The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  1–2 Tristan and Isolde · · · fatalistic: “an attraction as fatal as that indicated by the love-potion motif in Tristan und Isolde”, John Ford (1932).

  2 And the fatalistic horns: “Beats like a fatalistic drum”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 9. Laforgue: “sur un mode allègre et fataliste, un orchestre aux instruments d’ivoire improvisait une petite ouverture unanime” [In an allegro and fatalist mode, an orchestra of ivory instruments was improvising an astonishingly unanimous overture], Salomé III. Laforgue again: “cette éternelle valse de Chopin usée comme l’amour—ô délices poignantes, ô bon fatalisme!” [this eternal waltz of Chopin’s employed as though it were love—oh poignant delights, oh happy fatalism!], Paysages et Impressions in Mélanges posthumes [Posthumous Miscellanies] (1903) 30.

  2–4 the fatalistic horns | The passionate violins | And ominous clarinet: “Among the windings of the violins | And the ariettes | Of cracked cornets | Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins”, Portrait of a Lady I 29–32. French symbolists had characterised musical instruments (Verlaine: “la flûte impure”, Il parle encore 18), but so had Dryden: “The trumpet’s loud clangour”, “The soft complaining flute”, “Sharp violins proclaim | Their jealous pangs, and desperation”, A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day 25, 33, 37–38. Eric Griffiths (personal communication): “TSE was perhaps thinking especially of act II of Tristan und Isolde with its paroxysmic love-duet preceded by sequences for six horns (bar 76ff.) and solo clarinet (bar 126ff.), and with its ‘passionate violins’.”

  3, 5–6 passionate · · · And love torturing itself | To emotion for all there is in it: “To be in love with emotion has been our affliction since Rousseau · · · Strong passions do not need explanation; but just as a man who is not very much in love excuses the follies which he has committed for the purpose of appearing passionate, so the philosophical Christian apologizes for the religion in which he would like to believe”, “Religion and Science: A Philosophical Essay” by John Theodore Merz (1918), review. torturing itself: likewise of music, Laforgue: “Dans l’orgue qui par déchirements se châtie” [In the church-organ which tortures itself with heart-rendings], Complainte propitiatoire à l’Inconscient [Propitiatory complaint to the Unconscious] 9.

  5–6, 10 love torturing itself | To emotion for all there is in it · · · self-expression:

  Oh, spare these reminiscences!

  How you prolong the pose!

  These emotional concupiscences

  Tinctured attar of rose.

  (The need for self-expression

  Will pardon this digression).

  Portrait of a Lady II 15 ^ 16 variant

  [Poem I 236 · Textual History II 567]

  10 self-expression: in 1909, still a fairly recent compound. OED first citation, 1892, Nation: “This doctrine of unbounded self-indulgence—or, as his [Walt Whitman’s] admirers would prefer to call it, self-expression.” TSE conveyed his suspicions twice in one year, writing of J. E. Spingarn: “For Mr. Spingarn the phrase ‘self-expression’ appears to be completely adequate”, Creative Criticism (1926), and of Donne: “his sermons, one feels, are a ‘means of self-expression’”, Lancelot Andrewes (1926). For Hardy and “self-expression”, see headnote.

  11 We have the tragic? oh no!: Nietzsche, on Tristan act III: “Here there interpose between our highest musical excitement and the music in question the tragic myth and the tragic hero”, The Birth of Tragedy §21. TSE to Aiken, 19 July 1914: “For when you have all those little things you cease to fret about them, and have room for a sort of divine dissatisfaction and goût for the tragic which is quite harmless, d’ailleurs, and compatible with a bank account. I think perhaps that only the happy can appreciate the tragic, or that the tragic only exists for the happy.” 30 Sept: “That, in fact, is I think the great use of suffering, if it’s tragic suffering—it takes you away from yourself—and petty suffering does exactly the reverse, and kills your inspiration. I think now that all my good stuff was done before I had begun to worry—three years ago.” On suffering and a “pattern”, see note to The Dry Salvages II 37–66. Quoting Pound’s Canto XIV: “It is, in its way, an admirable Hell, ‘without dignity, without tragedy’”, After Strange Gods 43. “A man is only important as he is classed. Hence there is no tragedy, or no appreciation of tragedy, which is the same thing”, Eeldrop and Appleplex I (1917).

  12 Life departs with a feeble smile: “Till life evaporates into a smile”, First Debate between the Body and Soul 44. “And Life, a little bald and gray, | Languid, fastidious, and bland, | Waits, hat and gloves in hand”, Spleen 11–13.

  16 I feel like the ghost of youth: Symons 73 on Rimbaud: “there is a certain irony, which comes into that youthful work as if youth were already reminiscent of itself, so conscious is it that youth is youth, and that youth is passing.” James Thomson: “I felt a ghost already”, Insomnia 270 (Crawford 49). TSE at Milton Academy, 27 years after his own graduation: “it occurred to me that as I had to talk to somebody, I would take more or less a metaphorical figure and make him as real as I could—that is, it occurred to me to say a few words to the ghost of myself at the age of seventeen or thereabouts, whom we may suppose to be skulking somewhere about this hall”, Address by T. S. Eliot, ’06, to the Class of ’33 (1933).

  16–17 ghost of youth | At the undertakers’ ball: in Departmental Ditties, Kipling followed The Undertaker’s Horse with One Viceroy Resigns, which has “O Youth, Youth, Youth!” (6) and “That ghost has haunted me for twenty years” (18). TSE has “the Whore House Ball” in the refrain of Ballade pour la grosse Lulu and The Columbiad st. 15 (where it appears to be a tune).

  Humouresque

  Printed in Harvard Advocate 12 Jan 1910, then Adv 1938, Adv 1948, Undergraduate Poems, Early Youth (1950)+. Text of ms1 published in March Hare.

  [Poems I 236–37 · Textual History II 567]

  Dated Nov 1909 in Notebook.

  Hayward: “The theme of this exercise in the manner of Laforgue was suggested by the second stanza of his Locutions de Pierrot XII: ‘Encore un de mes pierrots mort; | Mort d’un chronique orphelinisme; | C’était un cœur plein de dandysme | Lunaire, en un drôle de corps” [Another of my pierrots dead. Dead of chronic orphanism; his was a heart full of lunar dandyism, in a freakish body]; Hayward’s spelling of the French as “dandyisme”, is here corrected. Laforgue’s lines had been quoted in Symons 108. In the commedia dell’arte tradition, poor little Pierrot is the deadpan, downtrodden clown, often berated by Harlequin.

  Title Humouresque: OED “humoresque”: “Mus. A composition of a humorous or capricious character”, 1880. Adjectivally: “Of a humorous style”, quoting Gosse, 1896: “the old tradition of humoresque literature”. See note to the title Suite Clownesque.

  6, 7, 10 face · · · face · · · Mouth twisted to: “Twisted faces from”, Morning at the Window 6.

  15 The snappiest fashion since last spring’s: “And in spring he affects such sartorial | Display as the fashion allows”, How to Pick a Possum 27–28. snappiest: OED “snappy” 6b: “Neat and elegant; smart, ‘natty’”, 1881.

  18 (Feebly contemptuous of nose): Symons: “although of nose not neat”, From Catullus. Chiefly Concerning Lesbia XLIII.

  Convictions (Curtain Raiser)

  Published in March Hare.

  Dated Jan 1910 (changed from Nov 1909) in Notebook.

  Title Convictions: Irving Babbitt on Ferdinand Brunetière: “He had convictions and insisted on judging with reference to them at a time when convictions, at least among the educated classes, had almost completely gone out of fashion. He possessed something of the power that usually belongs to those who have convictions to impose themselves on those who have none”, The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912) 303–304. Curtain Raiser: originally slang. OED: “The slight opening pieces, or ‘curtain raisers’ as they are profanely styled”, from 1886. Laforgue’s Hamlet: “Un héros! et que tout le reste fût des levers de rideau!” [To be the hero of a play! And to reduce all of the other plays
to little curtain-raisers!]; see note to Mandarins 1 13–15.

  [Poems I 237–38 · Textual History II 567–68]

  1 Among my marionettes: Symons 154 on Maeterlinck: “a drama so precise, so curt, so arbitrary in its limits, that it can safely be confided to the masks and feigned voices of marionettes · · · Are we not all puppets, in a theatre of marionettes, in which the parts we play, the dresses we wear, the very emotion whose dominance gives its express form to our faces, have all been chosen for us · · · ? And as our parts have been chosen for us, our motions controlled from behind the curtain, so the words we seem to speak are but spoken through us, and we do but utter fragments of some elaborate invention.” (For “a function assigned”, see note to He said: this universe is very clever 2–3.) Symons on Jarry’s Ubu Roi: “a generation which has exhausted every intoxicant, every soluble preparation of the artificial, may well seek a last sensation in the wire-pulled passions, the wooden faces of marionettes, and, by a further illusion, of marionettes who are living people; living people pretending to be those wooden images of life which pretend to be living people”, Studies in Seven Arts (1906) 374–75. An Apology for Puppets was moved to the front of the 1909 edition of Symons’s Plays, Acting and Music (1903): “The marionette may be relied upon. He will respond to an indication without reserve or revolt; an error on his part (we are all human) will certainly be the fault of the author; he can be trained to perfection · · · I assure you, you will find it quite easy to fall in love with a marionette · · · In our marionettes, then, we get personified gesture, and the gesture, like all other forms of emotion, generalized.” For TSE and Symons, see “A Beginner in 1908”. Irving Babbitt on Anatole France:

  His underlying mood is always that of contemptuous pity for beings who even in their most serious concerns are the dupes of mobile appearances.

  Les petites marionnettes

  Font, font, font

  Trois petits tours,

  Et puis s’en vont.

  [The little marionnettes, they make they make they make three little turns, and then they depart.] But the little marionettes, as M. France sees them, are thoroughly vicious and depraved, the playthings of hunger and the reproductive instinct.

  The Masters of Modern French Criticism 319

  Marionettes are everywhere in German romantic literature too, notably in Kleist. For TSE’s admiration for Alfred Kreymborg’s Puppet Plays (1923), see headnote to Sweeney Agonistes, 4. JAZZ. In 1923 he told Kreymborg that he was planning puppet plays of his own (Crawford 161). “I do not by any means intend the actor to be an automaton, nor would I admit that the human actor can be replaced by a marionette”, Four Elizabethan Dramatists (1924). TSE: “One of my marionettes is dead”, Humouresque 1. See also note to 14.

  2 enthusiasm: to Frank Morley, 15 Sept 1932: “I am incorrigibly distrustful of enthusiasm.” (Pater: “High passions give one this quickened sense · · · the ‘enthusiasm of humanity’”, Studies in the History of the Renaissance Conclusion.) For “Progress” and “enthusiasm”, see note to To the Class of 1905 78.

  3 They see the outlines of their stage: “Who see their outlines on the screen”, Mandarins 4 4.

  3–5 stage · · · later age: Milton: “the tale of Troy divine, | Or what (though rare) of later age, | Ennobled hath the buskined stage”, Il Penseroso 100–102.

  4, 6–7 immense · · · an audience · · · suspense: “immense · · · the audience | Who still continue in suspense”, Suite Clownesque I 14, 17–18.

  6 an audience open-mouthed: “the close rabble in the cinema · · · Wide mouthed, in charmed rapture worship from afar”, WLComposite Part III ms1 [25–27].

  [Poem I 238 · Textual History II 568]

  9–10 tissue paper roses · · · alone: “Her hand twists a paper rose · · · alone”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 57–59 (see note).

  9, 13 roses · · · supposes: rhymed in Austin Dobson, Pot-Pourri 3, 6 (see note to Burnt Norton I 16).

  11 The monotone: “Capricious monotone”, Portrait of a Lady I 34. The French romantic and symbolist poets reiterate “monotone”.

  13 supposes: as a noun (“an act of supposing”), archaic, though not apparently obsolete, by 1910; OED’s two latest citations, 1875 and 1897, have the word within inverted commas, as archaic or self-conscious. Jonson: “Fatted with Supposes of fine Hopes”, A Tale of a Tub III vii.

  14 over there my Paladins: W. S. Gilbert: “Overflowing, | Easy-going | Paladin”, The Gondoliers I. Paladins: OED: “In modern forms of the Charlemagne romances, one of the Twelve Peers or famous warriors of Charlemagne’s court, of whom the Count Palatine was the foremost; hence sometimes transf. a Knight of the Round Table; also fig. a knightly hero, renowned champion, knight-errant.” Samuel Daniel: “Let others sing of Knights and Paladins”, Delia XLVI (1592; in Oxf Bk of English Verse). W. W. [Watson White] in Harvard Advocate 25 Nov 1908, on Il Teatro Marionetti: “If you have read the board outside, and are somewhat familiar with Italian, you recognize in this puppet no other than Orlando—known as ‘Furioso,’ and you know that he must be waiting for Rinaldo or for his sister Bradamante · · · Presently Orlando may be joined by Carlamagno, gorgeously caparisoned as befits the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire.” Rimbaud repeats “paladins” three lines before “pantins” (puppets), in Bal des pendus [Dance of the Hanged] 2–3, 6. TSE on talkers of cant: “One characteristic which increased my suspicion of the scientific paladins of religion is that they are all Englishmen, or at least all Anglo-Saxons”, Thoughts After Lambeth (1931).

  15 talking of effect and cause: “we will talk of cause and effect whenever a phenomenon or group of phenomena is thought of as lived through and not as contemplated”, and “I agree thoroughly with Mr. Russell when he speaks of cause as a superstition: I only question whether we could live without superstitions”, Cause as Ideal Construction (1914). effect and cause: Bradley: “I may be told that in causation a succession is involved with a direction not reversible · · · even in our own world, how unsatisfactory the succession laid down in causation!” Appearance and Reality ch. XXIII. TSE: “A totality of causes is of course the effect itself, or freedom. But freedom is subject to the same alteration: complete freedom is identity of effect and cause”, Report on the Ethics of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1913). “Many years ago I was given to understand that science had dispensed with the notion of causality, and that the recurrence of the same events in the same order, and predictability, was all that it had to do with. The notion of cause and effect was to be left to man in his everyday common activities”, Poetical and Prosaic Use of Words (1943).

  15–16 effect and cause · · · laws: Clough: “Repose upon effect and cause, | And action of unvarying laws”, Say, will it, when our hairs are grey 12–13.

  [Poem I 238 · Textual History II 568]

  16 “learn to live by nature’s laws!”: Stoic doctrine, quizzed by Horace, Epistles I x 12. T. H. Green: “They seek to discover what are the laws—the modes of operation of natural forces—under which we have come to be what we are, in order that they may counsel us how to seek our happiness by living according to those laws. Now it is obvious that to a being who is simply a result of natural forces an injunction to conform to their laws is unmeaning”, Prolegomena to Ethics 10; TSE marked the second sentence here.

  19 Reason: “Mr. Foerster’s ‘reason’ seems to me to differ from any Greek equivalent (λόγος) by being exclusively human; whereas to the Greek there was something inexplicable about λόγος so that it was a participation of man in the divine”, Second Thoughts about Humanism (1929). nothing to excess: proverbial in Greek; written in the temple at Delphi by Cleobulus, and quoted by Plato in Protagoras. TSE: “Romanticism stands for excess in any direction”, Syllabus: Modern French Literature (1916) Lecture I.

  25–26 I’d throw my heart beneath his feet. | I’d give my life to his control: “my heart | Under my feet”; “your heart would have responded | Gaily, when invited, beating obedient | To controllin
g hands”, The Waste Land [III] 296–97, [V] 420–22.

  28–29 marionettes · · · keen: HAMLET: “I could interpret between you and your love, if I could see the puppets dallying.” OPHELIA: “You are keen, my lord, you are keen” (III ii).

  Spleen

  Printed in Harvard Advocate 26 Jan 1910, then Adv 1938, Adv 1948, Undergraduate Poems, Early Youth (1950)+.

  Title] Four successive poems in the section Spleen et Idéal in Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal share this title. Laforgue on Baudelaire: “Le premier qui ait apporté dans notre literature l’ennui dans la volupté · · · le spleen et la maladie (non la Phtisie poétique mais la névrose)” [The first to bring our literature the boredom implicit in sensuality · · · spleen and illness (not the poetic aspects of consumption but rather neurosis)], Littérature in Mélanges posthumes (1903) 112. Verlaine too has Spleen, and Symons has From “Romances sans Paroles” VII. Spleen. In English, “spleen” was taken up by Ernest Dowson.