39 Across the floor the shadows crawled and crept: “the darkness | Crawling among the papers on the table | It leapt to the floor”, [19–21], with “the darkness creep along the wall”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 74 ^ 75 [1].
39, 41 the shadows · · · form: Shelley: “there are two worlds of life and death: | One that which thou beholdest; but the other | Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit | The shadows of all forms that think and live”, Prometheus Unbound I 195–98 (TSE: “the living · · · the dead”, 32–33). Nine lines from the same passage of Shelley are quoted in The Cocktail Party III.
39–42 shadows · · · trees | Around · · · muffled · · · knees: Tennyson: “O muffle round thy knees with fern, | And shadow Sumner-chace!” The Talking Oak 149–50.
40 thin light: OED “thin” 3c: “Wanting depth or intensity; faint, weak, dim, pale. Formerly of light (arch.)”, from 1649. TSE: “thin moonlight”, Humouresque 19. shivered: OED “shiver” v.1 2: “To fly in pieces; to split”; and v.2 1b: “To tremble”, including 1878, “The air shivered with noise.”
40–41 shivered through the trees · · · danced: Tennyson: “Where I hear the dead at midday moan, | And the shrieking rush of the wainscot mouse, | And my own sad name in corners cried, | When the shiver of dancing leaves is thrown”, Maud I [vi] 259–62 (TSE: “the dead”, 33). For Tennyson’s wainscot mouse, see note to East Coker I 11–13.
44, 48 lair · · · along the stair: “lairs · · · along the garden stairs”, Circe’s Palace 8, 10.
45 sprang up a little damp dead breeze: see note to The wind sprang up at four o’clock 1. dead: OED IV: “Without motion”; 22a: “Of water, air, etc.: Without motion or current”, with 1861, “The wind had fallen dead”. Bulwer Lytton: “The night said not a word. The breeze was dead”, A Night in Italy 81 (in Oxf Bk of English Verse).
[Poem I 265 · Textual History II 580–81]
47 human voices: Tennyson: “Cried from the topmost summit with human voices and words”, The Voyage of Maeldune 28. TSE: “Till human voices wake us, and we drown”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 131.
47–49 And had those been human voices in the chimneys · · · You had not known whether they laughed or wept: The Family Reunion I i: “as you once explained the sobbing in the chimney” (David Chinitz, personal communication). human voices · · · known: Paradise Lost IX 560–61: “Thee, serpent, subtlest beast of all the field | I knew, but not with human voice endued”. chimneys · · · laughed: Whittier: “The great throat of the chimney laughed”, Snow-Bound 164 (TSE: “throats”, 1). W. D. Howells: “Leaped loud in welcome from the hollow floors; | | But gusts that blew all day with solemn laughter | From wide-mouthed chimney-places”, Forlorn (1873) 48–50 (TSE: “leapt”, 41; “floor”, 39).
48 along the stair: OED “along” B. 1: “Through the whole or entire length of; from end to end of”; as Thomson, Winter 186: “The whirling Tempest raves along the plain”. TSE’s usage resists the feeling that “along” moves horizontally. For other uses of “along”, see note to Morning at the Window 9. For “among”, see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 89, and for “across”, see note to Suite Clownesque I 1, 12.
The Love Song of St. Sebastian
Published in Letters (1988); then March Hare.
Sent in a letter to Conrad Aiken, from Marburg, 25 July 1914, with Oh little voices of the throats of men:
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. I send them, even in their present form, because I am disappointed in them, and wonder whether I had better knock it off for a while—you will tell me what you think. Do you think that the Love Song of St. Sebastian part is morbid, or forced? Then there will be an Insane Section, and another love song (of a happier sort) and a recurring piece quite in the French style beginning
“The married girl who lives across the street
Wraps her soul in orange-coloured robes of Chopinese.”—
Then a mystical section,—and a Fool-House section beginning
“Let us go to the masquerade and dance!
I am going as St. John among the Rocks
Attired in my underwear and socks …”
Does it all seem very laboured and conscious? The S. Sebastian title I feel almost sure of; I have studied S. Sebastians—why should anyone paint a beautiful youth and stick him full of pins (or arrows) unless he felt a little as the hero of my verse? Only there’s nothing homosexual about this—rather an important difference perhaps—but no one ever painted a female Sebastian, did they? So I give this title faute de mieux.
To Aiken 30 Sept, about this poem and Oh little voices of the throats of men: “The stuff I sent you is not good, is very forced in execution, though the idea was right, I think.” 16 Nov: “I think that you criticise my verse too leniently. It still seems to me strained and intellectual. I know the kind of verse I want, and I know that this isn’t it, and I know why. I shan’t do anything that will satisfy me (as some of my old stuff does satisfy me—whether it be good or not) for years, I feel it more and more.” (Aiken named The Love Song of St. Sebastian in print and quoted from the letter, “I think · · · intellectual”, March & Tambimuttu eds. 23.)
[Poems I 265 · Textual History II 581–82]
Henry James had written of the Descent from the Cross as the masterpiece of the painter Sodoma (Siena Early and Late I in Italian Hours, for which see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 70, 72). TSE’s reference to “St. John among the Rocks” suggests St. John the Divine, with not only the landscape of Patmos but Revelation 6: 15: “And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains.” But St. John the Baptist should not be excluded (for dualities in names, see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 94, “Lazarus”). In his London Baedeker, TSE marked, 170: “Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Madonna and Child, with John the Baptist and an angel, a studio-copy, with alterations, of La Vierge aux Rochers in the Louvre.” He also marked, 168: “Antonio Pollaiuolo (d. 1498), Martyrdom of St. Sebastian” (both National Gallery). Schuchard 219: “As Eliot’s lecture notes for his 1909 [1910] Harvard course, ‘Florentine Painting’ (Fine Arts 20b), reveal, he had begun his study of Sebastian with Antonio Pollaiuolo’s 15th-century painting of the martyr.” (See note to the title Portrait of a Lady.)
Title The Love Song of St. Sebastian: whether imagined as the words of or as words addressed to St. Sebastian is not clear, unlike The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock with its self-communing and evident failure to address another. Love Song: John Gray’s Spiritual Songs (1896) includes Lovesong to the Bridegroom, tr. from Friedrich Spee, with “arrows”, “shoots a thousand darts”, “pain”, and “sharp to kill”. Spee (1591–1635) questioned the use of torture in witch trials. St. Sebastian: John Gray, probably with Albrecht Altdorfer’s painting in mind: “The stair they stand on · · · Their ears · · · Pale Sebastian’s feet”, Saint Sebastian: On a Picture 9, 35, 51 (TSE: “at the foot of your stair · · · your feet are white · · · your ears”, 3, 12, 28). Ian Fletcher: “Homosexuals had a particular cult of Saint Sebastian. The combination of nudity and the phallic arrows was irresistible. Baron Corvo, for example, has two sonnets [1891] for a painting of the Saint by Guido Reni in the Capitoline Gallery at Rome”, The Poems of John Gray (1988) 325. Gordon 91 points out that although the saint was sentenced to be shot by archers, “he did not die but was rescued by a woman and nursed in her lodgings.” His later martyrdom by a mace occurs in Gray’s other such poem, Saint Sebastian (1897). Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. XI, has “medallions of many saints and martyrs, among whom was St. Sebastian” (for the chapter, see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 17–22). On the fin de siècle fascination with St. Sebastian, see Richard Kaye, Voluptuous Immobility: St. Sebastian and the Decaden
t Imagination (1997). Gabriele d’Annunzio’s sensational dance-drama or mystery play Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien was staged in Paris, danced by Ida Rubinstein, with music by Debussy and sets by Léon Bakst, 29 May to 19 June 1911, when Eliot could have seen it (Gross). Pound to his mother [May or early June]: “I heard St Sebastian the new De Bussy opera. The music is very wonderful, D’Anunzio’s libretto quite the worst thing even he has perpetrated.”
1 shirt of hair: OED 1c: “= hair-shirt”, the last instance being Cowper, Truth (1782) 81: “In shirt of hair and weeds of canvas dress’d”.
[Poem I 265 · Textual History II 581–82]
3 at the foot of your stair: “at the foot of the stair”, Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think? 4. “There will be no footsteps up and down the stair”, The Death of the Duchess 29.
6 And torture and delight: “Agony nearest to delight”, The Burnt Dancer 23, likewise rhyming with “night”.
7 Until my blood should ring the lamp: to Aiken, TSE wrote of this line, in the margin: “Does this mean anything to you? I mean stand all about in a pool on the floor”. ring the lamp: “The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 74 (here: “stair”, 3; “I would come with a little lamp in the night”, 2 variant).
9 neophyte: OED: “Not in general use before the 19th c.” 1a: “A new convert; one newly admitted to a church or religious body. Used chiefly with ref. to the primitive Christian, or the Roman Catholic, Church; in the latter, also applied to a newly ordained priest, or to a novice of a religious order.”
10 And then put out the light: Othello V ii: “Put out the light, and then put out the light” (TSE: “You would love me because I should have strangled you”, 34). Symons: “put out the light: | ’Tis morning, let the daylight come. | God! how the women’s cheeks are white”, In Bohemia (1892) 13–15 (TSE: “the morning came”, 20; “your feet are white”, 12). “And we must extinguish the candle, put out the light and relight it”, Choruses from “The Rock” X 40.
11 variant lead: TSE wrote to Aiken in the margin: “preterite! not present”. Oh little voices of the throats of men 18 likewise has “lead” for “led”. In early papers on philosophy, TSE wrote “lead” and “mislead” instead of “led” and “misled”. “the reader has been mislead”, Poetry and Propaganda (1930).
11–12 To follow where · · · To follow where: Shelley: “To follow where the kiss should guide it, | Oh, cruel I”, Kissing Helena (from the Greek of Plato) 5–6.
16, 18 you would take me in: Symons: “And the light is night above, | You will let me in, | You will take me”, Alla Passeretta Bruna (1891) last lines.
17 hideous in your sight: Job 18: 3: “Wherefore are we counted as beasts, and reputed vile in your sight?”
18 without shame: Shelley: “Naked they were from torture, without shame”, The Revolt of Islam X xxi (TSE: “torture”, 6).
19–23, 34–37 Because I should be dead | And when the morning came | Between your breasts should lie my head. | | I would come · · · your head · · · You would love me because · · · because you: Grover Smith 1996 158 points to Yeats, He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead (1899) 1–6:
Were you but lying cold and dead,
And lights were paling out of the West,
You would come hither, and bend your head,
And I would lay my head on your breast;
And you would murmur tender words,
Forgiving me, because you were dead.
20–21 And when the morning came | Between your breasts should lie my head: Song of Solomon 1: 13: “He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts”. Symons: “Nestle between your breasts to-night”, To Muriel: at the Opera (1895) 2.
[Poem I 265–66 · Textual History II 582]
25 no one’s else: to Aiken, 30 Sept 1914: “The thing is to be able to look at one’s life as if it were somebody’s else (I much prefer to say somebody else’s).” Fowler: “the usual possessive form is not everyone’s &c. else, which is felt to be pedantic though correct, but everyone else’s.”
26 all the world shall melt: Amos 9: 13: “all the hills shall melt”. Burns: “Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, | And the rocks melt wi’ the sun!” A Red, Red Rose (Crawford 2015 204).
29–30 linger · · · finger: see note to Suite Clownesque II 7.
30 follow the curve with my finger: Aurelia Hodgson on a conversation in 1932 or 1934: “Ralph once mentioned how he’d like to relive repeatedly that moment of boyhood when he first discovered the curve of a girl’s cheek. TSE couldn’t agree. ‘It was too painful’” (notebook 7, box 25, Bryn Mawr).
32 I think that at last you would understand: “some way we both should understand”, La Figlia Che Piange 15.
34 because I should have strangled you: Browning: “And strangled her”, Porphyria’s Lover 41. Wilde: “Yet each man kills the thing he loves”, The Ballad of Reading Gaol I vii. The line figures in translation in d’Annunzio’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien: “Il faut que chacun tue son amour” (Gross). Laurence Hope: “I would have rather felt you round my throat, | Crushing out life, than waving me farewell!” Kashmiri Song (1901); see note to The Death of Saint Narcissus 12–15, 27.
34–37 because: see Ash-Wednesday I 1–3 and note.
35 infamy: Inf. XXVII 66: “senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo” [without fear of infamy I answer thee], last line of the epigraph to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
35, 38 infamy · · · me: Beaumont and Fletcher: “Wilt thou, hereafter, when they talk of me, | As thou shalt hear nothing but infamy, | Remember some of these things?” A King and No King III i, quoted in Ben Jonson (1919).
Paysage Triste
Published in March Hare.
Assigned to 1914 by Gallup 1970 5 and to 1914–15 by Rainey 196.
Title] Verlaine has a sequence of seven poems, Paysages tristes. The fourth, Nuit du Walpurgis classique, mentions the opera Tannhäuser (TSE, 19), and three times “les cors”, the horns (TSE, 15: but see note). For Verlaine’s poem, see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 116, 118. Huysmans: “Jamais, sans que de nerveuses larmes lui montassent aux yeux, il n’avait pu se répéter ‘les Plaintes de la jeune fille’, car il y avait dans ce lamento, quelque chose de plus que de navré, quelque chose d’arraché qui lui fouillait les entrailles, quelque chose comme une fin d’amour dans un paysage triste” [He was never able to hum “The Young Girl’s Lament” without nervous tears rising to his eyes, for in this lamento there was something more than sadness, a note of despair that tore at his heartstrings, something reminiscent of a dying love-affair in a melancholy landscape], À rebours [Against Nature] ch. XV, tr. Patrick McGuinness (2003). Paysage: OED: “a. A representation of rural scenery. b. A rural scene, landscape.” (Described as “Obs. exc. as Fr.”) See notes to the titles The Waste Land and Landscapes.
[Poems I 266–67 · Textual History II 582–83]
1 mounted in the omnibus: going upstairs within the omnibus, as distinct from “mounted the omnibus”. Baedeker 20: “The ‘garden seats’ on the top (same fares as inside) are pleasant enough in fine weather and are freely patronized by ladies.” in the omnibus: Nathaniel Parker Willis, The Lady in the White Dress, Whom I Helped Into the Omnibus (1844); Symons, In an Omnibus (1892). (Pound’s French poem Dans un Omnibus de Londres is from 1916.) omnibus: not then affected, though formal; Baedeker, although it concedes “familiarly known as a ‘bus’” (20), regularly uses “omnibus”. (See the ten-year-old TSE’s verses “I thought I saw a elephant | A-riding on a ’bus” and “He thought he saw a Banker’s Clerk | Descending from the bus” in “Other Verses”.) OED 2a: “= omnibus-box” (at the theatre or opera) from 1844 (TSE: “the box · · · opera-glasses”, 8, 19).
2 a penny fare: Baedeker 20: “The fares vary from 1d. to 6d. or 7d.”
7 An almost: OED 2b: “qualifying a sb. with implied attribute”, with Southey, 1808: “an almost Quaker”. denizen of Leicester Square: Pope: “He summons strait his denizens of air”, T
he Rape of the Lock II 55 (for Pope’s poem, see March Hare notes to this poem).
7, 13 Leicester Square · · · ease: “ease · · · Bloomsbury Square”, Cat Morgan Introduces Himself 3, 4 (all line-endings).
10–11 eyes · · · loosened hair: Browning: “thy sweet eyes, | And loosened hair”. Pauline 2–3.
10–12 I see her moving · · · her chamber | With naked feet passing across the skies: Wyatt: “With naked foot stalking in my chamber. | I have seen them”, They flee from me that sometime did me seek 2–3. In Oxf Bk of English Verse, Wyatt’s line was smoothed: “With naked foot stalking within my chamber”. TSE: “With evening feet walking across the grass”, Hidden under the heron’s wing 5. “With broken boot heels stained in many gutters”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [31]. With naked feet: Sir Edwin Arnold: “With naked feet, amid the peering maids”, The Light of Asia, Book the Seventh. across the skies: “His soul stretched tight across the skies”, Preludes IV 1.
11 with loosened hair: Landor: “His chaplets mingled with her loosened hair”, Gebir II 136. TSE: “I wonder whether many people ever read Gebir; and yet Landor, the author of that dignified long poem, was a very able poet indeed”, What is Minor Poetry? (1944). D. G. Rossetti mentions the “loosened hair” of the prostitute, Jenny 47. TSE alluded to that poem in WLComposite 273: “The lazy laughing Jenny of the bard”. Meredith has “loosened hair” in Modern Love XIII, a Meredithian sonnet which remarks: “she drops a look of fondness, and goes by” (TSE: “that · · · look”, 4).
13–14 crudely ill at ease · · · sit: Symons: “We sat together, you and I; | Our hearts were sweetly ill at ease”, Fête Champêtre (1895) 2–3. The Family Reunion I i, first chorus: “Why do we feel embarrassed, impatient, fretful, ill at ease, | Assembled like amateur actors who have not been assigned their parts?”
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 173
