The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 171
4–5 Indifferent · · · Indifferent: frequent in Symons’s early poems. TSE: “With your air indifferent and imperious”, Conversation Galante 16. “And the eyes watchful, waiting, perceiving, indifferent”, Coriolan I. Triumphal March 31.
5–6 sudden rains · · · last year’s garden plots:
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
The Waste Land [I] 71–73
last year’s: frequent in Swinburne: “last year’s rose” (The Two Dreams), “last year’s leaf” (Thalassius), “last year’s birds” and “last year’s roses” (Pastiche).
5, 8–10 sudden rains · · · down the street · · · flowerpots · · · broken: “The showers beat | On broken blinds and chimney-pots, | And at the corner of the street”, Preludes I 9–11.
6, 9, 10 garden plots · · · flowerpots · · · broken: Tennyson: “With blackest moss the flower-plots · · · broken”, Mariana 1–5 (often misquoted as “flower-pots”).
8 Careless: including OED 1: “Free from care, anxiety, or apprehension. (Since c. 1650, archaic, poetic, or nonce-word).”
10 broken flutes: OED “flute” 4: “Arch. A channel or furrow in a pillar”; but the musical sense may be heard (Portrait of a Lady II 17: “a broken violin”). André Salmon: “La flûte s’est brisée sur mes dents, | La flûte est brisée! La flûte est brisée! | C’était un tuyau d’ivoire et rien dedans. | Mais le vent qui passait? · · · Le vent a passé. | | Mes dents l’ont brisée la flûte d’ivoire | Et le vent chanteur a fui je ne sais où” [The flute is cracked upon my teeth, the flute is cracked! The flute is cracked! It’s an ivory pipe with nothing inside but the wind which was passing? · · · The wind has passed. My teeth have cracked the ivory flute and the singing wind has gone I know not where], La flûte brisée (1905) 1–6. The poem ends: “Tout ce qui n’a pas fui avec le vent | Je l’ai brisé avec mes dents” [Everything that has not gone with the wind I have cracked with my teeth]. Writing to Scofield Thayer, 14 Feb 1920, on poets in France, TSE listed Salmon among “the more important men there”.
Ballade pour la grosse Lulu
Published in March Hare.
Dated July 1911, ms1. Grover Smith 30: “About 1913 a piece called The Ballade of the Outlook” was seen by Conrad Aiken. Ballade pour la grosse Lulu (each verse of which begins “The Outlook · · ·”) was untraced when Grover Smith wrote, so Aiken was presumably his source. For dealings with Wyndham Lewis over the poem, see headnote to The Triumph of Bullshit.
[Poems I 260 · Textual History II 577]
Title] Villon, La Ballade de la Grosse Margot (title). Lulu the woman of the streets was made famous by Frank Wedekind’s Lulu play Erdgeist (1909) (Loretta Johnson).
1–2 The Outlook · · · Lyman Abbot: Abbott (1835–1922), pastor and editor of the NY weekly The Outlook (formerly The Christian Union). “He championed a modern rational outlook in American Christianity”, The New Columbia Encyclopaedia. The jacket flap of the first US edition of 1925, issued in 1932, featured an endorsement from The Outlook: “In Mr. Eliot we have one of those renewals of poetry which happen roughly once in a century, and which spring from direct and deliberately made contact with the common life and speech of the moment.”
4 God is in his Firmament: Browning: “God’s in his heaven— | All’s right with the world!” Pippa Passes I 227–28.
5–6 “300 Boers | On Roosevelt have paid a call”: two Boer representatives were received at the White House by Theodore Roosevelt on 5 Mar 1902. Roosevelt, US President 1901–09, was Contributing Editor of The Outlook and had an article in each of the five issues of July 1911. In a letter to Maynard Keynes, 23 Mar 1945, TSE mentioned having kept “a scrap-book of the Boer War”.
8 the Whore House Ball: “the band struck up ‘The Whore House Ball’”, The Columbiad st. 15. The White House Ball was a regular fixture in the fashionable calendar.
10–12 Booker T. · · · “How I set the nigger free!”: Up from Slavery (1901), the autobiography of Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), was serialised in The Outlook. Between 6 May and 1 July 1911 it had published The Man Farthest Down, his series of six articles ending: “in Europe the man farthest down is woman”.
10 variant Edward Bok: editor of The Ladies’ Home Journal 1889–1919.
11 “Up from Possum Stew!”: see headnote to Practical Cats, 1. POSSUM.
13–14 “the learned horse | Jim Key, was murdered in his stall”: having apparently been trained by his owner Bill Key (a former slave) to read, write, use a telephone and perform other marvels, the learned horse Beautiful Jim Key performed in front of millions, 1897–1906, and was the biggest earner at the St. Louis World’s Fair. He died peacefully in 1912.
18–20 Rockefellar · · · Money · · · “Jesus as a Savings Bank”: John D. Rockefeller famously said “God gave me my money.” His gift of $1.5 million to U. Chicago for the building of a chapel was reported by The Outlook 31 Dec 1910.
26 Harvard’s great ex-president: Charles W. Eliot, president of the university 1869–1909. A letter from him to TSE, 25 July 1919, is printed in Letters 1. He was related not only to TSE but to the Lymans, and so to the Roosevelts. While he headed Harvard, Theodore Roosevelt was a student there, Booker T. Washington was awarded an honorary degree, and John D. Rockefeller helped to build the medical school.
[Poem I 260–61 · Textual History II 577–78]
The Little Passion: From “An Agony in the Garret”
Published in March Hare.
Assigned to 1915 by Gallup 1970 37. The hand of ms1, however, resembles that of poems from Paris, 1911 (when TSE lived in a garret), and the diction recalls that of Goldfish, Inside the gloom, He said: this universe is very clever, Portrait of a Lady, Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night, all poems of 1910–11 (see notes below).
The stifling frustration of the streets is recalled in a letter to Aiken on the last day of 1914 (see note to 2), but TSE is unlikely to have used “our souls are spread out” and “washed-out” later than the publication of Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night in Blast in July 1915 (see below, notes to ms1 16 and 19, 21).
In Notebook, ms2 follows Suppressed Complex and Morning at the Window and precedes twenty-eight blank leaves and three stubs.
An alternative title to the putative sequence An Agony in the Garret may have been The Descent from the Cross. TSE to Aiken, 25 July 1914: “I enclose some stuff—the thing I showed you some time ago, and some of the themes for the Descent from the Cross or whatever I may call it” (“cross”, 7, 15). To Otto Heller, 5 Oct 1923 on The Waste Land: “The poem is neither a success nor a failure—simply a struggle. Practically, one crucifies oneself and entertains drawing rooms and lounges” (see headnote to The Waste Land, 9. AFTER PUBLICATION).
Title The Little Passion: Corbière’s Petit mort pour rire [Little dead one for fun] is among the poems TSE transcribed on leaves laid into the Notebook (see headnote to Tristan Corbière). Passion · · · Agony: TSE corrected the Theological Editor of NEW, 29 Mar 1934: “when he speaks of ‘agony and passion’ he is transferring to the Incarnation two terms which are properly applicable to the Atonement”. Agony in: “After the frosty silence in the gardens | After the agony in stony places”, The Waste Land [V] 323–24. The Family Reunion I iii: “The agony in the dark”; and II i: “The agony in the curtained bedroom”. Little Gidding had in draft “The agony and the solitary vigil” (II 67–96, first venture in verse [3]). in the Garret: “They did not crucify him in an attic”, He said: this universe is very clever 11. “in a little low dry garret”, The Waste Land [III] 194. Mantegna, The Agony in the Garden, National Gallery, London.
1 Upon those stifling August nights: “Always the August evenings come”, Goldfish I 1.
2 I know he used to walk the streets: to Conrad Aiken, 31 Dec 1914: “One walks about the street with one’s desires, and one’s refinement rises up l
ike a wall whenever opportunity approaches.”
3, 5, 7 the lines of lights · · · the lines of lights · · · cross: Byron: “The line of lights too up to Charing Cross”, Don Juan XI xxvi, with immediately a description of those hanged on lamp-posts during the French Revolution. cross: “He said: ‘this crucifixion was dramatic’”, He said: this universe is very clever 9.
[Poem I 262 · Textual History II 578]
ms1 (printed in Textual History)
1 those ideas: (Gallup 1968 erroneously reads “these ideas”.) “Are these ideas right or wrong?” Portrait of a Lady II 43.
1, 3 ideas · · · seldom well digested: “Are not all these questions | Brought up by indigestions?” Inside the gloom 25–26.
6 That spun around him like a wheel: with the martyrdom in 15–16 suggesting St. Catherine. “The inhabitants of Hampstead are bound forever on the wheel”, The Death of the Duchess I 9. “London, your people is bound upon the wheel”, WLComposite 340.
7–8 “I feel | As if I’d been a long time dead”: Shelley: “I walked about like a corpse alive”, Rosalind and Helen 312. TSE: “A man lay flat upon his back, and cried | ‘It seems that I have been a long time dead’”, So through the evening, through the violet air 24–25. To Aiken, 31 Dec 1914: “In Oxford I have the feeling that I am not quite alive—that my body is walking about with a bit of my brain inside it, and nothing else.” The Family Reunion II iii: “It takes so many years | To learn that one is dead!”
16 our souls are spread: “His soul stretched tight”, Preludes IV 1.
17 across the bar: Tennyson, Crossing the Bar (title).
18–19 hopeless · · · withered face: Wordsworth: “his withered face. | Reverence the hope”, The Old Cumberland Beggar 176–77.
19, 21 face · · · A washed-out: “A washed-out smallpox cracks her face”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 56.
21 variant unconscious half-disgrace: James Thomson: “Unconscious of the deep disgrace”, In the Room 190, with “hopeless” 198 (TSE, 18); for the poem see note to The Waste Land [III] 215–18.
The Burnt Dancer
Published in March Hare.
Dated June 1914, ts1.
[Poems I 262 · Textual History II 578–79]
Title] St. John of the Cross: “Of little use are its eyes to a moth, since desire for the beauty of the light dazzles it and leads it into the flame”, Ascent of Mount Carmel I viii 3. Shelley: “The desire of the moth for the star, | Of the night for the morrow”, One word is too often profaned 13–14; “sweet Lamp! my moth-like Muse has burned its wings”, Epipsychidion 53; “plumes of fire, | And towards the lodestar of my one desire, | I flitted, like a dizzy moth · · · A radiant death, a fiery sepulchre, | As if it were a lamp of earthly flame”, Epipsychidion 218–24. Symons:
I am the torch, she saith, and what to me
If the moth die of me? I am the flame
Of Beauty, and I burn that all may see
Beauty, and I have neither joy nor shame,
But live with that dear life of perfect fire
Which is to men the death of their desire.
Modern Beauty (1899) 1–6
(TSE: “the end of his desire”, 36.) TSE: “but became a dancer before God”, The Death of Saint Narcissus 17. “that refining fire | Where you must move in measure, like a dancer”, Little Gidding II 92–93.
Epigraph sotta la pioggia dell’ aspro martiro: [beneath the rain of the sharp torment], Inf XVI 6 (Temple Classics: “sotto”). In the copy given to him by his mother, TSE scored the line. The Argument of the Canto makes clear that this is “burning rain”. Shelley: “the agony of the flame”, The Revolt of Islam X xxi.
1–2 flame | A black moth: Bhagavad-Gita xi 29: “As moths with exceeding speed pass into a lighted fire to perish, so pass the worlds with exceeding speed into Thy mouths to perish.” (The previous verse has “Thy blazing mouths”, and the next verse “flaming mouths”; TSE: “the ragged teeth of flame”, 17.) For the Gita see headnotes to I am the Resurrection and the Life and The Dry Salvages III.
3 Caught in the circle of desire: as Arnaut Daniel is caught in the circle of lust, Purg. XXVI 133–48, and Paolo and Francesca in the circle of the carnal sinners, Inf. V 73–142.
3, 5 desire · · · that do not tire: Tennyson: “But mine the love that will not tire, | And, born of love, the vague desire”, In Memoriam CX 18–19. Cavalcanti tr. Rossetti: “The devastating flame · · · desire · · · that shall not tire · · · fire”, Canzone: He laments the Presumption and Incontinence of his Youth 1, 4, 8–9 (in The Early Italian Poets). Christina G. Rossetti: “O Love exhaust, fulfilling my desire: | Uphold me with the strength that cannot tire, | Nerve me to labour till Thou bid me rest, | Kindle my fire from Thine unkindled fire”, Later Life 5.
4 Expiates: see letter to Hayward, 27 Aug 1942, in note to Little Gidding II 92.
5–13 wings · · · golden · · · pride · · · mirthless dance and · · · revel: Paradise Lost IV 763–70: “golden · · · lights | His constant lamp · · · wings · · · loveless, joyless · · · court amours | Mixed dance, or wanton mask · · · proud”.
6, 28 Distracted from · · · but not with human meaning: “Distracted from distraction by distraction | Filled with fancies and empty of meaning”, Burnt Norton III 12–13.
9, 10 a world too strange for: “Too strange to each other for misunderstanding · · · Between two worlds become much like each other”, Little Gidding II 51, 69. Pater: “in a world too coarse”, in Studies in the History of the Renaissance ch. V, with “strange” in the previous sentence.
13 mirthless dance: Chaucer: “Daunseth he murye [merry] that is myrtheles”, The Parlement of Foules 592.
[Poem I 262 · Textual History II 579]
14, 41 O danse danse mon papillon noir: David Augustin de Bruéys: “Ma femme, chasse, chasse ces papillons noirs” [My lady, chase, chase these black butterflies], L’Avocat Patelin [The Crafty Lawyer] II iii. Laforgue: “On y danse, on y danse”, Complainte de cette bonne Lune 3, after the nursery rhyme Sur le pont d’Avignon. papillon noir: in the plural, papillons noirs are dark thoughts. Flaubert: “Elle le regarda brûler · · · les corolles de papier, racornies, se balançant le long de la plaque comme des papillons noirs, enfin s’envolèrent par la cheminée” [She watched it burn · · · the shrivelled paper petals hovered along the fireback like black butterflies and finally flew away up the chimney], Madame Bovary penultimate paragraph of pt. I. Flaubert to Hippolyte Taine, 1 Dec 1866: “ce qu’on appelle ‘les papillons noirs’, c’est-à-dire ces rondelles de satin que certaines personnes voient flotter dans l’air, quand le ciel est grisâtre et qu’elles ont la vue fatiguée” [what are called “black butterflies”, which is to say those discs of satin that certain people see floating in the air, when the sky is grey and they have tired sight] (Henry Gott, personal communication). TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934) lists among the “Paper Books” both “Flaubert Correspondence” and “Flaubert Corresp. 2 vols.” Verlaine: “Et le chagrin mettait un papillon noir | A son cher front tout brûlant d’orfèvreries” [And sorrow set a black butterfly on his beloved forehead, burning so with the works of goldsmiths], Crimen Amoris 26–27 (Florian Gargaillo, personal communication).
15 odours of your name: Romeo and Juliet II ii (First Quarto): “That which we call a rose | By any other name would smell as sweet.”
15–16 odours · · · Mozambique: Paradise Lost IV 160–62: “past | Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow | Sabaean odours from the spicy shore.”
16 Nicobar: the Nicobar Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, often mentioned by Frazer in The Golden Bough.
15, 17 name · · · teeth of flame: Wilde: “teeth of flame · · · name”, The Ballad of Reading Gaol VI i.
15, 20–21 name · · · in little corners | Whimper: Tennyson: “And my own sad name in corners cried”, Maud I [vi] 261.
17–18 the ragged teeth of · · · upon the waters: Symons: “he saw | The ragged teeth of the sharp Apennine
s | Shut on the sea”, Giovanni Malatesta at Rimini (1906) 14–16. Symons’s poem is about Paolo and Francesca (see note to 3). flame · · · perfumed · · · upon the waters: Antony and Cleopatra II ii: “Burned on the water · · · so perfumed”. For this speech by Enobarbus, see notes to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 11–12 and The Waste Land [II] 77–110.
18 perfumed oil: Sir Edwin Arnold: “perfumed oils”, The Light of Asia Book the Fourth 83. For TSE’s admiration for the poem, see note to The Waste Land [V] 399–422. oil upon the waters: Oxf Dictionary of English Proverbs “to pour oil upon the waters”: “to smooth matters over”. upon the waters: Tennyson, Enoch Arden 590 and 592, describing the tropical island (TSE: “tropic”, 15).
18–19 upon the waters · · · secret: Ecclesiastes 11: 1: “Cast thy bread upon the waters”. Proverbs 9: 17: “stolen waters are sweet, And bread eaten in secret is pleasant”.
20 Children’s voices in little corners: see note to Landscapes I. New Hampshire 1, “Children’s voices in the orchard”.
23 Agony nearest to delight: John Davidson: “The Seraph at his head was Agony: | Delight, more terrible, stood at his feet”, Insomnia (1905) 10–11.