18 The avenue of penitence: “the way of penitence”, Choruses from “The Rock” IX 14.
20 Clutching · · · pence: Meredith: “And now she screws a gouty fist, | And now she counts to clutch her pence”, To Colonel Charles 19–20. piaculative: not in OED 1st ed., but later added with this as sole citation: “= piacular a. 1” (“Making expiation or atonement; expiatory”). Pronounced pea-aculative in TSE’s recording. TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934) includes Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915), with its chapter title “Piacular Rites and the Ambiguity of the Notion of Sacredness” (Harmon 1976b).
22 Sustained by staring Seraphim: “A local deity of love, | And pious vows and votive prayer | Shall hover in my sacred grove | Sustained on that Italian air”, Exequy 4–7. Writing to Pound [26? Jan 1922], TSE proposed to change The Waste Land [II] 79–80 to read “Sustained by standards wrought with fruited vines | Wherefrom [a golden Cupidon peeped out]”. Again at the head of the line, though in a different sense: “Sustained by juice of juniper and grape”, Three Sonnets (to Geoffrey Faber) 7. staring Seraphim: Paradiso XXI 92: “quel Serafin che in Dio più l’occhio ha fisso” [that Seraph who hath his eye most fixed on God] (Ernest Schanzer, EinC Apr 1955).
[Poem I 49 · Textual History II 355]
23–24 the devout | Burn invisible and dim: “cf. Henry Vaughan”, TSE in Thayer’s AraVP. Vaughan: “O for that Night! where I in him | Might live invisible and dim”, The Night 53–54 (Allardyce Nicoll, English Journal Apr 1934); TSE decided against a footnote wryly acknowledging the debt (see Textual History). TSE: “Vaughan is usually considered as the poet of occasional fine lines, and of no perfect poem”, The Silurist (1927). For “a dim religious light”, see note to Burnt Norton III 3.
25 Along the garden-wall: “Along the garden stairs”, Circe’s Palace 10. “I have seen the darkness creep along the wall”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 74 ^ 75 [1].
25–26 the bees | With hairy bellies: Milton: “the bee with honey’d thigh · · · hairy gown”, Il Penseroso 142, 169.
25–27 the bees | With hairy bellies pass between | The staminate and pistillate · · · epicene: Jain 1991: “The pollen clings to the hairs on their bodies and legs. The ‘staminate’ has stamens [male organs containing pollen] but no pistils; the ‘pistillate’ has pistils [female seed-bearing organs] but no stamens. The bees are thus ‘epicene’ in that the worker bees are neuter, having imperfectly developed generative organs, and because they are in contact with both sexes.” Irving Babbitt on Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme: “the celibacy of priests is backed up by the virginity of bees. He points out that ‘nature has not been as delicate as disbelievers … It has bestowed the form of the cross upon a whole family of flowers.’ He proves the necessity of the Sabbath”, The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912) 72. Whitman: “The hairy wild-bee that murmurs and hankers up and down, that gripes the full-grown lady-flower, curves upon her with amorous firm legs”, Spontaneous Me 17 (with “bellies”, 13) (Musgrove 51).
27 The staminate and pistillate: Laforgue: “Une chair bêtement, staminifère, | Un cœur illusoirement pistillé” [A flesh which is stupidly stamen-bearing, a heart delusively wearing pistils], Ballade 13–14 (Southam).
28 Blest: Vaughan: “Most blest believer he!” The Night 7. epicene: OED adj. 1: “In Lat. and Gr. grammar, said of nouns which, without changing their grammatical gender, may denote either sex”; 2c. fig: “often in the sense of ‘effeminate’”; and n. “One who partakes of the characteristics of both sexes. 1609 B. Jonson (title), Epicene, or The Silent Woman.” TSE: “One is particularly struck by an almost epicene refinement and certainly by the absence of references to sexual experience”, “The Poet’s Progress” by H. B. Cresswell, reader’s report (1929).
29 Sweeney shifts from ham to ham: Joseph Husband on “Sweeney the driver”: “An oppressive silence followed and Sweeney shifted uneasily in his chair”, The Summons in Harvard Advocate 29 Mar 1907 (TSE’s first appearance in the Advocate was 24 May). ham: OED n.1 b: “The back of the thigh; the thigh and buttock collectively”, with 1796: “They sit on their hams, with their legs and arms disposed in the manner of monkeys.”
30 Stirring the water in his bath: on 2 Aug 1938, TSE wrote to John Hayward that he was gathering Pseudodoxia Contemporanea, a modern collection of Vulgar Errors to match that of Sir Thomas Browne in the 17th century. Among them was “A fart, strained through bathwater, loses both odour and inflammability.”
[Poem I 50 · Textual History II 356]
30–32 Stirring the water in his bath · · · controversial, polymath: asked to rule in a controversy over the volume of gold in a crown, the polymath Archimedes worked out the means in his “Eureka moment”, when he observed the level of his bathwater rise as he stepped in (Doolie Sloman, personal communication). He is famous also for the Archimedes Screw, which raises water against (contra) the force of gravity by turning (vertens) (Peter Lockley, personal communication).
31 subtle schools: Socrates refers to the κομψοὶ (“elegant thinkers” such as Zeno) in Plato’s Philebus. Theodor Gomperz on Plato: “To this is joined an ironical expression of thanks to the ‘subtle school’”, Greek Thinkers: A History of Ancient Philosophy tr. G. G. Berry (1905) III 193. In 1913, TSE jotted down: “T. Gomperz: Greek Thinkers” in his notes from the Harvard course “Philosophy 10” (Houghton). J. H. Woods to Dean Briggs of Harvard, recommending TSE for a Sheldon Fellowship, 25 Feb 1914: “He wrote far the best papers in the Plato course; another year he read philosophical Sanskrit effectively” (Harvard Archives).
32 polymath: in the typescript Pound isolates the second syllable for scrutiny by marking “| math”, with the comment “μαθαιος or μανθανο?” He has both Greek words wrong, but is pointing out that in Sweeney’s case, μάταιος [mathaios] = foolish is more applicable than the actual root μανθανω [manthano] = to learn. For a playful Greek derivation by TSE, see headnote to Old Deuteronomy.
Sweeney Among the Nightingales
Published in Little Review Sept 1918, then 1919+, The Faber Book of Modern Verse ed. Michael Roberts (1936), Sesame and Penguin / Sel Poems.
Recorded, 21 Apr 1933, Columbia U. Second: 26 July 1946, NBC (NY) for Library of Congress; released Feb 1949. Third: 13 May 1947, Harvard, as part of the Morris Gray Poetry Reading. Fourth: 23 May 1947, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Undated in tss. Dated “? 1917–18” in Isaacs 1920 and “1917 1918” by TSE in Hayward’s 1925, but 1918 by TSE in Morley’s US 1920. Dated London, 1918 in Poèmes, and assigned to 1918 by Rainey 198.
[Poems I 50–52 · Textual History II 356–58]
Horace Gregory recalled TSE’s reading at the New School for Social Research in New York on 27 Apr 1933, where Henry Eliot told him that their mother “did not quite approve of some of Tom’s more ‘dangerous’ poems, his Sweeney poems; they made her wonder what kind of company he kept. As for himself, he liked the poems immensely, he even liked the poems written by Tom’s strange friend, Pound—what a very strange, extraordinary man! · · · And when Eliot preceded his reading of Sweeney Among the Nightingales by saying that the poem was like a modern painting, abstract and impersonal, I felt that he was addressing his remarks to Henry directly—in mock reassurance that he was only half as wicked as his family supposed him to be”, Gregory 206. Of the same occasion: “Speaking of Sweeney, one of his most discussed, he described the poem as a ‘still life,’ like a picture in which the methods of the painter can be analyzed but not the excitement caused by the painting. Thus, he said, each reader finds in each poem more or less different things from what the writer meant”, NY Herald Trib, 28 Apr 1933. However, when G. Jones 227 proposed that “In the mythical structure of this dark poem, Clytemnestra is probably Rachel of the murderous paws, while the redeemer-Orestes is ‘The silent man in mocha brown’”, TSE wrote in the margin, “nonsense”.
Vassar Miscellany News 10 May 1933, on TSE speaking at th
e college three days previously: “He went on to discuss Sweeney Among the Nightingales, ‘not an obscure poem, simply a series of images. I’m not sure it means anything at all,’ Mr. Eliot said. For him, the poem as he read it had an atmosphere of suspense and sultriness like the time of the air-raids in London. It is like a piece of still life, the meaning of which one does not formulate; one merely estimates the way the painter has used planes and angles.” (As originally printed, the paragraph has no opening inverted commas, so the attributed speech may begin with the next sentence. The report is not wholly accurate.) Gallup 1985 recorded TSE in 1944: asked whether modern art had been more readily and widely received than modern poetry, he replied, “What we call modern painting started earlier than modern poetry in English did.” Pound on The Waste Land II: “‘The Game of Chess’ poem shows the effect of modern abstract art, but vorticism from my angle was a renewal of the sense of construction”, interview in Paris Review Summer–Fall 1962. Reporting a reading of 5 May 1947 at Wellesley College, Judy Wolpert recorded that TSE read Sweeney Among the Nightingales, “which the poet described as a ‘picture and a mood for that picture’”, Wellesley College News 8 May 1947. Reading the poem at Harvard on 13 May 1947, TSE said he chose it for “a certain local sentimental association” (see notes to the titles Sweeney Erect and Sweeney Agonistes).
Title] Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Bianca Among the Nightingales (F. L. Gwynn, Grover Smith 304). Nightingales: though it is not mentioned in OED, a slang sense of “prostitute” is given by Partridge as c. 1840, and Chambers Slang Dictionary gives 1. “a prostitute” as 19th century, and 2. “a singer” as late 19th century to 1910s. Southam:
The “Nightingales” of the title are not only the birds of the final stanzas; the word is also a slang term for prostitutes; and Eliot once remarked to the critic Edmund Wilson that the poem takes place in a dive. Regarding the mood of the poem, Eliot said that “All I consciously set out to create · · · was a ‘sense of foreboding’.”
William Johnson Cory: “Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake; | For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take”, Heraclitus (in Oxf Bk of English Verse). For the legend that Philomela and Procne were turned into nightingales, see note to The Waste Land [II] 99–103. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock bore in ms the subtitle “(Prufrock among the Women)”. For nightingales in classical literature, see note to 35–39.
[Poem I 51–52 · Textual History II 356–58]
Epigraph] “Agamemnon”, TSE in Thayer’s AraVP. [Alas, I have been struck deep a mortal blow], Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1343: the cry of Agamemnon as he is murdered in his bath by Clytemnestra (see 38). The words written on the two typescripts, ὤμοι πέπληγμαι ἐν πλευροῖς εἰσω [Alas I have been struck deep in the ribs], deviate from Aeschylus’ text and are not metrical. In Tradition and the Individual Talent II (1919), TSE moves within a paragraph from “the murder of Agamemnon” to Keats, whose Ode “contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, perhaps partly because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.” For Pound’s suggestion that TSE translate the Agamemnon, see footnote to “Aggymemnon” at the end of Pound’s Sage Homme, in headnote to The Waste Land, 1. COMPOSITION.
Second epigraph (1919 and AraVP) Why should I speak of the nightingale? The nightingale sings of adulterate wrong: “Edward III”, TSE in Thayer’s AraVP. Spoken by the King in The Raigne of K. Edward the Third II i; see The Shakespeare Apocrypha, ed. C. F. T. Brooke (1908), recommended in TSE’s Syllabus: Elizabethan Literature (1918). For the same play, see note to 5–8. adulterate: OED ppl. a.: “Defiled, or stained by adultery”. TSE (title): Mélange Adultère de Tout.
1 Apeneck Sweeney: see note to the title Sweeney Erect. spreads his knees: “legs apart · · · spreading of the toes”, Suite Clownesque I 13, 23.
1–2 Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees | Letting his arms hang down to laugh: Kipling’s “ape-beast” in Bertran and Bimi used to “laugh” (see note to Sweeney Erect 11). J. G. Wood: “Its arms are of extraordinary length, the hands reaching the ground when it stands erect”, Illustrated Natural History (1897) 12. TSE: “Gesture of orang-outang”, Sweeney Erect 11. For “the body bent, and the hands · · · hanging down”, see note to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 14–15, 17.
1–4 Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees · · · zebra · · · giraffe: Laurent Tailhade: “Cœur de lapin, ventre de porc, nez de gorille · · · Et le gros Formentin concague ses genoux” [Heart of rabbit, belly of pig, nose of gorilla · · · And fat Formentin knock-knees his knees], Gendelettres [Manofletters] 1, 8.
1, 4, 10 Apeneck Sweeney · · · Swelling · · · shrunken: OED “sweeny”: “U.S. Atrophy of the shoulder-muscles in the horse. Also fig. of the ‘stiffness’ of pride”, with 1887: “The shrinkage of the muscles of the shoulder, and which is commonly called ‘sweeny’, is due to some lameness of the foot or limb.”
1, 11, 20 Apeneck · · · Spanish · · · grapes: “If Spanish Apes ate all the grapes | How should we do for sack’a?” If all the world were paper (anon) in Witt’s Recreations (1641).
3 zebra: pronounced zeebra (first of the two pronunciations in OED) in TSE’s recordings of 1947.
4 maculate: pronounced as rhyming with accurate in TSE’s recordings of 1947. OED: “= MACULATED · · · Now chiefly lit. and poet., in expressed or implied antithesis to immaculate”. TSE’s line is now quoted under this sense, although a more obvious meaning can be traced, that of either “maculated” 1: “Spotted, stained, defiled, polluted” or 2: “In scientific use: Marked with maculæ.” (“macula” 1: “A spot or stain · · · in the skin, now esp. one which is permanent.”)
5 circles of the stormy moon | Slide westward toward: rings around the Moon are said to indicate approaching bad weather. “Rolls toward the moon”, Nocturne 11.
5–8 circles of the stormy moon · · · Raven · · · hornèd: The Raigne of K. Edward the Third III i: “the horned circle of the moon · · · this flight of ravens” (Anne Stillman, personal communication).
[Poem I 51 · Textual History II 356–57]
6–7 westward · · · the River Plate, | Death and the Raven drift above: Corvus, constellation of the raven, is in the southern sky, and so visible from the River Plate in South America. For “the drift of stars”, see note to Burnt Norton II 8.
7 Death and the Raven drift above: TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “Marlowe”, referring to “Thus, like the sad-presaging raven, that tolls | The sick man’s passport in her hollow beak, | And in the shadow of the silent night | Doth shake contagion from her sable wings”, The Jew of Malta II i. Death and the Raven: Schubert (title): Death and the Maiden quartet (Anne Stillman). drift above: “the torn algae drift above him”, Those are pearls that were his eyes. See! 3.
8 hornèd gate: see note WLComposite 352, “the horn or ivory gates”.
8, 11 hornèd gate · · · Spanish: Kyd: “The gates of Horn, | Where dreams have passage in the silent night”, The Spanish Tragedy I i.
9 Gloomy Orion: Lemprière: “a celebrated hunter · · · After death, Orion was placed in heaven, where one of the constellations still bears his name · · · generally supposed to be accompanied, at its rising, with great rains and storms” (“stormy moon”, 5). Virgil: “nimbosus Orion”, Aeneid I 535 (Southam). TSE in Thayer’s AraVP: “Marlowe”, referring to “Thither made we | When suddenly gloomie Orion rose, | And led our ships into the shallow sands”, Dido, Queen of Carthage I ii (Collingwood 311). the Dog: “The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit”, Choruses from “The Rock” I 2. The Dog Star, Sirius, the brightest in the sky, is part of the constellation Canis Major, which along with Canis Minor is imagined as following Orion. Inside the gloom catalogues several constellations.
10 shrunken seas: significant to, for instance, geologists. Raphael Pumpelly: “deserts, relieved only by oases in high valleys and · · · t
he mouths of streams emerging from the mountains, or where larger rivers died out on the plains or entered the shrunken seas”; “from a study of the ancient shore-lines · · · of now shrunken seas · · · important records bearing on the archaeology as well as physiography of Central Asia are to be drawn”; “the Aral and Caspian—its two shrunken seas”, Explorations in Turkestan (1908), 13, 245, 291.
11 Spanish cape: Alan Seeger: “In corduroys and Spanish capes and locks uncut and flowing ties”, Paris, quoted by TSE in Short Reviews (1917). For Seeger’s poem, see note on the “Fresca couplets” [3–4] variant in the Commentary on The Waste Land (following note to WLComposite 298). For Seeger, see note to Whispers of Immortality 19. OED “cape” n.2: “A Spanish cloak (with a hood). Obs.” (last citation 1580).
14 a coffee-cup: unexpected in a “dive” (see note to title); for Prohibition, see note to WLComposite 2.
14, 16–18 coffee-cup · · · yawns and draws a stocking up · · · mocha brown · · · gapes: “Fresca stretches, yawns gapes | Aroused from dreams of love · · · translucent silks · · · foaming chocolate”, The Waste Land III ms1 [3–7] (see Textual History). draws a stocking up: to Pound, 2 Feb [1915]:
even so innocent a rhyme as
… pulled her stockings off
With a frightful cry of “Hauptbahnhof!!”
is considered decadent.
See note to The Triumph of Bullshit. (Hauptbahnhof = “central station”.) gapes:
“Priapus in the shrubbery | Gaping at the lady in the swing”, Mr. Apollinax 4–5.)
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 63