The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 164
Title Easter: Valerie Eliot noted that TSE’s mother, Charlotte Eliot, “throughout her life wrote poems, some of which, like Easter Songs, were printed in the Christian Register”, Letters (1988) 5. Houghton has a copy of Easter Songs (1899). Sensations of April: Laforgue: “O paria!—Et revoici les sympathies de mai” [Pariah!—And the sympathies of May are back again], Simple agonie 1 (with “se crucifie”, 17). Also Rimbaud on “les soirs bleus d’été”, “la fraîcheur” and “l’amour infini” [blue summer evenings, its coolness, endless love], Sensation 1–6. TSE (on Dadaism, loosely): “It prefers in fact, things which are not art, because the sensation of enjoying something ugly is more amusing than the worn out enjoyment of something beautiful · · · and in the end, if we pursue only sensation, we shall cease to have even sensation”, Modern Tendencies in Poetry (1920). Lytton Strachey “has invented new sensations from history, as Bergson has invented new sensations from metaphysics”, London Letter in Dial Aug 1921. TSE’s final Clark Lecture: “Humanity reaches its higher civilisation levels not chiefly by improvement of thought or by increase and variety of sensation, but by the extent of co-operation between acute sensation and acute thought”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 220–21.
I
I 1 The little negro girl who lives across the alley: for “The married girl who lives across the street”, see headnote to The Love Song of St. Sebastian.
I 3 formulae: OED “formula” 1a: “A set form of words · · · to be used on some ceremonial occasion”. TSE: “to reduce the world to a set of formulae is to let it slip through our fingers in a fine dust”, The Relativity of the Moral Judgment (1915). Of Paul Elmer More: “The fundamental beliefs of an intellectual conservatism, that man requires an askesis, a formula to be imposed upon him from above”, An American Critic (1916). “The true critic is a scrupulous avoider of formulae · · · The things of which we are collectively certain, we may say our common formulae, are certainly not true”, Knowledge and Experience 164–65. “The world is not quite given up to diplomacy, | Combinations and finding of formulas”, Choruses from “The Rock” VI after 34 variant [2–3].
I 4 Geraniums: see headnote to Rhapsody on a Windy Night for TSE’s debt to Laforgue. “a dead geranium · · · sunless dry geraniums”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 12, 63 (here: “Withered and dry”, 10).
[Poem I 241 · Textual History II 570]
I 7–8 smell · · · street: “smells of chestnuts in the streets”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 65.
I 9–13 Geraniums geraniums | Withered and dry | Long laid by | In the sweepings of the memory | | The little negro girl: Apollinaire: “yeux d’une mulâtresse · · · Et les roses de l’électricité s’ouvrent encore | Dans le jardin de ma mémoire” [the eyes of a mulatto woman · · · and the roses of electricity still open themselves in the garden of my memory], J’ai eu le courage [I have had the courage] (Nov–Dec 1908).
I 10, 12 Withered · · · memory: Shelley: “votive wreaths of withered memory”, Epipsychidion 4. dry · · · sweepings: Tennyson: “so I triumphed ere my passion sweeping through me left me dry”, Locksley Hall 131.
I 13–14 girl · · · Brings a geranium from Sunday school: Laforgue: “Les Jeunes Filles inviolables et frêles | Descendent vers la petite chapelle” [The frail inviolable Young Ladies descend toward the little chapel], Dimanches: C’est l’automne [Sundays: It’s autumn] 9–10, quoted in The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 214–15 (Clark Lecture VIII); see note to First Caprice in North Cambridge 1.
following I 14 in draft She is very sure of God: Symons 57–58, on Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: “He affirms; he ‘believes in soul, is very sure of God;’ requires no witness to the spiritual world of which he is always the inhabitant; and is content to lose his way in the material world, brushing off its mud from time to time with a disdainful gesture, as he goes on his way (to apply a significant word of Pater) ‘like one on a secret errand.’” In the same chapter: “‘I am far from sure,’ wrote Verlaine, ‘that the philosophy of Villiers will not one day become the formula of our century’”, Symons 41 (TSE: “formulae of God”, 3). Bacchus and Ariadne ends “I am sure”.
II.
Title, II 1 Easter · · · Daffodils: Housman: “And bear from hill and valley | The daffodil away | That dies on Easter day”, A Shropshire Lad XXIX. TSE to Miss St. Clare Byrne, 7 Apr 1931: “Housman was certainly a great influence twenty or thirty years ago, and I only just escaped his influence myself.” On The Name and Nature of Poetry: “‘I have seldom,’ he says, ‘written poetry unless I was rather out of health.’ I believe that I understand that sentence. If I do, it is a guarantee—if any guarantee of that nature is wanted—of the quality of Mr. Housman’s poetry”, Housman on Poetry (1933). To Cyril Clemens, 8 July 1936: “I have never been a very warm admirer of Mr. Housman’s poetry.” On a copy of the drawing she had made of TSE delivering the Clark Lectures at Trinity, Cambridge, TSE’s sister-in-law Theresa noted, that at dinner “Housman sat at high table, an honor to T.S.E.”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 16.
II 1, 3 Daffodils · · · The cool secluded room Van Wyck Brooks: “the kind of criticism which one receives from a bowl of daffodils on one’s desk or the breeze that rustles in the window curtains”, The Wine of the Puritans 27.
II 1, 9 Daffodils · · · imagination: in Oxf Bk of English Verse, Quiller-Couch printed Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” as Daffodils among “Poems of the Imagination”.
[Poem I 241–42 · Textual History II 570]
II 2–3, 7 sunlight fills · · · cool · · · room · · · perfume: Keats: “Filling the chilly room with perfume light”, The Eve of St. Agnes 275.
II 4 Swept and set in order: Luke 11: 25, the house “swept and garnished”. TSE: “I have swept the floors and garnished the altars”, Choruses from “The Rock” III 45. Herbert: “Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws”, The Elixir 19. set in order: Exodus 39: 37–38: “even with the lamps to be set in order · · · the oil for light · · · the sweet incense” (TSE: “sunlight · · · sweet perfume”, II 2, 7). TSE: “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” The Waste Land [V] 425 (see note).
II 4–5 in order— | Smelling: Paradise Regained II 351: “That fragrant smell diffused, in order stood”.
II 5 Smelling of earth and rain: Herbert: “I once more smell the dew and rain”, The Flower 38, likewise rhyming with “again”. TSE praised Herbert’s stanza as “itself a miracle of phrasing”, George Herbert 26. Tennyson: “Smelling of musk and of insolence”, Maud I [vi] 234 (TSE: “insistent sweet perfume”, II 7). TSE: “smelling of vegetation”, Journey of the Magi 22.
II 6–7 again | The insistent: “returns like the insistent out-of-tune”, Portrait of a Lady II 16.
II 7 perfume: stressed here on the second syllable (unlike I 6).
II 9–10 Irritate · · · the nerves: Hawthorne: “It irritated my nerves; it affected me with a kind of heart-sickness”, The Blithedale Romance ch. XVIII. TSE to his mother, 31 Oct 1920: “I have simply not had the time to do a single piece of work, and when one has in mind a great many things that one wants to do, that irritates the nerves more and more.” the imagination | Or the nerves: Henry James: “the imagination, for the nerves”, New York: Social Notes V in The American Scene. Symons 24, of Gérard de Nerval: “Every artist lives a double life, in which he is for the most part conscious of the illusions of the imagination. He is conscious also of the illusions of the nerves, which he shares with every man of imaginative mind.” Similarly, Symons, A New Art of the Stage: “The imagination has been caught; a suggestion has been given which strikes straight to ‘the nerves of delight’; and be sure those nerves, that imagination, will do the rest”, Studies in Seven Arts (1906) 354. TSE: “threw the nerves in patterns on a screen”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 105 (see note).
Ode (“For the hour that is left us Fair Harvard, with thee”)
Written for Harvard Commencement, 1910. Printed in Harvard Class Day, programme of eve
nts for 24 June 1910, beneath a photogravure of Memorial Hall, and in Harvard Advocate the same day. Also printed in the Boston Evening Transcript and Boston Evening Herald. Under the headline “St. Louisans in Class Day” and subheading “T. S. Elliott’s Ode is Sung by Harvard Graduates”, the St. Louis Republic or Post Dispatch reported: “The exercises in Sanders’ Theater began with the singing of the class ode by Thomas Stearns Elliott of St. Louis, class odist.” (The tune was that of Fair Harvard.) Reprinted in Adv 1948, Undergraduate Poems, Early Youth (1950)+.
[Poems I 242 · Textual History II 570]
Hayward: “As ‘Odist’ of the Harvard Class of 1910 T. S. Eliot recited his ‘Class Ode’ in the Sanders Theater at Harvard in the forenoon of Class Day. The ‘Poet’ of the Harvard Class of 1910 was Edward Eyre Hunt of Mechanicsburg, Ohio.”
1 the hour that is left us: Emerson: “To fill the hour,—that is happiness”, Experience in Essays: Second Series. For Emerson, a Harvard man, see note to Sweeney Erect 25–26.
2 the importunate years: George Hodges: “the importunate months”, The Human Nature of the Saints (1904). Hodges was Dean of the Episcopal Theological School at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
7 ambitions that sprang at thy feet: A. R. Eagar: “amaranths sprang at my feet”, The Invocation of Venus (1877).
13 efface and destroy: a pious commonplace since the 18th century.
16 to thine and to thee: poetic diction. Edward B. Osborne: “A new page is opening · · · to thine and to thee”, New Year’s Address, 1871, in Letters from the Woods (1893). S. B. Rockwell: “Threat’ning ruin and death to thine and to thee”, Apostrophe to Colonel E. D. Baker in Green Mountain Poets ed. Albert J. Sanborn (1872).
Silence
Published in March Hare.
Dated June 1910 in Notebook.
Title Silence: Laforgue on Baudelaire: “La Beauté c’est le Silence éternel. Tout notre tapage de passions, de discussions, d’orages, d’art, c’est pour, par le bruit, nous faire croire que le Silence n’existe pas. Mais quand nous retombons las, nous l’écoutons restagner de partout et nous sommes plus tristes, pas assez forts pour un tapage éternel ou pour nous faire au Silence éternel” [Beauty is eternal Silence. All our uproar of passions, of arguments, of storms, of art, is in order (by means of the noise) to make us believe that Silence does not exist. But when we lapse into being tired, we hear it become stagnant again everywhere, and we are more sad, not strong enough for an eternal uproar or to conduct ourselves in the face of an eternal Silence], Littérature in Mélanges posthumes (1903) 116–17 (tr. eds). TSE: “the heart of light, the silence”, The Waste Land [I] 41.
[Poems I 242–43 · Textual History II 570–71]
Title, 15 Silence · · · I am terrified: Pascal: “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraye” [The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me], Pensées 206. Pater quoted this in Studies in the History of the Renaissance ch. I, and TSE marked it in his copy. TSE: “For chance is merely absence of explanation, and a gigantic hand organ of atoms, grinding out predictable variations on the same tune, would fill the vast silences which idealism leaves empty”, The Relativity of the Moral Judgment (1915). TSE dissented from I. A. Richards (“The inconceivable immensity of the Universe”): “It was not, we remember, the ‘immense spaces’ themselves but their eternal silence that terrified Pascal. With a definite religious background this is intelligible. But the effect of popular astronomy books (like Sir James Jeans’s) upon me is only of the insignificance of vast space”, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 133 (referring to Jeans’s The Mysterious Universe, 1930). For “the vacant interstellar spaces”, see East Coker III 2 and note.
1 Along the city streets: “If he walked in city streets”, The Death of Saint Narcissus 18.
1–3 Along the city streets · · · high tide · · · the garrulous waves of life: Tennyson: “There where the long street roars, hath been | The stillness of the central sea”, In Memoriam CXXIII 3–4. Dr. Johnson: “Why, Sir, Fleet-street has a very animated appearance; but I think the full tide of human existence is at Charing-cross”, Boswell II 337 (2 Apr 1775). Hawthorne: “From the street came the tumult of the pavements · · · I felt a hesitation about plunging into this muddy tide of human activity”, The Blithedale Romance ch. XVII; see headnote to Morning at the Window (and its “waves of fog”, 5).
3–4 waves · · · Shrink: “and hushed the shrunken seas”, Sweeney Among the Nightingales 10 (“hushed” being a contrast to these “garrulous waves”). Paradise Lost XI 845–46, after the Flood: “the fresh wave · · · their flowing shrink”. divide: as in the miracle at the Red Sea; Paradise Lost VII 262–63, which—like TSE’s lines—has “divide” at the line-division: “let it divide | The waters from the waters”.
4, 9–10 divide · · · justified. | The seas of experience: a poem by TSE’s mother, Charlotte Eliot, has: “No longer shall the law thy tribes divide, | Through faith and love shall all be justified. | Let me go forth, O Lord!” Saint Barnabas: A Missionary Hymn 8–10 (undated, King’s).
5 With a thousand incidents: Henri Bergson: “notre vie psychologique est pleine d’imprévu. Mille incidents surgissent” [our psychic life is full of the unforeseen. A thousand incidents arise], L’Evolution créatrice ch. 1 (in the same paragraph as “la masse fluide · · · un écoulement sans fin” [the fluid mass · · · an endless flow]; TSE: “tide · · · waves · · · seas”, 2–3, 10). Bergson’s Introduction à la metaphysique has “les milles incidents”; also “indivisible” (TSE: “divide”, 4). Shelley: “with a thousand motions”, Prometheus Unbound IV 247.
6 Vexed and debated: OED “vex” 7: “To subject (a matter) to prolonged or severe examination or discussion; to debate at excessive length”; citing first Donne, Biathanatos: “The best way to finde the truth in this matter, was to debate and vexe it”.
7–8 the hour · · · the · · · hour: “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death | Pray for us now and at the hour of our death”, Ash-Wednesday I 40–41.
9 life is justified: Psalm 143: 2: “For in thy sight shall no man living be justified.” Nietzsche: “only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified”, The Birth of Tragedy §5.
10, 12 experience · · · So immediate: TSE’s Knowledge and Experience (completed 1916, pub. 1964) ch. 1, “On Our Knowledge of Immediate Experience”.
10–11 The seas of experience | That were so broad and deep: Arnold: “The Sea of Faith | Was once, too, at the full”, Dover Beach 21–22 (David Chinitz, personal communication).
11–12 That were so broad and deep, | So immediate and steep: Paradise Lost VII 288–89, after the dividing of the waters (see note to 3–4): “So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low | Down sunk a hollow bottom broad and deep”.
[Poem I 243 · Textual History II 571]
12–14 and steep · · · what you will: Donne: “On a huge hill, | Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will”, Satire III 79–80 (David Coleman, personal communication).
16 There is nothing else beside: in Laforgue’s Le Concile féerique, Le Monsieur ends his set speech: “Vrai, il n’y a pas autre chose” [Truly, there is nothing else]; the setting of the playlet, announced at the beginning, is “Nuit d’Etoiles” [Night of Stars]. Laforgue adapted the line for the end of his poem Esthétique: “Car il n’y a pas autre chose” [Because there is nothing else].
Mandarins
Published in March Hare.
Dated Aug 1910—“the 4” (poems under this title) in Notebook.
Title Mandarins: Laforgue mentions mandarins three times, once as “le Grand Mandarin”, in his Salomé, which begins: “II faisait ce jour-là deux mille canicules qu’une simple révolution rythmique des Mandarins du Palais avait porté le premier Tétrarque · · · sur ce trône” [Two thousand dog-stars ago that very day, a simple rhythmic revolution of the Palace Mandarins had placed the first Tetrarch on the throne]. Gustave Kahn: “vos oiseaux, vos tasses e
t vos mandarins” [your birds, your cups and your mandarins], Votre domaine est terre de petite fée [Your Realm is the Land of the Little Fairy] (printed in the anthology Poètes d’aujourd’hui, for which see headnote to “Poems (1920)”, 4. WHAT FRANCE MEANT TO TSE). In a run of four stanzas in Byron’s Don Juan (XIII xxxiii–xxxvi), the Mandarin is taken as a type of cultivated indifference. In the issue of the Harvard Advocate that printed TSE’s Circe’s Palace, 25 Nov 1908, an essay by W. W. [Watson White] described Il Teatro Marionetti in Boston, quoting twice from Hamlet: “But ‘the play’s the thing’ and we are here to see it. Presently, announced by a burst of chords from the mandolins, the curtain laboriously and unevenly ascends. Behold! There stands a martial figure ‘armed · · · cap-a-pie,’ its remarkably small head turned so as to present the audience with a staring, blank expression in shiny paint. Firmly planted on ridiculously fat legs—spread wide apart—it brandishes its tin sword.” (OED “mandarin”: “obs. variant of mandolin”.) For W. W.’s essay, see note to Convictions 14. Irving Babbitt on Gautier: “As time went on the means employed by the different schools to arrive at a titillation of the æsthetic faculty became increasingly complex and incomprehensible to the uninitiated. ‘Literature,’ wrote M. Lemaître at the height of the symbolistic movement, ‘tends more and more to become a mysterious diversion of mandarins’”, The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912) 308.