II 8 How can we love our neighbour?: Leviticus 19: 18: “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”. Mark 12: 31: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.”
II 16 a kind of: “A kind of is a phrase only to be used in extremity”, Charleston, Hey! Hey! (1927). Whipsnade: the zoo park in Bedfordshire opened in 1931, proving immediately popular.
II 26 the Church · · · always decaying, and always being restored: culture “is always decaying and always has to be reborn”, Notes on Mannheim’s Paper (1941).
II 33 expiating the sins of your fathers: Nehemiah 9: 2: “confessed their sins, and the iniquities of their fathers.”
II 43–44 Body of Christ incarnate. | And now you live dispersed: for “Parcel Resurrection”, see headnote to Ash-Wednesday II.
[Poem I 158–60 · Textual History II 471–72]
II 44 ribbon roads: OED’s earliest citation is from The Times in 1929 (TSE’s line being cited next), but The Old Inn by TSE’s friend W. G. Tinckom-Fernandez had “Out on the ribbon-road · · · the motor’s acrid smoke | Assails”, in The Nation 3 Dec 1914. TSE used the term in the first ed. of Anabasis (X vi, 1930) and wrote to A. L. Rowse, 7 Mar 1931: “When one observes the By Passes of London: mile after mile of suburban house each with its attendant Private Garage: this is merely planting out clerks and functionaries in places in which they could not possibly live unless each had his Small Car; it seems to me that the whole present settlement of England is being made to encourage the motor car industry.” He also made the point publicly: “when I see the tendency for the village to be replaced, not by the suburb, for which there is much to be said, but by an endless line of houses along a ribbon road over which passes a ceaseless stream of cars, I wonder what sort of organic unity can be left”, The Search for Moral Sanction (1932). The Ribbon Development Act was passed in 1935. For “by-pass way”, see VII 37.
II 49–51 Nor does the family even move about together, | But every son would have his motor cycle, | And daughters ride away on casual pillions: Middleton: “A fine journey in the Whitsun holydays, i’faith, to ride with a number of citizens and their wives, some upon pillions, some upon side-saddles, I and little Thomasine i’ the middle, our son and heir, Sim”, Michaelmas Term IV i, quoted in Thomas Middleton (1927). TSE to L. C. Knights, 14 July 1936: “I think that your criticisms of some of my remarks about Middleton are quite justified. I really was not thoroughly at home in Middleton’s comedies, although I once prepared a text of Michaelmas Term”. To Stephen Spender, 9 June 1932: “for one person who escapes through religion into a ‘sentimental dreamland’, there are thousands who escape by reading novels, by looking at films, or best of all, by driving very fast on land or in air, which makes even dreams unnecessary.”
III
III 25–26 peeled · · · iron · · · In a street of scattered brick where the goat climbs: against this line quoted in G. Jones, TSE wrote “Shadwell”. Rather than the 17th-century dramatist, Thomas Shadwell, this probably referred to the run-down district of East London. (“Shadwell and Stepney are picturesque”, A Commentary in Criterion Jan 1927, questioning “picturesque” as a principle for preservation. Of Bina Gardens: “Il n’est pas lieu moins pittoresque” [There is no less picturesque place], Vers pour la Foulque 8 in Noctes Binanianæ.) “patched and peeled in London. | The goat coughs at night in the field overhead”, Gerontion 10–11.
III 31–36 tennis flannels · · · godless people · · · golf: “an evening journal has published a photograph of the Bishop of London, complete with golf-bag and tennis racket, leaving for New Zealand · · · at the same time as renewed rumours of the design to destroy the City Churches”, A Commentary (deploring an industrial construction beside St. Magnus Martyr) in Criterion Oct 1926. For TSE’s association of bankers, golf clubs and unemployment, see A Commentary in Criterion July 1931.
III 32–33 the thorn revisit, | The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court: Isaiah 34: 13: “And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.”
[Poem I 160–62 · Textual History II 472–73]
III 34–36 decent godless people · · · the asphalt road | And a thousand lost golf balls: to Bonamy Dobrée, 21 Aug 1926: “What I meant was that after Disestablishment the Church of England will lose its whole reason for existence; and that its more serious members will gradually go over to Rome. Some will fall into nonconformity; the majority will content itself with civil marriages and individual Gods (my God, my dog, my pipe, my golf-tools and my allotment garden, your god for yours).” Golf again: “Everyone would be affected: the man who regularly has a run in his car and a round of golf on Sunday, quite as much as the punctilious churchgoer”, Thoughts After Lambeth (1931). “people who · · · believe that in a perfect world those who like golf could play golf, and those who like religion could go to church”, Catholicism and International Order (1933). The weekend for many consisted only of Sunday (see notes to I 24–29 and The Waste Land [I] 68).
III 37–38 We build in vain unless the LORD build with us. | Can you keep the City that the LORD keeps not with you: Psalm 127: 1: “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”
III 41 active marmots: as opposed to in hibernation.
III 44 I have loved the beauty of Thy House: Psalm 26: 8 (Douay tr.).
III 45 I have swept the floors and garnished the altars: Luke 11: 24–25: “my house · · · swept and garnished”. TSE: “Swept and set in order”, Easter: Sensations of April II 4. To Ezra Pound, 19 Dec 1934: “dambitall, you just cant keep things straight very long in this place; just when you got it swepngarnished in bust the amateurs again”.
III 52 the Stranger: Deuteronomy 29: 22–26: “the stranger that shall come from a far land, shall say, when they see the plagues of that land, and the sicknesses which the Lord hath laid upon it · · · what meaneth the heat of this great anger? Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God · · · For they went and served other gods.”
III 52–55 the meaning · · · a community?: to J. H. Oldham, 14 Sept 1939: “What does the term ‘community’ convey to most people nowadays?” The word does not appear in the King James Bible.
III 57–75] Taken as an extract in “The Choice of Life” section of Geoffrey Faber’s anthology The Pattern of Freedom (1940), which also included the five lines which were dropped from the end of Chorus VI (see Textual History).
III 65 common and preferred: like shares on the stock market. See note to East Coker III 1–7.
IV
IV 5 In Shushan the palace: Nehemiah 1: 1.
IV 5–13 in the month of Nisan · · · consumed with fire: Nehemiah 2: 1: “in the month Nisan, in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes the king, that wine was before him: and I took up the wine, and gave it unto the king · · · And said unto the king · · · why should not my countenance be sad, when the city, the place of my fathers’ sepulchres, lieth waste, and the gates thereof are consumed with fire?”
IV 10 with a few, to Jerusalem: Nehemiah 2: 11–12: “So I came to Jerusalem · · · I and some few men with me.”
IV 14 No place for a beast to pass: Nehemiah 2: 14: “there was no place for the beast that was under me to pass.”
IV 19, V 4 With the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other · · · “The trowel in hand, and the gun rather loose in the holster”: Nehemiah 4: 17–18: “every one with one of his hands wrought in the work, and with the other hand held a weapon. For the builders, every one had his sword girded by his side, and so builded” (Grover Smith 1956 174). TSE to Theodore Spencer, 7 Nov 1933, quoting VI 14–16:
[Poem I 162–65 · Textual History II 473–74]
Now (after a hurried visit to Inverness and Paris this week) I am to start work seriously on the text of the Revue for the 45 Churches, and am worki
ng myself up into the temper of a Prophet of Israel—
Men! polish your teeth on rising and retiring;
Women! polish your finger-nails:
You polish the tooth of the dog and the talon of the cat.
If they don’t mind my writing that sort of thing I believe I can do it—
Remembering the words of Nehemiah the Prophet: the trowel in hand, and the gun rather loose in the holster.
gun rather loose in the holster: William Howard Russell: “revolver loose in the holster”, My Diary in India (1860) I 408. Dillon Wallace: “a good old single-action · · · keep it prominent and handy, and loose in the holster”, Beyond the Mexican Sierra (1910) 193.
V
V 1 the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: Jeremiah 17: 9.
V 2 Sanballat · · · Tobiah · · · Geshem: officials who tried to prevent the Jews rebuilding Jerusalem (Nehemiah 2–6).
V 5 snakes that lie on mouldering stairs: “Along the garden stairs | The sluggish python lies”, Circe’s Palace 10–11 (Hands).
VI
VI 4–6 those who live near a Bank · · · those who live near a Police Station:
Eeldrop and Appleplex commanded from their windows the entrance of a police station across the way · · · [Eeldrop:] “I am, I confess to you, in private life, a bank-clerk …”
“And should, according to your own view, have a wife, three children and a vegetable garden in a suburb,” said Appleplex.
“Such is precisely the case,” returned Eeldrop · · · “As it is Saturday night, I shall return to my suburb. Tomorrow will be spent in that garden.’”
Eeldrop and Appleplex I
(“where they spend their Sundays · · · the suburbs”, Chorus I 24–26.) TSE joined Lloyds Bank in 1917, the year of Eeldrop and Appleplex. For “The suburban garden”, see note to The Waste Land [I] 71–75, “the Dog · · · that’s friend to men”.
VI 16–18 You polish the tooth of the dog · · · Death: “who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning | Death”, Marina 6–7 (for dog-fighting, see note).
VI 20 Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts: TSE jotting among Vivien Eliot’s papers: “There are only 2 things—Puritanism Catholicism. You are one or the other. You either believe in the reality of sin or you don’t. That is the important moral distinction—not whether you are good or bad. Puritanism does not believe in Sin: it merely believes that certain things must not be done” (c. 624 fol. 44).
[Poem I 165–66 · Textual History II 474]
VI 23 dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good: “No perfect scheme can work perfectly with imperfect men; if the Russian scheme ever comes to ‘work’ perfectly with what I call imperfect men, then to me the Russian system will be condemned by its very efficiency · · · no system that continues to repeat, and must repeat, the words ‘be ye perfect’ can be expected to work perfectly”, Christianity and Communism (1932), citing Matthew 5: 48: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” In the same series of Listener articles, TSE condemned “the pursuit of the mirage of the Earthly Paradise—the illusion that we can be made happy and perfect by the application of legislation or force of the results of scientific discovery”, The Search for Moral Sanction (1932). “one of the dangerous delusions that the Christian must avoid is that of the perfect human society situated somewhere in the future. It was one of the limitations of Judaism that it dreamt of such a future, a limitation that Christianity outgrew, and which we now see returning · · · Communism looks · · · to an eventual perfection of human nature to be brought about exclusively from outside”, The Christian in the Modern World (1935). To Leonard Woolf, 13 Jan 1940:
you will never get a society of complete automata or one of perfectly enlightened free men. However, your ideal democracy is more nearly compatible with Christianity than the ideal (at least as you put it) of totalitarianism, for the latter commits the fundamental error of an assertion of Human Infallibility incarnated in a Ruler · · · what is more difficult is to put one’s finger on the errors of a system of education which has failed to educate.
“Do we agree · · · that we must choose socialism in order to avoid fascism? [Friedrich] Hayek would maintain that the distinction · · · is largely illusory, and that once you commit yourself to a unitary plan, very similar consequences must follow in both cases”, “The Collective Commonwealth and the Christian” (1944), response to a paper by H. A. Hodges for The Moot. “The other direction in which the confusion of culture and politics may lead, is towards the ideal of a world state in which there will, in the end, be only one uniform world culture. I am not here criticising any schemes for world organisation. Such schemes belong to the plane of engineering, of devising machinery. Machinery is necessary, and the more perfect the machine the better. But a culture is something that must grow · · · a political structure is partly construction, and partly growth; partly machinery, and the same machinery, even if good, is not necessarily equally good for all peoples”, Culture and Politics (1947).
VI after 34 variant [4–5] There are always the young · · · The enthusiasts: Johnson:
“The young Enthusiast quits his Ease for Fame”, The Vanity of Human Wishes 136.
VII
VII 1 In the beginning · · · Waste and void · · · darkness was upon the face of the deep: Genesis 1: 1–2 (“waste and void” being the wording of the Revised Version, 1885).
VII 3 seed · · · lodgement and germination: frequent in American agricultural writing concerning seeds, spores etc.
VII 3 variant, 16 man · · · a feather on the wind | Driven this way or that · · · the snow: “Gull against the wind, in the windy straits · · · feathers in the snow · · · old man driven”, Gerontion 69–72. See note to VII 16 variant.
VII 5, 7 variants Crying for life beyond this life, for ecstasy not of the flesh · · · the waters: “ecstasy of the animals · · · the waters · · · this life · · · beyond me · · · this life · · · lips parted”, Marina 12, 21, 29–32.
[Poem I 167–68 · Textual History II 474–75]
VII 7–8 And the spirit moved · · · the light: for Genesis 1: 2–3, see note to II 7.
VII 9 Invented the Higher Religions; and the Higher Religions: William James: “as all the higher religions have assumed”, Is Life Worth Living? (1896). Frazer: “magic steals up to higher standpoints too, and insinuates itself into higher religions”, The Golden Bough I 424. TSE: “that there is such a thing as ‘religion’ above the various particular religions, seems to me very doubtful”, The Return of Foxy Grandpa (c. 1927).
VII 11 light was ever surrounded and shot with darkness: Genesis 1: 4: “God divided the light from the darkness.” OED “shot” ppl. 5a: “Woven with warp-threads of one colour and weft-threads of another, so that the fabric (usually silk) changes in tint when viewed from different points.”
VII 16 variant the windy places: “windy spaces”, Gerontion 16. (See Textual History, VII 15–17.)
VII 19 A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting, bisecting the world of time: “the author’s purpose · · · is not to produce something which might have been written and performed in the fifteenth century; it is merely to arouse in the audience the kind of feeling towards the divine story which a fifteenth century audience might have enjoyed. Such an audience would have been innocent of ‘historical accuracy’ of place or time; a modern audience is far too aware of these things. Nowadays every ‘historical’ film is staged in the original setting, when possible: if religious films become popular, the Holy Land will be over-run with film studios. On the other hand, we have already had Shakespeare in modern dress · · · Both of these methods are mistaken, because they both make the audience more conscious of what they should forget, the differences of place and time”, “The Merry Masque of Our Lady in London Town” (1928).
VII 27 not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never h
appened before: to the Editor, Manchester Guardian 20 Jan 1940 (responding to a letter from H. G. Wells): “Since early times men have arisen to proclaim that there was no God: it is quite a different thing to assert that the word ‘God’ ‘conveys no positive meaning at all’.” Of Twain: “It is as a native that he accepts the River God, and it is the subjection of Man that gives to Man his dignity. For without some kind of God, Man is not even very interesting”, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1950), Introduction. “you can never fight a religion except with another religion”, Christianity and Communism (1932). “one only ceases to be a Christian by being something else definite—a Buddhist, a Mohammedan, a Brahmin”, Why Mr. Russell Is a Christian (1927). “The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse”, Thoughts After Lambeth (1931). no god: Psalm 14: 1: “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” Clough: “‘There is no God,’ the wicked saith”, Dipsychus VI 154.
VII 28–29 gods · · · Dialectic: “what remote frontier of heaven and hell · · · I have searched the world through dialectic ways”, Oh little voices of the throats of men 7, 16. Dialectic: OED a and n.2 1: “Of, or pertaining to, or of the nature of logical disputation”. 2: “In Marxist theory used specifically in relation to materialism.”
[Poem I 168–69 · Textual History II 475–76]
VII 28 variant professing first Reason, as in seventeen hundred and eighty nine: first year of the French Revolution.
VII 31 with empty hands and palms turned upwards: “those who would build and restore turn out the palms of their hands”, II 6. See note to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 14–15, 17.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 124