The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 182
2 foreign bred pigs which our village disdains: Shelley: “failure of a foreign market for | Sausages”, Swellfoot the Tyrant II i. See notes to Coriolan I. Triumphal March 4–46 for Swellfoot and 44–47 for sausages and Dickens.
8 heavyweight · · · Pugstyles: OED “pugilist”: “One who practises the art of boxing · · · fig. a vigorous controversialist”, from 1790. “Jack Johnson · · · became the world’s champion heavyweight pugilist”, Popular Mechanics (1911).
11 From the tips of his ears to the ends of his pedals: “And the tips of his ears and his tail and his toes”, A Practical Possum 61.
21–24 Barn · · · Vale · · · Elms · · · Farm · · · Dale · · · Green: names of pastoral origin, but districts of London by 1933.
25 Minories · · · Old Jewry: streets and districts within the City of London with historic Jewish communities. Minories: pronounced Minn-ories.
26–28 along Lothbury glide · · · the lanes of Cheapside: Wordsworth: “Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, | And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside”, The Reverie of Poor Susan 7–8 (Grover Smith 34). “the long lanes of dogs and men | To Canning Town and Rotherhithe”, Airs of Palestine, No. 2 15–16.
27 Old Drury: tavern in Catherine Street, Covent Garden.
48 cheering until you could hear us for miles: “Bark bark BARK BARK | Until you can hear them all over the Park”, Of the Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles 9–10.
54 chaired: OED 1b: “To place in a chair or on a seat, and carry aloft in triumph, as an honour to a favourite, a successful competitor, and formerly often to the successful candidate at a parliamentary election.” Housman: “We chaired you through the market-place”, A Shropshire Lad XIX.
Bellegarde
The two typescript leaves of Bellegarde were sent by TSE to his brother Henry probably in 1935 or 1936 (Houghton MS Am 1691.9). The first has only seven typed lines, the second only four. TSE to Henry, 3 Mar 1937: “Bellegarde is merely a sketch which was never finished.” As Henry noted, the name is from the character in Henry James’s The American.
[Poems I 288–90 · Textual History II 600–602]
After receiving the Bellegarde typescript, Henry wrote to TSE, 5 Dec 1936, requesting material to present to Eliot House, Harvard. TSE replied, 30 Dec: “As for manuscripts, I do all my prose stuff straight onto the typewriter, so there is never anything of that; and as for verse, I usually make a few rough notes and then draft and redraft on the machine. Sometimes I start with a pencil and then when I have got going work straight on with the typewriter. I gave two mixed manuscripts of this kind, Anabasis and The Rock, to the Bodleian. I have about fourteen or sixteen pencilled sheets of part of Murder which I might send you: I only kept them in case of emergency as somebody told me that they might eventually fetch a considerable sum. But I ought to present something to Eliot House.” He subsequently sent 17 leaves of this pencil outline draft of the play
About two months later, these were followed by a further leaf which at some time has apparently been pinned to fols. 4–7 of the Murder in the Cathedral manuscript draft (now MS Am. 1691.9 fol. 21). This pencilled draft includes six lines which appear to have been an earlier state of Bellegarde, immediately followed by nine draft lines of Murder in the Cathedral I, beginning “Power possessed grows to glory”. In this pencil draft, the Bellegarde lines read:
Leaping pleasures pass tunefully
Follow futility easily [greedily alt] grasped
Held in the hand matchless a moment
Fade fast impaired by impotence
Slip from fingers slip
When fingered.
Henry wrote to Donald Gallup in Apr 1937 (quoted Gallup 1989 240–41):
I received from my brother the other day another page of pencil MS of Murder. It was pinned to a letter from the Sunday Times, London thanking TSE for the loan of it for some exhibit. On this TSE had typed (to me): “Another scrap of M in C.” I read the first few lines and then combed both editions for them but I could not find them—despite the fact that they were familiar. Finally I found that these first lines had been taken by TSE and used in a short poem called Bellegarde which he never finished or published. The rest of the MS was from Murder—a speech of the Second Tempter · · · I then examined the Bellegarde MS (which is typed, not handwritten) again, and noted that the four lines on p.2 of it sounded very much as if meant for Becket [12–15]. So this Bellegarde is evidently discarded material from Murder.
On a slip accompanying the two ts leaves of Bellegarde, Henry wrote: “These lines are nearly identical with six lines written for Murder in the Cathedral but deleted by TSE before publication. See Murder MS.”
Lines unrelated to Bellegarde, from a separate draft of Murder in the Cathedral, were to provide TSE with the opening of Burnt Norton (ts, U. Maryland). See headnote to Burnt Norton 2. GENESIS, and description of tsMinC (Burnt Norton Textual History, headnote).
[Poem I 290 · Textual History II 602]
The Anniversary
Recited 6 June 1935. John Carroll Perkins was minister of King’s Chapel, Boston, 1926–33. For the Perkinses, see headnote to next poem and headnote to Burnt Norton, 1. THE HOUSE AND TSE’S VISIT. To George Bell, 13 June 1934: “Dr. Perkins is a specimen of the almost extinct Right Wing American Unitarian Minister, and has read a good deal of Anglican theology.”
6–7 Mr. Mase- | field: as Poet Laureate since 1930, John Masefield had written a good deal of patriotic verse. His third poem, for George V’s silver jubilee in 1935, had appeared in April, and he had been appointed O.M. on 3 June.
19 pipkins: OED 1: “A small earthenware pot or pan, used chiefly in cookery.” panikins: OED (“pannikin · · · Also · · · panikin”): “A small metal · · · drinking vessel”. firkins: OED: “A small cask for liquids”.
A Valedictory
Forbidding Mourning: To the Lady of the House.
Recited 28 Sept 1935.
Mrs. Carroll Perkins was TSE’s hostess in Chipping Campden each summer from 1934 to 1939, except for 1936 (Composition FQ 35). TSE to Emily Hale’s friend Jeanie McPherrin, 3 Oct 1935: “I went down to Campden that afternoon [26 Sept] · · · I had, of course, a perfectly delightful birthday party. Mrs. P. is (almost too consciously, malice would say) the perfect hostess—on Friday The Yeomen of the Guard · · · on Saturday evening a dinner arranged by Emily with great care in her honour—healths and tasteful speeches from and to the servants, and an Occasional Poem by myself which seemed to go down well · · · I would gladly put up with · · · the Perkins’s in London permanently, for the sake of liberating E.”
Concerned about Emily, he wrote again to McPherrin, 13 Dec 1934: “the Perkins’s must be rather a drain on her vitality—I know that they are on mine, though I have never been with them any longer together than that weekend.” To his Aunt Susie (Mrs. Hinkley), 7 June: “Mrs. Perkins strikes me as one of those gentle, stupid, kind, tyrannous, prejudiced, oppressive and tremendously powerful personalities who blight everyone about them · · · she makes my back hair bristle; and confound it one can’t help trusting that bristle. Dr. Perkins is a very lovable, lazy-minded, muddleheaded man who is completely dominated by his wife, and who is really happier in Emily’s company than he is with Mrs. Perkins, but he doesn’t know it.” (For Housman’s “bristles”, see headnote to A Proclamation.)
To Mrs. Perkins, 5 Mar 1945: “I wish you might return and restore the garden at Campden: the place seemed to be so peculiarly yours, that I should not want to visit it again without you there · · · many of the gardens in England that you knew, and some of which I remember so clearly visiting with you, must be sad vestiges of their former state · · · There are still those at Campden who hope for your return. [footnote: I would write a poem for you.]”
[Poems I 291–93 · Textual History II 602–603]
On Mrs. Perkins’s behalf, TSE presented more than 400 of her colour slides of gardens of England and Scotland to the Royal Horticultu
ral Society in London (Evesham Journal 13 Mar 1948). To Mrs. Perkins, 3 Mar 1948: “It all seemed symbolic of a beauty and order which is vanishing from the world.”
To Gallup, 15 Sept 1961: “I remember composing a set of occasional verses for Mrs. Perkins. She and her husband had rented a house in Campden, Gloucestershire, for several summers, and they were just leaving I think, in 1939, after the outbreak of war, to return to the United States. Mrs. Perkins was a very keen gardener, and very much enjoyed the garden of the lady whose tenants they were. They never returned to England. After the war Dr. Perkins died and Mrs. Perkins went blind.”
TSE’s interest in flora dated back to his tenth year when he wrote Eliot’s Floral Magazine (1899). Another hostess and friend, Hope Mirrlees, gave him a copy of Wild Flowers of the Wayside and Woodland, ed. T. H. Scott et al., 1936 (repr. 1940) in July 1941. For his nonsense botany, see headnote to A Practical Possum.
Title] Like The Anniversary, written for Dr. Perkins three months earlier, this title is reminiscent of Donne. Yet unlike A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, which dramatises Donne’s own leavetaking, this Valedictory marks the departure of the recipient. Two days after reciting the poem, TSE wrote to her: “I want now to thank you for all your kindness and sweetness to me during the past two summers · · · I had come to feel ‘at home’ at Campden in a way in which I had not felt at home for some twenty-one years, anywhere.”
3–4 autumn’s season of · · · moister: Keats: “Season of mists”, To Autumn 1.
5 tardy rose: Horace: “Boy, ask not where the tardy Rose, | Secure from blighting Winter, blows”, Odes I xxxviii (tr. William Duncombe in Dodsley’s Works of Horace in English Verse. By Several Hands ed. Duncombe, 1757).
7–8, 49–50 grief · · · leaf · · · grief | Revive · · · leaf: Blake: “The Catterpiller on the Leaf | Repeats to thee thy Mothers grief”, Auguries of Innocence 37–38.
9 violas: the plant, pronounced with stressed long i (as violet).
10, 41 put off their coloured frocks · · · put on your gaudy jerkins: John Norris: “The Woods shall put on their green Livery · · · And I a Violet Garland for my Offering”, A Pastoral upon the Blessed Virgin, gone from Nazareth to Visit Elizabeth (1687). OED “jerkin”: “A garment for the upper part of the body, worn by men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”
11 zinnia and marigold: “experiences of gardenia or zinnia refine our experience of rose or sweet-pea”, John Marston (1934).
16 Clematis Jackmanii: “will the clematis | Stray down, bend to us · · ·?” Burnt Norton IV 3–4 (Composition FQ 36). Jackmanii: four syllables ending ee-eye.
17–18 myosotis · · · English name: forget-me-not.
20 cheat the winter into spring: “Midwinter spring is its own season”, Little Gidding I 1.
21 O long procession, happy flowers: Marvell: “See how the flow’rs, as at parade, | Under their Colours stand displayed: | Each Regiment in order grows, | That of the Tulip, Pink and Rose”, Upon Appleton House XXXIX.
[Poem I 292–93 · Textual History II 603–604]
28–29 And when to prune, and when to bind | And when to cut, and when to move: for “a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted”, see note to East Coker I 9–11. Paradise Lost IX 210: “Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind”.
36–38 variant winter’s dull · · · roots, that live beneath · · · death: “dead · · · Dull roots · · · Winter · · · life”, The Waste Land [I] 2–7.
39 revolving year: Dryden, The Hind and the Panther II 703; Thomson, Autumn 1305.
39–42 shall bring | The sweet deception of the spring · · · Mrs. Perkins: “The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring | Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring”, The Waste Land [III] 197–98. deception of the spring: “The deception of the thrush?” Burnt Norton I 22.
43–44 man alone | Remembers in the singing bone: “the bones sang · · · the bones sang · · · Forgetting themselves”, Ash-Wednesday II 23, 48, 51.
45 “Green earth forgets”: Meredith: “how they sucked the teats | Of Carnage · · · Flushed the vext earth with blood, green earth forgets”, France.—December, 1870 V 21–24.
47 familiar ghosts: “a familiar compound ghost”, Little Gidding II 42.
55 human wishes: after mentioning Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden and quoting Henry Brooke’s Universal Beauty in his Introduction to Johnson’s “London: A Poem” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1930), TSE wrote: “This is decadence · · · an age of retired country clergymen and schoolmasters · · · cursed with a Pastoral convention · · · intolerably poetic”.
Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats
Sent to Geoffrey Faber, 6 Mar 1936 (see headnote to Practical Cats, 3. COMPOSITION). A setting by Andrew Lloyd-Webber, and sung by him, was released on Now & Forever (2001).
For “Pollicle” and “Jellicle” see note to The Marching Song of the Pollicle Dogs. “Pollicle dogs and cats all must | Jellicle cats and dogs all must | Like undertakers, come to dust”, Five-Finger Exercises II. Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier 10–12.
1 The Princess Louise: renowned for its elaborate Victorian interior; at 208 High Holborn, a short walk from Russell Square.
1, 8–10] See note to WLComposite 207–213 = 321–27.
4 talking of thisses and that’s: “the I is a construction out of experience, an abstraction from it; and the thats, the browns and hards and flats, are equally ideal constructions from experience”, Knowledge and Experience 19.
6–19 I have been · · · a jack of all trades · · · I have done · · · I have been · · · I invented an excellent specific for scurf · · · I bought · · · I once wrote · · · I travelled · · · in hats: Lewis Carroll: “He said ‘I look for butterflies · · · I make them into mutton pies · · · I hunt for haddocks’ eyes · · · I sometimes dig for buttered rolls”, the White Knight’s song, Through the Looking-Glass ch. VIII (“It’s My Own Invention”). See Mélange Adultère de Tout.
[Poems I 293–94 · Textual History II 604]
8–9 life · · · and the profit and loss: “dead · · · And the profit and loss”, The Waste Land [IV] 312–14.
9 fat and the lean: Numbers 13: 20: “whether it be fat or lean”.
11 an agent for small furnished flats: “A small house agent’s clerk”, The Waste Land [III] 232.
14–15 Turf · · · Accountant: euphemism for a bookmaker.
16 scurf: OED: “A morbid condition of the skin, especially of the head”, obs.
16, 20 specific · · · cure: OED B. 1a: “A specific remedy”, with 1671, “a specific for the cure of the Dropsie”.
18 Levantine: stressed on the first syllable (the less common of the two pronunciations).
19 I travelled (from Luton) in hats: “One of the low on whom assurance sits | As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire”, The Waste Land [III] 233–34. travelled · · · in hats: commercial traveller, salesman.
34, 66 actually: to John Hayward, 12 June 1943: “it is always desirable to be reminded when one has slipped into using actually”.
51 Ingoldsby Oddie: for The Ingoldsby Legends, see headnote to A Fable for Feasters.
64 turned round with a look of surprise: “with a pained surprise · · · and turn · · · turned”, La Figlia Che Piange 4–5, 17.
The Country Walk
Published in The Times 6 June 2009, with the title Cows.
As the unadopted subtitle shows, TSE began this as an Epistle to Emily Hale. Their love for one another is manifest in his concern in letters when she was visiting England. See headnote to Burnt Norton for their visit to the house. TSE wrote to his Aunt Susie (Mrs. Hinkley), 7 June: “At present Emily is at Campden—a beauty-spot of England, or an eyesore, according as you look at it—with Dr. and Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Philip Hale.” (See headnote to A Valedictory Forbidding Mourning.)
To Dorothy Pound, 11 Aug [1925]: “I have a lovely p.c. for you but left it
in London not knowing where you were: 6 cows killed by lightning under a tree in Gloucestershire.” To Roy Campbell, 2 Sept 1929: “ I don’t know anything about bullfighting but it does not seem kind to the bulls or to your public. But I have a terror of bulls and even of cows, and was brought up to be amiable to animals, so I am prejudiced. I hope you will recover quickly. Who eats the bulls that are killed in this way? I am interested in the theories of the origin of the practice.” To Theodore Spencer, 19 July 1933: “The worst of the country is that I am terrified of Cows. How does one get over that?” To Virginia Woolf, 3 Oct 1935: “last week end I was in Gloucestershire and ran away from a Bull down a hill into some blackberry bushes”.
[Poems I 294–97 · Textual History II 605]
“I am afraid of high places and cows”, Harvard College Class of 1910, Seventh Report (1935). To Anthea Tandy, 18 Oct 1956: “I had meant to send you a word of warning, lest you should begin breathing at Bulls too close. A friend of mine tried it on 3 bulls (all behind bars). Two of them, so far as she could judge, were rather annoyed than otherwise; the third responded with purrs of friendliness, but (she added) he is a most exceptionally sweet-tempered bull anyway.”
Frank Morley of his son: “Donald at the age of nine in 1935 had begun to edit The Family News, a monthly periodical hand-published once a year. Tom submitted poems, but not until 1938 was a poem of Tom’s accepted by Donald. That was a poem on Cows. Poems on Cats had been rejected. Donald had his own cat, which he had named Saucerer. Perhaps Donald as editor felt there was a spoof somewhere, about Tom’s Cats. It did take a bit of knowing, always, to separate Tom’s wit from his chaff”, in Tate ed. 113.