by T. S. Eliot
2, 4 froward: see note to Airs of Palestine, No. 2 38.
Clerihews III
Mr. Geoffrey Faber
Likes to brandish his sabre
At Bishops and Rectors
And Minor Directors.
Mr. Geoffrey Faber
Still likes to belabour
The Wassops on Blossoms
And Aerial Possums.
Convalescents
Mr. Geoffrey Faber’s
“Farewell of Lochaber”’s
Annoying the neighbours.
(And it’s getting much worse
Since he’s had a Scotch Nurse).
Convalescence II
Mr. Geoffrey Faber
Likes to chatter and jabber
About what one ought to do
At the Battle of Waterloo.
Mr. Geoffrey Faber
Enjoys the macabre.
To be quite so Fabrous—
Well! I think it scabrous.
Five ts pages with pen and ink drawings, sent to Geoffrey Faber, 10 and 11 Feb 1940, the second envelope addressed to “Mr. Geoffrey Faber, | (or else his cadaver)”. Pen and ink drawings by TSE.
2 3 Wassops: perhaps “wasps”, although this is not one of the many forms recorded by OED. Not in Wright.
2 4 Aerial Possums: Ariel Poems are in the air.
3 2 Farewell of Lochaber: Farewell to Lochaber, ballad by Allan Ramsay (1686–1758), often sung or set for bagpipes.
4 3–4 what one ought to do | At the Battle of Waterloo: Stephen Weir: “a regular military shortfall of fighting the last war”, History’s Worst Decisions (1940) 128. Life magazine, 5 Oct 1942: “we are re-fighting the Abyssinian War and re-fighting the last war · · · Napoleon · · · used young generals against enemy generals who · · · were always fighting the last war”. Carola Oman’s Britain against Napoleon was published by Faber in 1942.
5 1–2 Faber · · · macabre: Fowler recommends the pronunciation macaber, and OED “macabre” 1. danse macabre gives among anglicised forms “dance macaber”, with citation from Longfellow.
When icicles hang by the wall
When icicles hang by the wall,
And Tom the typist blows his nail,
O then comes in the sweet o’ the year
With the stirrup pump in the frozen pail.
From a letter to Hayward, 3 Jan 1941 (King’s). Published in Smart 161.
Love’s Labour’s Lost V ii:
When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail · · ·
The Winter’s Tale IV ii:
When daffodils begin to peer,
With heigh! the doxy over the dale,
Why, then comes in the sweet o’ the year;
For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale.
An old man sat baldheaded, ’twas Christmas in Bombay
From the same letter to Hayward, 3 Jan 1941:
· · · The hostess was cheered by a cable from her son the Brigadier, who had leave to spend Christmas with his wife in Cairo. Which reminds me not very relevantly of the old jingle
An old man sat baldheaded, ’twas Christmas in Bombay:
He had a gang of coolies to keep the flies away.
He wished he was in Greenland, where flies are frozen stiff.
Someone said “Happy Christmas!” and he up and hit him: Biff.
We have no flies.
The sage will refrain from sitting in with Archbishops
To Hayward, 8 Feb 1941 (ts, King’s):
Whereupon he cast his turban to the ground, sprinkled his head with dust, and plucking at his beard, recited the following couplet:
The sage will refrain from sitting in with Archbishops:
They deal from the bottom of the pack.
Oh dae ye ken the turdie lads
To Hayward [12 Feb 1941] (King’s), telling him that The Dry Salvages would appear in NEW in ten days’ time:
This, however, need not be regarded as the final version · · · and I shall be grateful for further comments. Whereupon the old minstrel, bending his grey locks over the harp, and striking the strings with rheumatic fingers, burst into the following rude but stirring ballad of the old time:
Oh dae ye ken the turdie lads
Betwixt the Goble an’ the Tay,
Wha spear the lachsen fish a’ nicht
An’ hunt the horned stag a’ day?
5
Oh weel I ken the turdie lads
Betwixt the Goble an’ the Tay:
They’ll nae mair spear the fish a’ nicht
Or hunt the horned stag a’ day.
Oh wae is me on Knockiemuir
10
And sair my hert on Kinkiebrae;
And a’ for a’ the turdie lads
Wha speer nae mair the licht o’ day.
Oh Muckieburn to Goble rins
An’ Goble rins intae the Tay—
15
They’re rid wi’ bluid o’ turdie lads
Wha speer nae mair the licht o’ day.
Yr faithful TP
1 O dae ye ken: “D’ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay?”, traditional North Country song. turdie lads: Robert Fergusson: “strappin dames and sturdy lads”, Hallowfair 7 (Robert Crawford, as throughout, personal communication).
3, 7 spear · · · spear: (as also “speer”, 12, 16): = ask, inquire, request (Scots, usually speir). lachsen: = salmon (Germ.), for which the Tay is famous.
6 Goble: “goble” in ts.
9 Knockiemuir: Loch Knockie is near Loch Lomond, whereas the other names are invented. “I rode to the Knockie Muir to see that view of Loch Lomond”, The Reminiscences of Charlotte, Lady Wake (1909) 63.
13–14 Oh Muckieburn to Goble rins | An’ Goble rins intae the Tay: Burns: “Now Sark rins o’er the Solway sands, | An’ Tweed rins to the ocean”, Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation 5–6.
16 Wha speer nae mair the licht o’ day: Cymbeline IV ii: “Fear no more the heat o’th’Sun” (see note to Five-Finger Exercises II. Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier 4–5, 10–12).
after 16 TP: Tom Possum.
Speaking Piece, or Plum for Reciters
To Hayward, 2 Apr 1943 (King’s):
During train journeys, to occupy my mind restfully, I have been starting to compose a special SPEAKING PIECE, or Plum for Reciters, to be available free of charge. It begins something like this:
I love to stroll
By sleepy sedges where soft sewage seepeth,
Or breakers roll
On beaches where the piping pee-wit peepeth.
5
I like my tea
In that high style at which the kipper kippeth,
Not such as be
The nursery nuisance where the nipper nippeth
Or spurious crea-
10
M of Devon where the towny trippeth….
Tennyson: “Sadly the far kine loweth: the glimmering water outfloweth · · · The ancient poetess singeth, that Hesperus all things bringeth”, Leonine Elegiacs X 13.
6–8 the kipper kippeth · · · the nipper nippeth: OED “kip” v.2 slang: “To go to bed, sleep”, from 1889, with C. Rook, Hooligan Nights (1899): “that’s where me and my muvver kipped when I was a nipper.” nipper: OED b. slang: “A boy, a lad · · · the smallest or youngest of a family”, from 1847 (Dombey and Son).
His note is harsh and adenoid
His note is harsh and adenoid,
His manners are not nice:
O cuckoo! shall I call thee boid?
Or jist a wandering v’ice?
And it is also the vacuum cleaner which is apt to begin just outside the door as I settle down for composition.
To Hayward, 30 Apr 1943 (King’s).
3–5 O cuckoo · · · wandering v’ice: Wordsworth: “O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird | Or but a wandering Voice?”, To the Cuckoo 3–4. Two similarl
y famous lines prompted another such verse in a letter to Mary Trevelyan, 6 Aug 1943:
I hope that you will be enjoying a carefree holiday and amongst the haunts of
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Forget awhile the sombre street of Gower …
Yours etc.
where Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard 33–34 became the first two lines. (Gower Street is in Bloomsbury.)
Wee Dolly Sayers
Wee Dolly Sayers
Wouldn’t say her prayers.
Take her by the hind leg
And throw her down stairs.
To Mary Trevelyan, 11 Mar 1944 (Houghton), asking the identity of “the original on which the following Mother Goose is based”. The Mother Goose rhyme runs: “Goosey, goosey, gander, | Whither dost thou wander? | Upstairs and downstairs | And in my lady’s chamber. | | There I met an old man | Who wouldn’t say his prayers; | I took him by the left leg, | And threw him down the stairs.” TSE uses “the following Mother Goose” to mean “nursery rhyme”.
To John Hayward, 2 Apr 1943, on C. S. Lewis: “He irritates me in somewhat the same way that, on a lower plane, Dorothy Sayers does: a kind of cock‑sureness, as if they were the first people who had ever discovered Theology, and were the accredited interpreters of it to the ignorant public.” 12 Apr: “I fear he is going the way of Dorothy Sayers and taking the Church under his wing.”
TSE respectfully discussed with Dorothy L. Sayers the religious dramas she wrote for the Canterbury Festival and others. She went on to translate Dante for Penguin Classics (Hell, 1949; Purgatory, 1955; Paradise, completed by Barbara Reynolds, 1962).
1 Dolly: to Eric Fenn, 24 Feb 1941: “I am rather puzzled by not seeing Dotty Sayers billed in the Radio Times this week. Has the whole series been pushed off the air · · ·?” The seven broadcasts included TSE’s Towards a Christian Britain (1941) and Sayers’s The Religions behind the Nation. At TSE’s suggestion, they were collected as The Church Looks Ahead (1941).
Mr Maurice Bowra
Mr Maurice Bowra
Gets sourer and sourer,
Having been in a hurry
To succeed Gilbert Murray
5
And is now (poor soul) at the bottom:
I.e. Warden of Wadham.
Inscribed beneath the greeting “H. Hope Mirrlees | from T. S. Eliot | Christmas 1944” on the front free endpaper of a copy of Sophoclean Tragedy by C. M. Bowra (1944) (Bodleian). John Sparrow (Warden of All Souls, 1952–77) pencilled a box around “And” (5), with the suggestion “? He”.
This squib is perhaps in reply to one of the “witty and scurrilous poems about his friends” which Hayward reported (to Frank Morley, May 1941) that Bowra was writing. TSE to Hayward, 23 June 1944: “Maurice Bowra is no doubt enjoying himself wire-pulling: was there ever a more vulgar little fat Head of a House than he?”
“C. M. Bowra on Eliot’s American education—he had read a lot but didn’t really understand anything—a very stupid man, slow”, Edmund Wilson, The Forties (1983) 151. Valerie Eliot consulted Bowra about classical references when publishing the drafts of The Waste Land.
The sudden unexpected gift
Response to the gift in 1946 of a plastic cigarette-case from Stephen Spender. Accompanying the gift was a rhyme (typed entirely in capitals) on notepaper headed “ORGANISATION DES NATIONS UNIES | POUR L’EDUCATION, LA SCIENCE & LA CULTURE” and “Please address all correspondence to The Executive Secretary”:
TO THE MASTER OF RUSSELL SQUARE
When those aged eagle eyes which look
Through human flesh as through a book,
Swivel an instant from the page
To ignite the luminous image
With the match that lights his smoke—
Then let the case be transparent
And let the cigarettes, apparent
To his X-ray vision, lie
As clear as rhyme and image to his eye.
To Tom with love from Stephen August 21 1946.
TSE replied:
A L’ORGANISATEUR DES NATIONS UNIES
POUR L’EDUCATION, LA SCIENCE ET LA CULTURE
The sudden unexpected gift
Is more precious in the eyes
Than the ordinary prize
Of slow approach or movement swift.
5
While the cigarette is whiffed
And the tapping finger plies
Here upon the table lies
The fair transparency. I lift
The eyelids of the aging owl
10
At twenty minutes to eleven
Wednesday evening (summer time)
To salute the younger fowl
With this feeble halting rhyme
The kind, the Admirable Stephen.
Published in The Oxford Book of Letters ed. Frank Kermode and Anita Kermode (1995).
There are two typescripts (without variants). ts1 (Northwestern U.): copy of Spender’s poem followed by Eliot’s. ts2 (Valerie Eliot collection): later copy of TSE’s poem only, with “TSE” at foot in Valerie Eliot’s hand; together with a photocopy of Spender’s letter.
The gift followed a row over Roy Campbell’s remarks about “MacSpaunday” in Talking Bronco, which neither TSE nor Geoffrey Faber had recognised as referring to MacNeice, Spender, Auden and Day Lewis. TSE had written to Geoffrey Faber, 3 July 1946: “Campbell is not one of my authors · · · When he turned up with these new poems, I only thought of him as one of our authors, whose book we should publish if we possibly could. I gave a good deal of time to the book, and corresponded with Campbell over a long period, and gradually removed all the references to individuals that I could identify.” Twenty years before, TSE had been spontaneously enthusiastic about Campbell’s poem Tristan da Cunha, writing to the New Statesman on 15 Oct 1927 to praise it (see McCue 2014d). To Campbell, 23 Jan 1946, about Talking Bronco: “May I say that reading the book through together for the first time in proof, I think it is a very good piece of work and the satire in it seems to me the best verse satire of our time.” 14 Mar 1946: “I do not at all like asterisks and much prefer an invented name. The trouble about asterisks is first that they are a very strong invitation to the reader to stop and guess the name and second that they break the verse. If you know the name, the verse flows easily, if you don’t, it is a ruined line, so if you don’t mind we will stick to the vaguer Spaunday.”
1 The sudden unexpected gift: “the unexpected guest”, The Waste Land [III] 230.
14 the Admirable Stephen: the Admirable Crichton was renowned for his exploits in Europe. See note to VERSES To Honour and Magnify Sir Geoffrey Faber Kt. 2.
Clerihews IV
Unsigned postcard to Hope Mirrlees, 21 Aug 1946 (U. Maryland):
Before accepting this startling statement I should wish to investigate the political sympathies of yr. C. of P. and M.
Graham of Claverhouse
Was not inclined to favour Mouse:
This is scandal and a
Bit of Whig propaganda.
But are they sure of the HOUSE? I cling to CLAVERS or CLAVERUS. Scott writes it CLAVER’SE.
(The significance of “C. of P. and M.” is unknown.)
1] John Graham of Claverhouse, 1st Viscount Dundee (1649?–1689), was among the leaders of the first Jacobite rising, in which he lost his life.
2 Mouse: Latin mus would rhyme with Claverus.
4 Whig propaganda: Walter Scott: “tremble, false Whigs, in the midst o’ your glee, | Ye ha’ no seen the last o’ my bonnet and me”, Bonnie Dundee. (For Bonnie Dundee see headnote to Whan cam ye fra the Kirk? and note to Little Gidding III 33–38.) In a letter to Hayward, 12 May 1944, TSE regretted the omission of Scott’s poem from an anthology. In Anglicised form, TSE included it in A Personal Anthology (1947) for the BBC.
I don’t want to see no Shakespeare or Napoleon
I don’t want to see no Shakespea
re or Napoleon,
I don’t want to see no Lincoln or George Washington.
I paid mah money in advance
So kindly perpetrate a trance:
5
I want to see Jac Johnson fo’ to ask him fo’ mah tin.
Beneath: “Old lyric” (in TSE’s hand); with (in another hand): “Dashed off in about two minutes by T. S. Eliot at Faber Faber Book Committee Meeting after a plea for a spiritualist MS by Richard de la Mare 12 March 1952.”
1–2] “I shall not want Honour in Heaven | For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney … Coriolanus”, A Cooking Egg 9–11.
5 Jac Johnson: Jack Johnson (1878–1946) was the first black heavyweight world champion. mah tin: my money.
Richards & Roberts were two merry men
Richards & Roberts were two merry men,
They shinned up the Alps like a 3 legged hen.
Prompted by the mountaineering exploits of I. A. Richards and Michael Roberts, this couplet was sent to Pound, 7 Apr 1936. It was published in Janet Adam Smith’s Tom Possum and the Roberts Family in Olney ed. (with “three-legged” and no comma after “men”).
