the rose are one: in Aug 1917, while TSE was its assistant editor, the Egoist printed B. Durak’s The Unseen Attendant: “As the rose-fire of the hidden sun dawning over a winter sea, there comes to you the love that is enflaming, enlightening.” Gérard de Nerval: “Et la treille où le Pampre à la Rose s’allie” [And the arbour where the vine joins with the rose], El Desdichado [The Disinherited]. For the same sonnet, see notes to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 124–29 and The Waste Land [V] 429. TSE: “fires | Of which the flame is roses”, East Coker IV 19–20. For “three roses in the set of poems · · · have got to be · · · identified as one”, see note to III 35. For Hayward’s contribution to the line, see Textual History. rose: for “Rosa mystica”, see note to Ash-Wednesday II 28.
[Poem I 209 · Textual History II 545]
Occasional Verses
Section introduced, with half-title, 1963+. These poems were not collected in US 1952. None of the poems was ever added to Sel Poems.
CONTENTS
Defence of the Islands 1941
A Note on War Poetry 1942
To the Indians who Died in Africa 1943
To Walter de la Mare 1948
A Dedication to my Wife 1959, rev. 1963
On the top sheet to tsW (prepared for the printer of 1963 in connection with Washington copy 1954), TSE headed these “Occasional Poems”, but when adding to the Contents pages, he wrote: “Occasional Poems Verses”. (For A Valedictory Forbidding Mourning: to the Lady of the House as an Occasional Poem, see headnote to that poem, in “Uncollected Poems”.)
Dr. Johnson: “In an occasional performance no height of excellence can be expected from any mind, however fertile · · · The occasional poet is circumscribed by the narrowness of his subject · · · Not only matter but time is wanting. The poem must not be delayed till the occasion is forgotten. The lucky moments of animated imagination cannot be attended; elegances and illustrations cannot be multiplied by gradual accumulation: the composition must be dispatched while conversation is yet busy”, Life of Dryden.
To Michael Roberts, 14 Jan 1935: “I should be glad to think that the writing of occasional poetry is a justifiable activity, because that is all that the choruses in the Rock can pretend to be.” To Lawrence Durrell, 13 Feb 1942, who had requested a contribution to a “select magazine”: “I don’t know what to send you unless it is a set of verses which I have just done for the Indian Red Cross book. I only hesitate because although I have endeavoured to clear up the point a bit, I find that people are still very confused about the distinction between verse and poetry, so that what I offer as good verse might be judged as a bad poem.” (Rudyard Kipling always used the term “verse” of his own work, as acknowledged by the title of TSE’s selection, A Choice of Kipling’s Verse. This formula was used by Faber only once more during TSE’s lifetime, for A Choice of Walter de la Mare’s Verse.)
To John Nerber, 12 Oct 1948, assenting in principle to a request to reprint To Walter de la Mare: “I would ask you also to put in a note between the title and the poem stating that these verses were contributed to the volume of Tribute to Walter De la Mare upon his Seventy-fifth Birthday. I am always anxious to draw a clear distinction between my poems proper and my poems written for special occasions. Of the latter there are, of course, only a very few”. To Walter de la Mare was reprinted in Tiger’s Eye (NY) 15 Dec 1948.
[Poems I 211–19 · Textual History II 547–59]
To Walter McElroy, 11 Feb 1949: “As for the poem to Walter de la Mare, this was like two others which I published during the war, an occasional poem, and I do not wish to be represented in anthologies by any poems written for particular occasions. Indeed I no longer possess copies of the two poems written during the war and I have not copies of the volumes in which they appeared.” (The “two others” were A Note on War Poetry and To the Indians Who Died in Africa.) To McElroy, 28 Feb 1949, declining permission for any of the Four Quartets to appear in an anthology of Forties poetry: “If, however, you have the public texts of the three war poems you mention, and if you will give them as a general title, Three Occasional Poems, I am willing to let you use these as a compensation.” To McElroy, 19 Apr 1949: “I am glad you mentioned Defence of the Islands because I was rather distressed when I found that people regarded it as a poem. I had no idea of writing a poem and I do not wish to reprint it. These words were written for a particular purpose in 1940 to accompany an exhibition of photographs of British war-work to be displayed in New York. Each one of the sentences was meant to apply to and to appear in large letters on the wall together with an appropriate group of photographs, and to my way of thinking the words themselves lose a great deal of their meaning without the photographs they were designed to accompany.” McElroy’s planned anthology appears not to have been published. See headnote to Choruses from “The Rock”, 2. THE COMMISSION, for TSE’s view of his contributions as “occasional poetry” (or “hack-work”).
To W. P. Watt, 5 Jan 1945, returning a typescript of poetry: “The author’s description, ‘occasional poetry’, is quite correct. It is good and accomplished occasional verse, eminently worthy of a periodical but not sufficiently of our type to justify our considering the book.” TSE’s jacket copy for A. L. Rowse’s Poems of Deliverance (1946) reads: “These poems, though spoken with the tones of the patriot, are not in the limited sense ‘occasional verse’. For, as must always be true of verse that can claim to be poetry, the occasional approaches the universal in expressing also the particular experience of the poet” (initialled in Faber catalogue, King’s). In letters, TSE also speaks of “vers d’occasion” and “vers de circonstance”.
Defence of the Islands
[Poem I 213–14 · Textual History II 548–51]
Defence of the Islands was written at the request of E. McKnight Kauffer, who was then working for Britain’s Ministry of Information. TSE explained to Hayward [11 June 1940], that it would appear as an inscription “to go round the walls of a room of war photographs for the New York [World’s] Fair. You walk round in a determined order, so that you only see one clause at a time, and necessarily in that order. I should like your criticism, and especially of the last line. Is it too much like the epitaph of the Lacedemonians after Marathon? Thermopylae? I thought that if the resemblance seeped in to the minds of the better educated American readers, they might draw for themselves the analogy of these people in the pictures keeping the gates for them.” There followed a PS: “It is to be ANONYMOUS.” To Bernard Iddings Bell, 9 July 1940: “your · · · assertion that ‘resistance to Germany’s theology cannot be carried out by dead men’ seems to me very doubtful. St. Thomas of Canterbury’s resistance to the ideology of Henry II was far more operative after his death than before, and something might be said about the Lacedemonians after Thermopylae. Certainly, I would say that resistance to Germany’s ideology cannot be carried out by men who are unwilling to die, or to sacrifice everything individually dear to them, including social privileges. I do not see how it can be carried out by succumbing to German domination.” (See note to “
the hot gates”, Gerontion 3.)
To Hayward, 3 July 1940: Mary Hutchinson “astonished me with the information that the Kauffers are said to have left for America.” Some fifty copies of a broadside, LINES WRITTEN BY T. S. ELIOT TO ACCOMPANY THIS EXHIBITION OF PHOTOGRAPHS (ending “T. S. ELIOT | 9th June, 1940”) were hand-printed in London to send to the World’s Fair.
A second exhibition, the following year, was selected by the Director of London’s National Gallery, Kenneth Clark, and featured work by Britain’s official War Artists. After showing at the Museum of Modern Art, NY (22 May–2 Sept 1941), it toured the US. A press release stated that “In conjunction with the exhibition the Museum of Modern Art published a catalog Britain at War to which T. S. Eliot has contributed a poem entitled Defense of the Islands.” The acknowledgements in the catalogue, Britain at War, ed. Monroe Wheeler (New York, 1941), thanked TSE “for contributing his poem”, which appeared facing the introduction. Britain at War anticipates Inoubliable France, a book of photographs to which TSE contributed the Preface, for which see note to The Dry Salvages II 56–66.
TSE to Hayward, 14 July 1941: “About that Kauffer affair. I had always supposed that the screed I wrote (you remember for the M.o.I.) was prose. Ted [Kauffer] had cabled briefly to ask permission to print it in some volume, which I gathered was of a propaganda kind: but I was disconcerted to find it featured as a poem. And I fear that without the photos scattered in between (Times type of photos of Canterbury, snowdrops in Devon, ploughing in Berkshire etc. besides the air, army, navy and ARP scenes) it will not look very coherent. I have not yet seen the book. I shall be grateful if you will inform any American correspondents that it really is prose.” No Mean Heritage ed. S. N. Ritchie (Melbourne, 1946) used paragraphs which ignore TSE’s lineation.
To Basil N. Bass, 29 Apr 1953: “I have always declined to republish these lines as they are not self-explanatory, and furthermore, I did not intend them to be considered as poetry. They are merely a kind of prose commentary on a series of photographs of the war effort in Britain, which was exhibited in New York in 1940.” To Charles Norman, 1 May 1957: “I was indeed very glad to receive from you a copy of the lines I wrote in 1940 as I did not possess a copy until then. I should explain that it never occurred to me at the time of writing that my lines would be spoken of later as a ‘poem’ · · · I still think of the pieces rather as a collection of captions than as a poem”, with “captions” typed over “quotations”.
First collected by TSE in 1963, after Kauffer’s death in 1954.
[Poem I 213–14 · Textual History II 548–51]
Title Defence of the Islands: Winston Churchill: “I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home · · · We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be”, House of Commons, 4 June 1940 (McCue 2013a). (In a broadcast speech on 17 May, Churchill had said: “We shall defend our Island home, and with the British Empire we shall fight on unconquerable until the curse of Hitler is lifted from the brows of mankind.”) TSE: “if we proceed from bad to worse, we arrive at length at the prose style of Mr. Winston Churchill”, A Commentary in Criterion Apr 1929. Three pages of A Commentary in Jan 1934 were devoted to Churchill’s style, “which consists in constantly pitching the tone a little too high”. TSE’s attitude changed, however, in wartime. To Hayward, 19 June 1940, on the speech “This was their finest hour” (see note to [21–22]): “Incidentally, did you listen to Winston’s speech last night? the particularly husky after dinner one? Whatever else one thinks, my dear John, you will agree that it is a pleasure to realise that we have, what has not before happened in our time (mine or yours) · · · a Prime Minister who is, as Henry James would have said, had he been one of us (for he was, as a matter of fact, the grandson of an Irishman) in some respects, and with certain qualifications, what one might call roughly, in these days, a social equal: and a further pleasure (which I invite you to share with me) to reflect that the Churchill family, in earlier times, had an association with the county of Somerset” (as had the Eliots, see headnote to East Coker). Churchill knows “how to speak English which is pure but not pasteurized”, Christian News-Letter 14 Aug 1940 (see “The conditions of statesmanship” in note to the title Difficulties of a Statesman). To Philip Mairet, 10 Mar 1941, on preparing to broadcast Towards a Christian Britain (1941): “I was, and am · · · wanting to give them blood and sweat, and not promise them a Christian happy land as the reward for the Churchill blood and sweat.” Defence: “There are perhaps those who will admit to expression in poetry patriotism on the defensive: Shakespeare’s Henry V is acceptable, in his otherwise embarrassing grandiloquence, because the French army was a good deal bigger than the English force”, Rudyard Kipling (1941).
[1–2] memorials of built stone—music’s enduring instrument: legend has it that Troy was built by the music of Apollo. Tennyson: “the song-built towers and gates | Reel, bruised and butted with the shuddering | War-thunder”, Tiresias 96–98 (of Thebes, built to the music of Amphion). Tennyson on Camelot: “For an ye heard a music, like enow | They are building still, seeing the city is built | To music, therefore never built at all, | And therefore built for ever”, Gareth and Lynette 271–74 (for which see note to The Waste Land [V] 382). music’s enduring instrument: to Kauffer [10 June 1940]: “I think that ‘—music’s enduring instrument’ ought to come out. It blemishes the simple straightforwardness of the phrase.”
[1–2] variant music’s timeless instrument: “timeless · · · moment in and out of time · · · music | While the music lasts”, The Dry Salvages V 18–29.
[1–4] memorials of built stone · · · of English verse: Waller: “When Architects have done their Part · · · Time, if we use ill-chosen Stone, | Soon brings a well-built Palace down”, Of English Verse st. 3.
[1–2, 5–6] variant timeless instrument · · · with the defence of this island: “timeless moments · · · With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling”, Little Gidding V 22, 25.
[2–4] many centuries · · · of English verse: for “a collection of quotations”, see TSE to Charles Norman, 1 May 1957, in headnote.
[6] variant this Island: Waller: “Rome (tho’ her Eagle thro’ the World had flown) | Cou’d never make this Island all her own”, Panegyrick to my Lord Protector st. 17.
[Poem I 213 · Textual History II 550]
[8] battleship, merchantman, trawler: according to Churchill, the Dunkirk evacuation of 21 May–3 June 1940 (just days before this poem was written) involved “countless merchant seamen · · · 220 light warships and 650 other vessels”.
[9–10] pavement of British bone: “a solid pavement of bone-bed”, G. E. Roberts in Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association 1859–65.
[11–12] man’s · · · death · · · the power of darkness in air: Housman: “The Queen of air and darkness | Begins to shrill and cry. | ‘O young man, O my slayer, | To-morrow you shall die’”, Last Poems III.
[14, 17] forebears · · · ancestors: to Laurence Binyon, 16 May 1930: “‘Ancestors’ seems to me a weak word in English for family Pride: I wish that it might have been ‘Forbears’.”
[15] Flanders: Waller: “Flanders hath receiv’d our Yoke”, Upon the Death of the Lord Protector 20. Sterne: “what prodigious armies we had in Flanders”, Tristram Shandy bk. II ch. 18. John McCrae: “We shall not sleep, though poppies grow | In Flanders fields”, In Flanders Fields (1915).
[15–16] Flanders and France · · · undefeated in defeat: “Who are only undefeated | Because we have gone on trying”, The Dry Salvages V 45–46. Churchill: “our thankfulness at the escape of our Army and so many men, whose loved ones have passed through an agonising week, must not blind us to the fact that what has happen
ed in France and Belgium is a colossal military disaster”, House of Commons, 4 June 1940.
[15–22] those undefeated in defeat · · · changing nothing · · · to say, to the past and the future generations · · · we took up our positions: see Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, quoted in note to Little Gidding III 36–45.
[16–17, 20] changing nothing of their ancestors’ ways but the weapons · · · the past and the future generations: on behalf of the Classical Association to the Greek Ambassador (George Seferis), 21 Oct 1941, “on this anniversary of the Italo-German assault upon your country”: “As your people have maintained the glory of their ancestors in war and in endurance, so we believe that they will in the future be worthy also of their ancestors in victory and in peace.”
[18] the paths of glory: Pope: “With equal steps the paths of glory trace”, Odyssey I 392. Gray: “The paths of glory lead but to the grave”, An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard 36 (with “isle” = aisle, 39). Tennyson: “Not once or twice in our rough island-story, | The path of duty was the way to glory”, Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington 201–202, 209–10. (Tennyson urges Wellington’s vigilance about the threat of invasion from France: “He bade you guard the sacred coasts”, 172.)
[19] the lanes and the streets of Britain (variant the field and streets of our homes): Churchill: “we shall fight in the fields and in the streets”, House of Commons, 4 June 1940.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 156
