1–3 Do I know · · · let me take pen and ink · · · with my hat · · · take the air: “Let us take the air · · · you do not know, you do not know · · · I take my hat · · · Let us take the air · · · me sitting pen in hand”, Portrait of a Lady I 36; II 4, 29; III 30, 33.
4 at the foot of the stair: “at the foot of your stair”, The Love Song of St. Sebastian 3.
10 so much beauty: Tennyson, The Lover’s Tale I 206.
[Poem I 269 · Textual History II 584–85]
10–12 beauty spilled · · · | Or wasted · · · villages · · · darkened chambers: Thomas Gray: “Full many a gem of purest ray serene, | The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear: | Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, | And waste its sweetness on the desert air. | | Some village-”, Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard 53–57. beauty spilled · · · wasted · · · untasted: Symons: “This beauty is vain, this, born to be wasted, | Poured on the ground like water, spilled, and by no man tasted”, Wasted Beauty (1906) 1–2 (TSE: “water”, 16 variant). spilled on the open street | Or: Symons: “Or spilt upon the streets”, Summer in Spring (1913) 8. on the open street · · · in darkened chambers: “on the streets · · · in darkened rooms”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 63–64 variant. street | Or wasted: Kipling: “Our towns of wasted honour— | Our streets of lost delight!” The Broken Men (1903) 69–70. (On The Broken Men, see note to the title The Hollow Men.) wasted · · · untasted: Shelley: “From wide cities, famine-wasted; | Groans half heard, and blood untasted”, Prometheus Unbound I 528–29.
12 darkened chambers: Wilde’s opium-den: “a little staircase, leading to a darkened chamber”, The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. XVI. For Wilde’s paragraph see note to Prufrock’s Pervigilium [23].
12 variant neurasthetic: not in OED, which has “neurasthenic” from 1876. Neurasthenia: “Path. An atonic condition of the nervous system; functional nervous weakness; nervous debility”, from 1856.
13 restless on winter nights: “restless nights”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 6, as also Oh little voices of the throats of men 17. who can blame us?: Kipling: “Can you blame us if we soak ourselves in beer?” Gentleman-Rankers 28 (in A Choice of Kipling’s Verse). TSE quoted four lines of Kipling’s poem in Kipling Redivivus (1919).
15–16 slips · · · at my finger tips · · · that drips: of a pianist playing Chopin: “finger-tips · · · slips”, Portrait of a Lady I 9, 14. Symons ends The Chopin Player: “drips · · · Dying delicately at my finger tips?” (TSE: “death”, 19). Symons: “I see them in my brain · · · They die of a touch”, 1, 6 (TSE: “in the brain”, 20; “death · · · touch”, 19, 22). Swinburne’s Laus Veneris likewise rhymes “finger-tips” with “drips”, in lines which twice speak of “death” (149–52). TSE quoted Laus Veneris in a letter to Aiken, 19 July 1914. “slippery · · · held tight in his own fingers · · · pink tips”, The Death of Saint Narcissus 25, 27. “Slip from fingers slip | When freely fingered”, Bellegarde 10–11.
16 creolin: a disinfectant; in OED within citations for Jeyes’ fluid and lysol; 1891, as “creoline”.
19 Will investigate the cause of death: “In Gopsum Street a man murders his mistress · · · For the man’s neighbors the important fact is what the man killed her with? And at precisely what time? And who found the body? For the ‘enlightened public’ the case is merely evidence for the Drink question, or Unemployment, or some other category of things to be reformed. But the mediaeval world, insisting on the eternity of punishment, expressed something nearer the truth”, Eeldrop and Appleplex I (1917). Corbière: “Car il est mort, de quoi?” [Because he is dead, of what?], Pauvre Garçon [Poor Boy] 11.
19–20 life · · · in the brain: Tennyson: “And life is darkened in the brain”, In Memoriam CXXI 8 (TSE: “darkened”, 12).
[Poem I 269 · Textual History II 584–85]
20, 24 a little whisper in the brain · · · a little laughter: Symons: “A little love within my heart, | A little wisdom in my brain”, The Dance of the Seven Sins (1899).
21–22 the ancient pain · · · touch: W. G. Tinckom-Fernandez: “Still in my heart the ancient pain, | Where, in my heart, old memories lie, | Touched by the songs the organ plays”, The Street Organ 4–6. For his poem, see headnote to Interlude in London. Shelley: “And its ancient pilot, Pain”, Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills 333.
23 My brain is twisted in a tangled skein: “My thoughts in a tangled bunch of heads and tails”, The Death of the Duchess 43.
23–24 tangled · · · blinding light: Milton: “In the blind mazes of this tangled wood”, Comus 181; “twilight shade of tangled thickets”, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity 188.
24, 26 a little laughter · · · after: Swinburne: “Though time rend after · · · A little laughter”, Anima Anceps 33, 35.
25 blackness of ether: John Davidson: “Only the empty ether hovered black”, Insomnia 4. ether: “Like a patient etherised upon a table”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 3 (see note).
26 either: the relation to “ether” at the end of the previous line may be clarified by TSE’s recorded pronunciation of “either” in The Waste Land [I] 27, with a long i, not a long e. For another poem ending without a full stop, see Afternoon 9 and note.
The Death of Saint Narcissus
Printed in Early Youth (1950, 1967), anomalously, since this poem was not printed while TSE was at school or at Harvard; then WLFacs. (Lines 1–5 had been published in 1960 in Kenner 33.) See headnote to The Waste Land, 1. COMPOSITION, for relation to this poem.
TSE to Robert L. Beare, 29 Apr 1953: “That unfortunate fragmentary poem on The Death of St. Narcissus, which I very much regret not having destroyed at the time of writing it, was written, I think, in 1912 or 1913.” A letter to TSE from Richard G. Stern, 4 June 1956, enquiring about the poem, is annotated in Valerie’s hand: “TSE ‘does not consider the verses v. g. will not permit them to be printed in his lifetime’ wd prefer no quotations sd be made from it. Chief interest 1st seven lines obviously recast, condensed in his opinion, vastly improved for TWL [The Waste Land]. Poem’s date between 1912–14 never a part of TWL therefore did not meet EP’s blue pencil—at any rate in that context” (Faber archive).
[Poems I 269–70 · Textual History II 585]
Gordon 1974 noted that The Death of Saint Narcissus and Mr. Apollinax were both drafted on paper with the watermark “Excelsior Fine British Make”. She quoted TSE to Pound, 2 Feb 1915, on writing for Wyndham Lewis’s Blast: “I have corresponded with Lewis, but his puritanical principles seem to bar my way to Publicity. I fear that King Bolo and his Big Black Kween will never burst into print. I understand that Priapism, Narcissism etc are not approved of”, taking “Priapism, Narcissism” to refer to this poem and Mr. Apollinax. However, Rainey 133 takes them to refer to the indecent rhymes. Rainey 13–15 assigns the drafts of The Death of Saint Narcissus respectively to Apr 1915 and May 1915 (misprinted as “May 1916”, Rainey 34).
Hayward note:
Text from the unique Poetry (Chicago) galley-proof, preserved in the Harriet Monroe Collection in the University of Chicago. The proof, which consists of two galleys (15 and 16), is printed on one side of a single slip headed “POEMS”. The letterpress, which is broken after the line “If he walked in city streets” is scored through by hand with the manuscript directive “Kill” (i.e. suppress) in the margin of each section. In the top right-hand corner of the proof there is a manuscript editorial note: “Jewel file | This poem | never pub’d | T. S. Eliot”. There is no evidence to show when this poem was submitted to Poetry (Chicago), of which Harriet Monroe was the founder and editor, or when it was set in type. There was an interval of five years between the Harvard Class Ode and Eliot’s next appearance in print, with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which was published, on the recommendation of Ezra Pound, in the June 1915 issue of Poetry (Chicago), though it had actually been completed in 1911. The Death of Saint Narcissus was probably written during this interval, but it was
certainly not set in type with a view to publication until after the appearance of Prufrock. On the other hand, the fact that its opening lines were to be incorporated almost exactly in The Waste Land (1922) should not be taken to indicate a later date for its composition.
Evidence nonetheless does exist for the date of submission to Poetry. The archive of Poetry (U. Chicago) has a typescript which Hayward had not seen, and two manuscripts were discovered along with the drafts of The Waste Land. Correspondence, too, is revealing. After the publication of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Pound wrote to the editor on TSE’s behalf in [July 1915], promising a second submission: “I want you to hold two or three pages open for Eliot in either Sept. or Oct. · · · He has done three small (half page) jems and will have enough for three pages I should think.” He wrote again, presumably in August, sending “the three jems of Eliot for September, and a fourth thing Cousin Nancy which may do to fill the second page”. When D. D. Paige published this in Pound’s Letters, he appended a note: “Only three of the four were printed: The ‘Boston Evening Transcript’, Aunt Helen and Cousin Nancy, Poetry, October 1915.” Correctly noting that The Death of Saint Narcissus “was set up in type apparently for publication in Poetry, but was not printed”, Gallup allocated it to C21, “Three Poems”, Poetry, Oct 1915. Both WLFacs and March Hare accepted this allocation. But Pound’s page count rules out The Death of Saint Narcissus, which at 39 lines would in itself occupy a page and a half (David Bernstein, The Hebrew University Studies in Literature Spring 1976).
The Death of Saint Narcissus was not in the second batch of TSE’s poems for Poetry, but was sent in the third on 29 May 1916, when Pound wrote: “Here are five poems by Eliot.” Only four—Conversation Galante, La Figlia Che Piange, Mr. Apollinax and Morning at the Window—appeared in Poetry Sept 1916 (see Textual History of Morning at the Window). The typescript of The Death of Saint Narcissus appears to have been pinned to the others and folded in three for posting. It is marked up for publication in the sequence, and at the head of Conversation Galante, Monroe’s assistant, Henry B. Fuller, has written “23” (unexplained) followed by a calculation:
23
28) 139 (5
140
[Poem I 270 · Textual History II 585]
—meaning that the page depth of 28 lines would give 140 lines in five pages, which would just accommodate the 139 counted lines of the five poems. Including titles and spaces, the line count of the typescript of The Death of Saint Narcissus was 47 lines, while the others occupied, respectively, 22, 28, 25 and 12 lines, making a total of 134. To this, add space for the heading “Poems”, which was inserted above The Death of Saint Narcissus, with perhaps two lines beneath, and, at the end, space for the author’s name. When set in type, with several long lines needing to be turned, the total was rather more, but it is clear that The Death of Saint Narcissus was the unprinted poem from the third submission.
When Prufrock and Other Observations was published in 1917, all but one of its twelve poems had already appeared in a journal. The exception was Hysteria, which is brief enough to have fitted on the same page as, for instance, Morning at the Window and may well have been the unprinted item from the second submission. It was published in Pound’s Catholic Anthology in Nov 1915, but that July, in his letter to Monroe about the second submission, Pound had written: “I want the stuff out in time for my anthology.” This may have been intended to secure US copyright for the poems, which would otherwise be lost by prior publication in Catholic Anthology in Britain (see headnote to “Poems (1920)”, 1. CONTENTS IN ORDER OF FIRST PUBLICATION and Spoo 97–103). Though it was not printed, and does not survive in the Poetry archive, Hysteria was perhaps among the “stuff” of the second submission.
Title Saint Narcissus: Bishop of Jerusalem towards the end of the 2nd century, a recluse in the desert for many years. Narcissus: the story of the self-love of the mythological Narcissus is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses III. TSE: “the Catholic practitioners were, I believe, with the possible exception of certain heretics, not palpitating Narcissi; the Catholic did not believe that God and himself were identical”, The Function of Criticism (1923) II. Of Valéry: “He reminds us of Narcissus gazing into the pool, and partakes of the attraction and the mystery of Narcissus, the aloofness and frigidity of that spiritual celibate”, Introduction to Valéry’s The Art of Poetry (1958). Nijinksky danced the leading part in the Ballet Russe production of Fokine’s Narcisse in Paris during TSE’s time there in 1911. (Bernstein proposed Nijinsky’s life as the source of numerous details in the poem, but datable events show that many of his speculations are wrong.) TSE to Anne Ridler, 30 Sept 1952: “St. Ishmael is a charming name (like St. Narcissus, of whom I know nothing).”
1 the shadow of this gray rock: Paul Elmer More: “those who rest here have found for themselves the shadow of a great rock in a weary land”, The Great Refusal 127.
1–6 gray rock · · · red rock: | I will show you: reworked as The Waste Land [I] 26–30. Frazer: “prodigious precipices of red and grey rock”, The Golden Bough V (Adonis Attis Osiris I) 120 (Vickery 251). TSE: “While all the East was weaving red with gray”, Before Morning 1. “Go where the sunset reddens the last grey rock”, Murder in the Cathedral II. To Aldous Huxley, 11 May 1923, of his essay From the Grey Stone: “I like your essay From this Grey Rock very much.”
[Poem I 270 · Textual History II 585–86]
12–15, 27 stifled and soothed · · · By the river · · · the pointed tips of his fingers · · · pink tips: Laurence Hope: “Pale hands, pink tipped, like Lotus buds that float | On those cool waters where we used to dwell, | I would have rather felt you round my throat, | Crushing out life, than waving me farewell!” Kashmiri Song (1901). Adapted for music by Amy Woodforde-Finden in 1902 and lastingly popular. (TSE: “pale” 19 variant.)
14 the pointed corners of his eyes: Nijinsky was mocked at the Imperial Ballet School because of the shape of his eyes, but after his successes in London and Paris these became fashionable (Bernstein).
14–15 the pointed corners of his eyes · · · the pointed tips of his fingers: “His pointed ears”, Mr. Apollinax 19 (see note).
21 he was sure that he had been a tree: Herbert: “I reade, and sigh, and wish I were a tree”, Affliction (I) 57. Pound: “I stood still and was a tree amid the wood · · · I have been a tree amid the wood”, The Tree (1908).
23–26 tangling its roots · · · clutch: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow | Out of this stony rubbish?” The Waste Land [I] 19–20.
24–25 fish | With slippery white belly held tight in his own fingers: to Robert Sencourt, 30 Dec 1930, on Edith Wharton: “this poetry leaves me feeling as cold as if I had been · · · stroking a dead fish.”
25 slippery white belly: “slimy belly”, The Waste Land [III] 188.
25–27 slippery · · · held tight in his own fingers · · · pink tips: “grasped · · · Held in the hand · · · Slip from fingers slip | When freely fingered”, Bellegarde 6–11.
33–34 to God · · · his flesh was in love: “the love of God is erotic: that is only a tautology after all”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 276 (Turnbull Lecture II).
37 his white skin: “Is it white skin or perfume on a dress”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 65 variant.
37–39 and satisfied him · · · With the shadow in his mouth: Conrad: “opening his mouth voraciously as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind · · · a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities; a shadow darker than the shadow of the night”, Heart of Darkness pt. 3 (Shawn Worthington, personal communication).
To Helen
Published in March Hare.
Printed without title in March Hare, but in a letter to Christopher Ricks, 26 Sept 1996, Donald Gallup proposed that the title To Helen be adopted from ms2, which he considered the later of the two, as an emendation at 9 suggests. Rainey assigns ms2 to Apr 1915.
[Poems I 270–71 · Textual Histo
ry II 586–87]
Title To Helen: writing to Olive Walker, 4 Feb 1946, Henry Eliot recalled of his brother that at twelve or thirteen “he liked best, of Poe’s, the To Helen” (Houghton; Matthew Geary, personal communication). TSE on Poe: “His world is immaterial and ghostly, rather than spiritual. There are two poems entitled To Helen”, “A Dream within a Dream” (1943). TSE went on to quote from To Helen (“I saw thee once”), for which see note to The Waste Land [I] 36, “hyacinth girl”. The other To Helen (“Helen, thy beauty is to me”) is in Oxf Bk of English Verse; see note to Three Sonnets [III] 9 and variant (in Noctes Binanianæ). For Poe, see note to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 17.
1 lavatory: Fowler: “The euphemistic use, which will end in driving the word out of currency, is to be deprecated.” OED 4: “An apartment furnished with apparatus for washing the hands and face. Now often including water-closets, etc” (from 1656), with 1845: “the gentlemen’s room, denominated by a contemporary a Lavatory”.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 175
