The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

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The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 39

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks


  II 43 Are these ideas right or wrong: to A. L. Rowse, 2 Mar 1931: “I dare say Mosley is a ‘careerist’, but the point is are his ideas right or wrong?” To John Hayward, 27 Jan 1937: “Am I Right or am I Wrong?” (see headnote to A Proclamation). To Bonamy Dobrée, 9 Jan 1938, on dramatic verse: “Hamlet isn’t poetry while it’s going on: it’s poetry after it’s over. Are these ideas right or wrong?”

  III

  III 1 The October night comes down: John Davidson: “The London fog comes down”, Yuletide; “The day wears; twilight ends; the night comes down”, The Crystal Palace (1909). Both poems are in John Davidson: A Selection (1961), with Preface by TSE. (TSE had confessed to Maurice Lindsay, 20 Dec 1946, that after re-reading Davidson he was “rather disappointed”, and unable to recommend that Faber print his work.) TSE: “a soft October night”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 21. “The winter evening settles down”, Preludes I 1.

  III 2–4 Except for a slight sensation of being ill at ease | I mount the stairs · · · as if I had mounted on my hands and knees: “mounted · · · stare · · · ill at ease · · · on my knees”, Paysage Triste 1, 3, 13, 16. I mount the stairs and turn the handle of the door: “I mount the steps and ring the bell”, The “Boston Evening Transcript” 6. “F. M.”: “it is not necessary for Camille and Victorine to descend one staircase and mount another”, Diary of the Rive Gauche I (1925). stairs · · · mounted on my hands and knees: Davidson: “I came, a penitent; and on my knees | I climbed their stairs”, The Testament of a Man Forbid (1901), included in John Davidson: A Selection (1961).

  III 5–7 and when do you return? | But that’s a useless question. | You hardly know when you are coming back: James, on a return from Europe: “‘Olive came home six weeks ago. How long did you expect her to endure it?’ ¶ ‘I am sure I don’t know; I have never been there,’ Ransom replied”, The Bostonians ch. XXII. TSE: “‘And when to Paris?’”, WLComposite 263. To Virginia Woolf, 5 Sept 1925: “So when do you return? I want to come to see you as soon as you are here.”

  III 9 among the bric-à-brac: “among the bricks”, Interlude in London 1 (see Hawthorne’s “to vegetate among the bricks of an enclosed court”, quoted in note to Morning at the Window 3–4). For “among the” and then “bric-à-brac”, see note to Mr. Apollinax 2–5. “Among the débris”, Goldfish IV 1.

  III 12 This is as I had reckoned: to Bonamy Dobrée [Tues after 9th Sunday after Trinity] 1927: “Italics are bad in poetry. Abused by M. Arnold” (Brotherton Library). See note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 40, 43, 49, 55.

  [Poem I 12–13 · Textual History II 323]

  III 14 (But our beginnings never know our ends!): Corbière: “Sauf les amoureux commençants ou finis qui peuvent commencer par la fin il y a tant de choses qui finissent par le commencement que le commencement commence à finir par être la fin …” [Apart from lovers who are starting or who have finished who want to begin at the finish, there are so many things that finish at the start, that the start begins to finish by being the finish], prefatory (mis)quotation from Sagesse des Nations [Wisdom of the Nations] in Les Amours jaunes (Grover Smith 1950 420). TSE bought a copy of Les Amours jaunes during his year in Paris (Greene 62). James: “She answered that she didn’t care about ends, she cared about beginnings”, The Bostonians ch. XXII (Matthew Peters, N&Q Dec 2008). A Midsummer Night’s Dream V i: “That is the true beginning of our end.” TSE: “I take this period to have persisted until my nineteenth or twentieth year. Being a period of rapid assimilation, the end may not know the beginning”, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 33 (TSE was 22–23 when he wrote Portrait of a Lady). “In my beginning is my end”, East Coker I 1.

  III 14–15 (But our beginnings never know our ends!) | Why we have not developed into friends: Hawthorne: “Our beginnings might readily be adapted to his great end · · · he held out both his hands to me · · · But I stood aloof · · · ‘be my friend of friends forever’”, The Blithedale Romance ch. XV (TSE: “Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand”, II 20). our ends!) | Why we have not developed into friends: James: “She might have made up her mind that she had lost him as what she had hoped, but that it was better than desolation to try and keep him as a friend”, The Bostonians ch. XXII. James again:

  “we might, you and I, have been friends · · · I’ve wanted you too.”

  “Ah, but you’ve had me!” he declared, at the door with an emphasis that made an end.

  The Ambassadors, end of bk. XII ii (Grover Smith 301)

  III 16–17 shall remark | Suddenly, his expression in a glass: General Epistle of James 1: 23–24: “a man beholding his natural face in a glass · · · straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.” For TSE’s “the sight of one’s face in the glass” in a draft of Letters of the Moment I (1924) by “F. M.”, see McCue 2016.

  III 18 self-possession gutters: “repetition that displaces | Your mental self-possession | By this unwarranted digression”, Spleen 4–6. gutters; we are really in the dark: King Lear I iv: “So out went the candle, and we were left darkling.” TSE: “‘Just now you saw that bright flame burning itself out,’ said Appleplex, ‘now you see it guttering thickly’”, Eeldrop and Appleplex II (1917). (“street-lamp sputtered”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 14.)

  III 19–20 everybody said so · · · They were all sure our feelings would relate: Edward explains why he thought he was in love, The Cocktail Party I iii: “Everybody told me that I was; | And they told me how well suited we were.”

  III 23 You will write: to Henry Eliot, 2 July 1915, of Isabella Stewart Gardner, “I shall write to her at once about my affairs”. He was to send back to Boston full reports on London’s artistic scene, 4 Apr and 7 Nov 1915. See notes to The Engine I and Mr. Apollinax 21.

  III 27 To find expression … dance, dance: Rimbaud: “Faim, soif, cris, danse, danse, danse, danse!” [Hunger, thirst, shouts, dance, dance, dance, dance!], Mauvais Sang [Bad Blood].

  [Poem I 13 · Textual History II 324]

  III 27–28 To find expression · · · Like a dancing bear: Flaubert: “la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles” [human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars], Madame Bovary II xii (Mark Thompson, personal communication).

  III 28 Like a dancing bear · · · chatter: “The dancing bear · · · chattered”, Inside the gloom 13, 27 1st reading. To judge by Gino Severini’s painting La danse de l’ours au Moulin Rouge (1913; Pompidou Centre), dancing bears were exhibited in Edwardian Paris. For Symons, “Chained by enchantment to my stall · · · Dance to amuse a music-hall”, see note to Little Gidding I 79–82, 84. chatter like an ape: The Tempest II ii: “apes, that mow and chatter at me”. Shelley: “chattering like restless apes”, The Triumph of Life 493.

  III 31 Well! and what if she should die some afternoon: Laforgue: “Mais voici qu’un beau soir, infortunée à point, | Elle meurt!—Oh! là, là; bon, changement de thème!” [But now one fine evening, with perfectly timed ill-luck, she dies!—Oh goodness, let’s change the subject!] Pierrots (On a des principes) [Pierrots: One has Principles] 9–10 (Rees 80).

  Enfin, si, par un soir, elle meurt dans mes livres,

  Douce; feignant de n’en pas croire encore mes yeux,

  J’aurai un: “Ah çà, mais, nous avions De Quoi vivre!

  “C’était donc sérieux?”

  [At last, if one evening she dies among my books, quietly; pretending not to believe my eyes, I’ll react with a “Drat it, we had the wherewithal to live on! Was it serious after all?”]

  Autre Complainte de Lord Pierrot [Another Complaint from Lord Pierrot]

  Symons 110 quoted the whole poem. James: “she might die twenty deaths before he came near her”, The Bostonians ch. XXII.

  III 31, 41 if she should die · · · Not knowing what to feel · · · should I have the right t
o smile: to Middleton Murry [mid-April? 1925]: “I have done it deliberately · · · but it has killed V [Vivien] · · · What will happen if I live again? ‘I am I’ but with what feelings, with what results to others—Have I the right to be I · · · ?”

  III 32 Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose: “‘I shall pay my call on Mrs. Howexden,’ murmured Appleplex · · · The suburban evening was grey and yellow on Sunday”, Eeldrop and Appleplex (1917) I, then opening of II. evening yellow and rose: Baudelaire: “Vous êtes un beau ciel d’automne, clair et rose!” [You are a fine autumn sky, clear and rosy], Causerie [Monologue] 1; see note to The Waste Land [II] 74–75. TSE: “yellow evening”, First Caprice in North Cambridge 2. “evening in December | Under a sunset yellow and rose”, Second Caprice in North Cambridge 17.

  III 34 above the housetops: Isaiah 22: 1: ‘What aileth thee now, that thou art wholly gone up to the housetops?” Jeremiah 48: 38: “lamentations generally upon all the housetops.”

  III 36 Not knowing what to feel: Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think? (see note on its opening line). what to feel: “intelligence, of which an important function is the discernment of exactly what, and how much, we feel in any given situation”, Reflections on Contemporary Poetry III (1917).

  [Poem I 13–14 · Textual History II 324–25]

  III 36–37 Not knowing · · · if I understand | Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon: “I wonder if it is too late or soon”, Entretien dans un parc 6.

  III 36, 41 Not knowing what to feel · · · should I have the right to smile?: Arnold: “We know, we know that we can smile! · · · powerless to reveal | To one another what indeed they feel”, The Buried Life 5, 14–15 (see note to II 12–13).

  Preludes

  Published in Blast 2 (July 1915), then Others: An Anthology of the New Verse (1917), ed. Alfred Kreymborg (1917, not in Gallup), and collected in 1917+, Sesame and Penguin / Sel Poems. A letter from Wyndham Lewis to TSE [Nov 1923?], makes clear that TSE gave this poem and Rhapsody on a Windy Night to Blast without fee.

  Recorded 13 May 1947, Harvard, as part of the Morris Gray Poetry Reading, introduced by Theodore Spencer. (TSE started by saying that he liked to read poems “strictly in chronological order, in the order in which you find them in the book, trying to choose a few representative poems from each period of my work and varying the choice as much as is possible with such a meagre output · · · I should like to begin by reading all four of my Preludes for the reason that they were written here in Cambridge.”) Second: 12 Nov 1950, for U. Chicago Round Table, broadcast by NBC. Third: 26 Sept 1955, London; released Caedmon 1955 (US), 1959 (UK).

  Dated “Oct. 1910” (I & II), “July 1911” (III) in Notebook. Dated “1909–1910” (I & II) and “1911 (later part)” (III & IV) in VE’s 1951. Dated Cambridge, Mass., 1910 (I & II), Paris, 1910 (III) and Cambridge, Mass., 1911 (IV) in Poèmes. Dated Cambridge, Mass., 1910 (I & II), Paris, 1910 (III); Cambridge, Mass., 1911 (IV) in Isaacs US 1920 and by TSE in Morley’s US 1920. TSE wrote these dates and places also in a third copy, Hayward’s 1925, except “Cambridge Mass 1911 or 1912?” (IV). Dated 1909–11, “so far as I can remember”, to Norman Foerster, 15 June 1932. To Edward J. H. Greene, 18 Oct 1939: “Preludes are 1909–10; the first two having been written at Harvard, and the latter two in Paris.” To Greene, 28 Nov 1947: “it is still my impression that the first two Preludes were written at Harvard in 1908 or 1910 and the last two at Harvard in 1912. I am certain about the fourth but doubtful about the third.”

  Scripps College, California, possesses a rough ms translation into French of Part III in the hand of Vivien Eliot. For TSE’s revision of this see III 5.

  [Poems I 14–17 · Textual History II 325–27]

  The variant epigraph to III, “‘son âme de petite putain’: Bubu” [her little whore’s soul], apparently mingles phrases from Charles-Louis Philippe’s Bubu de Montparnasse: “Elle avait un sourire de pauvre petite putain” [She smiled like the poor little whore she was], ch. III; “ses histoires de pauvre petite putain” [stories of the poor little trot-about whore], ch. VIII; and “son âme” throughout, including “où l’on vend son âme pendant que l’on vend sa chair” [wherein you sell your soul at the same time you sell your flesh], ch. VII. TSE’s Preface of 1932 to Bubu of Montparnasse recalled reading the novel when he arrived in Paris in 1910: “Bubu stood for Paris as some of Dickens’ novels stand for London.” To Jacques Porel, 6 Jan 1931: “I should be quite glad to write a short preface to Bubu, to the best of my ability; but · · · I have not read the book, or had a copy in my hands, since 1910; so you will see that I am rather behind.” To Violet Schiff (Hudson), 22 Sept 1949, thanking her for her translation of Marie Donadieu: “It will be a very interesting experience to read this book again, because I have not read it since 1911, at a period when the works of Philippe made a very deep impression upon me. It is extraordinary that such a book should have waited so many years for translation, and I congratulate you upon having done it.”

  TSE: “While they are probably not those of my early poems which showed the most promise, I think they are still the most satisfactory to myself”, Chicago Round Table (1950).

  Title] Pronounced Pree-ludes by TSE in his recordings. OED gives both short and long e, with “The first pronunciation prevails in Great Britain.” Fowler recommends “short e”. Laforgue, Préludes Autobiographiques (Les Complaintes). “Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger-tips”, Portrait of a Lady I 9. Of the Nineties: “Gautier had written the Symphonie en blanc majeur, and Whistler had painted symphonies in various colours · · · critics took alarm at the confusion of genres”, The Borderline of Prose (1917); see note to Burnt Norton V 4–7. From 1895 Arthur Symons also used many musical titles for poems (including Caprice, Intermezzo, Madrigal and Air de Ballet), and TSE’s titles too were often from musical forms. Among the poems he did not publish are First Caprice in North Cambridge, Opera, Suite Clownesque, Interlude: in a Bar, Interlude in London, Airs of Palestine, No. 2 and Dirge; and among those he did publish are Nocturne, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, Five-Finger Exercises and Four Quartets. Other titles are suggestive of music, such as Inventions of the March Hare, Ballade of the Fox Dinner, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and A Song for Simeon. Three early poems were entitled Song. To L. A. G. Strong, 30 June 1925, The Hollow Men: “I am still in doubt as to how I wish this suite to be arranged”. To Vernon Watkins, 22 Apr 1941: “The committee don’t like a title with ‘Music’ in it, and the department who have to sell a book know best.”

  Part titles] In ms1, Preludes I was Prelude in Roxbury (Houses), emended from Prelude in Dorchester (Houses), and Preludes II and III were each Prelude in Roxbury. Roxbury and Dorchester are neighbourhoods in south Boston. (Concerning recordings, TSE wrote to Lloyd Frankenberg, 29 Mar 1949: “For a record the Four Preludes presents the advantage of unity”.)

  I

  I 4 burnt-out ends of smoky days: Romeo and Juliet III v: “Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day”. TSE: “the butt-ends of my days”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 60 (with “smoke”, 71). “The smoky candle-end of time”, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 20.

  I 7–8 withered leaves · · · vacant lots: “withered leaves · · · vacant square”, First Debate between the Body and Soul 6, 9.

  [Poem I 15–17 · Textual History II 325–27]

  I 9–10 beat | On broken blinds: “The sunlight beating in through broken blinds, and broken blinds keeping out the sun”, Eeldrop and Appleplex II (Anne Stillman, personal communication).

  I 11 And at the corner of the street: “We turn the corner of the street”, Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse 1.

  I 13 the lighting of the lamps: gas streetlamps were lit by means of a wick on a long pole. William Allingham, of London: “We were just in time to see the effect of the lighting of the lamps. The dusky mass awoke”, Diary 18 Aug 1849. TSE, outdoors and indoors: “They are lighting up the lamps, and it begins to rain”, Portra
it of a Lady, variant after I 40. “And when the lamps are lit and curtains drawn · · · twilight”, To Walter de la Mare. “And the evening circle in the winter gaslight”, The Dry Salvages I 14. Laforgue’s Hamlet, tr. Symons: “They, too, were the little people of History · · · lighting the dirty lamp every evening”, Symons 105 (for Laforgue’s Hamlet see notes to Rhapsody on a Windy Night 57–59, The Waste Land [II] 172 and Animula 5).

  II

  II 1 The morning comes to consciousness: “the evening fought itself awake · · · when the dawn at length had realized itself”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [10, 25].

 

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