The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 177
[Poem I 274 · Textual History II 589–90]
II
the engine · · · I lay in bed · · · endless geological periods · · · the machine: “Keeping his seasons · · · the machine · · · His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom · · · April · · · autumn · · · winter”; “The sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours”, The Dry Salvages I 8–14; III 13 (see note). the scuffle of feet · · · the music: to Eleanor Hinkley, while crossing the Atlantic to Europe (postmark 7 July 1914): “we have great fun, especially when it comes to dancing to the sound of the captain’s phonograph” (variant title for II: “Machinery: Dancers”). taut as a drumhead: perhaps assisted by the other, nautical, sense of drumhead: OED 3: “The circular top of a capstan”. OED: “court martial” 1b: “drumhead courtmartial · · · summoned round an upturned drum, for summary treatment of offenders during military operations”. TSE: “the deck of the drumming liner”, The Dry Salvages III 19 (see note). if the ship goes down: the passenger ship Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine, 7 May 1915, with more than a thousand dead, a hundred being Americans. See headnote to Mr. Apollinax.
Hidden under the heron’s wing
Published in March Hare. Date unknown.
1 Hidden under the heron’s wing: “hidden under the dove’s wing”, Coriolan I. Triumphal March 32; and “hidden under the · · · Hidden under the · · ·”, Coriolan II. Difficulties of a Statesman 32. “After the kingfisher’s wing”, Burnt Norton IV 8. heron’s wing: Edith Wharton: “the cleverly planted heron wing in her fur cap”, The Age of Innocence (1920) ch. 31.
2 song before daybreak: Swinburne, Songs before Sunrise. TSE, Before Morning (title). Jean Verdenal to TSE, 22 Apr 1912: “Je suis comme si j’avais toujours vécu à l’aube et comme si bientôt le soleil allait paraître” [It is as if I had always lived before daybreak and the sun were just about to rise], printed in Letters 1.
2–4 song before daybreak that the lotos-birds sing · · · my beloved what do you bring: Song of Solomon 2: 12, 16–17: “The time of the singing of birds is come · · · My beloved is mine, and I am his: He feedeth among the lilies. Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, Turn, my beloved”. OED, “lotos” 6: “The Parra gallinacea, which in Australia is called the lotus-bird. It sits on the leaves that float on the water, particularly those of the water-lily”. (For “the lotos rose”, see note to Burnt Norton I 36.) daybreak · · · sing · · · stars together: Job 38: 7: “When the morning stars sang together”.
[Poems I 274–75 · Textual History II 590]
2–8 song · · · sing · · · whisper of · · · mist. | | I lie · · · crimson: Tennyson: “Glow with the glow that slowly crimsoned all · · · while I lay, | Whispering · · · Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing, | While Ilion like a mist rose into towers”, Tithonus 56–63.
3 Evening whisper of stars together: “in the darkness | Whispering all together”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [16–17]. “whispers in darkness”, Murder in the Cathedral opening chorus.
5 With evening feet walking across the grass: Wyatt: “With naked foot stalking in my chamber”, They flee from me that sometime did me seek 2 (see note to Paysage Triste 10–12).
6 fragile arms: Paradise Regained III 387–89: “Much ostentation vain of fleshly arm, | And fragile arms, much instrument of war | Long in preparing, soon to nothing brought”. dividing the evening mist: Paradise Lost XII 629: “Gliding meteorous, as evening mist”.
6–8 arms · · · crimson fist: Paradise Lost II 173–4: “arm again | His red right hand”. I · · · the housemaid’s crimson fist: “I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids”, Morning at the Window 3 (here, “daybreak”, 2). The maid Amanda “With coarsened hand, and hard plebeian tread”, WLComposite 235.
O lord, have patience
Published in March Hare. Date unknown.
The top two-thirds of the ms page are given to the three widely spaced lines of Dante, each underlined, with TSE’s quatrain immediately following the third of them. TSE may have intended to supply verses to follow each of Dante’s three lines. In Dante (1929) I, he quoted the second tercet of Inferno III:
We cannot understand the inscription at Hell Gate:
Giustizia mosse il mio alto Fattore;
fecemi la divina Potestate,
la somma Sapienza e il primo Amore.
Justice moved my high Maker; what made me were the divine Power, the supreme Wisdom, and the primal Love.
until we have ascended to the highest Heaven and returned.
[Poems I 275 · Textual History II 590]
(TSE emends the Temple Classics translation, and in Selected Essays put “the primal Love” in roman type for emphasis.) The opening of Inferno III is quoted again by TSE at the end of the first section of Dante (1929). In Two Studies in Dante (1928), he had written about “what is certainly the central idea of the Divine Comedy—the idea of Justice”: “the importance of the conception of Justice in the Divine Comedy can hardly be over-estimated”; “The Aristotelian ‘justice’ as taken over by Dante is a term with progressive enlargement of meaning, from social or legal justice to Divine justice, which are related but not identical. It is largely due, we believe, to the romantic conception of justice that the Inferno has been, especially among Anglo-Saxon and Northern readers, the most popular and most apparently intelligible part of the Comedy.” Paul Elmer More thought well of TSE’s Dante essay, but TSE wrote to him, 2 June 1930: “I am perturbed by your comments on Hell. To me it is giustizia, sapienza, amore. And I cannot help saying, with all due respect of a (somewhat) younger and (much) more ignorant man, that I am really shocked by your assertion that God did not make Hell. It seems to me that you have lapsed into Humanitarianism. The Buddhist eliminates Hell · · · only by eliminating everything positive about Heaven (uttama paranibbana being obviously not heaven). Is your God Santa Claus?” Crawford 42–43 noted that TSE probably read Dante later than (and in some way in the light of) James Thomson, who twice adopts the inscription at Hell Gate: “They leave all hope behind who enter there”, “Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here”, The City of Dreadful Night I 78; VI 210.
1 O lord, have patience: Matthew 18: 26, 29: “The servant therefore fell down, and worshipped him, saying, Lord, have patience with me · · · Have patience.”
2 derelictions: OED 1: “The action of leaving or forsaking (with intention not to resume); abandonment. (Now rare exc. in legal use.)” The religious application is clear from OED, in Donne: “Desertion, or Dereliction”; and in Jeremy Taylor: “Repentance and dereliction of sins”. The modern use (OED 2), “implying a morally wrong or reprehensible abandonment or neglect; chiefly in the phr. dereliction of duty”, dates from 1778, Burke.
2, 4 derelictions · · · my · · · convictions: Browning: “Let me enjoy my own conviction · · · Still spying there some dereliction | Of truth, perversity, forgetfulness!” Christmas-Eve 1144–47.
In silent corridors of death
Published in March Hare.
Undated. The manuscript at one time belonged to Vivien Eliot’s brother, Maurice Haigh-Wood, who was commissioned 2nd lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment, 12 May 1915. It is likely that he was the author of the first-hand account of the Front which was published with TSE’s introductory remarks as a letter in Nation 23 June 1917 (repr. TSE’s Letters 1). Its author complained:
It is hideously exasperating to hear people talking the glib commonplaces about the war and distributing cheap sympathy to its victims.
Perhaps you are tempted to give them a picture of a leprous earth, scattered with the swollen and blackening corpses of hundreds of young men. The appalling stench of rotting carrion mingled with the sickening smell of exploded lyddite and ammonal. Mud like porridge, trenches like shallow and sloping cracks in the porridge—porridge that stinks in the sun · · · But these are only words, and probably convey only a fraction of their meaning to their hearers.
[Poems I 275 · Textual History II 590–91]
Among Vivien Eliot’s papers and evidently typed at the same time as Necesse est Perstare? by “F. M.” (Criterion Apr 1925; see note to The Hollow Men V 25–27) is a fair copy ts of a poem, Perque Domos Ditis Vacuas, also “by F. M.”:
It was after the acrobats
And I left my box
And ran along the corridor
Fast
Because I wanted to get into the air into the air
And in the suffused light of the empty corridor
In the stale air and soft suffused light of the corridor
In the deathly airlessness of the silent corridor
In the stifling scent of death and suffocation of the corridor
I met my own eyes
In another face.
(c. 624 fol. 10)
The title is from Aeneid VI 269 [through the empty halls of Dis], describing the entrance to Hades (see McCue 2016).
1 silent corridors of death: adapting T. E. Hulme, Pound’s Catholic Anthology (1915) contains Poem: Abbreviated from the Conversation of Mr. T. E. H. (subscribed TRENCHES: ST. ELOI), which ends: “My mind is a corridor. The minds about me are corridors. | Nothing suggests itself. There is nothing to do but keep on” (George Simmers, personal communication). TSE, reviewing an anthology of war poets: “Mr. Osborn has omitted one dead soldier who was a real poet—T. E. Hulme”, The New Elizabethans and the Old (1919).
1–2 death | Short sighs: “I had not thought death had undone so many. | Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled”, The Waste Land [I] 63–64.
3–4 silent sighing · · · crying: likewise rhyming with “dying”, After the turning of the inspired days 2: “the silence and the crying” (1st reading: “the silence and the sighing”).
4 the soul crying: Proverbs 19: 18: “let not thy soul spare for his crying”.
6 without hope: “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope”, East Coker III 23. See note to The Dry Salvages II 42–47.
7, 9, 11–12 Without pressure · · · dying · · · warm · · · airless: “Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves, | In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,” Burnt Norton I 24–25.
12 Dry airless: “sunless dry”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 63. “air which is now thoroughly small and dry”, Ash-Wednesday I 30.
12–13 airless sweet scent | Of the alleys of death: Hamlet I v, GHOST, of his death by poison: “alleys of the body” (after “scent the morning air”). The Times 28 Dec 1916, on “Christmas at the Front”: “the battalion had been roused to the crisp, chill dawn to sniff the sickly sweet scent of the rolling gas-cloud” (for “scent of death and suffocation” in Perque Domos Ditis Vacuas, see headnote).
12, 14 airless sweet scent · · · corridors of death: “apprehension deeper than all sense, | Deeper than the sense of smell, but like a smell | In that it is indescribable, a sweet and bitter smell | From another world”, Harry to Mary, The Family Reunion I ii, after speaking of “a corridor · · · every corridor”. In II ii, Agatha speaks of walking “down a concrete corridor | In a dead air”, and in her next speech: “Up and down, through the stone passages | Of an immense and empty hospital | Pervaded by a smell of disinfectant.” Murder in the Cathedral I: “more pain than birth or death. | Sweet and cloying through the dark air | Falls the stifling scent of despair.”
13 Of the alleys of death: Tennyson: “Into the valley of death”, The Charge of the Light Brigade.
[Poem I 276–77 · Textual History II 591]
Airs of Palestine, No. 2
Published in March Hare.
Assigned to 1917 by Rainey 198.
TSE to Aiken, 21 Aug 1916: “I have been writing: philosophy for the Monist and the International Journal of Ethics, reviews for the New Statesman, the Manchester Guardian and the Westminster Gazette · · · Of poetry I have not written a line; I have been far too worried and nervous. I hope that the end of another year will see me in a position to think about verse a bit.” To his mother, 6 Sept 1916: “The Westminster have given some novels to do.” The following day, to J. H. Woods: “I am doing considerable reviewing for the Westminster Gazette—all sorts of things from Durkheim and Boutroux down to Village Government in India and even H. de Vere Stacpoole’s novels. I got hold of their Indian books by telling them that I was a student of Sanskrit and Pali—whereupon they gave me several books on contemporary Indian politics.” But on 30 Jan 1917, Pound wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver: “I am afraid Eliot has split with The Westminster.” For TSE and newspapers, see headnote to The “Boston Evening Transcript”.
In a letter to John Middleton Murry, [Nov?] 1919, TSE adapted the first and third stanzas to deplore J. C. Squire, active in the publications named by TSE:
God from a Cloud to Squire spoke
And breath’d command: take thou this Rod
And smite therewith the living Rock;
And Squire hearken’d unto God.
And Squire smote the living Rock,
And Lo! the living Rock was wet—
Whence issue, punctual as the clock
Land and Water,
The New Statesman,
The Owl,
The London Mercury,
And the Westminster Gazette
Squire was literary editor of the New Statesman from its inception in 1913 and acting editor 1917–18. (TSE contributed 1916–18.) He was founding editor, 1919–34, of the London Mercury, and published widely. Reviewing Georgian Poetry 1916–1917, ed. Edward Marsh, TSE called Squire’s Lily of Malud “an original and rather impressive poem which deserves better company”, Verse Pleasant and Unpleasant (1918). TSE to John Quinn, 25 Jan 1920, of the London Mercury: “J. C. Squire, the editor, knows nothing about poetry; but he is the cleverest journalist in London. If he succeeds, it will be impossible to get anything good published. His influence controls or affects the literary contents and criticism of five or six periodicals already. The Times [TLS] always more or less apart, the Athenaeum (and, of less influence, Art & Letters) are the only important reviews outside of the Squire influence.”