IV 1–10 descending · · · terror · · · sin and error · · · fire · · · torment · · · hands: Herbert: “terror · · · When sin and error · · · torturing · · · Thy hand above did burn · · · Thy hand · · · descend”, Justice (2). Webster: “Sin · · · error, | Their death a hideous storm of terror”, The Duchess of Malfi IV ii.
IV 1–14 air · · · despair · · · Love. | Love · · · suspire · · · fire: Swinburne: “two loves · · · Two loves · · · Their breath is fire upon the amorous air, | Fire in thine eyes and where thy lips suspire · · · fire · · · despair · · · despair”, Hermaphroditus 6–14 (partly quoted in OED “suspire”).
IV 2 incandescent: Mallarmé: “Le soleil que sa halte | Surnaturelle exalte | Aussitôt redescend | Incandescent” [The sun which its supernatural stay raises up comes down at once burning], Cantique de saint Jean [Canticle of Saint John] 1–4 (Greene 138).
[Poem I 207 · Textual History II 538–42]
IV 8 Who then devised the torment? Love: Hayward: Juliana of Norwich: “I desired oftentimes to wit in what was our Lords meaning: and fifteen year after and more, I was answered in ghostly understanding, saying thus; ‘What? wouldest thou wit thy Lords meaning in this thing? Wit it well: love was his meaning. Who sheweth it thee? Love. Wherefore sheweth he it thee? For love’ · · · Thus was I learned that love is our Lords meaning. And I saw full surely that ere God made us He loved us; which love was never slacked, nor ever shall be. And in this love He hath done all His works; and in this love He hath made all things profitable to us; and in this love is our life everlasting. In our making we had beginning; but the love wherein He made us was in Him from without beginning: in which love we have our beginning. And all this shall we see in God, without end”, final paragraph of the last of her Revelations. Dante, Inf. V 100–102: “Love, which is quickly caught in gentle heart, took him with the fair body of which I was bereft; and the manner still afflicts me” (with “torments”, 116); see note to Ash-Wednesday II 34–38. devised: to Hayward, 9 Sept 1942: “first draft, ‘devised’ rejected as too self‑conscious”; yet after alternating between this and “designed”, in successive drafts, it was “designed” that TSE finally rejected. torment? Love: Samuel Daniel: “Love is a torment of the mind”, Song from Hymen’s Triumph (in Oxf Bk of English Verse). TSE: “torment | Of love unsatisfied | The greater torment | Of love satisfied”, Ash-Wednesday II 35–38. To Hayward, 9 Sept 1942: “I had hesitated already between ‘torture’ and ‘torment’”. In 1956, revising for a new edition his critical note from 1933 on Harold Monro’s Collected Poems, TSE emended “tortured” to “tormented” in the phrase “one variety of the infinite number of possible expressions of tortured human consciousness”. He also changed “tormented” to “harassed” in the phrase “sincere and tormented introspection” (King’s).
IV 8 variant Who heaped the brittle rose leaves?: Pentecostal customs in Italy traditionally included the strewing of rose petals.
IV 8–9, 11 Love. | Love · · · shirt of flame: Alexander Smith: “clad in love, | Like a pale martyr in his shirt of fire”, A Life-Drama (1859) ii 220–21 (Archie Burnett, personal communication).
IV 11–12 The intolerable shirt of flame | Which human power cannot remove: the centaur Nessus assaulted Dejanira and was killed by an arrow shot by her husband, Hercules. As he died, he gave her a tunic, saying it had “the power of recalling a husband from unlawful love”. When Dejanira heard of Hercules’ wooing of Iole, she sent him the tunic, “and Hercules as soon as he had put it on fell into a desperate distemper, and found the poison of the Lernæan hydra penetrate through his bones. He attempted to pull off the fatal dress, but it was too late · · · As the distemper was incurable, he · · · erected a large burning pile on the top of mount OEta · · · laid himself down upon it · · · and the hero saw himself on a sudden surrounded with the flames without betraying any marks of fear or astonishment”, Lemprière (“Hercules”). Antony and Cleopatra IV xii, ANTONY: “The shirt of Nessus is upon me.” cannot: pronounced can nòt in TSE’s recording of 1946–47. “And can not be confused”, How to Pick a Possum 47 (Noctes Binanianæ).
IV 13–14 only suspire | Consumed by either fire or fire: OED “suspire” v. 3. intr: “To breathe”, cites Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “fire-flies, that suspire | In short soft lapses of transported flame”, Aurora Leigh VII 1061–62. TSE quotes Dante’s “sospiri” (Inf. IV 27) in Notes on the Waste Land 64. “Sullen succuba suspired”, Ode (“Tired. | Subterrene”) 14 variant.
[Poem I 207 · Textual History II 538–42]
V
V verse draft (msC) [8–11] the end · · · The only obituary · · · every word · · · Every poem · · · every action | A step on the scaffold: “The only end to the battle, if we live to the end, is holiness; the only escape is stupidity · · · the first step is to find the least incredible belief · · · everything · · · Everyone, in a sense, believes in something; for every action involving any moral decision implies a belief”, A Commentary in Criterion Apr 1933.
V verse draft (msC) [13–15] The dying die for us | And we die with them. But to speak of regret | | Is to outlive regret: Tennyson: “O last regret, regret can die”, In Memoriam LXXVIII 17. Emerson: “The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience dies with them”, Self-Reliance.
V 4–5 every word is at home, | Taking its place: Swift: “Proper words in proper places, makes the true definition of a style”, A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Entered into Holy Orders. TSE: “The ideal literary critic · · · should be primarily concerned with the word and the incantation; with the question whether the poet has used the right word in the right place, the rightness depending upon both the explicit intention and an indefinite radiation of sound and sense”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 287 (Turnbull Lecture III); for sound and sense, see note to V 9 and note to To Walter de la Mare 19, 23, 30, 32. “The ugly words are the words not fitted for the company in which they find themselves”, The Music of Poetry (Iman Javadi, personal communication).
V 4–11 every word is at home · · · the old and the new · · · the complete consort · · · every sentence: Virginia Woolf: “You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet always mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but · · · part of a sentence · · · How can we combine the old words in new orders · · · That is the question”, Craftsmanship (1937; see note to III 41, and note to East Coker I 2–4).
V 5, 6, 8, 21 Taking its place · · · The word · · · exact · · · pattern: for “the word · · · in its place · · · exact and comprehensive · · · a fusion and a pattern with the word”, see Transit of Venus: Poems by Harry Crosby (1931), TSE’s Preface.
V 6–9 neither diffident nor ostentatious · · · exact without vulgarity · · · precise but not pedantic: “Nor intellectual nor mean, | And graceful, not too gay”, Mandarins 4 12–13. TSE on 18th-century prose: “style neither strained nor relaxed, neither ascetic nor luxurious”, Views and Reviews in NEW 20 June 1935. For the pedantic Polonius, “rich not gaudy”, see note to Mandarins 2 13 “(rich not crude)”. exact without vulgarity · · · precise but not pedantic: Denham on the Thames as “My great example”: “Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull; | Strong without rage, without o’erflowing full”, Cooper’s Hill 188–89. pedantic: to A. L. Rowse, 3 Mar 1941: “You know that my pencil has a chronic itch to comment on the margins. But as you know me for Pedant (and proud of it, mind you: Pedant and Puritan) you will not be ruffled by that.” See note to Five-Finger Exercises V 5–7.
[Poem I 208 · Textual History II 542–43]
V 7 An easy commerce of the old and the new: Pound: “I am old enough now to make friends. | It was you who broke the new wood · · · Let there be commerce between us”, A Pact (1913) 5–6, 9. TSE included the poem, which begins “I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman”, in Pound’s Selected Poems (1928), and wrote to Pound,
8 Dec 1936: “I am quite Willin to make a Pact with you” (Shawn Worthington, personal communication). TSE: “I have, in recent years, cursed Mr Pound often enough; for I am never sure that I can call my verse my own; just when I am most pleased with myself, I find that I have only caught up some echo from a verse of Pound’s”, Isolated Superiority (1928). See note to V 18.
V 8–9 Without vulgarity · · · The formal word precise but not pedantic: in ts9b Hayward marked the stress “withōūt vulgarity” and suggested “būt unpedāntic”. In a memoir of Hayward, Kathleen Raine quoted V 9 as “a line of Little Gidding whose authorship he claimed”, Book Collector Winter 1965. TSE: “We are, of course, accustomed to think of the poet as spending a good deal of time fussing over ‘the right word’, and yet to think of poetry as concerned with material essentially vague. Our notions of ‘precision’ are measured by the precision of the physical sciences · · · I do not pretend that poetry aims at precision of the same kind, or of an analogous kind”; later, giving an example from Poe: “he is sacrificing sense to sound · · · This sacrifice is not so illegitimate as might at first seem, because · · · precision of sound is as important as precision of sense. But it is an imperfection, though the poem as a whole is the precise expression of a peculiar, though vague emotion”, Poetical and Prosaic Use of Words (1943).
V 8–10 without vulgarity · · · dancing together: “the poem is for its own sake—we enjoy a poem as we enjoy dancing; and as for the words, instead of looking through them, so to speak, we are looking at them · · · When the written language remains fixed, while the spoken language, the vulgar speech, is undergoing changes, it must ultimately be replaced by a new written language”, Introduction to The Art of Poetry by Paul Valéry (1958).
V 12 Every poem an epitaph: Vaughan: “every book is thy large epitaph”, On Sir Thomas Bodley’s Library; The Author Being Then in Oxford (K. Narayana Chandran, N&Q Dec 1993).
V 12–13 And any action | Is a step to the block: Henry King: “And ev’ry houre a step towards thee”, An Exequy To his Matchless never to be forgotten Friend 96. TSE quoted 89–100, 111–14 in The Metaphysical Poets (1921). He recalled the poem in Personal Choice (1957). For his discovery of the poem as a boy, see headnote to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar. to the block: Johnson: “And fatal Learning leads him to the Block”, The Vanity of Human Wishes 172. TSE’s first thought was “on the scaffold” (see Textual History).
V 13 the sea’s throat: see notes to I 35–37 and to The Dry Salvages IV 11–13.
V 16–18, 27–28 See, they depart, and we go with them · · · See, they return, and bring us with them · · · the end · · · Will be to arrive where we started: “every language, to retain its vitality, must perpetually depart and return upon itself; but without the departure there is no return and the returning is as important as the arrival”, “Leçon de Valéry” (1946) (Ricks 106).
V 18 See, they return, and bring us with them: Pound: “See, they return; ah, see the tentative | Movements”, The Return (1912) 1–2 (Mary T. Shea, 1942, Grover Smith 325). TSE quotes the first four lines of the poem in Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry (1917) (Ricks 260). For Pound’s poem, see note to Ash-Wednesday VI 3–4.
V 19–20 The moment · · · equal duration: used by TSE for occasional inscriptions, as in Lee Anderson’s commonplace book signed and dated 4. v. 60 (Album of Gems, Washington U.), and on a Faber postcard signed and dated 15. ix. 60, laid into Mardersteig copy no. 171.
[Poem I 208 · Textual History II 543–44]
V 19–22 The moment · · · not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern | Of timeless moments: “A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time”, Choruses from “The Rock” VII 19 (noted by Hayward in his copy of 1944). “This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional”, Tradition and the Individual Talent I (1919).
V 24 History is now and England: “there are some words, the history of which is almost the history of England”, The Writer as Artist (1940) (“every word is at home”, V 4). See notes on I 39 (“Now and in England”) and I 52–53 (“Here, the intersection of the timeless moment | Is England and nowhere. Never and always”). “The critical moment | That is always now, and here”, Murder in the Cathedral II.
V 25 with the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling: The Cloud of Unknowing ch. 2: “What weary wretched heart and sleeping in sloth is that, the which is not wakened with the drawing of this love and the voice of this calling?” ch. 9: “therefore lift up thy love to that cloud. Or rather (if I shall say thee sooth) let God draw thy love up to that cloud; and strive thou through help of its grace to forget all other things” (scored in TSE’s copy). See letter to Hayward, 2 Sept 1942, quoted in note to III 17–19. For The Cloud of Unknowing, see note to Ash-Wednesday I 39. (To Hayward, 2 Oct: “My edition of Cloud of Unknowing IS m’Cann’s, the most recent”; see Bibliography.) For Lancelot Andrewes on spiritual procrastination, see note to Gerontion 18, 20.
V 27–28 the end · · · Will be to arrive where we started: returning to a thought from long before: “The token that a philosophy is true is, I think, the fact that it brings us to the exact point from which we started. We shall be enriched, I trust, by our experience on the Grand Tour, but we shall not have been allowed to convey any material treasures through the Custom House. And the wisdom which we shall have acquired will not be part of the argument which brings us to the conclusion; it is not part of the book, but it is written in pencil on the fly-leaf. For the point to which we return should be the same, but somehow is not, but is a higher stage of reality”, The Validity of Artificial Distinctions (1914). “A man’s destination is his own village, | His own fire, and his wife’s cooking”, To the Indians who Died in Africa 1–2.
V 27–32 the end · · · to arrive where we started · · · the last of earth left to discover | Is that which was the beginning: Bradley: “truth-seeking scepticism pushes questions to the end, and knows that the end lies hid in that which is assumed at the beginning”, Appearance and Reality ch. XV (Ricks 106).
V 31–32 When the last · · · Is that which was the beginning: Matthew 20: 16: “So the last shall be first, and the first last”.
[Poem I 208–209 · Textual History II 544]
V 34–35 The voice · · · And the children in the apple-tree: Hayward: “A recollection of the poet’s childhood in general and not of any specific incident in it.” TSE told Hayward, 5 Aug 1941, that “the children in the appletree · · · tie up with New Hampshire and Burnt Norton”. (“Children’s voices in the orchard · · · Swing up into the apple-tree”, Landscapes I. New Hampshire; and “for the leaves were full of children”, Burnt Norton I 40. Also: “Children singing in the orchard”, Ode (“Tired. | Subterrene”) 12. “Whispers and small laughter between leaves”, Marina 20.)
V 34–38 voice of the hidden waterfall · · · children in the apple-tree · · · the stillness | Between two waves of the sea: Hayward: “the distant waterfall in the forest, | Inaccessible, half-heard. | And I hear your voice as in the silence | Between two storms, one hears the moderate usual noises | In the grass and leaves, of life persisting”, The Family Reunion (1939) I ii. It was Hayward who suggested “stillness” as an alternative to the earlier reading, “silence”. TSE replied, 7 Sept 1942: “I think silence will have to stand, because I was using a line from the Family Reunion. And surely the (relative) silence between two waves is when they are breaking on something. Should I say ‘Between two waves on the shore’?”
V 36 Not known, because not looked for: TSE put a question mark against the Gide/Bosco tr., “Que nos yeux ne virent jamais”.
V 40 complete simplicity: “Great simplicity is only won by an intense moment or by years of intelligent effort, or by both. It represents one of the most arduous conquests of the hum
an spirit: the triumph of feeling and thought over the natural sin of language”, The Post-Georgians (1919). Of a poet’s progress: “Simplicity and naturalness of speech are not necessarily his gift at the beginning; he is more likely to arrive at them in his maturity by years of hard work”, The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse (1937). To A. L. Rowse, 13 June 1934: “perhaps simplicity only comes through a gradual mastery of one’s own emotions” (see headnote to Choruses from “The Rock”, 4. COMPOSITION).
V 41 Costing not less than everything: against the Gide/Bosco tr., “(Plus chèrement rien ne s’acquiert)”, TSE wrote “weak”.
V 44–46] Paradiso XXXIII 85–93 (last canto of the Commedia):
Nel suo profundo vidi che s’interna,
legato con amore in un volume,
ciò che per l’universo si squaderna;
sustanzia ed accidenti, e lor costume,
quasi conflati insieme per tal modo,
che ciò ch’io dico è un semplice lume.
La forma universal di questo nodo
credo ch’io vidi, perchè più di largo,
dicendo questo, mi sento ch’io godo.
[Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe; substance and accidents and their relations, as though together fused, after such fashion that what I tell of is one simple flame. The universal form of this complex I think that I beheld, because more largely, as I say this, I feel that I rejoice.]
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 155