The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 56
Fie, you have missed it here, Antiphilia;
You are much mistaken, wench:
These colours are not dull and pale enough
To show a soul so full of misery
As this sad lady’s was. Do it by me,
Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia;
And you shall find all true but the wild island.
Suppose I stand upon the sea-beach now,
Mine arms thus, and mine hair blown with the wind,
Wild as that desert; and let all about me
Tell that I am forsaken. Do my face
(If thou had’st ever feeling of a sorrow)
Thus, thus, Antiphilia: strive to make me look
Like Sorrow’s monument: and the trees about me,
Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks
Groan with continual surges; and behind me,
Make all a desolation. See, see, wenches,
A miserable life of this poor picture!
(For phrasing, see The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 123–28, and The Waste Land [II] 132–33. For Aspatia, see Elegy 3–4.) Look, look, wenches!: Second Quarto text; the reading “See, see, wenches” in the Mermaid text (above), follows the First Quarto. “‘Look, look, master’”, Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service, epigraph. The first line of TSE’s five-line Those are pearls that were his eyes. See! likewise became “(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)” in The Waste Land [I] 48.
Unadopted epigraph Voici ton cierge, | C’est deux livres qu’il a coute …: [Here’s your candle. It cost two francs], Corbière, La Rapsode foraine et le Pardon de Sainte-Anne [The Strolling Singer and the Festival of Saint Anne] 145–46 in Les Amours jaunes (1873), printed with “(C’est deux livres qu’il a coûté)” in the first ed. and in the anthology Poètes d’aujourd’hui, but quoted without brackets by André Barre in Le Symbolisme (1911). See note to 13–16 below. Pound praised Corbière’s poem highly, and printed it over more than six pages in A Study of Modern French Poets in Little Review Feb 1918.
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1–5 Paint me · · · Paint me · · · Display me: resembling, as well as Aspatia’s instructions to Antiphilia, the self-addressed creative injunctions of the “Instructions” genre begun by Waller’s Instructions to a Painter (see note to The Last Instructions to a Painter in The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 1927, 3rd ed. 1971).
2 Cyclades: Lemprière: “a name given to certain islands of the Aegean Sea, those particularly that surround Delos as with a circle; whence the name.” Pronounced with short i as in sickle; three syllables.
2, 3, 9 Cast · · · rocks · · · feet and hands: Emerson: “Cast the bantling on the rocks · · · Power and speed be hands and feet”, quatrain epigraph to Self-Reliance (Anne Stillman, personal communication).
3 anfractuous: TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “a favourite word of Dr Johnson’s”. To Johnson’s definition, “Winding; mazy; full of turnings and winding passages”, OED adds 2: “[After F. anfractueux craggy.] Rugged, craggy”, with TSE as first citation. Johnson: “Sir, among the anfractuosities of the human mind, I know not if it may not be one, that there is a superstitious reluctance to sit for a picture”, Boswell IV 4. Laforgue: “elle alla, dégringolant de roc en roc, râler, dans une pittoresque anfractuosité qui lavait le flot” [she toppled from rock to rock, with death rattling in her throat, and in a picturesque anfractuosity which was washed by the waves], Salomé, a dozen lines from the end (Hands). See note to 7–8.
3–4 rocks | Faced by the snarled and yelping seas: T. E. Brown: “the clamour of the yelping seas!” Old John 35 in Collected Poems (1900). Swinburne: “In the teeth of the hard glad weather, | In the blown wet face of the sea”, A Song in Time of Order 53–54. TSE: “the sea | A crowd of barking waves”, Goldfish IV 10–11 (with “winds”, 14; here: “gales”, 6). “faces sneer and snarl · · · If there were water | And no rock”, The Waste Land [V] 344–47. “The sea howl | And the sea yelp, are different voices”, The Dry Salvages I 26–27.
5 Display: Seneca, tr. Jasper Heywood: “Display to these that Hercules to th’ eternall ghostes is gone”, Hercules Œteus (see note to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 7–12). Display me Aeolus: winds from particular directions, such as Auster or Zepher, often appeared on maps, cheeks puffed out and with their names (Anthony Payne, personal communication). Aeolus: pronounced Ee-olus. Lemprière: “The king of storms and winds · · · because he was the inventor of sails, and a great astronomer, the poets call him the god of the wind.” The personage of Æolus appears in the masque in The Maid’s Tragedy I ii.
7–8 Ariadne · · · perjured sails: daughter of Minos, King of Crete. She gave Theseus the thread by which he found his way out of the Labyrinth after killing the Minotaur. Abandoning her, Theseus sailed back to Athens, but forgot to change his black sail for a white one. His father, Aegeus, concluded that Theseus had perished, and threw himself from a cliff. (Recounted in Ovid’s Heroides X.)
9 Morning stirs the feet and hands: “dawn · · · to see what it had stirred; | The eyes and feet of men”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [25–27]. “The morning comes to consciousness · · · feet · · · hands”, Preludes I 1, 4, 8. “When morning stirred the long nasturtium creeper”, Suppressed Complex 7 variant. “Stirred by the morning air”, Oh little voices of the throats of men 38.
[Poem I 36–37 · Textual History II 343]
9–37 Morning · · · Polypheme · · · root of knots of hair | Slitted below and gashed · · · the bed · · · hysteria: “When the bridegroom smoothed his hair | There was blood upon the bed. Morning · · · (Io Hymen, Hymenæe) | Succuba eviscerate”, Ode (“Tired. | Subterrene”) 9–14 (Arrowsmith 1981). For Ruskin, “rooted knots of herbage”, see note to Lune de Miel 10.
10 Nausicaa: Pope, Odyssey VI, THE ARGUMENT: “Pallas appearing in a dream to Nausicaa · · · commands her to descend to the river, and wash the robes of State, in preparation to her nuptials. Nausicaa goes with her Handmaids to the river; where, while the garments are spread on the bank, they divert themselves in sports. Their Voices awake Ulysses” (Odysseus). Pronounced Norsic-ay-ah. Polypheme: Polyphemus, a Cyclops—the monster with one eye—who held captive Odysseus and his crew (Odyssey IX). In Ovid’s Metamorphoses XIII, Polyphemus lusted after Galatea and “when he saw her surrender herself to the pleasures of Acis, he crushed his rival with a piece of broken rock” (Lemprière); see 14–15. TSE: “He told of polyphemes, and clashing rocks”, Lines Addressed to Geoffrey Faber Esquire, on his Return from a Voyage from the Bahamas, and the Parts about New Spain 7.
10, 13, 21 Polypheme · · · knots of hair · · · to shave: Ovid, tr. Golding: “Polypheme · · · His staur stiff hair he kembeth · · · his bristled beard”, Metamorphoses XIII 901–904. See note to 41.
11 Gesture of orang-outang: Poe: “the ape, razor still in hand, occasionally stopping to look back and gesticulate”, The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Grover Smith 47). “Apeneck Sweeney”, Sweeney Among the Nightingales 1 (here: “from nape to base”, 22). orang-outang: OED: “‘man of the woods’ or ‘wild man’ · · · An anthropoid ape · · · of arboreal habits”. Pronounced our-ang-oot-ang (OED mentions differences of stress). Poe: “Caught—In the Bois de Boulogne, early in the morning of the ––– inst. (the morning of the murder), a very large, tawny ourang-outang”, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Poe paraphrases Georges Cuvier: “It was a minute anatomical and generally descriptive account of the large fulvous ourang-outang of the East Indian Islands. The gigantic stature, the prodigious strength and activity, the wild ferocity, and the imitative propensities of these mammalia are sufficiently well known to all. I understood the full horrors of the murder at once.” Kipling’s Bertran and Bimi (1891) has a conversation on a “steamer”:
He haf found him when he was a child—der orang-outang—und he was child und brother und opera comique all round to Bertran. He had his room in dot house—not a cage, but a room—mit a b
ed und sheets, and he would go to bed und get up in der morning und smoke his cigar und eat his dinner mit Bertran, und walk mit him hand in hand, which was most horrible. Herr Gott! I haf seen dot beast throw himself back in his chair und laugh when Bertran haf made fun of me. He was not a beast; he was a man.
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(TSE: “Morning · · · hands”, 9; “sheets”, 12.) Kipling’s orang-outang tears Bertran’s wife to pieces. TSE jotted down the title of the story for comparison with Conrad, in Lecture Notes as Norton Professor (1933). For Bertran and Bimi see headnote to The Engine.
In the 18th century, Lord Monboddo had proposed that the orang-outang be seen as a form of human, prompting Thomas Love Peacock’s novel Melincourt (1817), about the adventures in polite society of Sir Oran Haut-Ton. When Queen Victoria saw the orang-outang at London Zoo in 1842, she commented: “he is frightfully, and disagreeably human” (see note to 11, 21–29). TSE quoted Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield) in his third Turnbull Lecture: “‘The question is,’ as the late Lord Beaconsfield observed, ‘is man an ape or an angel?’ I think that Lawrence was on the side of the angels; some reformers are certainly on the side of the Apes”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 293–94. On 13 Oct 1939, TSE sent to Bruce Richmond the Selected Shelburne Essays of Paul Elmer More, for Richmond’s anthology The Pattern of Freedom (1940): “the last paragraph of the essay on Huxley is good eternal verity in a light and readable form”. It describes how Disraeli addressed a Diocesan Conference at Oxford in 1864, “And then, turning to the presiding officer, the same Bishop Wilberforce whom four years earlier [T. H.] Huxley had so crushingly rebuked, he uttered one of his enigmatic and unforgettable epigrams: ‘What is the question now placed before society with a glibness the most astounding? The question is this: Is man an ape or an angel? I, my lord, am on the side of the angels’ · · · these words contain a truth that shall some day break to pieces the new philosophy which Huxley spent his life so devotedly to establish.” TSE on Wyndham Lewis: “Tarr is a commentary upon a part of modern civilization: now it is like our civilization criticized, our acrobatics animadverted upon adversely, by an orang-outang of genius, Tarzan of the Apes”, Contemporanea (1918) (Arrowsmith 1981). Of Shelley’s note to Queen Mab VIII 211–12: “from a poet who tells us, in a note on vegetarianism, that ‘the orang-outang perfectly resembles man both in the order and the number of his teeth’, we shall not know what not to expect”, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 88 (Shelley reads “the order and number”).
11, 21–29 orang-outang · · · addressed full length to shave · · · nape to base, | Knows the female temperament | And wipes the suds around his face · · · the razor: W. S. Gilbert: “He shaved his bristles, and he docked his tail · · · And he paid a guinea to a toilet club · · · the Ape, despite his razor keen, | Was the apiest Ape that was ever seen! · · · the Maiden fair, whom the Monkey craved, | Was a radiant Being · · · While a Man, however well-behaved, | At best is only a monkey shaved!” Song: The Ape and the Lady in Princess Ida (1884) act II. The last two lines are given in the World’s Classics edition as “While Darwinian man, though well-behaved · · ·”
13 withered root: The Tempest I ii: “wither’d roots, and husks” (Grover Smith 1996, 161). root of knots of hair: Poe: “On the hearth were thick tresses—very thick tresses—of grey human hair. These had been torn out by the roots · · · Their roots (a hideous sight!) were clotted with fragments of the flesh of the scalp”, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. root of knots: Emerson: “A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots”, History (Peake). Irving Babbitt: “Man, according to Emerson, is a bundle of roots, and a knot of relations”, The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912) 150.
13–14 root of knots of hair · · · eyes: Shelley on Rousseau:
Struck to the heart by this sad pageantry,
Half to myself I said—“And what is this?
Whose shape is that within the car? And why—”
I would have added—“is all here amiss?—”
But a voice answered—“Life!”—I turned, and knew
(O Heaven, have mercy on such wretchedness!)
<
[Poem I 36–37 · Textual History II 343]
That what I thought was an old root which grew
To strange distortion out of the hill side,
Was indeed one of those deluded crew,
And that the grass, which methought hung so wide
And white, was but his thin discoloured hair,
And that the holes he vainly sought to hide,
Were or had been eyes
The Triumph of Life 176–88
TSE quoted from memory the last seven of these lines in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 90, and quoted 176–205 in What Dante Means to Me (1950), commenting: “Well, this is better than I could do.” (To J. M. Robertson, 23 Aug 1927: “I dislike Shelley as you will have perceived, and only reproach you for not disliking him enough.”)
13–15 This withered root · · · teeth: to C. A. Bodelsen, 19 Dec 1958, responding to his book T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”: A Commentary (1958): “you take three lines as a description of Sweeney’s morning face. What I had in mind, however, as the face described, was the face of the paralytic on the bed.”
13–16 This withered root · · · thighs: TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “Cf. Tristan Corbière: Rhapsode Foraine” (see note to unadopted epigraph, above). TSE quoted 169–70 from Corbière’s poem in his last Clark Lecture:
From his greatest poem, La Rapsode foraine, the assemblage of crippled and diseased at a religious festival in Brittany—
Là, ce tronc d’homme où croît l’ulcère,
Contre un tronc d’arbre où croît le gui …
“This trunk of a man on which the ulcer grows, (leaning) against this trunk of a tree on which grows the mistletoe”: this sudden and surprising collocation of the animal and vegetable, with the added horror thrown back upon the human disease, is worthy of Dante.
The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 218
Praising Corbière’s description of “the procession of mendicants and cripples to the shrine of the Virgin”, TSE had previously written of these two lines: “the phrase burns itself in like the cotto aspetto of Dante’s Brunetto Latini”, Modern Tendencies in Poetry (1920); see note to Little Gidding II 39–45.
13–14, 20 root of knots of hair · · · eyes · · · clawing: Beddoes: “twisting root-like hair up to his eyes · · · hands, | Like roots, with pointed nails”, Fragments of “The Last Man” IV.
14–15 eyes, | This oval O: Ovid, tr. Golding, of Polypheme: “The roundeyd devill”, Metamorphoses XIII 1035.
15 cropped: OED “crop” 6a: “trans. To cause to bear a crop; to sow or plant with a crop · · · Chiefly U.S.” 10a: “Min. and Geol. Of a stratum, vein, etc.: To come up to the surface”, with 1792: “Where the different strata · · · crop out” (as in outcrop). 10c: “fig. crop out · · · to come out, appear, or disclose itself incidentally.” cropped out with teeth: OED “dragon” 21: “dragon’s teeth: the teeth of the dragon fabled to have been sown by Cadmus, from which sprang armed men”.
[Poem I 36 · Textual History II 343]
16–17 sickle motion from the thighs | | Jackknifes upward at the knees: OED “jack-knife” v.: “(a) trans. to cut with a jack-knife; (b) intr. to double up like a jack-knife”, with 1806: “A sailor .. Jacknifed (as he termed it) the poor creature [sc. a cat] in several places about the head”; and 1897: “One of their amusements in camp .. was to throw stones and chips past one another’s heads, and raise a laugh at the active dodging and bending the body low or ‘jack-knifing’ as the men called it.” TSE: “convulsive thighs and knees”, The Death of Saint Narcissus 19. “A saggy bending of the knees”, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 14. “Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees”, Sweeney Among the Nightingales 1. “By Richmond I raised my knees”, The Waste Land [III] 294. For a boxer “doubled up like a jack-
knife”, see note to Whispers of Immortality 32.
19–20 Pushing the framework of the bed | And clawing: Poe: “the unwieldy bed-stead which is thrust close up against it” (by the orang-outang with its “talons”), The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
21 Sweeney addressed full length to shave: Shelley: “And the rose like a nymph to the bath addressed”, The Sensitive Plant I 29. OED “address” 1: “To raise oneself, to stand erect, lit. and fig. Obs.”, quoting Caxton’s Golden Legend (1483): “The first day that he was wasshen and bayned he addressid hym right up in the bassyn.” Last citation 1620.
21–22 to shave · · · pink from nape to base: shaving soap was often pink. Pound to John Quinn, 19 Apr 1917, of the portrait painter Giovanni Boldoni: “To think that I should have lived to see another Boldoni hung upon a wall, a pink-shaving-lather-and-safety-razor Boldoni.” TSE: “Mike got up early and bathed returning very pink and pleased”, jotting for a story by “F. M.” (c. 624 fol. 64).
21–24 Sweeney addressed full length to shave · · · the suds around his face: Poe of his orang-outang: “Razor in hand, and fully lathered, it was sitting before a looking-glass, attempting the operation of shaving”, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. OED “Sweeney” 2: “A (nickname for a) barber”; see note to title.
22–24 pink from nape to base · · · wipes the suds around his face: “knees · · · The smiling stripling with the pink soaped face”, Paysage Triste 16, 18 (“knees”, 17).
22 Broadbottomed: J. W. Croker: “There are some vile, vulgar words adopted in modern politics · · · Broad-bottomed administration is a vile phrase, it is meant to express an admiration of weight, pondere fixa suo, but it may be turned to denote one that shews its a——”, The Amazoniad (1806) 52 (with “Fragrant the tepid steam arose” on the same page; TSE: “Rises from the sheets in steam”, 12). The Fox–North Coalition had boasted of being a “broadbottomed administration of all the talents”. TSE: “broadbacked hippopotamus”, The Hippopotamus 1. “The broadbacked figure”, Ash-Wednesday III 15.