The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  [Poem I 267 · Textual History II 583]

  13, 16 ill at ease · · · knees: “ill at ease | I mount the stairs · · · mounted on my hands and knees”, Portrait of a Lady III 2–4 (“mounted”, 1; “stare”, 3).

  15 when the lights went out and the horn began: act II of Tristan und Isolde begins with horns (Kit Toda, personal communication).

  18 The smiling stripling with the pink soaped face: Paradise Lost III 636–40: “And now a stripling cherub he appears, | Not of the prime, yet such as in his face | Youth smiled celestial · · · flowing hair” (“loosened hair”, 11). Byron: “a handsome stripling with smooth face”, Don Juan XI xxxv. For pink shaving soap, see note to Sweeney Erect 21–22.

  19 in his care: Paradise Lost IX 318: “so spake domestic Adam in his care”.

  Afternoon

  Published in Letters (1988) and in March Hare.

  Assigned to 1914 by Gallup 1970 37. Sent to Aiken, 25 Feb 1915, together with Suppressed Complex on a folded ms leaf: “I will put one or two small verses into this letter.” After making a typescript copy of the poems, Aiken sold TSE’s ms, c. 1931, and it is now untraced (see Textual History).

  Baedeker 290 on the British Museum: “Assyrian, and American Collections and the Waddesdon Room. The Museum is open on Sun. afternoon from 2 o’clock, but is shut on Good Friday and Christmas Day.—Sticks and umbrellas are left in the hall.”

  1–2 The ladies who are interested in Assyrian art | Gather in the hall of the British Museum: Laurent Tailhade: “Les femmes laides qui déchiffrent des sonates | Sortent de chez Erard” [The ugly women who decipher sonatas are leaving Erard’s], first lines of Place des Victoires, which also ends with the women under the gaze of statuary. Since TSE’s copy of Tailhade’s Poèmes aristophanesques (1904) was not printed until 1915, he evidently read the poem in the anthology Poètes d’aujourd’hui (see headnote to “Poems (1920)”, 4. WHAT FRANCE MEANT TO TSE). In the anthology the poem shared a page with Musée du Louvre (see March Hare notes), and both poems were quoted and discussed by Pound in New Age 2 Oct 1913. For Tailhade, see headnote to Cousin Nancy and note to Mr. Apollinax 6–7. For the subtitle Feuillet d’album. à Laurent Tailhade, le maitre, see Vers pour la Foulque, Textual History, at the end of Noctes Binanianæ. The ladies · · · Assyrian art | Gather in the hall: “In the room the women come and go | Talking of Michelangelo”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 13–14.

  1, 4–5 The ladies · · · steam from drying rubber overshoes · · · hats: Henry James: “The ladies, who were much the more numerous, wore their bonnets · · · Two or three had retained their overshoes, and as you approached them the odour of the india-rubber was perceptible”, The Bostonians ch. IV. (For the novel, see headnote to Portrait of a Lady.) drying rubber overshoes: Baedeker advises (“Disposition of Time”, 81): “Rainy days had better be devoted to the galleries and museums.” overshoes: OED has as its first citation Moby-Dick (1851): “Hat, coat, and overshoes were one by one removed”.

  [Poems I 267 · Textual History II 583]

  1–5 Assyrian · · · perfume · · · hats: Tennyson on the Assyrian art of the British Museum: “That jewelled mass of millinery · · · Assyrian Bull | Smelling of musk and of insolence”, Maud I [vi] 232–34. Assyrian · · · purple: Byron: “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, | And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold”, The Destruction of Sennacherib 1–2.

  3 perfume: stressed here on the second syllable; see note to Easter II 7. last year’s tailor suits: a fashion (and new term) from the previous decade (see March Hare notes to this poem). OED from Westminster Gazette 1907: “We do not soar beyond the new tailor-suit for a week or two longer”; also Westminster Gazette 1906: “Elégantes of Paris who were tailor-suited”.

  3, 5, 9 last year’s tailor suits · · · hats · · · Towards the unconscious, the ineffable, the absolute: TSE on philosophy in 1912: “the New Realism, like most pre-War philosophies, seems now as demoded as ladies’ hats of the same period”, Views and Reviews in NEW 6 June 1935. “hat and gloves in hand · · · suit · · · On the doorstep of the Absolute”, Spleen 13–14, 16.

  6 sombre Sunday afternoon: Baedeker 84: “The movement for the Sunday opening of museums, galleries, and other large public collections has recently made great strides in London: and that day need no longer count as practically a dies non in the traveller’s itinerary.”

  6–7 Vanish in · · · fade · · · statuary: Keats: “Vanished in elemental passion”, Endymion II 375 (at the head of the line); “I vanish in the heaven’s blue”, Fairy’s Song 18; “fade away · · · Fade far away”, Ode to a Nightingale 20–21; “she cannot fade”, Ode on a Grecian Urn 19; “I marked the goddess in fair statuary”, The Fall of Hyperion I 336 (at the line-ending).

  8 Like amateur comedians across a lawn: “lawns · · · Here’s the comedian again”, Suite Clownesque I 3–5.

  9 Towards · · · the absolute: the poem apparently has no final full stop. The last sentence of Knowledge and Experience as published reads: “And this emphasis upon practice—upon the relativity and the instrumentality of knowledge—is what impels us toward the Absolute.” In the Preface, written in 1964, TSE explained of his Harvard doctoral dissertation (completed 1916): “The last page of the typescript ends with an unfinished sentence: For if all objectivity and all knowledge is relative … I have omitted this exasperating clause: it is suitable that a dissertation on the work of Francis Herbert Bradley should end with the words ‘the Absolute’.” On A. R. Orage: “without this restless desire for the absolute, Orage · · · would have been merely a reasonable persuader towards the reasonable revolution”, A Commentary in Criterion Jan 1935. the unconscious · · · the absolute: of Corbière: “he has less direct feeling of ‘the absolute’, ‘the unconscious’, and the other abstractions which aroused Laforgue’s passion”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 217 (Clark Lecture VIII). the absolute: TSE may have recalled one of the hugely popular Hans Breitmann ballads, in pidgin Germanic English, by Charles Godfrey Leland, whose Wein Geist (1871) ends: “In Madchenlieb or Schnapsenrausch | Das Absolut ist dein” [In a girl’s love or a fit of drunkenness, the Absolute is yours]. For the philosophical term, see note to Conversation Galante 14.

  [Poem I 267–68 · Textual History II 583]

  Suppressed Complex

  Published in Letters (1988), then March Hare.

  Assigned to 1914 by Gallup 1970 37. Sent in letters by TSE from Oxford. First, to Pound, 2 Feb 1915: “I enclose one small verse. I know it is not good, but everything else I have done is worse. Besides, I am constipated and have a cold on the chest. Burn it.” Second, to Aiken, 25 Feb 1915 (see headnote to Afternoon).

  Gallup 1970 tentatively proposed that Suppressed Complex might have been the poem sent by Pound to Wyndham Lewis in 1915 for Blast 2, but Timothy Materer’s Pound/Lewis (1985) 12–13 makes clear that the poem Pound sent was Portrait of a Lady.

  Title Suppressed: OED “suppress” 2a: “Psychol: to consciously inhibit (an unacceptable thought, memory or desire)”, citing Freud, 1913, The Interpretation of Dreams (tr. A. A. Brill): “During his waking state ·· he has made an effort to suppress the sinful thoughts as often as they arise.” TSE to his brother Henry, 2 July 1915, about Vivien and himself: “I am much less suppressed, and more confident, than I ever have been.” To A. L. Rowse, 3 Mar 1941: “the Autobiography impresses me very favourably (it is always a wonder to me how people can write an autobiography, but it is probably because they have less to suppress than I have).” Complex: OED 3: “Psychol. A group of emotionally charged ideas or mental factors, unconsciously associated by the individual with a particular subject, arising from repressed instincts, fears, or desires”, from 1907.

  5–8 She stirred in her sleep · · · She was very pale · · · I passed joyously out through the window: Baudelaire, tr. Stuart Merrill: “looked through the windows as thou wert sleeping · · · passed noiselessly through the panes · · · extraordinarily pale · · · jo
y”, Les Bienfaits de la Lune [The Blessings of the Moon] in Pastels in Prose. (Baudelaire: “La Lune · · · regarda par la fenêtre pendant que tu dormais · · · passa sans bruit à travers les vitres · · · extraordinairement pâles · · · sa joie”.)

  7 morning shook the long nasturtium: “madman shakes a dead geranium”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 12. the tawny bowl: Robert Stephen Hawker: “Drink-hael! in Jesu’s name | We fill the tawny bowl; | But cover down the curving crest, | Mould of the Orient Lady’s breast”, King Arthur’s Waes-hael 3–6 (in Oxf Bk of English Verse).

  8 I passed joyously · · · through: Shelley: “where joyously | Sate my two younger babes at play, | In the court-yard through which I passed”, Rosalind and Helen 525–27.

  In the Department Store

  Published in March Hare.

  Assigned to 1915 by Gallup 1970 37 and to 1914–15 by Rainey 196.

  [Poems I 268 · Textual History II 584]

  TSE’s poem belongs, in kind, with one by his Harvard friend, W. G. Tinckom-Fernandez, The Waitress in Harvard Advocate 31 Jan 1908; the poems share mention of the lady, her eyes, her hair, her smile, and her being business-like / busy.

  Title In the Department Store: OED “department store”: “orig. U.S.”, from 1887. H. G. Wells in Mr. Polly (1910) still finds it necessary to explain the term: “One of those large, rather low-class establishments which sell everything from pianos and furniture to books and millinery—a department store.” Henry James’s love-story In the Cage (1898) has a similar setting. TSE’s “The summer evenings in the park” (5) recalls James’s central elaborated scene on a summer evening in the park; in James, the phrase “in the Park” comes half a dozen times. James’s story contributed to the cancelled title of Part II of The Waste Land, “In the Cage”.

  1 The lady of the porcelain department: Whistler’s La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine was painted in 1864 (Freer Gallery, Washington). TSE: “To porcelain land”, Goldfish II. Embarquement pour Cythère 13 (with “Ladies”, 1). The tower or pavilion of porcelain was much invoked in poetry and prose. Longfellow: “And yonder, by Nakin, behold! | The Tower of Porcelain, strange and old”, Kéramos strophe 27. (TSE in his Preface to Leone Vivante’s English Poetry (1950): “I myself consider Longfellow underrated.”) Henry James’s Princess contemplates her insufficiently happy marriage under the image of “some wonderful beautiful but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard bright porcelain”, with its “rare porcelain plates”, The Golden Bowl bk. IV i. Théophile Gautier: “Celle que j’aime, à présent, est en Chine; | Elle demeure avec ses vieux parents, | Dans une tour de porcelaine fine” [She whom I love, just now, is in China; she is living with her aged parents in a fine porcelain tower], Chinoiserie 5–7; “Dans la Chine bizarre, aux tours de porcelaine” [In the bizarre land of China, with its porcelain towers], Le Sommet de la tour [The Pinnacle of the Tower] 113. Judith Gautier, tr. Stuart Merrill: “In her pavilion of porcelain · · · the Empress is sitting · · · the Emperor · · · walks towards the pavilion of porcelain, leaving the astonished Mandarins to stare at one another in silence”, The Emperor (After Thoo-Foo) in Pastels in Prose (with “Mandarins” thrice). Also Merrill: “Past the porcelain towers of Keou-Kang”, Ballade of the Chinese Lover 9. (The lady’s “pencil in her hair” may suggest an oriental pin.) André Salmon: “Dans une tour de porcelaine | O n’être de rien occupé | Que des vers de Li-Taï-Pé | Et d’un petit magot obscene” [In a porcelain tower oh to be occupied with nothing other than the verses of Li-Taï-Pé and a little obscene figurine], Odelette Chinoise (1910) 33–36.

  2 Smiles at the world: Paradise Lost V 124–31:

  “· · · fair morning first smiles on the world,

  And let us to our fresh employments rise

  Among the groves, the fountains, and the flowers

  That open now their choicest bosomed smells

  Reserved from night, and kept for thee in store.”

  So cheered he his fair spouse, and she was cheered,

  But silently a gentle tear let fall

  From either eye, and wiped them with her hair.

  [Poem I 268 · Textual History II 584]

  (TSE: “keeps · · · her hair”, 3; “eyes”, 4; “nights”, 6.) Milton: “employments · · · in store”.

  4 sharpened eyes: Pope, Odyssey V 505. OED “sharpen” 2a: “To render more acute (a person’s wits, sight · · · etc.)” TSE:

  There is a well-known comparison or simile in the great XVth canto of the Inferno [XV 20–21], which Matthew Arnold singled out, rightly, for high praise; which is characteristic of the way in which Dante employs these figures. He is speaking of the crowd in Hell who peered at him and his guide under a dim light:

  e sì ver noi aguzzevan le ciglia,

  come vecchio sartor fa nella cruna.

  and sharpened their vision (knitted their brows) at us, like an old tailor peering at the eye of his needle.

  Dante (1929) I

  The Temple Classics translation is “sharpened their vision”; TSE’s gloss is in parentheses. Adduced also (with a different translation) in The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 122 (Clark Lecture IV). See note to Little Gidding II 37–38.

  4–6 behind her sharpened eyes take flight · · · heated: Henry James: “the fear that Mrs. Gereth, with sharpened eyes, might wonder why the deuce · · · she had grown so warm”, The Spoils of Poynton ch. 7.

  5, 7 The summer evenings in the park · · · dark: Clough: “(Written in London, standing in the Park, | An evening in July, just before dark)”, Dipsychus IV 128–29. TSE: “any morning in the park”, Portrait of a Lady II 31.

  6 second story: OED “story” 1: “while in England [as against the U.S.] the term FIRST-FLOOR is applied to the floor above the ground floor, the numbering of ‘stories’ (so named) usually begins with the ground-floor, so that the ‘first-floor’ is identical with the ‘second story’.”

  7 Man’s life is powerless and brief and dark: Bertrand Russell: “Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark”, The Free Man’s Worship (1903). (Russell owed something to Shelley’s Queen Mab III 220–21: “Man’s brief and frail authority | Is powerless”.) TSE, quoting Russell’s first six words: “It is quite as good prose as Pater’s, but it is not Mr. Russell’s best prose”, Style and Thought (1918). Hobbes: “and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, Leviathan ch. 13 (TSE’s copy of a 1907 ed. was dated by him Feb 1914). King Lear II iv: “Man’s life is cheap as beast’s”. Byron: “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, | ’Tis woman’s whole existence”, Don Juan I cxciv.

  Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think?

  Published in March Hare.

  Assigned to Jan–Apr 1915 by Rainey 198.

  [Poems I 268–69 · Textual History II 584]

  1 Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think?: “Not knowing what to feel”, Portrait of a Lady III 36. “Knowing neither how to think, nor how to feel”, WLComposite 338. “They know what they are to feel and what to think · · · They know what to think and what to feel”, The Death of the Duchess 5, 8. “And what we feel, or not”, Entretien dans un parc 21. On Laforgue’s intelligence: “a poet genuinely occupied with the relation of feeling and thought, not, like Browning and Meredith, playing with their mechanical combinations”; then: “I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 217, 220 (Clark Lecture VIII). “a pattern · · · of speech expressing more than what the characters know or know they feel”; “It is in those later plays that one becomes most conscious of the fact that we know neither what we do nor what we feel”, The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse (1937).

  Pater: “The peculiar strength of Marius was to have apprehended this weakness of the threshol
d of human knowledge · · · Our knowledge is limited to what we feel, he reflected: we need no proof that we feel. But can we be sure that things are at all like our feelings?” Marius the Epicurean ch. VIII. (For the chapter, see note to A Cooking Egg 20, “experience”.) In his copy of Bernard Bosanquet’s The Essentials of Logic, TSE underlined “whatever we are obliged to think” (11) and wrote “How can I know what I am obliged to think?” in the margin. TSE: “L’esprit historique, c’est le fondement de la culture, et étant aussi le moyen de nous connaître nous-mêmes, de connaître notre état d’âme à nous, de savoir ce que nous pensons” [The historical spirit, such is the foundation of culture, and at the same time the means by which we recognise ourselves, recognise the state of our souls, know what we think], Autour d’une Traduction d’Euripide (1916). TSE’s Syllabus: Modern French Literature (1916) has it that one of Rousseau’s main tendencies was “Emphasis on feeling rather than thought” (Margolis 10). In his copy of Coleridge’s Poetical Works (1907), he scored Dejection 87–90: “For not to think of what I needs must feel, | But to be still and patient, all I can; | And haply by abstruse research to steal | From my own nature all the natural man—”.

  1–2 Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think? | Let me take ink and paper: “If you want to write poetry, keep away from pencils and paper and typewriters until you have overcome the temptation · · · Whatever you think, be sure that it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that it is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that it is what you feel”, Address by T. S. Eliot, ’06, to the Class of ’33 (1933). feel · · · think · · · pen and ink: to his mother, 19 Jan 1919, after his father’s death: “my thoughts have been with you every day, though it always seems that little, very little, can ever filter through to pen and ink of what one feels. I am waiting as patiently as I can for letters. One keeps thinking of little things—I have been longing to have some little drawings of father’s” (“letters”, 5; “little · · · little”, 20, 24).