The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 86
[Poem I 63, 335 · Textual History II 392]
352 To spring to pleasure through the horn or ivory gates: Homer’s Penelope tells Odysseus of the two gates through which dreams pass on their way from the underworld: “one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory. Those dreams that pass through the gate of sawn ivory deceive men · · · But those that come forth through the gate of polished horn bring true issues to pass”, Odyssey XIX 563–67 (tr. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1919). TSE to Jackson Knight, 13 Mar 1945: “I am not an Homeric but a Virgilian.” Valerie Eliot quotes Virgil in WLFacs notes: “Sunt geminae Somni portae; quarum altera fertur | cornea, qua veris facilis datur exitus umbris, | altera candenti perfecta nitens elephanto, | sed falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia Manes” [Two Gates the silent House of Sleep adorn; | Of polish’d Iv’ry this, that of transparent Horn: | True Visions through transparent Horn arise; | Through polish’d Iv’ry pass deluding Lyes], Aeneid VI 893–96; Dryden tr. VI 1235–38. TSE refers in other poems to each kind of sleep (VE): “And Sweeney guards the hornèd gate”, Sweeney Among the Nightingales 8; “The empty forms between the ivory gates”, Ash-Wednesday VI 18. The words from Virgil are spoken to Aeneas and the Sibyl during their journey through Hades by Aeneas’ father, who then “dismisses them by the ivory gate”. Gérard de Nerval: “Je n’ai pu percer sans frémir ces portes d’ivoire ou de corne qui nous séparent du monde invisible” [I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separate us from the invisible world], Aurélia I. spring: because of “taxi throbbing” in the previous line, Pound wrote in the margin “Taxi spring ??” (meaning its suspension). He also transposed “horn” and “ivory”, perhaps because of “taxi · · · horn”.
[III] 218 Tiresias: said to have lived as many as nine generations. When he saw two serpents copulating, he struck them and was changed into a woman. Lemprière: “Seven years after he again found some serpents together in the same manner, and he recovered his original sex, by striking them with his wand. When he was a woman, Tiresias had married, and · · · Jupiter and Juno referred to his decision · · · which of the sexes received greater pleasure from the connubial state. Tiresias · · · decided in favour of Jupiter, and declared, that the pleasure which the female received was ten times greater than that of the male. Juno, who · · · gave the superiority to the male sex, punished Tiresias by depriving him of his eye-sight. But this dreadful loss was in some measure repaired by the humanity of Jupiter, who bestowed on him the gift of prophecy.” Inf. XX 40–45: “Behold Tiresias who changed his aspect, when of male he was made woman, all his limbs transforming; and afterwards he had again to strike the two involved serpents with his rod, before he could resume his manly plumes.” throbbing between two lives: Arnold: “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, | The other powerless to be born”, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse 85–86. TSE: “Bleeding between two lives”, Song (“The golden foot I may not kiss or clutch”) 5. “Being between two lives”, Little Gidding III 6.
[III] 218 TSE’s Notes Tiresias · · · the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest: to Jonathan Edwards, 9 May 1939, on a “partition” of The Waste Land into different voices for performance: “partly as a result of the broadcast adaptation of the poem, and partly because this broadcast confirmed my expectations, I have a strong dislike of dividing up for voices poems which were conceived in terms of one voice.” (For TSE’s letter to the director of the broadcast, see headnote, 8. ANTHOLOGIES, TRANSLATIONS, ADAPTATIONS.) not wholly distinct from: F. M. Cornford: “The Cook · · · is not, in origin, distinct from the Learned Doctor”, The Origin of Attic Comedy 189. See note to Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of an Agon 9–10. Ferdinand Prince of Naples: see note to [III] 191–92.
[III] 218–19 I Tiresias, though blind · · · can see: TSE’s Notes quote the description of Jove and Juno in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Jove did
[Poem I 63, 335 · Textual History II 393]
fall a-jesting with his wife, and saide: a greater pleasure
In Venus games ye women have than men beyonde all measure.
She answerde no. To trie the truth, they both of them agree
The wise Tyresias in this case indifferent judge to bee,
Who both the man and womans joyes by tryall understood.
For finding once two mightie Snakes engendring in a Wood,
He strake them overthwart the backs, by means whereof beholde
(As straunge a thing to be of truth as ever yet was tolde)
He being made a woman straight, seven winter lived so.
The eight he finding them againe did say unto them tho:
And if to strike ye have such powre as for to turne their shape
That are the givers of the stripe, before you hence escape,
One stripe now will I lende you more. He strake them as beforne
And straight returnd his former shape in which he first was borne.
Tyresias therefore being tane to judge this jesting strife,
Gave sentence on the side of Jove. The which the Queene his wife
Did take a great deale more to heart than needed, and in spight
To wreake hir teene upon hir Judge, bereft him of his sight.
But Jove (for to the Gods it is unleeful to undoe
The things which other of the Gods by any meanes have doe)
Did give him sight in things to come for losse of sight of eye,
And so his grievous punishment with honour did supplie.
tr. Arthur Golding (1567), III 401–422
In Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos, King Laius, Oedipus’ father, has been murdered, bringing a plague upon Thebes. Tiresias refuses to explain that it was Oedipus himself who killed the king, and that in taking Jocasta as his queen, he has married his mother. TSE had studied Sophocles’ play at Harvard in 1907–08 in a Greek Literature course, given by Charles P. Parker and E. Cary. TSE compared tragedy in Malory to Sophocles’ Oedipus: “Arthur throughout is a man under doom, at first admonished by the prophetic voice of Merlin, his Tiresias, himself cursed, not by blindness, but by the blind infatuation which ruins him”, Le Morte Darthur (1934). Swinburne: “I, Tiresias the prophet, seeing in Thebes | Much evil”, Tiresias I 43–44 (Friend). WLComposite 110: “(I John saw these things, and heard them).” throbbing between two lives, | Old man with wrinkled female breasts: Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tiresias caused controversy when first performed in 1919 (C. J. Ackerley, personal communication). On Tiresias, Frazer’s ed. of Apollodorus (Loeb, 1921) I 360–67 contained explicit and suggestive notes (Robert M. Adams, Litz ed. 145). TSE: “Then he had been a young girl · · · old man”, The Death of Saint Narcissus 28–29. To Bonamy Dobrée, 12 Nov 1927, on the Bolo world: “Did I tell you that the Male Bolovians were divided equally at Puberty into Modernists and Fundamentalists, but that the Females communicated in both Kinds? But even Ovid pointed out that the Female has the best of it.”
[Poem I 63, 335 · Textual History II 393]
[III] 220–23 the evening hour that strives | Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, | The typist home · · · lays out food: TSE’s Notes refer to “Sappho’s lines”: “Evening Star, that brings back all that the shining Dawn has scattered, you bring back the sheep, you bring back the goats, you bring the child home to its mother” (Fragment 149). Inf. II 1–3: “Lo giorno se n’andava, e l’aer bruno | toglieva gli animai, che sono in terra, | dalle fatiche loro” [The day was departing, and the brown air taking the animals, that are on earth, from their toils]; TSE marked the Italian in the copy his mother had given him. Purg. VIII 1–2: “’Twas now the hour that turns back the desire of those who sail the seas and melts their heart” (Friend). Paradise Lost XII 629–32: “evening · · · the labourer’s heel | Homeward returning” (Saskia Hamilton, personal communication). Thomas Gray: “The plowman homeward plods his weary way, | And leaves the world to darkness and to me”, Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard 3–4. Whitman: “scenes of life and the wor
kshops, and the workmen homeward returning”, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d 88 (Musgrove). Stevenson: “let me lie. | Glad did I live and gladly die, | And I laid me down with a will · · · Here he lies where he longed to be; | Home is the sailor, home from sea, | And the hunter home from the hill”, Requiem (TSE: “and I’m glad it’s over”, [III] 252). Housman: “Home is the sailor, home from sea · · · Home is the hunter from the hill · · · All flesh lies taken at his will”, R.L.S. 1, 5, 7. John Davidson: “The thin-shod clerks, the shopmen neat and plump | Home from the city came”, A Woman and her Son (immediately preceding the passage quoted in note to Preludes II 1–4).
TSE’S Notes refer to “the ‘longshore’ or ‘dory’ fisherman, who returns at nightfall”. James B. Connolly: “A banker’s dory is built and equipped for two men. When the dory puts out from the vessel one man takes the job of rowing, the other of heaving the trawl”, Fishermen of the Banks (1928) 18. In his reader’s report on Connolly’s book, 8 Oct 1927, TSE wrote: “The author does not make it very clear at first what a dory is, or what a banker is. But the readers will find out in the course of the book.”
[III] 222–23 home at teatime, clears her breakfast · · · food in tins: Hayward: “The early morning rush to the office prevented her from clearing away her breakfast. A slut, as much by force of circumstance as by nature, she has neither time nor inclination to cook proper meals and eats out of tins. Line 226 places her as one of the many thousands of tenants of a single bed-sitting room or ‘bed-sitter’ in one of the decaying residential quarters of London.” food in tins (variant squalid food): TSE, on television: “just as food comes to be something you have got out of a tin, and not something you have grown for yourself, so drama may mean for millions of people something out of a box or thrown onto a screen”, Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern (1937).
357–60 against the four lines in ts3b Pound wrote “verse not interesting enough as verse to warrant so much of it”. He also underlined the repetition in “Prepares the room and sets the room to rights” (360), commenting: “qui dira les gaffers de la rime” [who will speak of rhyme’s gaffes]. Verlaine: “O qui dira les torts de la Rime?” [Oh who will speak of rhyme’s wrongs?], Art Poétique 25 (WLFacs notes).
[III] 224 Out of the window perilously spread: “F. M.”: “Out of the window she thrusts the upper half of her body”, Diary of the Rive Gauche I (1925), followed by memories of Morning at the Window: “the uproar of déjeuner begins · · · in the kitchen, but gradually it spreads through the whole hotel · · · the crashing of china—surely broken?—rattle of cutlery”.
362 the sun’s last rays: Pound underlined the last three words in ts3b, perhaps because of “the sun’s inclining ray”, 229.
[III] 225–26 rays · · · divan: Paradise Lost X 457: “Raised from their dark Divan”.
[III] 226 divan · · · (at night her bed): OED “divan” 3: “a long seat · · · furnished with cushions, so as to form a kind of sofa or couch. Now usually, a low bed or couch with no back or ends”, with Dickens: “The bed being soft and comfortable, Mr. Quilp determined to use it, both as a sleeping place by night and as a kind of Divan by day”, The Old Curiosity Shop ch. XI. Vivien Eliot: “He knew she was in his room because the bed settee was th in it, and she had to lie down for an hour before meals. Sometimes he wished the bed-settee could be in another room. It was in his study because, as Ellison said, that made it a kind of bed-sitting room for him, & he could occasionally sleep there” (c. 624 fols. 3–4).
[III] 226, 244 divan: pronounced divv-àn in TSE’s recordings, except in the second of these lines in 1946, die-vàn. The draft reading “And on the divan piled, (at night her bed)” had required dìe-van, stressed on the first syllable (for Pound’s comment, see Textual History).
[Poem I 63, 335–36 · Textual History II 393]
[III] 227 camisoles: OED 2b: “An underbodice”, citing 1916: “Cambric and nainsook combinations are .. becoming obsolete, the camisole-knicker or camisole-chemise taking their place.” stays: OED “stay” n.2 3a: “A laced underbodice, stiffened by the insertion of strips of whale-bone (sometimes of metal or wood) worn · · · to give shape and support to the figure: = corset”.
365–66 A bright kimono wraps her as she sprawls | In nerveless torpor on the window seat: against these lines Pound wrote “mix up of the couplet + grishkin not good”. Although Valerie Eliot quotes Whispers of Immortality 17–24, “Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye | Is underlined for emphasis · · · Grishkin has a maisonnette” (WLFacs), Pound may have been confusing this quatrain poem with another: “The silent man in mocha brown | Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes”, Sweeney Among the Nightingales 17–18. WLFacs notes: “Pound wrote (Canto LXXVII): ‘Grishkin’s photo refound years after | with the feeling that Mr. Eliot may have | missed something, after all, in composing his vignette | periplum’.” (“Periplum”: Cookson LIX 324: “(Gk.) voyage round a coast-line · · · sometimes used for voyages of the mind.”) For “The married girl who lives across the street | Wraps her soul in orange-coloured robes of Chopinese”, see TSE to Conrad Aiken, 25 July 1914, in headnote to The Love Song of St. Sebastian.
371 these crawling bugs: of nations and language: “the forces of deterioration are a large crawling mass”, Observations (1918). To Lytton Strachey, 1 June 1919: “I am sojourning among the termites” (see McCue 2014b).
[III] 230 the expected guest: Hawthorne: “I should hardly judge that she was an expected guest”, The Blithedale Romance ch. IV. See note to “unfamiliar gust”, WLComposite 526.
[III] 231 young man carbuncular: Milton: “that old man eloquent”, To the Lady Margaret Ley 8. TSE to Alan M. Hollingsworth, 22 Mar 1955, who had drawn a comparison with “the brash young clerk Marlow meets in the city of the dead” in Heart of Darkness pt. 1: “‘The young man carbuncular’ is a conscious derivation from a sonnet of Milton’s, but I am not aware of any of the associations that you mention in your letter. Finally, I must say frankly that such points seem to me of very minor interest to anybody.” TSE: “The young are red and pustular”, Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service 19. Turnbull Lecture III: “Jules Laforgue was a young man · · · He was tuberculous”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 281. carbuncular: Johnson’s Dictionary, “carbuncle”: “A jewel shining in the dark, like a lighted coal or candle”, citing Wilkins on the lighted coal, “from whence it hath its name.” Johnson: “a gem supposed to have intrinsic light, and to shine in the dark; any other gem may reflect light, but cannot give it”, Notes to Shakespeare, Henry VIII II iii. OED’s citations for carbuncular are all medical, diverging from carbuncle 1. (precious stones). Jonson: “See, a carbuncle | May put out both the eyes of our Saint Mark”, Volpone III vi, quoted in Ben Jonson (1919).
[III] 231–55 the young man · · · bored and tired · · · finding the stairs unlit … | She turns and looks a moment in the glass, | Hardly aware of her departed lover · · · smoothes her hair: Conrad Aiken (drawing upon TSE’s earlier poems):
[Poem I 63, 336 · Textual History II 393–95]
all the lighted rooms are bare,
Numberless gas-jets flare
Thousands of secret lives, with unconcern,
Yawn and turn.
Men in their shirtsleeves reading papers,
Women by mirrors combing out their hair,
Women sleeping, old men dying,
The furtive lover half way up the stair · · ·
The young man drinks and leans across the table,
Through clamor of music and hurrying feet
Desperate to repeat
What she, who lowers her eyes, has heard before;
And across his shoulder, while he has turned away,
She smiles to her lover who smiles beside the door
The Jig of Forslin (1916) V vi
382 London’s one cafe: WLFacs notes: “The Café Royal. A favourite London rendezvous of writers and artists.”
384 Nevinson: WLFacs notes: “C. R. W. Nevi
nson, A.R.A. (1889–1946). The painter was an habitué of the Café Royal.”
[III] 232 house agent: OED: “an agent employed · · · in the sale and letting of houses, the collection of rents, etc.”
[III] 234 silk hat · · · Bradford: “The inhabitants of Hampstead have silk hats”, The Death of the Duchess I 1. “Top hats and all, we and Silk Hat Harry”, WLComposite 4 (see note). “Bonnets, silk hats, and conscious graces”, Spleen 3. “And at one time I travelled (from Luton) in hats”, Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats 19. Bradford millionaire: Hayward: “Bradford, centre of the woollen industry in Yorkshire, profited immensely from war-contracts between 1914 and 1918. The ‘millionaire’ in this line is the type of the ‘war-profiteer’.” An editorial in The Times, 19 Jan 1920, reported that the Central Profiteering Committee had heard that it was being said “up and down the West Riding and in Bradford that the worsted spinners were making thousands per cent. Mr. Webb added that the spinners thought they were perfectly right in continuing to make these profits, and he was promptly confirmed by the authentic voice of Bradford with the argument that everybody would profiteer if he could.” The Times of 20 Feb 1920 ran a story headlined “A Bradford Profiteer”, about a butcher who had been fined £1,000. Valerie Eliot: “my husband told me that his millionaire came from Yorkshire, and did business with Lloyds Bank”, TLS 18 June 1976. Julia Bolton Holloway proposed the Yorkshire mill owner Sir James Roberts, who lost a fortune in the Russian Revolution: “After World War I he made many a fruitless visit to the Lloyds Bank on Threadneedle Street seeking reparation payments · · · The clerk in charge of reparations in the Colonial and Foreign Department was Thomas Stearns Eliot”, Yeats Eliot Review Summer 1979. (Valerie Eliot confirmed this identification to Roberts’s family; see Yorkshire Post 22 Apr 2013.) From 1939, TSE encouraged Hayward to set down his memories in a “Recherche du temps perdu”, and later, mentioning the “house of the local family of industrial magnates”, 3 Nov 1941, he wrote, “the sociology of these local industrial families ought to provide a separate volume of La Recherche: it is the same whether in Leeds, Bristol, Hull, etc. and varies slightly according to the particular dissenting background—in Newcastle, as in Bristol, it is Quaker. In Leeds it is Unitarian.”