10–12 under coral islands · · · drift down in the green silence · · · fingers of surf: Rimbaud: “Dévorant les azurs verts; où, flottaison blême | Et ravie, un noyé pensif parfois descend” [Devouring the green azures; where, entranced and pallid flotsam, a dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down]; “Et je voguais, lorsqu’à travers mes liens frêles | Des noyés descendaient dormir, à reculons!” [And I was scudding along when across my frayed cordage drowned men sank backwards into sleep!], Le Bateau ivre [The Drunken Boat] 23–24, 67–68 (Greene 63–64; in the margin of Greene’s ts, TSE wrote “Good. I was unaware of this”). worried bodies of drowned men: Dickens, on a visit to America, wrote to Mrs. J. T. Fields, 19 Mar 1868, describing how his train became flooded, and how he helped release “sheep that had been in the water I don’t know how long · · · leaping wildly · · · over the worried body of a deceased companion”.
[Poem I 25 · Textual History II 333–34]
11–15 drowned men drift down · · · I looked for the head · · · With seaweed in its hair: John Davidson: “About my face like seaweed droops | My tangled beard, my tangled hair”, A Loafer. (An extract from Davidson’s poem of 1894 appeared in John Davidson: A Selection (1961), with Preface by TSE; see note to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 127–31.) The submarine world is imagined with both (i) fear of death by water, heightened perhaps by TSE’s own transatlantic crossing; and (ii) longing, as here, for its passivity.
(i) “the drowned Phoenician Sailor · · · Fear death by water”, The Waste Land [I] 47–55, with its quotation from Ariel’s song, The Tempest I ii; see notes to Dirge, which also influenced The Waste Land IV. Death by Water. With its mention of the Dry Salvages, WLComposite 490 anticipates the third Quartet. Richard III I iv, CLARENCE: “Methought what pain it was to drown · · · dead men’s skulls, and · · · holes | Where eyes did once inhabit.” See also Lycidas in note to Ode to a Roman Coot 43.
(ii) to Conrad Aiken, 25 Feb 1915: “The idea of a submarine world of clear green light—one would be attached to a rock and swayed in two directions—would one be happiest or most wretched at the turn of the tide?” TSE: “Flood tide and ebb tide | Roll him gently side to side”, Dirge 12–13 (see note). Swinburne: “Ah God, that I were as all souls that be · · · As bones of men under the deep sharp sea”, Laus Veneris 77–80. For William Morris’s Hylas, “Forgetting the rough world, and every care; | Not dead, nor living, among faces fair, | White limbs, and wonders of the watery world”, see note to The Waste Land [IV] 312. TSE: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws | Scuttling across the floors of silent seas”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 73–74. “Still quiet brother are you still and quiet”, Those are pearls that were his eyes. See! 5. “he knew that he had been a fish”, The Death of Saint Narcissus 24. See note to The Dry Salvages I 20–21.
11–12, 15 drift down · · · surf · · · seaweed in its hair: “surf · · · Swims down and down; | And about his hair the seaweed purple and brown”, So through the evening, through the violet air 30–32. “torn algae drift above”, Those are pearls that were his eyes. See! 3.
12 ^ 13] at different times the poem has been a single paragraph, or else two, with the break after twelve, thirteen or fifteen lines. The present spacing dates from 1963. See Textual History and McCue 2012 Proposal 12.
13, 19 I looked for the head of Mr. Apollinax rolling under a chair · · · “· · · He must be unbalanced”: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ch. VII, “A Mad Tea-Party”, is followed by the Queen screaming for heads to roll (“‘Off with their heads!’”), by croquet with hedgehogs as balls, and by the appearance of the head of the Cheshire Cat. OED has “heads will roll” only from 1930, but Bourrienne’s Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte has “‘I only wait the decree · · · and soon shall their heads roll in the kennels!’” (1830, I 72). OED has from before 1845 “off one’s head”: “Out of mind or wits”; and from 1855 “to talk (etc.) a person’s head off”, with—apt to a philosopher—“the standing danger of having one’s head talked off one’s shoulders” (1897). Mark Twain: “it was enough to make a person laugh his head off”, Autobiography (1871). TSE: “I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 82.
16 I heard the beat of centaurs’ hoofs over the hard turf: see centaur twins in note to epigraph. Meredith: “Hears the heart of wildness beat | Like a centaur’s hoof on sward”, The Woods of Westermain III. Although in ms1 TSE had used the singular possessive, which returned in US 1920 and subsequent printings, he emended it in typescript to the plural possessive, which became the reading of the first three printings. “horses’ heels | Over the paving”, Coriolan I. Triumphal March 1–2. Harold Joachim: “A ‘significant whole’ is such that all its constituent elements reciprocally involve one another · · · in this sense a Centaur is inconceivable”, The Nature of Truth (1906) 66 (Crawford 2015 216).
18 “He is a charming man”: Jean Verdenal to TSE, 5 Feb 1912 (in Letters 1): “votre philosophe Fuller. C’est un homme charmant” (Crawford 2015 156). For “charming”, see note to 2–5.
[Poem I 25 · Textual History II 334]
19 His pointed ears: see note to epigraph. Hawthorne: “The pointed and furry ears, therefore, are the sole indications of his wild, forest nature”; “how delightful, if it really includes the pointed ears!” and “if Hilda and you and I—if I, at least,—had pointed ears! For I suppose the Faun had no conscience, no remorse, no burthen on the heart, no troublesome recollections of any sort; no dark future either”, The Marble Faun ch. I, II. Vivien Eliot to Bertrand Russell, anticipating the birth of his son, 1 Nov 1921: “Tom says he is quite sure the baby will have pointed ears, so you need not be anxious. Even if not pointed at birth, they will sharpen in time.” He must be unbalanced: TSE wrote to Eleanor Hinkley, 21 Mar 1915, that Russell had “a sensitive, but hardly a cultivated mind, and I begin to realise how unbalanced he is”.
21 dowager Mrs. Phlaccus: below this in a copy of 1936 13th imp. (1949), Valerie Eliot wrote “Mrs Jack Gardner”, and in a footnote to TSE’s letter to Mrs. Gardner, 4 Apr [1915], she records: “Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924), prominent Boston hostess and art collector, who bequeathed her Venetian-style house, Fenway Court, with its contents, to the city. Her guest book records two visits by TSE in 1912, on 16 September and between 31 October and 3 November.” (For “Mrs. Phlaccus”, see note to 6.) The Society column of the Pittsburgh Press 22 Nov 1910 announced “Mrs. Flaccus Names Aids for Smart Tea: Prettily Appointed Event to Be Given Next Friday Afternoon at Her Home · · · Mrs. Charles L. Flaccus, who has cards out for a tea to be given next Friday afternoon, has chosen as her aids for the affair, Mrs. H. Fred Mercer, Mrs. Newton Chapin, Mrs. George Bliss, Mrs. Raymond D. Jenks, Miss Kathryn E. Rea and Miss Miriam and Miss Madeline Stemmeyer. The hours are from 4 to 6 o’clock, and the appointments will be handsome and artistic. There is no special guest.” Russell, the grandson of a prime minister and heir to an earldom, was a catch. The full name of the Roman poet Horace was Quintus Horatius Flaccus, and the cognomen “Flaccus” was an illustrious one. dowager: OED a: “A woman whose husband is dead and who is in the enjoyment of some title or some property that has come to her from him. Often added to the title so enjoyed, as princess-dowager, queen-dowager, dowager-duchess, dowager- queen, dowager- lady, etc.” c: “famil. An elderly lady of dignified demeanour.” For “Alice, Countess Dowager of Derby”, see headnote to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar.
22 lemon: OED b: “(slang) · · · a loser; a person easily deluded or taken advantage of”, with 1908, Sullivan, Criminal Slang: “Sucker or lemon”. Van Wyck Brooks: “True poetry is quite as likely to come from young men as from old · · · and it is absurd to insist that the most appropriate poetry college men can produce is college poetry; as if ‘goodies’ [college servants] and ‘exams’ and ‘lemons’ after all were the chief emotions of which sensible men of twenty are capable”, Varied Outlooks II in Harvard A
dvocate 5 Apr 1907. bitten: OED 6b: “To take or be caught by any bait.” macaroon: OED 3: “dolt · · · Obs.” Donne: “To hear this macaroon talk on in vain”, Satire IV 115–17. OED 1: “A small sweet cake or biscuit”. S. Baring-Gould: “Mr Cheek set down a macaroon he was eating, which was bitten in half · · · then he laughed insultingly”, Court-Royal (1887) ch. LIV (TSE: “laughter”, 8). a slice of lemon and a bitten macaroon: “They squeezed lemon-juice on their pancakes · · · ‘Curse them,’ he said bitterly”, On the Eve (1925); TSE’s authorship uncertain, see Index of Identifying Titles. “To have bitten off the matter with a smile · · · squeezed”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 91–92. “The bitter apple and the bite in the apple”, The Dry Salvages II 69, with variant: “The [added: bitten/bitter] fruit and the bite in the fruit”. “But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit”, Little Gidding II 80. “influenza · · · which leaves extreme dryness and a bitter taste in the mouth”, London Letter in Dial Aug 1921. (“As his dry and passionate talk devoured the afternoon”, 17.)
[Poem I 25 · Textual History II 334]
Hysteria
Published in Catholic Anthology (Nov 1915), 1917, US 1920 (not AraVP), 1925+.
No recording known.
Dated Oxford, 1915 by TSE in both Morley’s US 1920 and Hayward’s 1925. Probably submitted to Poetry, but not used, before publication in Catholic Anthology (see headnote to The Death of Saint Narcissus).
“Is this prose or verse? or prose and verse? It is whatever is most exciting”, TSE’s jacket copy for David Jones’s The Anathemata (1952). For TSE’s other prose poems, see The Engine and Introspection, as well as Anabasis.
Baudelaire: “Sois toujours poète, même en prose” [Always be a poet, even in prose], Mon Cœur mis à nu (Journaux Intimes CIII). TSE: “in the long forgotten ’Nineties when sins were scarlet, there appeared a little book called Pastels in Prose. It was mostly, if not altogether, translations from the French—from Ephraim Mikhaël, Judith Gautier, Mallarmé, and many less-remembered names. This book introduced to the English reader the Prose-Poem · · · I have remarked recently a recrudescence of the poem in prose · · · Rimbaud, who I suspect is responsible for everything that is good in Verlaine, wrote his prose poems between 1872 and 1875. They are short prose pieces, as obscure as Kubla Khan or Christabel and of a similar inspiration. They are amazingly convincing, and their prose is good French prose · · · The Illuminations · · · find their proper expression in prose because they seem to have come to their author already clothed in that form · · · Mr. Aldington’s prose poems, delicately handled, yet seem to hesitate between two media · · · There could be no prose equivalent for The Rape of the Lock. There could be no verse equivalent for Madame Bovary or Bubu de Montparnasse · · · Both verse and prose still conceal unexplored possibilities, but whatever one writes must be definitely and by inner necessity either one or the other”, The Borderline of Prose (1917). Pasted into TSE’s copy of Stuart Merrill’s Pastels in Prose (1890) is a five-paragraph parody of the prose-poem, headed “The Latest Form of Literary Hysterics”. Having first appeared in the Chicago Tribune, this was syndicated from coast to coast throughout 1893 and reprinted in Good Humour for Reading and Recitation ed. Henry Firth Wood (1893). TSE was interested in Merrill as an American who had become a French symbolist poet, to the point of inclusion among the Poètes d’aujourd’hui (see headnote to “Poems (1920)”, 4. WHAT FRANCE MEANT TO TSE). On Aldous Huxley: “In his prose poems, he has made the mistake of going for a model to Laforgue instead of to Rimbaud. The prose poem is an aberration which is only justified by absolute success”, The Post-Georgians (1919).
[Poem I 26 · Textual History II 334]
“I have not yet been given any definition of the prose poem which appears to be more than a tautology or a contradiction. Mr. Aldington, for example, has provided me with the following: ‘The prose poem is poetic content expressed in prose form.’ Poetic content must be either the sort of thing that is usually, or the sort of thing that ought to be, expressed in verse. But if you say the latter, the prose poem is ruled out; if you say the former, you have said only that certain things can be said in either prose or verse, or that anything can be said either in prose or verse. I am not disposed to contest either of these conclusions, as they stand, but they do not appear to bring us any nearer to a definition of the prose poem”, Prose and Verse (1921). In Grierson’s Introduction to Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (1921) xxxi, TSE scored the sentence “The metaphysicals are the masters of the ‘neutral style’, of a diction equally appropriate, according as it may be used, to prose and verse.” (TSE had had the same cadence, in verse, in Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service 31: “The masters of the subtle schools”. For writing in the “plain style”, see note to Little Gidding II 38.)
“The greatest possible mistake would be to label the poetry of Dryden and his successors prosaic. The infusion of the prosaic into verse is an accomplishment of the greatest masters of verse · · · if there is a reproach to be levelled against the poetry of the age · · · it is that this poetry is not prosaic enough; it is from our point of view often much too poetical. But so was much of their prose; and the prose and verse of a period should be considered in relation to each other”, The Minor Metaphysicals (1930). “Prose which has nothing in common with verse is dead; verse which has nothing in common with prose is probably artificial, false, diffuse, and syntactically weak”, Dryden the Dramatist (1931). On North: “your reviewer · · · quotes the well-known passage from North’s Plutarch (Coriolanus’s speech to Aufidius), and follows it with the equally famous version of Shakespeare, which he prints as prose. He observes that the version of Shakespeare is ‘a far better piece of prose than the original.’ I make precisely the opposite observation. The prose of North is fine prose, the verse of Shakespeare is great poetry. And printed as prose, the verse of Shakespeare seems to me to be bad prose. As prose, it is difficult to grasp; as prose, it is badly constructed. North’s I find much superior—as prose. What I think your reviewer · · · has overlooked is this: that verse, whatever else it may or may not be, is itself a system of punctuation; the usual marks of punctuation themselves are differently employed. If your reviewer were right, the method ought to be reversible; so that some passages of great prose could be converted into fine verse; and I do not believe he can find an example”, Questions of Prose (1928). Returning to the same example: “I admire · · · the consummate skill of the man who could, by altering so little, turn a piece of fine prose into great poetry · · · The fact that Shakespeare altered so little, is the best possible testimonial to the beauty of North’s prose; and his alterations are a comment on its limitations · · · Every change made by Shakespeare is not merely the change from prose to verse, but an absolute improvement in force, concision, and ease of syntax”, The Tudor Translators (1929). On Antony and Cleopatra: “The verse speech is so perfectly conversational that it can, on occasion, be interpolated with prose without any disturbance. In Act I sc. ii, Enobarbus speaks in prose, Antony in what might be either, and the short dialogue in which Antony announces the death of his wife is either verse or prose”, The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse (1950 text).
[Poem I 26 · Textual History II 334]
On St.-John Perse’s Anabase: “I refer to this poem as a poem. It would be convenient if poetry were always verse—either accented, alliterative, or quantitative; but that is not true. Poetry may occur, within a definite limit on one side, at any point along a line of which the formal limits are ‘verse’ and ‘prose’. Without offering any generalized theory about ‘poetry’, ‘verse’ and ‘prose’, I may suggest that a writer, by using, as does Mr. Perse, certain exclusively poetic methods, is sometimes able to write poetry in what is called prose”, Preface to Anabasis. To Hugh Chisholm, 3 Sept 1942: “I have read your prose poems. While I respect the imagination and craftsmanship which I find in them I cannot find anything that I want to say about them in public, because
this form of writing always seems to me a mistake. Years ago I did a little of the sort myself but was never able to persuade myself that the result was more than just a note for a poem to be written. Your prologue reminds me of St.‑J. Perse though I am glad to see that that influence is not evident later. I admire Perse’s work but I think there is much more to be said for the prose poem in the French language than in English.” To Edward J. H. Greene, 25 Feb 1948: “I have never read any of Lautréamont’s work and have never been an enthusiast for prose poetry.”
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 45