The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
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[V] 425 Shall I at least set my lands in order?: Isaiah 38: 1: “Set thine house in order: for thou shalt die, and not live” (A. D., N&Q 19 Aug 1950), as also 2 Kings 20: 1. TSE: “Swept and set in order”, Easter: Sensations of April II 4. Title-page epigraph to For Lancelot Andrewes: “Thou, Lord, Who walkest in the midst of the golden candlesticks, remove not, we pray Thee, our candlestick out of its place; but set in order the things which are wanting among us, and strengthen those which remain, and are ready to die”, a slight adaptation from the Sunday Morning Intercession in Andrewes, Preces Privatæ 43. Jacopone da Todi: “Ordina quest’Amore, O tu che m’ami” [Set Love in order, thou that lovest Me]. The Italian is printed on the leaf before the first canto of Purgatorio in the Temple ed. The translation given here is the first line of Rossetti’s Cantica in The Early Italian Poets (1861), a poem constructed from a speech by St. Francis of Assisi. TSE: “But there are all sorts of ways of setting the world in order; from the relative precision of physics to the relative confusion of theology”, The Relativity of Moral Judgment (1915). On Pound: “He added his own extensive erudition, and proceeded to a curious syncretism which I do not think he has ever set in order”, Isolated Superiority (1928). On the discovery of a “found” tribe: “And until we set in order our own crazy economic and financial systems, to say nothing of our philosophy of life, can we be sure that our helping hands to the barbarian and the savage will be any more desirable than the embrace of the leper?” A Commentary in Criterion Oct 1935.
[V] 426 London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down: Hayward: “The refrain of one of the best known traditional English nursery rhymes:— ‘London Bridge is broken down | Dance o’er my lady lee.’” The element of sing-song is audible in TSE’s recordings. TSE to his Swedish translator Erik Mesterton, 20 Jan 1932: “‘London Bridge etc.’ is a children’s game, and my version is probably merely a variant of yours.” (“Here we go round the prickly pear | Prickly pear prickly pear”, The Hollow Men V 1–2.)
[Poem I 71, 346 · Textual History II 406–407]
[V] 427 Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina: TSE’s Notes quote Purg. XXVI 145–48, of which this is the final line: [“Now I pray you, by that Goodness which guideth you to the summit of the stairway, be mindful in due time of my pain.” Then he hid him in the fire which refines them.] Hayward: “Arnaut, before leaping back into the refining fire (cf. Little Gidding II 92), says: ‘I am Arnaut who weep and go singing; contrite I see my past folly, and joyful I see before me the day I hope for.’” For TSE’s returns to this passage, see next note and note on volume title Ara Vos Prec (“Poems (1920)”).
[V] 428 Quando fiam uti chelidon: [when shall I be as the swallow]. TSE’s Notes refer to Pervigilium Veneris XXII:
illa cantat, nos tacemus: quando ver venit meum?
quando fiam uti chelidon ut tacere desinam?
perdidi musam tacendo, nec me Apollo respicit:
sic Amyclas, cum tacerent, perdidit silentium.
cras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit cras amet.
[She sings, we are mute: when is my spring coming? when shall I be as the swallow, that I may cease to be voiceless? I have lost the Muse in silence, nor does Apollo regard me: so Amyclae, being mute, perished by silence. To-morrow shall be love for the loveless, and for the lover to-morrow shall be love].
[Poem I 71, 346 · Textual History II 407]
(For TSE’s Prufrock’s Pervigilium, see Textual History of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, after 69.) TSE to E. M. Stephenson, 19 Aug 1943: “‘When I become like the swallow’. You will find a good account of the Pervigilium Veneris in [J. W.] Mackail’s Latin Literature.”
To George L. Haskins, 14 Feb 1933, in reply to a query about the use of ceu in place of uti before 1936: “You are quite right, but I should be very much interested myself if I could find out why I used ceu instead of uti. I knew perfectly well that uti was correct, but I quoted from memory, and seemed to remember a text which had given the other. Even if my memory is correct, the interesting point is to know why I capriciously chose ceu, but that I am afraid will always remain a mystery. Meanwhile I suppose I ought to correct it in another edition.” To John J. Slocum, 19 Feb 1957: “I think that my attention was first drawn to this poem by Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean and Mackail’s admirable History of Latin Literature. I cannot remember just why I made the change in the quotation. I had quoted it originally in The Waste Land from memory but somebody queried the ‘ceu’. I think that I then looked up the text of the Pervigilium Veneris and found ‘uti’, and accordingly made the change. I should be very glad if you would tell me how the best text reads. The poem made a great impression on me at the age of seventeen or eighteen and I still admire it very much.” The reading “ceu”, an editorial emendation, had been printed in the textual apparatus to the Anthologia Latina, sive Poesis Latinae Supplementum ed. Franz Buecheler and Alexander Riese (2nd ed. 1894) 175 (Kenneth Haynes, personal communication).
TSE, undated: “If I had known that I was, late in life, to have the felicity to have this radiant angel, Valerie, my Valerie, as my wife—when I had long ceased to quando fiam ceu chelidon—I should have been myself radiant with joyful hope”, TSE on the epigraph page of her copy of Ara Vos Prec (Valerie Eliot collection). O swallow swallow: TSE’s Notes cross-refer to the Philomela legend at [II] 98–103 and [III] 203–206. Tennyson: “O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South”, The Princess IV 75 (A. D., N&Q 19 Aug 1950). Swinburne: “Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow, | How can thine heart be full of the spring? | A thousand summers are over and dead. | What hast thou found in the spring to follow?” Itylus 1–4. TSE to his Swedish translator Erik Mesterton, 20 Jan 1932: “The reference is not particularly to Swinburne though I had that in mind, but to the whole history of the swallow in literature since the affair of Procne and Philomela. The swallow of course is also a reference to the nightingale.”
[V] 429 Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie: TSE’s Notes refer to Gérard de Nerval (1808–55), El Desdichado [The Disinherited]:
Je suis le ténébreux,—le veuf,—l’inconsolé,
Le prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie:
Ma seule étoile est morte,—et mon luth constellé
Porte le soleil noir de la Mélancholie.
[I am the shadow, the widower, the unconsoled, the Aquitainian prince with the ruined tower: my only star is dead, and my star-strewn lute bears the black sun of Melancholy.]
Jain 1991 193: “The culture of which the troubadours were a part was destroyed by the Albigensian Crusade against heresy in southern France (1208–13). By that destruction de Nerval’s persona, the Prince of Aquitaine, felt himself disinherited of the tradition of the troubadours.” After TSE’s reading at Columbia U. in Apr 1958, Jacques Barzun wrote to him on 12 Aug, “having gone over the recording several times”, to enquire about his pronunciation, “princ’ dAquitaine”, making “eleven syllables instead of the twelve that a verse reading would require.” TSE replied, 5 Sept: “I was unaware of my elision of the mute e in the line from Nerval and think it could only have been due to unconscious assimilation of the French to the English context. I do think that to sound the mute e there would have given a somewhat precious and self-conscious effect and I am not altogether sorry that I missed it, but I must admit that it was unconscious.” (He did not sound the final e in “prince” in his recordings.) la tour abolie: in the Tarot pack La Maison Dieu shows a tower toppling as it is struck by lightning (Grover Smith 97).
[Poem I 71, 346 · Textual History II 407]
[V] 430 These fragments I have shored against my ruins: TSE: “We have saved a shilling against oblivion”, Gerontion 69–73 variant. “We cannot hope for the comparative unity of Virgil’s or Dante’s Italy or of Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s England, but we can preserve the fragments”, Why Rural Verse (1925). fragments I have shored: “some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected”, Hysteria. To Pound, “Sunday” [27 May? 1923], on
the opening of Canto VIII, “These fragments you have shelved (shored)”: “I object strongly on tactical grounds to yr 1st line. People are inclined to think that we write our verses in collaboration as it is, or else that you write mine I write yours. With your permission we will begin with line 2.” Pound’s line was omitted in Criterion July 1923 but restored in A Draft of XVI Cantos (1925). WLFacs notes: “On 19 May 1948 Mr. Peter Russell wrote to Eliot about the first line of Pound’s Canto VIII: ‘These fragments you have shelved (shored).’ Eliot replied (27 May): ‘I have no idea whether Canto VIII followed or preceded The Waste Land. I am under the impression that it followed [VE: it did], because of course Mr. Pound saw the manuscript of The Waste Land immediately on its completion and my lines certainly occurred in the draft which he saw in, I think, the month of January 1922. While I made some revisions and chiefly a great many excisions as a result of Pound’s criticism of this draft, the final section of the poem remained exactly as I first wrote it. I should think also that his putting the word ‘shored’ in brackets at the end would indicate a deliberate reference to The Waste Land which the reader was intended to appreciate’.”
TSE: “Metaphysical poetry involves the existence of a background of thought, of a definite system or fragments of definite systems. Behind Dante there was Aquinas, behind Donne the fragments of every philosophical system and every theological system up to his own time; and although the whole was chaos, the fragments were still sharp and identifiable”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 203 (Clark Lecture VII). “It seemed as if, at that time, the world was filled with broken fragments of systems, and that a man like Donne merely picked up, like a magpie, various shining fragments of ideas”, Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca (1927). On Pascal: “He who reads this book will observe at once its fragmentary nature; but only after some study will perceive that the fragmentariness lies in the expression more than in the thought”, The “Pensées” of Pascal (1931), with a footnote: “An important modern theory of discontinuity, suggested partly by Pascal, is sketched in the collected fragments of Speculations by T. E. Hulme.” (To Michael Roberts, 11 June 1936, asking him to write a book on Hulme: “I don’t believe that his notes on various subjects at various times are perfectly consistent”.)
[V] 431 Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe: TSE’s Notes refer to Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy IV i:
HIERONIMO: Is this all?
BALTHAZAR: I, this is all.
HIERONIMO: Why then, ile fit you: say no more.
When I was yong, I gaue my minde
And plide my selfe to fruitles Poetrie;
Which though it profite the professor naught,
Yet is it passing pleasing to the world.
TSE to his Swedish translator Erik Mesterton, 20 Jan 1932: “‘Hieronymo’s mad againe’ is not as I remember a quotation though I have not time to verify this, but was either an alternative title sometimes given to the Spanish Tragedy or the title of a similar play, I forget which.” The words “Hieronimo is mad againe” were an addition to the title-page in the posthumous Seventh Quarto (1615), referring to the hero’s intermittent bouts of real or feigned insanity. The page is shown in facsimile in Frederick S. Boas’s 1901 edition of Kyd, which TSE mentioned in 1927 in Seneca in Elizabethan Tragedy (Arthur Freeman, personal communication). Hayward: “‘Hieronymo’s mad againe.’ This means, or it is meant to suggest, that to the modern world all this will seem like madness. But it is, as it was in Hieronymo’s case in the old play—a precursor of Hamlet—a madness with a purpose. (Cf. ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t’, Hamlet II ii.)” TSE: “Hieronymo bites off his own tongue. There is nothing like this in Seneca”, Seneca in Elizabethan Tragedy (1927). By doing so Hieronymo brings on himself a speechlessness akin to Philomela (John Turner, personal communication). TSE: “There is, of course, a long distance separating the furibund fluency of old Hieronimo and the broken words of Lear”, “Rhetoric” and Poetic Drama (1919). fit · · · mad: “hysteric fits · · · distract her brain”, WLComposite 287, 290. fit you: promising to stage for the murderers of his son a dramatic entertainment at court. TSE to his Swedish translator Erik Mesterton, 20 Jan 1932: “You are right. It is ‘furnish’.”
[Poem I 71, 346 · Textual History II 407]
[V] 432 Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata: for context see note to [V] 399–422. B. Rajan writes that the original Sanskrit sequence—“Damyata. Datta. Dayadhvam” [Control. Give. Sympathise]—has the advantage of “providing us with an orderly descent through the scale of existence as well as with an indication of the main shortcoming of each of the three orders. Eliot begins with man, and it can be argued that he does so · · · because all three imperatives are heard in the poem as addressed to the human condition” (Moody ed. 1974 11). On the rear pastedown of Frank Morley’s copy of 1920 (once apparently TSE’s own), TSE wrote “damyata | datta | dayadhvam | ‘hridayam’”. Here the last three words of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad 5.2 (see note to [V] 399–422), are followed by the first word (meaning “the heart”) of the next section, 5.3: “Hridayam, the heart—it is Prajapati; it is brahman, it is the Whole” (tr. Patrick Olivelle, 2009). Sanskrit rhetoric often has a list of three followed by a fourth which encompasses and transcends them. TSE considered invoking the Upanishads at the close of East Coker, but instead postponed their use until The Dry Salvages, towards which he pointed by ending with the ocean (East Coker V 37 and note).
[V] 433 Shantih shantih shantih: TSE’s Notes: “Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. ‘The Peace which passeth understanding’ is our equivalent to this word.” Monier-Williams’ Sanskrit–English Dictionary (2nd ed. 1899) defines santi as “tranquillity, peace, quiet, peace or calmness of mind, absence of passion, averting of pain (santi! santi! santi! may the three kinds of pain be averted!)” (Harmon 1976a). A. N. Dwivedi: “A Vedic (as well as Upanishadic) mantra which is recited at the close of all rituals (cremation of the dead being not excluded), especially on auspicious occasions such as weddings, occupation of a new house, offering of prayers and oblations every morning and evening. Its repetition in the proper way with exact accent and intonation (it is meant to be chanted aloud) echoes the unruffled condition of mind · · · Once such a perfect peace is attained, man becomes liberated from all bonds for good”, Explicator Fall 1984. In TSE’s 1933 recording he clips and lifts the second syllable of each “shantih”, whereas in those of 1948 and 1950 each trails away. Valerie’s Own Book concludes with Dedication II (“Uncollected Poems”):
To you I offer this dedication
In three words which for us are at one with each other:
Love adoration desire
[V] 433 TSE’s Notes “The Peace which passeth understanding” is our equivalent to this word: TSE’s phrasing prior to 1932 was criticised by F. R. Leavis:
Mr. Eliot’s note that “‘the Peace which passeth understanding’ is a feeble translation of the content of this word” can impart to the word only a feeble ghost of that content for the Western reader.
New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), ch. 3
[Poem I 71, 346 · Textual History II 407–408]
TSE had written to Leavis, 1 July 1930, that the Criterion could not accept a submission “which deals at such length and so kindly with my own work”—presumably a version of this chapter (Christopher McVey, personal communication). To Marguerite Caetani, 27 Sept 1926, on translating Perse’s Anabase: “One must find equivalents—that cannot be done bit by bit, but by finding an English key to the combination.” In the prefatory Note to the revised translation in 1949, TSE wrote that originally he had been “concerned, here and there, less with rendering the exact sense of a phrase, than with coining some phrase in English which might have equivalent value”. See also letter to Jean Mambrino, 24 July 1952, in headnote to Landscapes: “probably no French equivalent. All you can do, is to substitute known European song birds for unknown American birds.” “The Peace which passeth understanding”: Philippians 4:
7: “And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” In Revelation (1937), TSE later quoted Babbitt:
“Religion also looks upon life as a process of adjustment. This process as envisaged by the Christian is summed up once for all in Dante’s phrase: ‘In his will is our peace’. A reading of works like the Dhammapada suggests that the psychological equivalent of this form of adjustment was not unknown to Buddha.”
One might remark, about the last of these quotations, that it is not proved that there can be any “psychological equivalent”; and it leads us further to remark that Babbitt sometimes appears to be unaware of differences as well as of resemblances between Buddhism and Christianity
“Our peace in His will”, Ash-Wednesday VI 30 (see note to VI 30–33). To Anne Ridler, 28 Sept 1958: “My most recent Bengali, doing the usual thesis on ‘The Mystical Element in Modern English Literature’ · · · tried very persistently to get me to admit that the Great Truths of religion were found in Christianity and Brahmanism and Buddhism equally.”
The play The Peace That Passeth All Understanding by TSE’s Harvard contemporary John Reed (performed by the Provincetown Players in New York, 1919) was one of many applications of the phrase to the Versailles Treaties. For the “bad peace” of Versailles, see Keynes in note to [III] 277–78, 290–91 and see headnote to Coriolan I. Triumphal March.
TSE in 1960: “It cannot be only in America that the image of God can be made to serve human ends, or that the peace that passeth understanding can be equated to a ‘tranquilliser’”, All Souls’ Club (1960).