The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 160
TSE to D. E. S. Maxwell, 22 May 1951: “I am averse to any further republication of my juvenile poems. If I did agree to publish them, it would have to be under the imprint of Faber & Faber, in any case, but I have no intention or design to do so · · · I think they are verse of a kind which is much better printed, if at all, some time after the author’s death.” To Wilder Penfield, 1 May 1964: “I don’t think I produced any memorable verse during my undergraduate days · · · the various poems which appeared in the Harvard Advocate are now only of biographical interest.” The first trade collections of the poems followed TSE’s death:
Early Youth 1967: Poems Written in Early Youth (1967). Follows Early Youth 1950 except where stated. Published reluctantly by Valerie Eliot so as to retain rights, because of fears of unofficial publication in Germany. Four of the poems were reprinted using this text in First Flowering: The Best of the Harvard Advocate ed. Richard M. Smoley (1971).
1969: as an appendix to the edition.
Except where noted, the present text is that of Early Youth 1950, which had TSE’s imprimatur.
Note (by Valerie Eliot) from Early Youth 1967:
These early poems were collected by John Hayward and privately printed in an edition limited to twelve copies by Albert Bonniers of Stockholm in 1950. So much interest has been expressed in this collection, which was supervised by the author, that it seems wise to make it generally available as a corrective to the inaccurate, pirated versions.
These appear to be the only juvenilia of my husband that survive. At the age of nine or ten, he told me, he wrote “a few little verses about the sadness of having to start school again every Monday morning”. He gave them to his Mother and hoped they had not been preserved. At about fourteen he wrote “some very gloomy quatrains in the form of the Rubáiyát” which had “captured my imagination”. These he showed to no one and presumed he destroyed.
Two incidents connected with A Lyric (which is given on page 17) remained in the poet’s mind. These stanzas in imitation of Ben Jonson were done as a school exercise when he was sixteen. “My English master, who had set his class the task of producing some verse, was much impressed and asked whether I had had any help from some elder person. Surprised, I assured him that they were wholly unaided”. They were printed in the school paper, Smith Academy Record, but he did not mention them to his family. “Some time later the issue was shown to my Mother, and she remarked (we were walking along Beaumont Street in St. Louis) that she thought them better than anything in verse she had ever written. I knew what her verse meant to her. We did not discuss the matter further”.
1966, V.E.
Acknowledgements and thanks are due to the late John Hayward’s sister, Mrs. Oakeley, for her permission to reproduce his introduction and notes.
(The jacket material for Early Youth 1967 derives closely from this note: “These early poems were collected by John Hayward and privately printed in 1950 by Bonniers of Stockholm in an edition limited to twelve copies. So much interest has been expressed in the poems that it has been decided to re-issue them in order that correct versions may be made generally available. The collection was prepared under the supervision of the author.”)
[Poems I 221–319 · Textual History II 561–619]
Introduction (by Hayward) from Early Youth 1950, 1967:
Apart from a few unrecorded jeux d’esprit, this collection contains all the surviving poems written by T. S. Eliot between the winter of 1904 and the spring of 1910; that is to say, between his sixteenth and twenty-second birthdays, while he was a day-boy at Smith Academy, St. Louis, or an undergraduate at Harvard. The Death of Saint Narcissus, which was suppressed in proof and never published, is of a slightly later date.
The first two schoolboy poems were originally published in Smith Academy Record; the third was publicly recited by the poet on Graduation Day, 1905, and is here printed for the first time from the only known copy. The nine undergraduate poems, together with a variant version of the Lyric printed in Smith Academy Record, were originally published between 1907 and 1910 in The Harvard Advocate, of which the poet was an associate-editor from 1909 to 1910. Eight of these ten poems were reprinted together in The Harvard Advocate in 1938; and, without permission, with the addition of the second Song, in the same periodical in 1948. The ten poems were reissued in the same year by the editors of the Advocate, again without permission, and with many misprints, in a pamphlet entitled The Undergraduate Poems of T. S. Eliot.
The sources of the text of the present authorized collection are given in the Notes at the end.
J. H. [Early Youth 1967 spells out: JOHN HAYWARD]
To A. H. Cooke, 18 Sept 1929: “At nineteen, I wrote some verse worth publishing, but I did not get anyone to publish it until I was twenty-eight.”
3. INVENTIONS OF THE MARCH HARE
To Keith Douglas, 15 Feb 1941: “My impression so far is that you have completed one phase which begins with the very accomplished juvénilité, and that you have started on another which you have not yet mastered. Of the first phase I feel that, as might be expected, there is a certain musical monotony in the rhythms. That does not matter in itself because it is a good thing to go on doing one thing until you are sure that its use is exhausted, but from the point of view of collective publication it is a very good monotony, and I think you have definitely an ear. What I should like to see is the second phase which you have begun developed to the point of formal mastery.”
OED “Invention” 11: “Mus. A short piece of music in which a single idea is worked out in a simple manner.” Kipling: “and I must even piece out what he had told me with my own poor inventions while Charlie wrote of the ways of bank-clerks”, The Finest Story in the World. This story was collected in Kipling’s Many Inventions (1893), and TSE referred to it, together with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in a footnote to Rudyard Kipling (1941). Carroll’s Haigha and Hatta appear together in Through the Looking-Glass, in which the White Knight repeatedly says “It’s my own invention”. TSE to J. H. Oldham, 4 Nov 1944, on The Moot: “I anticipate that even without that, members will tend to disperse all over the place each chasing his own March Hare, and I don’t want this to become an educational discussion.” Grover Smith to Christopher Ricks, 15 Mar 1997: “Once, when I was quizzing Eliot on some supposed allusions in his poems, he wrote at the end of a long reply: ‘And please don’t hunt so many March Hares!’”
[Poems I 221–319 · Textual History II 561–619]
For the history and contents of the Notebook and accompanying leaves, and for Valerie’s Own Book, see the Textual History headnote, 5. THE MARCH HARE NOTEBOOK AND ACCOMPANYING LEAVES and 6. VALERIE’S OWN BOOK. For the history of the other poems in this section, see individual headnotes.
A Lyric (“If Time and Space, as Sages say”)
and
Song (“If space and time, as sages say”)
The first, printed in Smith Academy Record Apr 1905, then Early Youth (1950) and reprinted in 1957 in Powel, then Early Youth (1967)+. Written Jan 1905.
The second, printed in Harvard Advocate 3 June 1907, then Adv 1938, Adv 1948, Undergraduate Poems, Early Youth (1950)+.
For TSE’s mother’s reaction to seeing A Lyric in Smith Academy Record, see headnote to “Uncollected Poems”, 2. POEMS WRITTEN IN EARLY YOUTH. TSE wrote an introduction to his mother’s dramatic poem Savonarola and arranged its publication in 1926. Following her death he wrote to his brother, Henry, 19 Oct 1929:
About mother’s poems. I should very much like them to be published. I have a few, but not many. It would be a great pleasure to me to write an introduction or preface for the book, and perhaps if I did so a publisher, or a publisher of limited editions particularly, might be ready to bear part or all of the cost of production. It would be a delicate and possibly invidious task, as whatever I wrote would have to have the approval of all members of the immediate family before it appeared, but I should be glad to do it. Some of them, indeed all of them in some degree, are goo
d poems. I remember when I wrote a poem at Smith Academy, when I was 16, I learned to my surprise that she had had copies typed and distributed (I only heard that from Aunt Rose) and then mother said to me that it was a better poem than any she had written. It wasn’t; but even then I had some perception of what such a statement meant.
Imitation of Ben Jonson’s Song. To Celia (“Drinke to me, onely, with thine eyes”).
The line-numbered lemmata below give preference to TSE’s second version, Song.
Titles A Lyric | Song: in early notes for what became his essay The Nature of Metaphysical Poetry (Criterion Apr 1923), Herbert Read claimed that “the lyric has the essential quality of ‘emotion’ but its distinction seems to rest on its connection with visual sensibility”. TSE objected: “? Why not stick to the meaning—to accompany music, to be sung” (Read papers, U. Victoria).
[Poems I 223 · Textual History II 561–62]
1–2 If space and time, as sages say, | Are things that cannot be: the poem was written months before Einstein revolutionised the physics of space, time and matter with the special theory of relativity. In Sept 1904 Henri Poincaré lectured on the emerging ideas at the St. Louis World’s Fair (to which Smith Academy sent a troop: Yearbook 1903–04). In his paper for the Fair, The Principles of Mathematical Physics, Poincaré described contemporary challenges to the Newtonian laws of time and space (vol 1 of Congress of Arts and Science: Universal Exposition, St. Louis, 1904 ed. Howard J. Rogers, 1905). Josiah Royce of Harvard also spoke at the Congress. Charles Mauron’s On Reading Einstein, which TSE translated for Criterion Oct 1930, described how “before the first relativists (Lorentz, Poincaré) two vast things-in-themselves dwelt quietly at the very heart of abstract science: Space and Time”, and how in the new theory, “Time and Space in themselves vanish”. For Poincaré and Einstein, see headnote to Mr. Apollinax. TSE to Pound, 23 July 1934: “a Little Animil wich I understan does illustrate the Quantum Theory by bein at two Places at once even if he dont understand it”.
Emerson: “Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes”, Self-Reliance. TSE’s Knowledge and Experience 110 quotes Bradley’s Appearance and Reality ch. IV, “Space and Time”: “And time so far, like space, has turned out to be appearance” (Lockerd 16). Two of TSE’s anonymous reviews in Monist Oct 1917 mention Time and Space. Summarising essays in Mind Apr 1917, he wrote: “Time and space are both objective”; and summarising B. M. Laing: “This perversion of the Kantian doctrine leads Schopenhauer to hold (in contrast to Kant) that the world of space and time is an illusion.” Kipling: “the soul had passed beyond the illusion of Time and Space of Things”, Kim ch. XV (two pages from the end) (Crawford 31). TSE: “his maturest work on India, and his greatest book, is Kim”, Rudyard Kipling (1941); a copy appears in TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934).
7 time is time, and runs away: “When will time flow away”, Five-Finger Exercises I. Lines to a Persian Cat 10.
9 flowers I sent thee: Jonson: “I sent thee, late, a rosie wreath”, Song 9.
9, 11 flowers · · · withered: TSE: “Fresh flowers, withered flowers, flowers of dawn”, Before Morning 4.
11 withered · · · bee: Jonson: “It could not withered bee”, Song 12 (original spelling).
A Fable for Feasters
Printed in Smith Academy Record Feb 1905, signed “T. E. ’05”, then Early Youth (1950)+.
Hayward: “This Byronic exercise was Eliot’s first appearance in print” (though perhaps written after A Lyric). TSE wrote that Byron was his “first boyhood enthusiasm · · · images come before the mind, and the recollection of some verses in the manner of Don Juan, tinged with that disillusion and cynicism only possible at the age of sixteen, which appeared in a school periodical”, Byron (1937). Moody 352: “The verses were A Fable for Feasters. Beppo looks a likelier model.” Ottava rima, Byron’s stanzaic form in both Don Juan and Beppo, was adopted by Richard Barham for The Ghost in The Ingoldsby Legends (Grover Smith 3), a copy of which appears in TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934). TSE: “you cannot write satire in the line of Pope or the stanza of Byron”, After Strange Gods 24. “No imitation of Alexander Pope’s couplets, or of Byron’s ottava rima can be more than a clever pastiche”, Royal Academy Speech (1960). See note to WLComposite 229–300.
[Poems I 223–25 · Textual History II 562–63]
An address at Chichester Cathedral: “In my schooldays, we were given to understand that, before the Reformation, England was groaning under the burden of supporting innumerable idle monks; and that Henry VIII sent them all packing, except a small number of the least incorrigible, whom he turned into deans and canons”, The Value and Use of Cathedrals in England Today (1951). In William Henry Schofield’s English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer 128, TSE underlined “keenly satirised” in the sentence “The notorious vices of the monks were keenly satirised in an amusing piece, L’Ordre de Bel Aise.”
6 travelers: Valerie Eliot, 8 Oct 1969, answering a query: “it is the American spelling and Tom was living there at the time” (memo, Faber archive).
21 He stole the fatter cows and left the thinner: Peacock: “The mountain sheep are sweeter, | But the valley sheep are fatter; | We therefore deemed it meeter | To carry off the latter”, The War Song of Dinas Vawr 1–4.
To the Class of 1905
Printed in Early Youth (1950)+ under a provided title, At Graduation 1905.
Written as a school graduation piece and recited at Memorial Hall, 13 June 1905. TSE was commencement poet of Smith Academy, according to The Smith Academy Anvil, Class of 1905 (Myerson, St. Louis), of which he was also associate editor. To Marquis W. Childs of Missouri Historical Society, he wrote on 8 Aug 1930 that he had graduated from Smith Academy “with some distinction, having produced the Class Poem, which even now seems to me not bad”. In 1953: “my part in the ceremony was to deliver the valedictory poem of the year. I was informed afterwards, by one of my teachers, that the poem itself was excellent, as such poems go, but that my delivery was very bad indeed”, American Literature and the American Language 3. This was perhaps his respected English teacher, Roger Conant Hatch, who contributed several rousing songs to The School Songs of Smith Academy [1907? ed.]. Also in the volume was the school song (words W. W. Gale, music W. H. Pommer, 1897): “When boyhood’s past and we are men | Where’er or what we be, | We’ll oft look back with feelings warm | To Smith Academy.” The St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904, epitomised high expectations for the new century. To Hayward, 19 Aug 1943: “I hope you will be impressed by the pathos of the hopes which I expressed for the twentieth century and for the future of a day school which was dissolved through lack of pupils a few years later.” For “false assumption of the excessive value of the future”, see note to The Dry Salvages I 10.
Title To the Class of 1905: this title, though not necessarily TSE’s own, is from a printed programme discovered by Jayme Stayer at Washington U. TSE may later have agreed to the title At Graduation 1905, which Hayward printed in square brackets in Early Youth (1950).
3–4 sail we | Across the harbor bar: Tennyson, Crossing the Bar (title).
5 to warn of rocks which lie below: “the ragged rock in the restless waters”, The Dry Salvages II 70.
15 o’er: to Ross E. Pierce, 9 Mar 1936: “Why use ‘o’er’ at all, in this century? People do not use it in the best conversation.”
[Poems I 224–30 · Textual History II 563–64]
43–44 when we are grown | Gray-haired and old: “We’ll call it back to mem’ry dear when we are gray and old”, The Red and the White (music, W. H. Pommer) in The School Songs of Smith Academy.
50 Incense of altar-smoke shall rise to thee: “smoking incense, which had a most unpleasant odor”, The Man Who Was King (1905).
57 t’will: Robert Giroux suggested the emendation “’twill”, but in a memo to Peter du Sautoy, 23 Mar 1967, Valerie Eliot replied that “t’will” had been “confirmed by Tom in 1950”.
77 motto: “This gol
den motto e’er shall stand. | Not for ourselves alone, | But for our friends and native land”, Non Nobis Solum: Our Motto (words, Roger Conant Hatch; music, William John Hall) in The School Songs of Smith Academy. The Eliot family’s close involvement with the school is evident from this title, for as Charlotte Eliot noted in her life of TSE’s paternal grandfather, “The motto on Dr. Eliot’s family crest was ‘Tace et fac.’ Another less commonly used in the family was, ‘Non nobis solum,’ and this he preferred”, Charlotte C. Eliot, William Greenleaf Eliot (1904) 358. For “Tace et fac”, see note to East Coker I 13.
78 “Progress!”: on Unitarianism: “I do not plan to deprecate the alcoholic or stimulant value of the idea of Progress. I belong to a church of which one of the tenets refers to the Progress of mankind onward and upward forever. I do not understand what this phrase means, but I acknowledge its value for enthusiasm”, The Relationship between Politics and Metaphysics (1914), alluding to J. R. Lowell. For the Eliots and Unitarianism, see headnote to Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service. “the doctrine of progress, while it can do little to make the future more real to us, has a very strong influence towards making the past less real to us. For it leads us to take for granted that the past, any part or the whole of it, has its meaning only in the present”, A Commentary in Criterion Oct 1932. “The assumption of the inevitability of progress has, we all know, been discarded in its nineteenth century form: it is the butt of popular philosophers like Dean Inge · · · Nevertheless, we retain the essential of the doctrine of progress: we have no faith in the present”, Literature and the Modern World (1935). For “superficial notions of evolution · · · in the popular mind”, see East Coker II 40–41.