During the Great War, TSE’s friend W. G. Tinckom-Fernandez had discussed the strategic importance to Western Imperialism of India’s participation: “For the first time in modern history · · · dark-skinned troops of India and the Far East, black troops of the hinterlands of Africa, have fought for and against Europeans, and have espoused a quarrel that is not their own · · · a new morale must be substituted and imposed if the fetich of a legendary supremacy is to be maintained throughout the harems and bazaars of the East”, India and the War in Nation 10 June 1915. For a commission for TSE to review “several books on contemporary Indian politics” in 1916, see headnote to Airs of Palestine, No. 2.
Writing to Edward Thompson on 11 Oct 1930, TSE described himself as “a director of Faber & Faber who happens to be particularly interested in India” and proposed a meeting “not because I am one of the publishers of your last book, but because what you said to me about India was so congenial to my own prejudices or intuitions · · · I have had Indian friends, and my interest in India was enough to make me spend two or three years, at one more leisured period, in the study of Sanskrit and Pali.”
To Raja Rao, writer and philosopher, 27 Apr 1939: “I have read your short stories with much interest and appreciation, and it does seem to me that you have unusual success in communicating the life of an Indian village · · · I sincerely hope that you may find some other publisher to take the risk, as I should like to see them in print.”
TSE remained interested in Indian affairs and wartime loyalties, telling Hayward on 12 July 1943 that he had been reading Sir Reginald Coupland’s report on the lack of realism in plans to partition the Punjab (1943). In Nov 1943 the Council for the Defence of Church Principles published TSE’s Reunion by Destruction: Reflections on a Scheme for Church Union in South India.
Of G. T. Wrench: “He argues that it is impossible to superimpose the British pattern of life upon the Indian. A purely Indian solution must be sought—and sought, not in the westernized towns, but in the rural communities and in the development of the soil and countryside”, Land and Motherland (1947), jacket copy (initialled by TSE in Faber catalogue, King’s).
[Poem I 216 · Textual History II 553–54]
K. S. Narayana Rao’s T. S. Eliot and the Bhagavad-Gita (American Quarterly Winter 1963; Addendum, Spring 1964) explains TSE’s evocation of specific stanzas of the Gita, especially II 37–38 and II 46, and compares the dilemma of Indians who fought for the British Empire with that of Arjuna in the epic (see note to The Dry Salvages III 33–44 for Preston on Arjuna’s dilemma).
Title] Thousands of Indian troops took part in Operation Crusader, Nov–Dec 1941, which relieved the eight-month Siege of Tobruk. This victory over Rommel was the first by British-led forces over German ground forces during the Second World War.
1–3 A man’s destination · · · His own fire · · · To sit in front of his own door at sunset: “The man who has builded during the day would return to his hearth at nightfall”, Choruses from “The Rock” V 10. “the evening hour that strives | Homeward”, The Waste Land [III] 220–21 (see note).
1–5 A man’s destination · · · Playing in the dust: Kipling: “Who is the happy man? He that sees in his own house at home little children crowned with dust, leaping and falling and crying”, epigraph to The Story of Muhammad Din. See Coriolan II. Difficulties of a Statesman 48 and note.
1–6 A man’s · · · village, | His own fire · · · his own door at sunset · · · his grandson, and his neighbour’s grandson | Playing · · · Scarred but secure, he has many memories: Longfellow: “The village smithy stands · · · When the evening sun is low. | | And children coming home from school | Look in at the open door · · · the flaming forge · · · burning”, The Village Blacksmith 2–23. (For Longfellow’s poem, see notes to Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of an Agon 42, “Under the bamboo tree” and to The Columbiad st. 28.)
3–4 in front of his own door at sunset | And see his grandson, and his neighbour’s grandson | Playing in the dust together: Southey: “It was a summer evening, | Old Kaspar’s work was done, | And he before his cottage door | Was sitting in the sun; | And by him sported on the green | His little grandchild Wilhelmine”, After Blenheim, on “the famous victory” (K. N. Chandran, Journal of Modern Literature Spring 2007).
3–5 in front of his own door · · · his grandson, and his neighbour’s grandson | Playing in the dust together: “and children tumble in front of the door”, Murder in the Cathedral II opening chorus, added in 2nd ed. (1936).
16–17 the Midlands · · · the Five Rivers: to Mons. J. Simon, 9 Oct 1945, offering To the Indians who Died in Africa for translation into French for the journal Presence: “I wish to make it quite clear that the enclosed poem is vers d’occasion · · · I should not propose to include it in any collection, but I have no objection to its appearing as such in a periodical. If you use it I should be glad if you would append the date, 1943. In case you use this poem, I should like to point out for the benefit of the translator that the Midlands means a certain number of counties in the centre of England, and that the Five Rivers means the part of India known as the Punjab, Five Rivers being the translation of the Indian name. It is from this part of India that some of the most notable fighting troops have come.” (Punjab, “land of five rivers”, Sanskrit.)
[Poem I 216 · Textual History II 553–54]
17 graveyard: more controversial than the pre-1963 reading, “memories”, because the Hindu custom is not to bury the dead (Rao, American Quarterly Spring 1964); see headnote.
21 judgment after death: when Alan Clodd protested that the new reading in 1963, “moment after death”, made the lines “less Christian”, TSE replied, 19 June 1964: “I shall certainly go back to ‘judgment after death’ instead of ‘moment after death’ as it is, I agree, more serious and immensely superior.” The emendation was made in 1963 4th imp. (1968), but “moment” continued to appear in US printings (see Textual History).
21–22 variant the moment after death · · · the fruit of action: “At the moment which is not of action or inaction · · · the fruit of action”, The Dry Salvages III 32–38.
To Walter de la Mare
Published in Tribute to Walter de la Mare on his Seventy-fifth Birthday [ed. W. R. Bett], Faber, 1948. Bett wrote asking for a contribution on 18 Feb 1947, and TSE replied on 5 Mar: “I find myself too much in the dark as to what kind of compilation you have in mind to be able to reply definitely · · · I should be unable to write anything of critical value by the end of June as I have to pay a visit to America next month. It is possible that I might be able to write a few verses in Walter de la Mare’s honour, but this would only be a small contribution to a volume which needs very much more solid matter than that.” (Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, 14 Jan [1949]: “The Eliot poem was charming—not very strenuous though. A couple of years ago, when he’d just finished it, he said to me that verse allowed one to be much more uncritically enthusiastic, or something of the sort.”) TSE’s first venture in writing a tribute for the Festschrift may have been Montpelier Row (see headnote to that poem), followed by the draft sonnets from which To Walter de la Mare emerged (see Textual History). At Easter 1947 he wrote again to Bett enclosing the final text, “which is not yet quite what I should like it to be: but I am afraid I simply cannot devote any more time to improving it, as I have to leave for America in a fortnight”.
To George Rylands, 6 July 1926, inviting him to review for the Criterion: “I do not know whether you have ever read any of de la Mare’s prose—the books which I have for review are all prose—or what you think of it. My opinion is that although he is over-rated he has certain original and valuable qualities, especially in The Memoirs of a Midget, and I do not think it is worth while for anyone to tackle him who does not care for what he has to give. One must be critical of course, but I do not think it is necessary to be quite so harsh as was Leonard Woolf in the last Nation. Or rather, I think that what Leonard said was all perfectly
true, but there are other things in de la Mare’s work worth praise.” Rylands reviewed four volumes of de la Mare’s prose (along these lines) in Criterion Oct 1926.
Walter de la Mare’s son Richard was one of the founding directors of Faber (and later chairman). One of the best-selling of established poets, Walter de la Mare was an early addition to the firm’s list. As well as six Ariel poems apiece, he and TSE each contributed two poems to The Queen’s Book of the Red Cross in 1939.
After sending Journey of the Magi to de la Mare in 1927, TSE asked for a contribution to the Criterion, where de la Mare’s story The Picnic appeared in Apr 1930.
[Poems I 216–18 · Textual History II 554–58]
In 1929, de la Mare invited TSE to write for The Eighteen-Eighties: Essays by Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature (1930). TSE replied that he was unable to write on Aesthetics or Vernon Lee, but could write about Pater. To de la Mare, 6 Jan 1930: “Many thanks both for your letter about the 80s, and for the honour which you have, I suspect, inveigled others into agreeing to bestow upon me. I must confess that the Royal Society of Literature, like the British Academy, is terra incognita on my map; and it is an honour I had never dreamed of—it is not so very many years since I was called a literary bolshevik (in the Morning Post, to be sure). But I am highly pleased at being elected to the fellowship.” TSE’s essay appeared in the book as The Place of Pater and was reprinted in Selected Essays as Arnold and Pater. TSE was also represented in a volume of de la Mare’s in 1930, the anthology Desert Islands, which includes within a running sequence the lines that became Ash-Wednesday I (see Textual History).
In a note to Geoffrey Faber, TSE wrote: “a publisher has got to pursue a certain consistency in the kind of verse he publishes, if he is going to market any of it. Of course, there are awkward exceptions! Of which Walter de la Mare is the most conspicuous example”, “Thames Symphony” by Oliffe Richmond, reader’s report, 7 Oct 1945. On 7 May 1946, TSE went to tea at Walter de la Mare’s house, where he met Owen Barfield (whose name he did not catch). To Hope Mirrlees: “This afternoon I have to make a pilgrimage to Twickenham, to see Walter de la Mare. It takes an hour to get there, and presumably an hour to get back; I shall probably get off the bus at the wrong stop and no one will be able to direct me; and I think it is very conscientious of me to go”. Later that year he wrote the jacket copy for de la Mare’s The Traveller.
For TSE’s sixtieth birthday in 1948, Richard March and Tambimuttu edited A Symposium. TSE complained to I. A. Richards, 10 May 1948, that Tambimuttu had been “poisoning my relations with all of my friends; thank God for one who has refused to have anything to do with this offensive tombstone. I intend to be on the s.s. America on my birthday, at least. Even Walter is too young to have such a festschrift, and perhaps it will be the death of both of us; but I couldn’t well not appear in Walter’s book could I?”
Two days after his 75th birthday, de la Mare wrote a sonnet, To Light You to Bed, dedicated to TSE and dated “April 25 1948” (the ms, “bearing Eliot’s marginal notes critical of the romantic diction”, is reproduced in Sackton 261). “Here at his hornbook sits a drowsy child | Lit by a guttering candle’s fickle beams | So heavy is his eye each letter seems | An imp endowed with grins and antics wild.”
De la Mare was appointed a Companion of Honour in 1948, six months after TSE’s appointment to the Order of Merit. TSE to de la Mare, 12 June 1948: “I permit myself to write a line to express my pleasure in learning of your Companionship of Honour, and in thinking of the pleasure that it will give to those who love you and to innumerable admirers of your work; in thinking also of the dignity which is added to the order. Thinking least of all, in a way, of yourself; for your fame will survive and orders and degrees will be forgotten.” In Nov 1948, TSE was awarded the Nobel Prize.
In 1951 de la Mare was to tell Laurence Whistler, “What I have against T.S.E. is that in The Waste Land he felt it necessary to give precise meanings and correspondences” (Theresa Whistler 401). Laurence Whistler was the brother of Rex Whistler, who had drawn the decorations for de la Mare’s Desert Islands. Later, Laurence Whistler would engrave on glass TSE’s poems Amaz’d astronomers did descry (for Geoffrey Faber) and Long may this Glass endure, and brim with wine (for the Faber family).
[Poem I 217–18 · Textual History II 554–58]
TSE to Theresa Whistler, 21 Nov 1962, of de la Mare: “I did not know him intimately and saw him on very few occasions but I have at least one memory of a visit to him which is worth recording and will let you have it in due course.” No further letter arrived.
2 A desert island: to de la Mare, 8 May 1930, thanking him for an inscribed copy of Desert Islands: “it is written in a siren style that might charm even the dullest of subjects into animation; but who does not like this subject?”
5 kinkajou · · · mangabey (with variants capybara, coati, peccary): small mammals. J. G. Wood: “The Kinkajou is also an inhabitant of Southern America. It is not unlike the Coati in its habits”; “The Common, or Collared Peccary, is an inhabitant of South America”; “The Mangabeys, as these monkeys are called, are all inhabitants of Western Africa.” For Wood, see note to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 22–24. To Ezra Pound, 12 Mar 1934: “if he dont look out he will be reincarnate as a Capybara”. 4 May 1936: “Now Then, Ez, mon capybara, hydrochaerus, you know zwellz I do that a prince should before all else watch over his own rational and moral motivation”.
9 the nursery tea: “The nursery tea, the school holiday”, The Family Reunion I i.
13 ghosts return: de la Mare published two poems entitled The Ghost, and one called The Ghost Chase. TSE: “Story of Turn of Screw. Good visible ghosts not dela Mare shivers”, Lecture Notes as Norton Professor (1933) fol. 37.
13 ghosts (variant they): for Kipling’s They, see note to Burnt Norton I 30–38.
18 two worlds meet, and intersect: Byron: “Between two worlds life hovers like a star”, Don Juan XV xcix, quoted twice in TSE’s Byron (1937). TSE: “bisecting the world of time”, Choruses from “The Rock” VII 19. THE ROCK: “I have known two worlds, I have known two worlds of death”, The Rock 47 (last speech of Part I). “The point of intersection of the timeless | With time”, The Dry Salvages V 18–19. “the intersection of the timeless moment”; “In concord at this intersection time | Of meeting”, Little Gidding I 52, II 52–53.
19 cats · · · moonlight dance: Edward Lear: “They danced by the light of the moon”, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat. TSE: “Reserving their terpsichorean powers | To dance by the light of the Jellicle Moon”, The Song of the Jellicles 27–28.
19, 23, 30, 32 dance · · · chance · · · By conscious art practised with natural ease · · · sound: Pope: “True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, | As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance · · · The sound must seem an echo to the sense”, An Essay on Criticism 362–65.
19, 22–24 “moonlight · · · the nocturnal traveller · · · an empty house: de la Mare: “‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, | Knocking on the moonlit door · · · But only a host of phantom listeners | That dwelt in the lone house then | Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight | To that voice from the world of men”, The Listeners.
29 Wherewith: TSE’s indecision over “By which” / “Wherein” / “Whereby” (see Textual History) resembles that over “Wherefrom” / “From which”, The Waste Land [II] 80.
[Poem I 217–18 · Textual History II 554–56]
30 conscious art practised with natural ease: “Of all poets, Valéry has been the most completely conscious (perhaps I should say the most nearly conscious) of what he was doing”, “Leçon de Valéry” (1947).
Draft sonnets (printed in Textual History)
I.
1, 3 children · · · inaccessible · · · not a tiger. There’s no room for him: “The tiger in the tiger-pit | Is not · · · And inaccessible by the young”, Lines for an Old Man 1–2, 11.
6 from limb to limb: �
��tear you limb from limb”, Five-Finger Exercises IV. Lines to Ralph Hodgson Esqre. 7.
9 Spanish Gold: de la Mare’s Desert Islands (1930), in which Marina was reprinted, includes descriptions of several treasure hoards, including one of a wreck on the Spanish Main.
10, 13 nursery · · · to be read to: “an old man · · · Being read to by a boy”, Gerontion 1–2.
14 de la Mare: pronounced as if rhyming with Delaware (having been spelt as one word by his father and grandfather).
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 158