The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 176
2–6 a negro · · · Bringing a dish with oranges and bananas, | And another brought coffee and cigars · · · large mouth: “The silent man in mocha brown | Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes; | The waiter brings in oranges | Bananas figs and hothouse grapes”, Sweeney Among the Nightingales 17–20. To Eleanor Hinkley from Paris, 26 Apr 1911 (see note to Interlude in London 1): “And one looked through the windows, and the waiter brought in eggs and coffee, and the Graphic (which I conscientiously tried to read, to please them).” For a situation with a man, a waiter, a woman, a mouth, see Hysteria.
6–7 variant wide mouth · · · suspended on the: Shelley: “suspended on the sweep of the smooth wave · · · Yawned”, Alastor 362–64. TSE: “the close rabble in the cinema · · · Wide mouthed”, WLComposite 229–98 ms1 [25–27]. (For Howells’s “wide-mouthed chimney-places”, see note to Oh little voices of the throats of men 47–49.)
6, 8 large mouth · · · rabbit: Tennyson: “A rabbit mouth that is ever agape”, Maud I [x] 360. white rabbit: to Eleanor Hinkley, 3 Jan 1915, about his boarding-house: “Mrs. Nichols an elderly white rabbit with a very small timid daughter who plays solitaire when it rains”.
8–9 the corner · · · his nose: “the corner of his nose”, Mandarins 3 4.
After the turning of the inspired days
Published in WLFacs.
Assigned to Oct 1913 by Rainey 34. Gordon 87 proposes Harvard, 1914. Valerie Eliot: “The [hand]writing and the Laforguean ending indicate that it is an early poem”, BBC broadcast 2 Nov 1971. The handwriting matches that of I am the Resurrection and the Life and that of So through the evening, through the violet air, which Valerie Eliot assigned to “1914 or even earlier” (see headnote), although it also matches TSE’s letter to his father, 23 July 1915.
WLFacs 109 remarks that with the substitution of “After” for “And”, 7 became The Waste Land [V] 322. WLFacs notes: Compare 1–10 with The Waste Land [V] 322–330. See headnote to The Waste Land, 1. COMPOSITION.
[Poems I 271 · Textual History II 587]
1–2, 5–6 After the turning · · · After the praying and the silence and the crying · · · After the life and death · · · After the judges and the advocates and wardens: “After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, | After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 101–102.
2, 10 the silence and the crying · · · dying: “silent sighing; | Somewhere the soul crying”, In silent corridors of death 3–4.
4 frosty vigil: Arthur Lillie: “he has never known storm, shipwreck, captivity, fever, and wounds, the frosty vigil, and the burning march. He has never broken lance for the Holy cause”, The King of Topsy-Turvy (1870) ch. II.
9 shaking spears and flickering lights: “The campfire shake the spears”, Song (“The golden foot I may not kiss or clutch”) 12. “I saw · · · The camp fire shake with alien spears”, The wind sprang up at four o’clock 9–10.
13 The world seemed futile: G. T. W. Patrick: “This is the most costly and the most tragic of all the wars of history · · · modern wars are wholly futile · · · the whole European world has gone insane”, The Psychology of War in Popular Science Aug 1915.
13 variant The world was ended: “This is the way the world ends | Not with a bang but a whimper”, The Hollow Men V 28–31, and see note on warfare.
13 variant The show was ended: OED “show” n.1 15b: “Mil. slang. An engagement, battle, or raid; a war”, with Kipling: “What was the end of all the show, Johnnie, Johnnie?” (The Widow’s Party).
I am the Resurrection and the Life
Published in WLFacs.
Assigned to Oct 1913 by Rainey 34. Gordon 87 proposes Harvard, 1914. See headnote to So through the evening, through the violet air.
WLFacs notes: “This little poem was influenced by The Bhagavad-Gita (with perhaps a nod to Emerson’s Brahma)”, quoting Bhagavad-Gita ix 16, tr. R. C. Zaehner (1969). In Lionel D. Barnett’s Temple Classics tr. (1905), the verse reads:
I am the sacrifice. I am the offering.
I am the father’s oblation. I am the healing herb.
I am the spell. I am the butter-libation,
I am the fire, I am the offering.
(TSE’s copy of this is dated by him “Cambridge 1912”. For the Gita, see note to The Burnt Dancer 1–2 and headnote to The Dry Salvages III.) Emerson:
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the song the Brahmin sings.
Brahma 9–12
(See notes to 4–5 and to Ash-Wednesday I 1.) Emerson’s lines were quoted by Bradley in Appearance and Reality ch. XXVI, where they are compared with three stanzas of Baudelaire’s L’Héautontimorouménos [The Self-Punisher]. Gordon 151 (acknowledging Michael Wood) points to the poem’s penultimate stanza:
[Poems I 271–72 · Textual History II 587–88]
Je suis la plaie et le couteau!
Je suis le soufflet et la joue!
Je suis les membres et la roue,
Et la victime et le bourreau!
[I am the wound and the knife, I am the blow and the cheek, the limbs and the rack, the victim and the executioner!]
For Baudelaire’s poem, see note to Airs of Palestine, No. 2 9.
Valerie Eliot: “Some Joyce scholars may think the poem was prompted by part of Stephen’s soliloquy in the Scylla and Charybdis episode of Ulysses [IX], which, Eliot told John Quinn, he had lived on ever since he had read it; but I am inclined to believe that the influence was direct, because when my husband gave me his copy of the Hindu classic, he spoke of the fire and the butter”, BBC broadcast 2 Nov 1971, referring to TSE’s letter to Quinn [9 July 1919]. (Ulysses: “I am the fire upon the altar. I am the sacrificial butter”, but this was not published until Little Review Apr 1919.) William James, comparing monism to “the Hindoo doctrine of the Brahman”: “In the Bhagavat-gita the holy Krishna speaking for the One, says: ‘I am the immolation. I am the sacrificial rite. I am the libation offered to ancestors. I am the drug. I am the incantation. I am the sacrificial butter also. I am the fire · · · Place thy heart on me, worshipping me, sacrificing to me, saluting me’”, Some Problems of Philosophy ch. VII (see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 56–58). TSE to Egon Vietta, 23 Feb 1947: “Long before I was a Christian, I was a student of Indian philosophy, and of the Buddhist scriptures in Pali: both from study of some original texts, under teachers of Indic philology and philosophy at Harvard, and from an early interest in Schopenhauer and Deussen also in connexion with Sanskrit” (see headnote to The Dry Salvages III). See headnote to The Waste Land, 1. COMPOSITION, for relation of I am the Resurrection and the Life to Part V.
1 I am the Resurrection and the Life: John 11: 25.
3–4 the wife · · · the sacrificial knife: Henry James, of Mrs. Penniman: “to have the sacrificial knife · · · suddenly thrust into her hand”, Washington Square ch. XXVIII.
4 And the victim and the sacrificial knife: TSE: “The victim and the sacrificial knife are perfectly adapted to each other”, “Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence” (1931), reviewing John Middleton Murry’s study. (Valerie Eliot on this review: “he referred ironically to subject and author as ‘the victim and the sacrificial knife’”, BBC broadcast 2 Nov 1971.)
4–5 the victim and the sacrificial knife · · · the butter also: on an author who wrote “The victimiser and the victims are the same reality · · · this is tremendous truth”, TSE wrote: “Tremendous, but yet a household word. It is our old acquaintance, the Red Slayer, la plaie et le couteau! [the wound and the knife!]”, “The World as Imagination” (1918), reviewing Edward Douglas Fawcett.
5 butter: for the butter (“gheé”) as used in sacrifice, see Gita iv 24 (WLFacs notes): “The process is Brahman, the clarified butter is Brahman, offered by Brahman in the fire of Brahman.”
[Poem I 272
· Textual History II 588]
So through the evening, through the violet air
Published in WLFacs.
Assigned to Oct 1913 by Rainey 34. Gordon 87 proposes Harvard, 1914. Valerie Eliot: “Both the tone, reminiscent of the Preludes, and the [hand]writing suggest it is an early piece”, BBC broadcast 2 Nov 1971. WLFacs notes, more specifically:
In An Anatomy of Melancholy, Mr. Conrad Aiken mentioned that he had “long been familiar with such passages as ‘A woman drew her long black hair out tight’” [13], which he “had seen as poems or part-poems, in themselves. And now saw inserted into The Waste Land as into a mosaic” (The Sewanee Review Winter 1966). It would seem from the handwriting that this poem, After the turning, and I am the Resurrection were written about 1914 or even earlier.
The Waste Land [V] 377–84 adapts 13–16 and 19–22. Additionally, the first line contributes to [V] 372 (see note), and the sixth to [V] 344–45. See headnote to The Waste Land, 1. COMPOSITION.
6 sunbaked houses: OED “adobe” 1: “An unburnt brick dried in the sun”. 2: “A house made of adobe. U.S.” TSE: “brown baked features”, Little Gidding II 41.
7–8, 16 The · · · word that frees | The inspiration that delivers · · · wings: “to set free the purity that clings · · · wings”, Bacchus and Ariadne 16, 18.
9 wrinkled road which twists: “wrinkled ways”, Oh little voices of the throats of men 6.
25 It seems that I have been a long time dead: “I feel | As if I’d been a long time dead”, The Little Passion: From “An Agony in the Garret” ms1 7–8.
32 about his hair the seaweed purple and brown: “By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 130.
Introspection
Published in March Hare.
Assigned to July–Aug 1915 by Rainey 198.
For prose poems, see Hysteria and headnote.
[Poems I 272–73 · Textual History II 588–89]
Title Introspection: OED 2: “spec. (with no object expressed): The action of looking within, or into one’s own mind”; anticipated by Dryden, 1695, “introspection into mine own mind”, and then from 1807. Bradley: “I have set down · · · of Introspection that ‘The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one’s mind’”, Appearance and Reality. TSE ruled the margins of this penultimate paragraph of the preface, and underlined Bradley’s self-quotation. (For the same paragraph, see note to Ash-Wednesday II 36–38.) On “what is called Introspection”, see Bradley in the note to Entretien dans un parc 5, 18, 21, 28. TSE: “There is certainly an important field for psycho-physics and the study of behaviour, and there are even certain processes where introspection is not without value”, Knowledge and Experience 82. To his mother, 11 Apr 1917: “I have some ideas for an Article on Introspective Consciousness.” On Aiken’s The Charnel Rose: “Mr. Aiken has gone in for psycho-analysis with a Swinburnian equipment; and he does not escape the fatal American introspectiveness; he is oversensitive and worried. He is tangled in himself”, Reflections on Contemporary Poetry IV (1919). On 21 Aug 1916, TSE sent Aiken a Laforguean burlesque concluding “they turned a flip flop somersault and disappeared down their own throats, leaving the assembly in darkness”. To I. A. Richards, 9 Aug 1930, on the impossible feat of “translating” Indian thought into the European tradition: “However, some such study (as far as one can) is I believe profitable, as getting outside of one’s own skin, or jumping down one’s own throat.” Henry Adams: “society in America was always trying, almost as blindly as an earthworm, to realize and understand itself; to catch up with its own head, and to twist about in search of its tail”; “He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection · · · Ever since 1870 friends by scores had fallen victim to it. Within five-and-twenty years, a new library had grown out of it. Harvard College was a focus of the study; France supported hospitals for it; England published magazines of it”, The Education of Henry Adams chs. XVI, XXIX.
six feet deep: traditional depth of a grave. in a cistern and a brown snake: Antony and Cleopatra II v: “So half my Egypt were submerged and made | A cistern for scaled snakes.” a brown snake · · · along the brick wall: “Along the garden stairs | The sluggish python lies”, Circe’s Palace 10–11. head having swallowed his tail: “My thoughts in a tangled bunch of heads and tails”, The Death of the Duchess II 28. The mythical snake that swallows its tail is Ouroboros.
The Engine
Published in March Hare.
The pencilled draft ms1 is on notepaper from U.S.M.S. [United States Maritime Service] St. Louis, on which TSE sailed from Liverpool to New York, 24 July–1 Aug 1915. For wartime fears when crossing the Atlantic, see note to II, “if the ship goes down”, and headnote to Mr. Apollinax.
Both drafts assigned to Apr 1915 by Rainey 198.
On TSE’s prose poems, see Introspection and note, and Hysteria. The Engine has some likeness to Charles Vildrac’s prose poems in Découvertes (1912). Aiken reported on the young TSE, back from Paris: “But what did we talk about? What to write, of course, and how to write, and what to read—Charles Louis Philippe and Vildrac, fresh from Paris—” (March & Tambimuttu eds. 22). Writing to Scofield Thayer, 14 Feb 1920, TSE listed Vildrac among half a dozen of the “more important men” (as poets) in France.
[Poems I 273–74 · Textual History II 589]
In Kipling’s story Bertran and Bimi (1891), the first paragraph has “he roused himself”, and “without ceasing” (TSE: “I roused myself” and “ceased”). On the next page, on board ship:
Then we laid out our bedding in the bows · · · our forefoot · · · The ship · · · The trampling tune of the engines was very distinct, and the jarring of the ash-lift, as it was tipped into the sea, hurt the procession of hushed noise. Hans lay down by my side and lighted a good-night cigar. This was naturally the beginning of conversation. He owned a voice as soothing as the wash of the sea, and stores of experiences as vast as the sea itself; for his business in life was to wander up and down the world, collecting orchids and wild beasts and ethnological specimens for German and American dealers. I watched the glowing end of his cigar wax and wane in the gloom, as the sentences rose and fell, till I was nearly asleep.
(TSE: “The engine · · · American business men · · · cigar · · · life · · · smooth · · · I lay in bed · · · the wash · · · the scuffle of feet · · · the tune · · · the light · · · the ship · · · I thought drowsily”.) For Kipling’s story, see headnote to Sweeney Among the Nightingales and note to Sweeney Erect 9–12.
Title The Engine: as a child of ten, TSE had included a train-story, Bill’s Escape, in his magazine Fireside (No. 1, 28 Jan 1899, and No. 2, 29 Jan); ch. II: “He heard the toot of the engine, he did not know what to do. It was sure death”; and ch. III began: “The engine came on”.
[Poem I 274 · Textual History II 589–90]
I
The engine hammered and hummed · · · The machine was hard, deliberate and alert: to Middleton Murry [mid-Apr? 1925]: “I have made myself into a machine. I have done it deliberately—in order to endure, in order not to feel—but it has killed V [Vivien].” Alice Corbin Henderson: “One can not turn oneself into a human machine”, The Rejection Slip in Poetry July 1916. (TSE: “the human engine waits | Like a taxi throbbing waiting”, The Waste Land [III] 216–17.) American business men · · · The machine · · · The machine: Van Wyck Brooks: “American civilization has not yet learned to accept the machinery of life as a premise. Your business man · · · really loves his business—which means that he loves the machine”; “An American · · · doesn’t believe in impulses and intuitions, because they interfere with the silent, regular inexorable grinding of the machine”; “the machinery of life”, The Wine of the Puritans 19, 29, 55 (TSE: “silent”); TSE reviewed the book in Harvard Advocate 7 May 1909. American · · · motives: Brooks 28: “America · · · simple motives”. American · · · machine · · · surface: Brooks 37: “The American · · · makes a religion of the
machine · · · appearance of being always on the surface”. (TSE: “worshippers of the machine”, The Dry Salvages I 10.) Flat faces of American business men: Henry James: “No impression so promptly assaults the arriving visitor of the United States as that of the overwhelming preponderance · · · of the unmitigated ‘business man’ face”, New York: An Autumn Impression VIII in The American Scene. Vivien Eliot to Henry Eliot, 11 Oct [1916]: “dreadful people really—very very rich manufacturing people · · · my American friends tell me they are very much like Americans!! Tom has just met a few at Ilkley (in Yorkshire) · · · and he says the same—he was struck with how much more like Americans they are than the South of England people.” TSE to Scofield Thayer, 30 June 1918: “pour the vials of contumely upon the fair flat face of the people” (the American people). “The white flat face of Death”, Murder in the Cathedral II, third chorus. For Flatland, see note to Animula 2. Flat faces of American business men · · · one plane, broken only by the salient · · · angle: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska: “ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES BECOME NOXIOUS · · · I SHALL DERIVE MY EMOTIONS SOLELY FROM THE ARRANGEMENT OF SURFACES · · · THE PLACES AND LINES BY WHICH THEY ARE DEFINED · · · this hill where the Germans are solidly entrenched · · · broken up by earth-works”, Vortex (Written from the Trenches) in Blast 2 (May 1915). OED “salient” 4: “Of an angle: Pointing outward”, “chiefly in Fortif.” B. 2a: “a spur-like area of land, esp. one held by a line of offence or defence, as in trench-warfare; spec. (freq. with the and capital initial), that at Ypres in western Belgium, the scene of severe fighting in the war of 1914–18” (this sense from 1914). TSE to Isabella Stewart Gardner, 4 Apr [1915]: “I have been seeing a good deal of some of the modern artists whom the war has so far spared. One of the most interesting of the radicals—Gaudier-Brzeska—do you know of him?—is in the trenches, (as is the interesting T. E. Hulme); cubism is still represented by Wyndham Lewis, by Jacob Epstein, and a man whose work I like exceedingly, Edward Wadsworth. There has been an exhibition · · · Epstein’s four things · · · are certainly extraordinarily habile · · · I do not know whether you have heard of a certain infamous soi-disant quarterly called Blast · · · I am thinking of sending you a copy.” The art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner (sometimes known as “Mrs. Jack”) was married to the American businessman John Lowell Gardner II. For a poem “like the time of the air-raids in London” and modern art with “planes and angles”, see TSE’s remarks at Vassar College, in headnote to Sweeney Among the Nightingales. An undated inventory at Yale of TSE’s possessions includes “Wadsworth Engine Room”. Inspired by Conrad’s Typhoon, this large, angular woodcut (1914/15) may have been exhibited at the Doré Gallery’s Vorticist Exhibition in June 1915. A scene from Typhoon IV, when the Nan-Shan is threatening to sink, provided a caption when the print was shown again in 1919: “the iron walls of the engine room. Painted white, they rose high into the dusk of the skylight, sloping like a roof: and the whole resembled the interior of a monument, divided by floors of iron grating, with lights flickering in the middle, within the columnar stir of the machinery” (for this print, and Gaudier-Brzeska’s letters from the Front to Wadsworth, see Jonathan Black in London, Modernism, and 1914 ed. Michael J. K. Walsh, 2010). Wadsworth designed the Ovid Press initials and colophon used in Ara Vos Prec. magazine: OED 2: Mil. “A building in which is stored a supply of arms, ammunition and provisions for an army in time of war.” 3a: Mil. “Stores, provisions, munitions of war”. 4. “A ship laden with stores” (obs). 6. “A chamber in a repeating rifle, machine-gun, etc.” The machine · · · having chosen with motives and ends unknown to cut · · · The machine was certain: Epstein’s sculpture Rock Drill, incorporating mechanical drill and abstract figure, was exhibited in the Second London Group exhibition, at the Goupil Gallery, in Mar 1915. TSE: “we have direct knowledge neither of our own nor of others’ will; a simple man could no more have will than could a machine”, Cause as Ideal Construction (1914). For “the chorus · · · ought to have a noise like a street drill”, see headnote to Sweeney Agonistes, 10. PREMIÈRE IN AMERICA: ENTER AN OLD GENTLEMAN. motives · · · unknown: Pope: “Must act on motives powerful, though unknown”, An Epistle to Bathurst 114 (with “men of pelf”, 109; TSE: “business men”). ends unknown: “ends unshaped”, Entretien dans un parc 30. “tendencies unknown”, Bacchus and Ariadne 4. certain and sufficient as a rose bush: Laforgue: “—Conséquemment, comme la rose | Est nécessaire à ses besoins” [—It follows, as the rose is necessary to its needs], Dialogue avant le lever de la lune [Dialogue before the Rise of the Moon] 19–20. “rosiers · · · suffisants” [roses · · · sufficient], Complainte des pianos qu’on entend dans les quartiers aisés [Complaint of the Pianos that One Hears in the Comfortable Districts] 35, 39.