The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 159
II.
1–3 familiar · · · Or when the strange is one already known, | And presences walk with us, when alone: “There is always another one walking beside you”, The Waste Land [V] 362 (and see Commentary). “I met one walking · · · stranger · · · known, forgotten, half recalled · · · familiar”, Little Gidding II 33–42.
5, 7–8 moonlight dance · · · midnight hour | The witches’ sabbath of the maiden aunts: Pope: “As Hags hold Sabbaths, less for joy than spight, | So these their merry miserable Night; | Still round and round the Ghosts of Beauty glide”, Of the Characters of Women 239–41. William Empson discussed Pope’s lines in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) ch. IV, and alluded to them again in ch. VIII (“to maintain one’s defences and equilibrium and live as well as one can; it is not only maiden aunts who are placed like this”). TSE’s first note to Montpelier Row makes play with Seven Types.
7 Under · · · at the midnight hour: Stanley Holloway, monologue on the ghost of Anne Boleyn (1934): “With her head tucked underneath her arm | She walks the Bloody Tower! | With her head tucked underneath her arm | At the midnight hour.”
A Dedication to my Wife
An earlier text appeared as To My Wife, the dedication to The Elder Statesman (1959), reprinted at the head of that play in Collected Plays (1962). The final version first appeared in 1963. On its prominent positioning there, see Textual History. See also Dedication II (“Uncollected Poems”).
[Poems I 218–19 · Textual History II 555–58]
“This copy no. 1 is of course for my darling bedfellow with whom I sink into blissful silence, my beloved Valerie, my wife, the wife of | T. S. Eliot | 6.xi.60”, inscription in Mardersteig edition of Four Quartets (Valerie Eliot collection). Earlier, on 26 Apr 1946, TSE had inscribed for her a copy of 1936 5th imp. (1942). He subsequently added, on its title page: “Inscribed eleven years ago, at the request of Collin Brooks, for a young lady whom I had never met whose name was that of a complete stranger. We did not meet until the 29th August 1949. I married her on the 10th January 1957. I inscribe this book again, to my beloved adored wife. Good Friday 1957. T. S. Eliot.” Enclosed is a letter, 30 Sept 1946, thanking her for her “kind letter and birthday wishes, both of which gave me much pleasure” (Valerie Eliot collection).
To Cyril Connolly: “I was particularly touched by the way in which you referred, in reviewing my Collected Poems, to my last dedicatory poem to my wife. You were the first sympathetic reader and critic to call attention to the unusual fact that I had at last written a poem of love and of happiness. It would almost seem that some readers were shocked that I should be happy” (quoted by Connolly, Sunday Times 10 Jan 1965). To Pound, 28 Dec 1959: “She gives me the first happiness I have ever known.”
“Without the satisfaction of this happy marriage no achievement or honour could give me satisfaction at all”, Harvard Class of 1910, Fiftieth Anniversary Report (1960).
2–3 wakingtime · · · sleepingtime: OED “waking” vbl.n. 5: “waking-time, the time when one is awake; the moment at which one wakes up”. OED “sleeping” 1e quotes 1833 E. B. Browning tr. Prometheus Bound: “From work-times, diet-times, and sleeping-times.” TSE: “One who moves in the time between sleep and waking”, Ash-Wednesday IV 14. In The Elder Statesman III, Lord Claverton hears a voice of conscience “between waking and sleeping”.
5 lovers whose bodies smell of each other: TSE inscribed a copy of The Sacred Wood “for my Valerie”, adding: “the touch and smell of whom intoxicates her husband T. S. Eliot” (Magdalene). each other: twelve times in The Elder Statesman including “in love with each other”, twice, and “love each other”. See “each other”, four times in Dedication II (“Uncollected Poems”). “among each other · · · among each other”, The Death of Saint Narcissus 22–23.
8 No peevish winter wind: OED “peevish” 2b: “Of the wind: Piercing, ‘shrewd’.”
9–10 No sullen tropic sun shall wither | The roses: “Have you no brighter tropic flowers | With scarlet lips, for me?” Song (“The moonflower opens to the moth”) 7–8. “The sun which does not feel decay · · · withered”, A Lyric 3, 11.
11–12 But this dedication is for others to read: | These are private words addressed to you in public: “my opinion is, that a good love poem, though it may be addressed to one person, is always meant to be overheard by other people. Surely, the proper language of love—that is, of communication to the beloved and to no one else—is prose”, The Three Voices of Poetry 6.
[Poem I 219 · Textual History II 558–59]
Uncollected Poems
1. Poems not Collected by TSE: Arrangement in the Present Edition
2. Poems Written in Early Youth 3. Inventions of the March Hare
1. POEMS NOT COLLECTED BY TSE: ARRANGEMENT IN THE PRESENT EDITION
Many of TSE’s poems were not included by him in his final Collected Poems of 1963. Among the exclusions were two volumes: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) had been included in 1952 in the American Complete Poems and Plays (a volume he disliked), whereas Anabasis (1930), his translation of St.-John Perse’s Anabase, had not. Also excluded were his contributions to Noctes Binanianæ (1939), which had been for private circulation. Each of these three has a separate section in Vol. II of the present edition.
Likewise absent from 1963 were the poems he had written as a schoolboy and undergraduate, which had been privately printed in The Undergraduate Poems of T. S. Eliot [1949] and Poems Written in Early Youth (1950). Had he known of their survival, TSE would undoubtedly also have excluded the poems in Inventions of the March Hare (1996) and the materials associated with The Waste Land (published in WLFacs in 1971).
Of individual poems, the only one to have been published in a volume of his own but excluded from 1963 was Ode (“Tired. | Subterrene”) from Ara Vos Prec, but also absent were Song (“The golden foot I may not kiss or clutch”), which had been published anonymously in Spring 1921 in Tyro but never collected and The Death of Saint Narcissus, which had been submitted for publication to Poetry but not printed (and which he wished not to see printed in his lifetime, see headnote). He also omitted from 1963 some contributions to anthologies: The Marching Song of the Pollicle Dogs and Billy M’Caw: The Remarkable Parrot, poems for children printed in The Queen’s Book of the Red Cross (1939), and Let quacks, empirics, dolts debate, printed in Gala Day London (1953). All of these appear in the present section, along with miscellaneous private poems and unfinished poems.
“Other Verses” such as need to be presented within their immediate context—juvenilia, poems in letters or written as the addresses of envelopes, and other forms of light and comic verse—are printed in Vol. II, as are “Improper Rhymes”.
The contents of this section are arranged chronologically, so far as can be determined. TSE to Geoffrey Faber, 28 Apr 1941, on Faber’s The Buried Stream: Collected Poems 1908–1941: “any order of poems written over a long space of time is more or less at best the best of a bad job, I think; and so I prefer the chronological”. Despite his writing to Grover Smith, 4 July 1949, “My ability to forget dates in connection with my own work is, I should think, somewhat exceptional”, his memory and concern for dates were enduring.
[Poems I 221–319 · Textual History II 561–619]
Many poems in the March Hare Notebook were dated by TSE, mostly in pencil and (it appears from the hand) around the time of composition. The dates range from Nov 1909 to Apr 1911, but do not match the order of the poems. Some later poems in this section are also dated on the drafts. In other cases, dates are apparent from letters or from date of publication. With different degrees of confidence, dates can be assigned to most of the other poems on the basis of reference to known events, or the paper on which they were written (for which, see Rainey), or the handwriting or typewriter. Information on each appears in the individual headnotes.
2. POEMS WRITTEN IN EARLY YOUTH
TSE: “I began I think about the age of fourteen, under the inspiration of FitzGer
ald’s Omar Khayyam, to write a number of very gloomy and atheistical and despairing quatrains in the same style, which fortunately I suppressed completely—so completely that they don’t exist. I never showed them to anybody”, Paris Review (1959). On Blake: “His early poems show what the poems of a boy of genius ought to show, immense power of assimilation. Such early poems are not, as usually supposed, crude attempts to do something beyond the boy’s capacity; they are, in the case of a boy of real promise, more likely to be quite mature and successful attempts to do something small,” William Blake (1920).
TSE was one of the editors of the Harvard Advocate 1909–10. “I was known as a poet as an undergraduate; I was an editor of the Harvard Advocate the chief undergraduate literary paper and I wrote the ode for the graduation ceremonies for my class in 1910”, Northrop Frye corrigenda (1963).
After their first appearances, most of the Poems Written in Early Youth were reprinted in special issues of the Harvard Advocate in 1938 and 1948 and in The Harvard Advocate Anthology (1950). The note on the author on the back of his Selected Poems (Penguin, 1948) included the information that “His first poems were printed in The Smith Academy Record and the Harvard Advocate (1905–1909).”
An unauthorised separate printing, The Undergraduate Poems of T. S. Eliot [1949], was suppressed but was followed by an authorised edition of 12 copies only of Poems Written in Early Youth (1950). This was reprinted in 1967 in a trade edition, and the poems appeared in an appendix to 1969.
[Poems I 221–319 · Textual History II 561–619]
Adv 1938: “Eight Poems” reprinted in the Harvard Advocate Dec 1938, special number for T. S. Eliot (TSE’s corrected copy, King’s). To Donald Brace, 18 Nov 1938: “I enclose a copy of the letter which I have just written to Harry Brown of the Harvard Advocate. The editors of the Advocate have been designing a special number for my jubilee [fiftieth birthday], including a number of articles about me, to appear in December; and for this I naturally raised no objection to their reprinting eight undergraduate poems of mine, which appeared in that periodical (of which I was an editor) between 1906 and 1910. But a possibility which Cap Pierce brought to Frank’s attention seems now to be in danger of sprouting: a literary agent has persuaded them into thinking of reprinting the whole issue as a pamphlet, and trying to get some publisher here to undertake it · · · I wanted to let you know at once that I definitely object to having these poems reprinted except in the Advocate. If they choose to reprint the articles about me, that is their affair and I cannot object, but I have no desire to have my old undergraduate verse broadcast. Mr. Harry Brown appears to be under the impression that the Advocate holds all rights. They can hardly maintain this after receiving my veto: if they should, we must come down on them. I shall be glad and grateful if you will take steps if you hear any rumours of such a pamphlet being published.” To Henry Eliot, 23 Dec 1938: “I hope that Mr. Harry Brown was not downcast by my putting a veto upon the re-issue of the Advocate number in England, which he had ingenuously undertaken. My point was simply that I did not want this undergraduate verse to re-appear except as a part of a number of the Advocate, not in a pamphlet form · · · He replied very respectfully, but seemed to think that I did not even want the poems mentioned or quoted in any review of the Advocate in any other periodical—which far exceeded my prohibition.”
Adv 1948: nine poems—now including Ode (“For the hour that is left us Fair Harvard”)—reprinted Harvard Advocate Nov 1948. To the editors of the Harvard Advocate, 2 Feb 1949: “May I say without offence that I am surprised that you should reprint these poems without asking my permission. It may not have occurred to you that if I had thought these poems good enough I should long ago have included them in my Collected Works. Authors do not always like to see in circulation the poems which they have themselves rejected. These were reprinted in a special number of the Advocate some years ago, but that was a rather different occasion as that number was entirely in my honour and there was that special justification for exhuming my own contribution to the Advocate.”
Undergraduate Poems: ten poems, as The Undergraduate Poems of T. S. Eliot [1949], now including Song (“The moonflower opens to the moth”). Hayward’s Introduction to Early Youth 1950 wrongly dated this unauthorised pamphlet 1948.
As the error at Nocturne 14 shows, this is a re-impression of the type from Adv 1948, with the addition of the extra poem and with two lines in Spleen accidentally transposed. In 1947, TSE had protested about the eighty copies of A Practical Possum printed at Harvard (see headnote to that poem), so when some 1,000 copies of Undergraduate Poems were printed, he wrote to the editor of the Harvard Advocate, 29 Nov 1949, to say that he was “exasperated by the circulation of this pamphlet”. It was, nevertheless, included in Gallup, who corrected the date and added that “about 750 were withdrawn from circulation in December 1949, but at least some—and possibly all—of these appear to have found their way back into the market”. (Gallup 1988 108 explains how withdrawn copies “were put away in a closet, and promptly began to disappear, as each departing editor took a few copies as souvenirs. The Undergraduate Poems of T. S. Eliot soon acquired for those in the know the status of a presumably rare, ‘suppressed’ item. In the 1960s, an undergraduate who had access to the Advocate office appropriated for himself a good many more than just the winked-at few, selling them at very substantial prices to dealers in Cambridge, New Haven and New York. The thief was soon caught; and the Advocate editors profited by the lesson he had taught them, making their own arrangements with a rare book firm in England to handle most of the copies that remained.”)
[Poems I 221–319 · Textual History II 561–619]
Adv Anth: eight poems reprinted, together with Gentlemen and Seamen (a prose piece from May 1909), in The Harvard Advocate Anthology ed. Donald Hall [1950]. TSE to Hall, 29 Dec 1949: “I must thank you for your very handsome apology without any date. After all, part of the experience of editing university magazines is the experience of finding out what the etiquette of publication is. However, while I am ready to forgive your predecessors for their ignorance of the rules, I think that it is more difficult to excuse their publishing my verses with so many misprints as to be practically garbled.” Acceding then to a request to print the poems in The Harvard Advocate Anthology, he added: “The only thing I ask is that you should not want all of my undergraduate poems, but leave out at least one. I don’t care which. Make up your minds as to which is the worst, and leave that out.” Accordingly, the anthology omitted Song (“If time and space as sages say”) as “probably the poorest”. Hall to TSE, 5 July 1950: “Mr. Donald Gallup · · · tells me that your Humouresque, even as printed in 1910, contained two errors. (The Advocate seems to have had similar faults over a forty year period.) Perhaps you would like to rectify these errors in the Advocate Anthology.” TSE, 10 July: “I cannot lay my hand on a copy at the moment, so would you be so kind as to ask Mr. Donald Gallup for the corrections, as I am sure that you may take any corrections he gives you as authoritative.” For the Advocate in 1957, see Your cablegram arrived too late (“Other Poems”).
Early Youth 1950: Poems Written in Early Youth [ed. with notes by John Hayward, and with Introduction initialled by him] (1950). To the ten poems of Undergraduate Poems are added two from Smith Academy Record (A Fable for Feasters and A Lyric), the recital piece To the Class of 1905 and the later poem The Death of Saint Narcissus. Gallup received a letter from Hayward, June 1950: “Eliot has agreed to allow Bonniers, his Swedish publishers, to produce a tremendously private edition of 12 copies (including one for you) of his verse Juvenilia. Bonniers will keep 5–6 copies for themselves (one for each of the directors) on the understanding that they must never be sold or alienated. No copies will be available to the public as the edition will not be ‘published’, no copies will be sent to ‘copyright’ libraries in Sweden or abroad. I have undertaken to supply the material do any necessary editing. I want your help.” Gallup’s account goes on: “I sent him photocopies of t
he texts as originally printed between 1907 and 1910 in the Advocate and suggested that Eliot might be willing to allow the inclusion of The Death of Saint Narcissus · · · I sent Hayward a Photostat, and he reported to me in July that Eliot hadn’t ‘the foggiest recollection’ of the poem, but agreed that it could be included in ‘the rare booklet’. Poems Written in Early Youth (Stockholm, 1950) appeared in December and stirred up a good deal of interest” (Gallup 1988 108–109). Georg Svensson of Bonniers to Peter du Sautoy, 3 Dec 1965: “Eliot was so strict about this that although a copy was sent to the Swedish Academy [where he had received the Nobel Prize in Dec 1948], the Royal Librarian and the university libraries never got any although they can claim to have one free copy of every book printed.” The title Poems Written in Early Youth may have been influenced by “Poems written in Youth”, a section of Edgar Allan Poe’s Poems (TSE dated his copy 1906).
Hayward’s copies of pages from the original Harvard Advocate printings are at King’s. They are bound with his manuscript transcript, the typescript made from that and one of his two proofs. Those intermediate stages are not collated in the present edition. Information from the notes not given elsewhere is designated “(Hayward)”, although Valerie Eliot wrote in a letter of 26 May 1966 to Peter du Sautoy that they “were in fact provided by Tom” (Faber archive).
[Poems I 221–319 · Textual History II 561–619]