[Poem I 263 · Textual History II 579]
24–25 Dance fast dance faster · · · mortal disaster: Poe: “whom unmerciful Disaster | Followed fast and followed faster · · · perfume”, The Raven 63–64, 79 (TSE: “perfumed”, 18). Christina G. Rossetti: “He danced indeed, but danced in dudgeon, | Capered in fury fast and faster:— | Ah, could he once but hug his master | And perish in one joint disaster!” Brother Bruin 22–25. TSE: “Which, just at a word from his master | Will follow you faster and faster | And tear you limb from limb”, Five-Finger Exercises IV. Lines to Ralph Hodgson Esqre. 5–7. disaster: OED: “f. des- + astre · · · unfavourable aspect of a star or planet” (“evil · · · star”, 11–12).
28 but not with human: Paradise Lost IX 561: “but not with human voice endued” (TSE: “voices”, 20).
30 Within the circle of my brain: Hamlet I v: “Within the book and volume of my brain” (six lines after “globe”).
32 acolyte: OED 1: “Eccl. An inferior officer in the church who · · · performed subordinate duties, as lighting and bearing candles, etc”. The candle duties are stressed throughout the OED instances. of pain: Swinburne’s Dolores has “Our Lady of Pain” concluding every other stanza of the fifty-five.
34 The singèd reveller: Matthew Arnold, The Strayed Reveller (title). reveller: Edward Young: “For other ends they shine, | Than to light revellers from shame to shame”, Night Thoughts IX 679–80. See headnote to Whispers of Immortality.
34–37 fire · · · Losing the end of his desire | Desires completion of his loss: “the death of desire · · · completion”, Little Gidding III 9–11 draft (msA). “fire · · · The culmination of desire”, Little Gidding IV first draft of 1–7 (msA) [2, 4]. fire · · · loss: 1 Corinthians 3: 15: “If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.”
35 Caught on those horns that toss and toss: (i) “horns · · · toss”: those of a bull. “bullocks have horns (and they toss ’em)”, How to Pick a Possum 5. (ii) 1 Kings 2: 28: “caught hold on the horns of the altar”. (iii) the horns of the monster, Daniel 7: 7, and Revelation 17: 16: “And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire” (TSE: “fire · · · horns”, 34–35, and “burn”, 38). Revelation has “golden” (TSE, 7), and “strength” (TSE: “strong”, 33). (iv) Inf. XXVI 85, which TSE quoted in Dante (1929) I:
So Ulysses, unseen in the hornèd wave of flame,
Lo maggior corno della fiamma antica · · ·
The greater horn of the ancient flame.
35, 37 Caught on those horns · · · his loss: “torn on the horn · · · loss”, Ash-Wednesday V 22, VI 4 (Jain 187).
35, 38 Caught on those horns · · · whiter flames: Keats: “I looked upon the altar, and its horns | Whitened with ashes, and its languorous flame”, The Fall of Hyperion I 237–38.
36–37 the end of his desire | Desires completion: Tennyson: “That my desire, like all strongest hopes, | By its own energy fulfilled itself, | Merged in completion?” The Gardener’s Daughter 232–34. the end of his desire: Paradiso XXXIII 46: “al fine di tutti i disii” [the goal of all my longings]. desire | Desires: Luke 22: 15: “With desire! have desired”. Christina G. Rossetti: “Thy Will I will, I Thy desire desire”, A Martyr 34 (rhyming with “fire”, in martyrdom); see note to Ash‑Wednesday VI 30–33, “Our peace in His will”.
[Poem I 263 · Textual History II 579]
37–38 Desires · · · whiter flames that burn: Symons: “I dance, and as I dance | Desires as fires burn white | To fan the flame delight”, The Armenian Dancer 16–18.
38–39 strayed · · · vagrant: Pope, of birds: “Vagrants of air, and unforeboding stray”, Odyssey II 212. vagrant · · · star: Kipling: “vagrant star-dust”, Dedication to Barrack-Room Ballads (in A Choice of Kipling’s Verse). Kipling’s next two lines have: “our world. | | They are purged of pride” (TSE: “world too strange for pride”, 9).
38, 40 burn not · · · return not: Swinburne rhymes, for instance, “know not · · · flow not · · · grow not” (Anima Anceps); “falls not · · · calls not” (A Forsaken Garden); “bent not · · · lent not”, “give not · · · forgive not”, “give not · · · live not” (A Song in Season).
40 broken guest: Donne: “When my grave is broke up againe | Some second ghest to entertaine,” The Relique 1–2. TSE cited Donne’s stanza in Reflections on Contemporary Poetry I (1917), The Metaphysical Poets (1921) and The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 125 (Clark Lecture IV).
Oh little voices of the throats of men
Published in Letters (1988); then March Hare.
Sent in a letter to Conrad Aiken, from Marburg, 25 July 1914, with The Love Song of St. Sebastian. In this ts (which lacks 6), TSE marked the margin in three places. Bracing 1–14, he wrote: “Introduction. To be amplified at the end also”. Beside 15–34, he wrote: “This [added: theme] to recur twice, in variations.” Bracing 37–end, he wrote: “finale to the foregoing”. For subsequent comments to Aiken see headnote to The Love Song of St. Sebastian.
1 little voices: as in two successive poems by Symons in Images of Good and Evil (1899): The Coming of Spring I and September Idyl 2. Verlaine’s “Le choeur des petites voix” (Romances sans paroles I 6) was translated by Symons (1913) as “Little voices that sing” (TSE: “song”, 2). In The Symbolist Movement in Literature 155, Symons quoted, in translation, from Maeterlinck “the little voice of light” (from Le tragique quotidien). For TSE on frequent use of “little”, see note to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 1–2.
3–4 hands · · · rend the beautiful and curse: Richard III I ii: “These nails should rend that beauty” with “Curse” six lines later and, a dozen lines further on, “Why dost thou spit at me?” (TSE: “spit”, 12).
3–8 men · · · undirected feet · · · ways · · · paths: Proverbs 3: 6: “In all thy ways acknowledge him, And he shall direct thy paths”. Proverbs 16: 9: “A man’s heart deviseth his way: But the Lord directeth his steps.”
5 Impatient tireless · · · feet: Sir Edwin Arnold: “To tread its paths with patient, stainless feet”, The Light of Asia, Book the Fourth (TSE: “paths”, 8).
5, 7–9 feet · · · heaven and hell · · · paths · · · do well: Rossetti: “those stairs | Which, of all paths his feet knew well, | Were steeper found than Heaven or Hell”, Dante at Verona, closing lines (TSE: “stair”, 48).
[Poems I 263–64 · Textual History II 579–80]
7 frontier of heaven and hell: Symons 20–21 on Gérard de Nerval: “so sharp an awakening was but like the passage from one state to another, across that little bridge of one step which lies between heaven and hell, to which he was so used in his dreams.” Pascal: “Entre nous, et l’enfer ou le ciel, il n’y a que la vie entre deux, qui est la chose du monde le plus fragile” [Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world], Pensées 213.
7, 11–12 hell · · · pleasure and pain · · · wind · · · rain: Paradise Lost II 586–89: “Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain. | Beyond this flood a frozen continent | Lies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms | Of whirlwind and dire hail”.
8 divers: OED 3: “Now somewhat archaic, but well known in legal and scriptural phraseology”.
10 to keep the ways you keep: “to meet the faces that you meet”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 27.
11–13 balance pleasure and pain · · · rain · · · sun: Tennyson, Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere 1–4:
Like souls that balance joy and pain,
With tears and smiles from heaven again
The maiden Spring upon the plain
Came in a sun-lit fall of rain.
(TSE: “heaven”, 7); with “fear of wrong”, 13 (TSE: “ways of wrong”, 6). Bradley discussed “a balance of pain” and “a balance of pleasure”, and concluded: “In the worl
d, which we observe, an impartial scrutiny will discover more pleasure than pain, though it is difficult to estimate, and easy to exaggerate, the amount of the balance”, Appearance and Reality ch. XIV, XVII.
12 blow against the wind and spit against the rain: Blake: “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau! | Mock on, mock on—’tis all in vain! | You throw the sand against the wind, | And the wind blows it back again”, Mock on 1–4. blow against the wind: Paradise Lost XI 311–13: “But prayer against his absolute decree | No more avails than breath against the wind | Blown stifling back on him that breathes it forth.”
13 more real than: Shelley: “Forms more real than living man”, Prometheus Unbound I 1748.
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15 Appearances appearances: religious, philosophical, artistic and social.
(i) 1 Samuel 16: 7: “for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart”. John 7: 24: “Judge not according to the appearance”.
(ii) Kant: “For the truth is, that, however far we may carry our investigations into the world of sense, we never can come into contact with aught but appearances”, The Philosophy of Kant ed. John Watson 37; underlined by TSE in his copy. TSE on F. H. Bradley, notably on Appearance and Reality: “The attitude of science, then, involves the constitution of a larger and larger limbo of appearance · · · Economics is appearance for the biologist, biology for the chemist. Similarly, social psychology is appearance to the individual psychologist”; “This seems to me essentially the position of the critical philosophy: the thing is known through its appearances, but as soon as the distinction is made appearance and thing fall apart, and appearance replaces thing as a point of attention”, Knowledge and Experience 73, 96. “Whenever we desire to explain we will think of a reality which causes the appearance, but as soon as we have clearly formulated it, it turns out to be itself appearances”, Cause as Ideal Construction (1914). On Bradley’s understanding of appearance, see Richard Wollheim, F. H. Bradley (1959) 211–32.
(iii) Symons 170: “Knowing so much less than nothing, for we are entrapped in smiling and many-coloured appearances”. TSE, Introduction to G. Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire (1930): “in a work of art, as truly as anywhere, reality only exists in and through appearances · · · The work of Shakespeare is like life itself something to be lived through. If we lived it completely we should need no interpretation; but on our plane of appearances our interpretations themselves are a part of our living.” Turnbull Lecture III: “The artist is the only genuine and profound revolutionist, in the following sense. The world always has, and always will, tend to substitute appearance for reality. The artist, being always alone, being heterodox when everyone else is orthodox, and orthodox when everyone else is heterodox, is the perpetual upsetter of conventional values, the restorer of the real”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 288–89.
(iv) TSE’s brother Henry to their mother, 12 Dec 1921: “he spoke of always having to be keyed up, alert to the importance of appearances, always wearing a mask among people · · · like a man playing a part.”
15, 21–22 Appearances appearances · · · Contradiction · · · contradiction: Nietzsche, on Raphael: “we shall then have to regard the dream as an appearance of appearance · · · Raphael · · · has represented to us this depotentiating of appearance to appearance · · · the ‘appearance’ here is the counter-appearance of eternal Contradiction, the father of things”, The Birth of Tragedy §4.
16 world through dialectic: “it is only by an abuse of transcendental dialectic that he can reduce the world to the one or the other”, The Ethics of Green and Sidgwick (1914). On Purgatorio: “It is the philosophy of that world of poetry which we have entered. But with the XXVIIth canto we have left behind the stage of punishment and the stage of dialectic”, Dante (1929) II. dialectic ways: Nietzsche: Kant “entices us into the dialectic by-ways that lead · · · to his ‘categorical imperative’”, Beyond Good and Evil §5. Bradley: “I wish simply to consider what sort of operation is performed by Dialectic, assuming that it has a real way of its own”, The Principles of Logic bk. III, pt. I, ch. ii. TSE: “Much of idealism · · · consists in an attempt to take the delicate and evasive truths of historical and literary criticism · · · and dragoon them into the goose-step of dialectic · · · And in spite of the irresistible current of dialectic, I find myself always returning to the feeling · · · that what we call the physical universe represents something much more real and permanent than all our structures of thought”, The Relativity of the Moral Judgment (1915). “men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, | And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic”, Choruses from “The Rock” VII 28–29.
16–17 world through dialectic ways · · · nights: Paradise Lost III 543–45: “Of all this world at once. As when a scout | Through dark and desert ways with peril gone | All night”.
16–18 the world · · · I · · · questioned restless · · · every · · · where: Shelley: “‘Where?’ —the world’s echo answered ‘where?’ | And in that silence, and in my despair, | I questioned every tongueless wind that flew”, Epipsychidion 234–36.
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17–18 questioned restless nights · · · followed · · · led: “Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels · · · Streets that follow like a tedious argument · · · To lead you to an overwhelming question”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 6–10. “When restless nights distract her brain from sleep”, WLComposite 290.
18 led: both typescripts have “lead”. See note to The Love Song of St. Sebastian 11.
21 Contradiction is the debt: Bradley: “There is only one way to get rid of contradiction, and that way is by dissolution”, Appearance and Reality ch. XVI. TSE: “Nothing is contradictory until it has been made a thing, and everything can be made a thing, and everything is contradictory”, Definition and Judgment in Bradley and His Critics (1914). “the real world of practice is essentially vague, unprecise, swarming with what are, from a metaphysical point of view, insoluble contradictions”, Knowledge and Experience 136.
22 And still: at the head of the line in Milton: “And still revolt when truth would set them free”, Sonnet: I did but prompt (TSE: “truth”, 31, 32, 33).
23 know what else you seek: Paradise Lost VII 639: “know; if else thou seek’st”.
23, 28, 34 you seek · · · whether you · · · no other place: Clark Lecture III: “whether you seek the Absolute in marriage, adultery or debauchery, it is all one—you are seeking in the wrong place”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 115.
26–27 nowise real; unreal, and yet true; | Untrue, yet real: “we have in no wise gained the right to say that the object has passed out of existence altogether”, On Real, Unreal, Ideal, and Imaginary Objects (1914). nowise: a favourite word for Browning (more than 130 instances). Swinburne: “And these things nowise move me” and “But nowise through her living”, Atalanta in Calydon 205, 937. real; unreal: “Unreal emotions, and real appetite”, WLComposite 281.
28 Hopeful of what?: at the head of the line, Samson Agonistes 1575: “Hopeful of his delivery.”
29 Or pray for earth on tired body and head: Pascal: “On jette enfin de la terre sur la tête, et en voilà pour jamais” [at the last a little earth is thrown upon our head, and that is the end forever], Pensées 210. Swinburne: “Ah yet would God that stems and roots were bred | Out of my weary body and my head”, Laus Veneris 57–58. tired body and head: “not yet tired of the game— | But weak in body as in head”, Humouresque 2–3.
30–31 all the paths you tread · · · said: Deuteronomy 11: 25: “all the land that ye shall tread upon, as he hath said unto you”.
30–33 true · · · As true as truth · · · truth · · · truth: Troilus and Cressida III ii has “true” four times and “truth” eight times in twenty lines, including “I am as true as truth’s simplicity, | And simpler than the infancy of truth.”
32 no truth: as in Hosea 4: 1: “no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land”. John 8: 44: “there is no truth in him”.
32–33 among the living · · · the dead: likewise both ending the lines, Shelley: “Thou wert the morning star among the living · · · New splendour to the dead”, To Stella (from the Greek of Plato) 1, 4. See note to East Coker V 20–25, “the pattern · · · Of dead and living”.
34 No other · · · no other: Keats: “Happy is England! I could be content | To see no other verdure than its own; | To feel no other breezes”, Sonnet XVII 1–3.
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36 till the morning broke: Shelley: “Until upon their path the morning broke”, The Revolt of Islam VII ix.
36–44 -chair · · · Stirred · · · crawled · · · leapt · · · crawled · · · lair: Wilkie Collins: “I had stirred in its lair the serpent-hatred of years · · · Like a lurking reptile, it leaped up at me · · · Like a lurking reptile, it dropped out of sight again—as she instantly resumed her former position in the chair”, The Woman in White The Third Epoch viii. TSE called this “the greatest of Collins’s novels”, Wilkie Collins and Dickens (1927).
37–38 Across the window panes · · · Stirred by the morning air: “stirred by the air | That freshened from the window”, The Waste Land [II] 89–90. “morning stirred the long nasturtium”, Suppressed Complex 7 variant. “Morning stirs the feet”, Sweeney Erect 9. The Family Reunion II ii, HARRY: “Do you feel a kind of stirring underneath the air?”
38–40 Stirred · · · the shadows crawled and crept · · · through the trees: The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. XI: “shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves · · · Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known” (TSE: “real; unreal”, 26). For the same passage of Wilde, see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 17–22.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 172
