The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 186
8 patroon: “to those who have easy access to the O.E.D. ‘patroon’ may not seem too inapt”, ts1. OED 1: “Patron Obs.” 2: “A master (esp. of a slave) · · · Obs.” 3: “The captain, master, or officer in charge of a ship”. 4: “In U.S. A possessor of a landed estate and certain manorial privileges granted under the old Dutch governments of New York”. See Textual History.
9 Eximious: OED: “Excellent, distinguished, eminent”, noting “Common in 17th c. literature: the few examples in 19th c. are humorously bombastic or pedantic.”
10 Or ſkies to ſcan: as an amateur astronomer.
10–11 ſcan · · · in mild affright: Dryden: “looking backward with a wise afright, | Saw”, Absalom and Achitophel 71–72.
Long may this Glass endure, and brim with wine
Written in Sept 1955, to be engraved by Laurence Whistler on a second Georgian rummer, for presentation to Geoffrey and Enid Faber by their children on their 35th wedding anniversary, 30 Dec 1955. The rummer was sold at Bonhams, 20 Sept 2005, but the verse appears to be unpublished. In addition, Whistler engraved two quatrains of his own verse and a fireworks display on a glass goblet for Geoffrey Faber to present to his wife on the same occasion.
[Poems I 313–14 · Textual History II 617–18]
TSE to Whistler, 28 Sept 1955:
I enclose herewith my copy of the verses in its latest form, which has been passed by Faber. You will observe that I have omitted all punctuation at the end of lines. In the case of the triplet, I had in mind the fact that the three lines are to follow each other round the rim of the glass. I should have liked to make a triplet such that it would make sense equally well, no matter at which line you started. That is easy enough with a couplet, but with the triplet I have not wholly succeeded, inasmuch as if your eye strikes first the third line, you will observe that “Sev’rally charactered”, which is apposite to “Faber line”, cannot qualify “this Glass”. Nevertheless, I think that anyone can make out the sense of the triplet, no matter where he started. It struck me in any case that a full stop or a colon after “design” would look ungraceful, though I myself would not object to a little star or a dot like the upper part of a colon, being set between the three lines. On the other hand, I should rather like the prospective reader to know that when the verses are read in their proper order, they begin with “Long”. I leave that problem entirely to you to solve.
With the three couplets, I had in mind that the emblems of the three grown-up children, together with the verses, were to be dispersed at equal intervals round the glass. There should, in any case, be no priority of age or sex, and the person looking at the glass can begin with anyone and turn round to the others. It would be impossible to put full stops after all of them, since none of them is a sentence in itself, and the alternative of having a comma after “mind”, and after “parts”, and a full stop after “lore” would defeat the continuity. It would seem to me best, therefore, to have no punctuation.
6 subtile: quoting Donne’s “That subtile wreath of hair, which crowns my arm” (The Funeral), TSE comments: “the adjective ‘subtile’ is exact, though its exactness be not to us immediately apparent in the literal sense of the word which has so suffered from the abuse of the kindred word ‘subtle’”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 124 (Clark Lecture IV). However, TSE’s usage here with this spelling—unique in his poems—is not OED 2, “Of fine or delicate texture”, but 5: “Involving careful discrimination of fine points”.
9 secrets of hermetic lore: as a physicist.
The gourmet cat was of course Cumberleylaude
In a letter of 8 July 1964 to Anthony Laude (of Neville Road, Cambridge), thanking him for dinner. “I also enjoyed meeting Cumberley a particularly fastidious eater without doubt, but a dignified and beautiful cat. I hope you will enjoy a few lines in honour of your feline companion, his character struck me so forcefully that I felt I had to write a few words in honour of him.”
1 Cumberleylaude: OED “Cumberland”: “a piquant sauce”, quoting Dinners at Home (1878): “Cumberland Sauce for Game (Cold) · · · Cumberland Sauce (Hot).”
How the Tall Girl and I Play Together
Fair copy only, in Valerie’s Own Book.
[Poems I 314–316 · Textual History II 618]
In 1953: “my opinion is, that a good love poem, though it may be addressed to one person, is always meant to be overheard by other people. Surely, the proper language of love—that is, of communication to the beloved and to no one else—is prose”, The Three Voices of Poetry 6. Asked what he hoped he had achieved: “one always likes to think that one’s last work is one’s best so far · · · What I should like to do—I should like to write some poem that would give my wife as much delight as the poems which I have already written have given her”, Talking Freely (1961).
12–13 our middle parts · · · toes: Hamlet II ii, GUILDENSTERN: “On Fortune’s cap we are not the very button.” HAMLET: “Nor the soles of her shoe?” ROSENCRANTZ: “Neither, my lord.” HAMLET: “Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours?” GUILDENSTERN: “Faith, her privates we.” HAMLET: “In the secret parts of Fortune?” Frederic Manning rearranged Shakespeare’s phrasing for the title of his Great War novel The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929; expurgated as Her Privates We, 1930).
13 My toes play with her toes and my tongue with her tongue: a copy of Sweeney Agonistes (Magdalene) is “Inscribed for my dear Valerie Eliot by T. S. Eliot; by Tom, for his beloved bedfellow Valerie, for her upon whom he relies and lies, touching her from mouth to toes.”
Sleeping Together
Fair copy only, in Valerie’s Own Book. Title from the list of Contents at the end of the first exercise book.
How the Tall Girl’s Breasts Are
Fair copy only, on two pages, in Valerie’s Own Book. Title above the poem has no apostrophe, but is correct in the Contents at the end of the first exercise book.
Dedication II
Fair copy only, in Valerie’s Own Book. Beneath the poem TSE subsequently wrote: “(Rejected. See final version of Dedication in Collected Poems: 1909–1962).”
7–8 To you I offer this dedication | In three words which for us are at one with each other: | Love adoration desire: The Waste Land, closing lines:
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
[Poems I 316–19 · Textual History II 618–19]
Love seeketh not Itself to please
Written for Valerie Eliot, in TSE’s very late hand. Contesting Blake’s The Clod & the Pebble (from Songs of Experience, 1794):
“Love seeketh not Itself to please,
“Nor for itself hath any care,
“But for another gives its ease,
“And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.”
So sang a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle’s feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
“Love seeketh only Self to please,
“To bind another to Its delight,
“Joys in another’s loss of ease,
“And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”
(For Songs of Experience, see notes to The Waste Land [V] 322–26 and 379–81.) TSE: “The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and the poems from the Rossetti manuscript, are the poems of a man with a profound interest in human emotions, and a profound knowledge of them. The emotions are presented in an extremely simplified, abstract form”, William Blake (1920) I.
But if there was nothing to distract him from sincerity there were, on the other hand, the dangers to which the naked man is exposed. His philosophy, like his visions, like his insight, like his technique, was his own. And accordingly he was inclined to attach more importance to it than an artist should; this is what makes him eccentric, and makes him inclined to formlessness.
But most through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot’s curse
Bla
sts the new-born infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse,
is the naked vision;
Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite,
is the naked observation; and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is naked philosophy, presented. But Blake’s occasional marriages of poetry and philosophy are not so felicitous.
William Blake (1920) II
(The unadopted subtitle to The Superior Landlord was The Marriage of Life and Death; see Sweeney Agonistes headnote, 6. THE SUPERIOR LANDLORD.)
On 9 Jan 1957, the day before his wedding, TSE had written to a friend to say that he and Valerie were keeping the ceremony very private “in view of the disparity of age and the obnoxiousness of most of the press · · · We love each other very much and are both sure that we are doing the right thing.”
[Poem I 319 · Textual History II 619]
“The End of All Our Exploring”
“The whole of Shakespeare’s work is one poem; and it is the poetry of it in this sense, not the poetry of isolated lines and passages or the poetry of the single figures which he created, that matters most. A man might, hypothetically, compose any number of fine passages or even of whole poems which would each give satisfaction, and yet not be a great poet, unless we felt them to be united by one significant, consistent, and developing personality.” (John Ford, 1932)
1. Cumulation and Development 2. Experimentation 3. Publisher and Poet
1. CUMULATION AND DEVELOPMENT
To William Force Stead, 7 Jan 1927: “One may change one’s ideas, sentiments and point of view from time to time; one would be rather atrophied if one did not; but change of mind is a very different thing from repudiation. Certainly I am ‘dissatisfied’ with everything I have done, but that also is a very different thing. I do not see why one should ‘repudiate’ anything that one has written provided that one continues to believe that the thing written was a sincere expression at the time of writing. One might as well repudiate infancy and childhood.”
To Paul Elmer More, 27 Mar 1936: “I think that what appears to another person to be a change of attitude and even a recantation of former views must often appear to the author himself rather as part of a continuous and more or less consistent development.”
“In the work of any major poet who does not repeat himself, the earlier part is necessary for understanding the later, and the later for understanding the earlier”, new postscript, written 1948, for the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound. To Edith Sitwell, 20 Sept 1949, acknowledging a copy of her volume The Canticle of the Rose: “It is very useful too to have so much in one volume. I mean, that in a collection of the right length, representing all periods of a poet’s work, one can grasp development so much better—the variety one is well aware of, but from the separate books as they appear one does not grasp the development as a whole. Also, the impression of the unity of the work, over twenty-seven years, is a great source of satisfaction; and the confirmation of validity is that the later poems make one understand the earlier poems better, as well as vice versa.”
Yeats (1940): “Now, in theory, there is no reason why a poet’s inspiration or material should fail, in middle age or at any time before senility. For a man who is capable of experience finds himself in a different world in every decade of his life; as he sees it with different eyes, the material of his art is constantly renewed. But in fact, very few poets have shown this capacity of adaptation to the years. It requires, indeed, an exceptional honesty and courage to face the change. Most men either cling to the experiences of youth, so that their writing becomes an insincere mimicry of their earlier work, or they leave their passion behind, and write only from the head, with a hollow and wasted virtuosity. There is another and even worse temptation: that of becoming dignified, of becoming public figures with only a public existence—coat-racks hung with decorations and distinctions, doing, saying, and even thinking and feeling only what they believe the public expects of them. Yeats was not that kind of poet.”
2. EXPERIMENTATION
To Pamela Murray, 4 Feb 1938: “I do experiment consciously, in the sense that everything I undertake is like setting myself a new problem to solve. If one wants to say something that one has not said before, one must find a new way of saying it. It does not seem to me worth while ever to do the same thing twice. And as for the way of working, that depends upon the kind of poem. If it is only a little poem, well, it probably shapes itself quite quickly (though it may have been at the back of my head for a long time) and gets written in an hour or two at any time. If it is a long poem, or a play, then it is a matter of sitting down every morning after breakfast and working regularly for two or three hours a day at it, over a period of perhaps many months.”
To Desmond MacCarthy, 14 Nov 1947: “assuming that an ‘experiment’ in the way of Finnegans Wake was worth making, was there any point in making it at such length? There will always, probably, be but few who will read the whole of it, in any generation: though everybody will have read Anna Livia Plurabelle (with the assistance, certainly very great, of the gramophone) just as all Frenchmen have read the propos torcheculatifs of Gargantua. I think the answer is that even such morceaux are a very different thing, if we know that they are fragments of a huge completed work, from what they would be if they were presented as sufficient in themselves · · · I don’t think, therefore, that the ‘unreadability’ of Finnegans Wake makes it any the less a great literary ‘monument’ · · · The question remains, whether Finnegans Wake was worth doing; also the question, whether it must have a bad influence.”
James Joyce 1882–1941, exhibition catalogue (1949): “One of the greatest capacities of genius is the power of development. The volume of a man’s work should correspond to this capacity in him: what he leaves behind should be no more and no less than what is needed to realise each definite stage of his development. While an artist is still living and working, we see his development rather as change. According to our own capacities, we see this change as for the better or for the worse, in relation to that one of his works which we elect as ‘the best’. Thus, there may have been readers of Dubliners who regarded the Portrait as an aberration, there were certainly admirers of the Portrait who deplored Ulysses; there were still more admirers of Ulysses who viewed Finnegans Wake as the raving of genius in decay, or as the futile effort of a man who had achieved his masterpiece, to find something new to say and a new way of saying it. But now at last, I think, the question ‘which was Joyce’s greatest work?’ should appear as pointless as the question ‘which is Shakespeare’s greatest play?’ Joyce’s writings form a whole; we can neither reject the early work as stages, of no intrinsic interest, of his progress towards the latter, nor reject the later work as the outcome of decline. As with Shakespeare, his later work must be understood through the earlier, and the first through the last; it is the whole journey, not any one stage of it, that assures him his place among the great.”
3. PUBLISHER AND POET
To Anne Ridler 28 Oct 1940, on contemporary poets: “There are only those who are of use to you, in one way or another, and those who are not: and as a rule, if people are trying to do something like what one is trying to do oneself, they are a nuisance; and if they are not, they are irrelevant.”
To Geoffrey Faber, 25 Mar 1941:
I suppose you must be allowed to keep that horrid term “modernist”, which, as applied to poetry, was first used I think by Edith Sitwell, who never had the advantage of an education anyhow, and who meant, of course, poetry by Sitwells.
I think that some positive case can be made out for the reaction against 19th century poets—something more respectable at least than the picayune destructiveness of a Lytton Strachey, if one looks at the poets whom some of us admired instead. The reaction was not literary criticism—it did not start from that impulse, though when we wer
e young we did not see the distinction ourselves: it was rather one of affinities—“X is of more use to me than Y”—and a feeling that the creation of one literary generation cannot be nourished by that of the preceding. We had got into a different mood, and the 19th century seemed remote. It was also a reaction against meliorism—though that does not apply directly to Arnold. It is at least more interesting for what it tried to restore, than for what it disliked · · · My private view, which may shock you, is that the second phase of “modernist poetry”—I mean the “Faber poets”—is really the first phase of the a reaction. The revolution, if it deserves that name, which began before the last war, was abortive. The Leninists went out, and the Stalinists came in: Auden, Spender preserving external trappings of versification, allusiveness, obscurity, contemporary imagery, and adding the still more modern‑seeming graces of homosexuality, leftwingery and an interim taste for Germans. Auden seems to drop with relief into the position of being a queer epigone of Kipling (no disrespect to the latter). (The quickest way to becoming old‑fashioned is to be Modern). Of course this is not the meeting of the waters of which you speak. I am a bilious old Jeremiah, but the deadening of the auditory imagination, the slackness of craftsmanship in contemporary poetry, seems to me ominous.
To Robert Waller, 21 Sept 1942: “I doubt whether I get very much pleasure from any modern poetry, either by my contemporaries or by my juniors. That does not imply a comparative rating in which I put my own work very high. It is simply that if one writes oneself, interest in poetry is largely a matter of what can be of use to oneself, and I do not believe that living poets can be of much use to each other · · · I have had misgivings, in one direction or another, about everybody and about every tendency in the last twenty years. I don’t feel that I have much in common with contemporary poetry. My own influence, so far as I have had any, has been purely negative—in helping to put one kind of poetical jargon out of date. But some of the fundamental attitudes which I disliked in ‘Georgian’ verse have seemed to me, from time to time, to creep back again in up-to-date disguises; as well as other attitudes which seemed to me mistaken. I cannot understand the fluency of many poets, or their inclination to write another poem rather than to spend time perfecting the one just written. Modern verse often seems to me to show a defective ear, and a lack of vitality in language · · · I do fear that Dylan Thomas has been up a blind alley, an alley choked with rather rank vegetation of verbiage. As for [Henry] Treece, I think that he has some real musical sense, and a great facility of striking imagery—some of which is really successful. I hope that he will discipline his language, and learn to put the right image in the right place and leave it to do its work, instead of making excess of imagery a substitute for structure · · · I have to go back to the dead to find poetry that I enjoy reading.”