I 9–10 Transmit · · · finger-tips · · · intimate: in his recording, TSE pronounces “intimate” as intermit.
I 9, 14 finger-tips · · · slips: Arthur Symons’s sonnet The Chopin Player ends: “Dying delicately at my finger tips?”, rhyming with “and drips”. TSE: “something which should be firm but slips, just at my finger tips · · · that drips”, Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think? 15–16.
I 10 Chopin: pronounced show-pan in TSE’s recording.
[Poem I 10–12 · Textual History II 320–24]
I 10, 19, 27; II 18, 26, 29, 38; III 11, 15, 18, 20–21, 36 intimate · · · how much they mean to me, my friends · · · How much it means · · · sure that you understand · · · the friendship and the sympathy · · · how can I make a cowardly amends? · · · I remain self-possessed · · · My self-possession flares up for a second · · · we have not developed into friends · · · My self-possession gutters; we are really · · · relate | So closely! · · · Not knowing what to feel or if I understand: Van Wyck Brooks: “an old friend’s misfortune · · · sympathy · · · We are really regretful of all our former thoughtlessness · · · sympathy · · · two not particularly intimate friends · · · our own self-respect is quite needlessly injured by our mortification · · · poor, dazed creature who only wanted five minutes of moderate attention from week to week · · · really to understand what it all means”, The Wine of the Puritans 60–62. TSE to Herbert Read, 18 Jan 1927: “I imagine it is impossible for a person in my position to be any more detached about H. J. than, from an opposite point of view, is Van Wyck Brooks.”
I 11 resurrected only among friends · · · two or three: Matthew 18: 20: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
I 12–13 touch the bloom | That is rubbed and questioned: W. D. Howells: “vulgarized or coarsened · · · forgetting that modern invention has found a way of fixing the chalks, I have felt, in going over these little pieces, that the slightest rudeness of touch might shake the bloom, the color, from them”, “The Prose Poem”: Introduction to Pastels in Prose tr. Stuart Merrill (see headnote to Hysteria).
I 13 questioned in the concert room: “It is in the concert room, rather than in the opera house, that the germ of a poem may be quickened”, The Music of Poetry (1942).
I 14 And so the conversation slips: James: “A silence of a few moments had fallen upon their talk”, The Bostonians ch. XXII. TSE: “And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence”, East Coker III 19.
I 15 Among velleities and carefully caught regrets: “regrets · · · Among such scattered thoughts”, Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse 9, 13. velleities: OED “velleity” 2: “A mere wish, desire, or inclination without accompanying action or effort. Very common in the 17th c.; now somewhat rare.” Pronounced vel-ee-ities in TSE’s recording (as OED).
I 15–19 regrets · · · tones of violins · · · You do not know how much they mean to me: Kipling: “tunes that mean so much to you alone— | Common tunes · · · rip your very heartstrings”, The Song of the Banjo 61–64 (in A Choice of Kipling’s Verse); see notes to The Waste Land [III] 261–77, and Landscapes II. Virginia 2, 4, 11.
I 16–18 violins · · · And begins: Symons: “When a sighing begins | In the violins”, From Poèmes Saturniens I. Soleils Couchants [Saturnian Poems I. Setting Suns]. TSE: “Now begins | The piano and the flute and two violins”, The smoke that gathers blue and sinks 13–14.
I 17, 31 cornets: given the draft spelling “cornetts” (31), Derek Roper asks whether this is the early wooden “cornetto” or the modern instrument associated with jazz and ragtime (N&Q June 2007); “Almost certainly these are the brass cornets à piston · · · The ‘cracked’ note in line 31 may be caused by overblowing” (Roper 2007). John Marston’s Entertainment of Alice, Dowager-Countess of Derby, quoted in the epigraph to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar, begins with “a full noise of cornets winded”. Pronounced cor-nètts in TSE’s recording, although OED stresses the first syllable.
[Poem I 10 · Textual History II 320–21]
I 19–21 how much they mean · · · And how, how rare · · · In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends: “how much it means; | How much”, Mandarins I 13–14. “How much · · · How much · · · How much one means”, Goldfish III 13–15.
I 21 a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends: James: “His life, on the whole, had not been rich in episode”, The Bostonians ch. XXII.
I 24 who has these qualities: in his recording, TSE says “who has those qualities”, reverting to the manuscript reading (perhaps an eye-skip to 26).
I 28 what cauchemar!: Laforgue: “Quels cauchemars pleins de talent!” [What nightmares full of genius!], Locutions des Pierrots [The Things that Pierrots Say] III 2. The form of dialogue in TSE’s poem, with one side silent, derives from Laforgue’s Autre Complainte de Lord Pierrot. TSE: “what mask bizarre!” Humouresque 24. cauchemar: OED “mare” (Obs.): “The Teut. word is the source of Old French mare, appearing also in the compound cauchemar nightmare, f. caucher, to trample”. Pronounced as French (co-sh’marre) in TSE’s recording. Fowler “FRENCH WORDS”: “To use French words that your reader or hearer does not know or does not fully understand, to pronounce them as if you were one of the select few to whom French is second nature when he is not of those few · · · is inconsiderate & rude.”
I 29 Among the windings: Hawthorne: “among the windings of the wood-path”, The Blithedale Romance ch. XI. windings of the violins: Whitman: “sweet flutes and violins · · · the different voices winding in and out”, That Music Always Round Me 6–8 (Musgrove 62). TSE: “The pleasant whining of a mandoline”, The Waste Land [III] 261. windings: OED vbl. n.1 2b: “A melodic alternation or variation” (obs., citing musical guides 1667–1706 and now this line).
I 30 ariettes: Oxford Companion to Music “ariette”: “(Fr.) A shorter and simpler aria · · · occasionally applied to instrumental music.”
I 30–31 ariettes | Of cracked cornets: Braddon: “listening to a dreary band with a cornet that was a note and a half flat. Again he heard the old operatic airs”, Lady Audley’s Secret 56 (Heywood). TSE: “a cracked violin”, II 17 variant.
[Poem I 10–11 · Textual History II 321]
I 32 Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins: Kipling: “There is a tomtom outside, isn’t there? I thought it was my head at first”, At the End of the Passage (1890). “The drums of life were beating on their skulls | The floods of life were swaying in their brains”, Bacchus and Ariadne 5–6 (and note). “Beats like a fatalistic drum”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 9. Second Clark Lecture: “Instead of ideas as meanings, as references to an outside world, you have suddenly a new world coming into existence, inside your own mind and therefore by the usual implication inside your own head. Mankind suddenly retires inside its several skulls, until you hear Nietzsche—pretty well tormented in his cranial lodging—declaring that ‘nothing is inside, nothing is outside’”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 80–81. Goethe, rather: “Nichts ist drinnen, nichts is draussen; | Denn was innen, das ist aussen” [Nothing is within, nothing is without; that which was within is without], Epirrhema (Jennifer Formichelli, personal communication). Hermann Hesse often quoted or adapted this, notably as the motto to the first essay in Blick ins Chaos (1920); see note to The Waste Land [V] 366–76. TSE: “Within the circle of my brain | The twisted dance”, The Burnt Dancer 30. tom-tom: for “sentimental Tommy”, see note to I 3–4. Corbière: “—Va donc balancier soûl affolé dans ma tête! |Bats en branle ce bon tam-tam, chaudron fêlé | Qui rend la voix de femme ainsi qu’une sonnette” [Go then, pendulum, distracted in my head, boozed! | Beat with a swing this fine tom-tom, a tinny piano so flat], Rapsodie du sourd [Deaf Man’s Rhapsody] 47–48 (Grover Smith, 301). (TSE to Ruth Harrison, 1 Apr 1935: “Corbière · · · seems to me much the greatest French poet after Baudelaire”. To Edward J. H. Greene, 30 June 1947: “it was Corbière rather tha
n Laforgue who succeeded Baudelaire in my affections.”)
[Poem I 10–11 · Textual History II 321]
I 32–34 a dull tom-tom begins · · · monotone: Geoffrey Faber to TSE, 15 Sept 1927: “You spoke once to me of the influence which the drum-taps had on your rhythmic preferences. It tends to monotony?” (For reading in a monotone and accentuation by “drum-beats”, see headnote to Sweeney Agonistes, 4. JAZZ and 5. ARNOLD BENNETT’S ADVICE.)
I 32–36 Inside my brain · · · “false note” · · · take the air: James: “the poor Assinghams · · · were the only approach to a false note in the concert, the stir of the air was such, for going, in a degree, to one’s head”, The Golden Bowl bk. III vii. “false note”: James: “these last words struck him as a false note”, The Portrait of a Lady ch. X (Eleanor Cook, N&Q Dec 1980); as often in James.
I 33–34 prelude of its own, | Capricious monotone: J. R. Lowell: “Singing, in dreary monotone, | A Christmas carol of its own”, The Vision of Sir Launfal, Prelude to Part Second (Grover Smith 301). At Christmas in 1904, TSE read aloud an essay, now untraced, “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” A Christmas Study (programme at Washington U.; Jayme Stayer, personal communication). “There is a prose arbitrariness and a verse arbitrariness · · · there is a verse monotone and a prose monotone · · · we never allow this ground-monotone to become entirely inaudible”, The Borderline of Prose (1917).
I 33, 36, 40 prelude · · · tobacco · · · drink our bocks: Laforgue: “Vous fumez dans vos bocks” [You smoke over your beer glasses], Complainte de l’oubli des Morts [Complaint for the Forgetting of the Dead] 9. The American Beer Company produced a “St. Louis Bock Beer”. TSE: “street pianos and small beers!” Goldfish IV 36–37.
I 34–36 Capricious monotone · · · take the air: Whitman: “some wild trumpeter, some strange musician, | Hovering unseen in air, vibrates capricious tunes to-night”, The Mystic Trumpeter 1–2, with “cornet”, 10 (TSE: “cornets”, 17, 31) (Musgrove 62). monotone · · · let us take the air, in a tobacco trance: Laforgue: “—Allons, fumons une pipette de tabac” [Come, let us smoke a little pipe of tobacco], Complainte de l’automne monotone [Complaint of Monotonous Autumn] 45 (Greene 37). I 36 tobacco trance: Dickens: “fell into a kind of tobacco-trance”, Barnaby Rudge ch. XXX.
II
II 1 Now that lilacs are in bloom · · · in her room: Whitman on the death of Lincoln (15 Apr 1865): “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, | And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, | I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring”, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d 1–3 (Musgrove 33). TSE: “When Whitman speaks of the lilacs or of the mockingbird, his theories and beliefs drop away like a needless pretext”, Whitman and Tennyson (1926). “I never read Whitman properly until I was of an age where I could no longer be influenced by him”, Walt Whitman and Modern Poetry (1944). Rupert Brooke: “Just now the lilac is in bloom | All before my little room”, The Old Vicarage, Grantchester (pub. Poetry Review Nov 1912), quoted by TSE, after Brooke’s death, in Reflections on Contemporary Poetry I (1917). To Geoffrey Faber, 25 Mar 1941: “I don’t think you are on very secure ground with Rupert Brooke. I still believe that he was never anything but a poetaster, not in the same class with De la Mare, Hodgson, Davies or Binyon at their best.”
II 3 twists one in her fingers: Symons: “one who twists a kerchief’s lace | Between her well-gloved finger-tips”, From Paul Verlaine. Fêtes Galantes VIII (Cortège). Murder in the Cathedral II, chorus: “more horror | Than when twisting in the fingers”.
II 4–5 “Ah · · · you do not know · · · who hold it in your hands”: Austin Dobson: “I plunge my hand among the leaves · · · ‘If youth but knew!’ Ah! ‘if,’” Pot-Pourri 1, 7, with epigraph “‘Si jeunesse savait?—’” (TSE: “youthful”, II 15) (Ricks 1998); see note to Burnt Norton I 16. Dobson’s poems are listed among TSE’s books, to be sent to him, c.Aug 1920 (Letters 1 486).
II 8 cruel: two syllables in TSE’s recording.
II 9 situations which it cannot see: “a situation is for Stendhal something deliberately constructed · · · definitely visual. Hawthorne and James have a kind of sense · · · which is not of sight. Not that they fail to make you see · · · The point is that Hawthorne was acutely sensitive to the situation; that he did grasp character through the relation of two or more persons to each other”, The Hawthorne Aspect (1918), with “situation” nine times in all. To Eleanor Hinkley, 1 Apr 1918, on Henry James: “he has about the keenest sense of Situation of any novelist, and his always alert intelligence is a perpetual delight.” See note on Entretien dans un parc variant title, Situation.
II 9, 29, III 33, 41 And smiles · · · I take my hat · · · pen in hand · · · the right to smile: Symons 109, on Laforgue: “an inflexible politeness towards man, woman, and destiny. He composes love-poems hat in hand, and smiles with an exasperating tolerance before all the transformations of the eternal feminine.”
II 11, 28 drinking tea · · · sit here, serving tea: “ladies of uncertain age | Sit by a window drinking tea”, Mandarins 2 1–2. “out to tea · · · and tea · · · and then tea”, The Death of the Duchess I 2, 3, 4. James: “rang for some tea · · · (Mrs. Luna’s tea was excellent)”, The Bostonians ch. XXII.
II 12–13 April · · · buried life: Tennyson: “regret for buried time | That keenlier in sweet April wakes”, In Memoriam CXVI 1–2. Arnold’s The Buried Life (1852) gave the phrase general currency (Southam); see note to III 36, 41. recall | My buried life · · · Paris in the Spring: for Paris see note to III 5–7. For “recall the moments of our lives which were passed there · · · a life that is buried”, see Inoubliable France in note to The Dry Salvages II 56–66, III 3–15. James: “Buried for long years in dark corners at any rate these few germs had sprouted again under forty-eight hours of Paris”, The Ambassadors bk. II ii (Grover Smith 12). TSE later recommended James’s novel to Mary Hutchinson (Crawford 2015 269).
II 15 ^ 16 [1–6] variant Tinctured attar of rose · · · Will pardon this digression: “Is it perfume from a dress | That makes me so digress?” The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 65–66. (See Textual History for this six-line interpolation.)
[Poem I 11–12 · Textual History II 322]
II 16 returns like the insistent: “again | The insistent”, Easter: Sensations of April II 6–7. out-of-tune: quoted by OED “out” III, as an elliptical use of the adjectival phrase as though a noun.
II 18 “I am always sure that you understand: Bradley: “What · · · we are convinced of, is briefly this, that we understand and, again, are ourselves understood”, Appearance and Reality ch. XXIII; scored by TSE.
II 21 Achilles’ heel: Achilles’ body was invulnerable except the heel by which his mother held him as she plunged him in the Styx. He died of an arrow in his heel. OED “heel” records the colloquial phrase back to Coleridge (1810).
II 26–27 the friendship and the sympathy | Of one: Van Wyck Brooks (on reasons for visiting Europe): “the sympathy and co-operation one meets”, The Wine of the Puritans 121.
II 28–30 friends · · · how can I make a cowardly amends | For what she has said to me?: Blake: “My Generosity is to my Friends, | That for their Friendship I may make amends”, I am no Homer’s Hero (Roper 2007). a cowardly amends: OED: “The sing., common in Fr., is very rare in Eng., in which amends has been used as a collective sing. from the first”.
II 28, III 25 I shall sit here · · · I shall sit here: likewise repeated in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ch. VI: “‘I shall sit here,’ the Footman remarked, ‘till to-morrow—’ · · · ‘—or next day, maybe,’ the Footman continued in the same tone, exactly as if nothing had happened · · · ‘I shall sit here,’ he said, ‘on and off, for days and days’” (Sewell).
II 29 take my hat · · · amends: James: “he didn’t in the least long for this arrangement, and was conscious that the most pertinent sequel to her conjecture would be for him to take up his hat and walk awa
y · · · He did not pick up his hat to go · · · at last he took up his hat in earnest”, The Bostonians ch. XXII. “I’m sorry, I said, | It’s no use being sorry, he said; let me get my hat, I said”, WLComposite 37–38.
II 31 any morning in the park: “The summer evenings in the park”, In the Department Store 5.
II 32 comics: OED 2a: “the comic strips in a newspaper” (from 1889 and citing this line).
II 39 a street-piano, mechanical and tired: Oxford Companion to Music “Mechanical Reproduction”: “a barrel-and-pin-operated pianoforte, with no proper claim to the name, however, since no ‘piano’ · · · is in any way possible.” Carlyle, Tennyson, Holman Hunt and Millais supported a Bill proposed by the brewer Michael T. Bass MP to restrain street music. Charles Babbage considered that “one-fourth of his entire working power had been destroyed by audible nuisances, to which his highly strung nerves rendered him peculiarly sensitive”. TSE: “A street-piano, garrulous and frail’”, First Caprice in North Cambridge 1. “And a street piano through the dusty trees”, First Debate between the Body and Soul 13. piano: pronounced with long a in TSE’s recording (as the adverb), although OED gives only a short a for the instrument.
[Poem I 12 · Textual History II 323]
II 39–40 tired | Reiterates: in Morley’s US 1920, TSE added the comma after “tired” that sense appears to require, but he never emended the text in print. John Quinn to TSE, 24 Sept 1920: “Your avoidance of punctuation marks is obviously studied, but it occurred to me that in some cases the sense, in others the grammar and in others the rhythm required a certain pause that might be indicated by a comma.” TSE to Quinn, 9 May 1921: “I see reason in your objection to my punctuation; but I hold that the line itself punctuates, and the addition of a comma, in many places, seems to me to over-emphasise the arrest. That is because I always pause at the end of a line in reading verse, which perhaps you do not.” For “the end of a line is a kind of punctuation in itself”, see headnote to The Waste Land V (letter to Montgomery Belgion, 19 July 1940). For punctuation “which includes the absence of punctuation marks”, see the Author’s Note on the recording of Four Quartets (headnote, 9. TSE ON FOUR QUARTETS). For omission of “all punctuation at the end of lines”, see letter to Laurence Whistler, 28 Sept 1955, quoted in headnote to Long may this Glass endure (“Uncollected Poems”).
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 38