2–5 Sunday faces; | Bonnets, silk hats and conscious graces · · · mental self-possession: Isaac Taylor: “Sunday dresses and Sunday faces, illuminated by a Sunday summer sky, give to the scene the liveliness and grace that so well befit Christianity, where Christianity is free, intelligent, and sincere”, Unitarianism in England in Logic in Theology and Other Essays (1859).
3 silk hats: Conrad Aiken to TSE, 23 Feb 1913, on their friend Harry Wehle: “Write and tell me · · · how Silk Hat Harry demeans himself”. TSE: “a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire”, The Waste Land [III] 234.
6 unwarranted digression: “Is it perfume from a dress | That makes me so digress?” The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 65–66.
11–14 a little bald · · · fastidious · · · Waits, hat and gloves in hand, | Punctilious of tie and suit: “slightly bald · · · hold my coat · · · attendant lord · · · meticulous”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 82, 85, 112, 116.
[Poems I 238–39 · Textual History II 568]
16 On the doorstep of the Absolute: likewise concluding Afternoon: “the absolute” (there rhyming at a distance with “suits”, as here with “suit”). On the philosophical term, see note to Conversation Galante 14.
First Debate between the Body and Soul
Published in March Hare.
Dated Jan 1910, ms1.
Title First Debate between the Body and Soul: Marvell, A Dialogue between the Soul and Body. Laforgue wrote debate-poems with antiphonal effects similar to the intercalated quatrains here all ending with “our sensations”. TSE on Laforgue: “What he wants, of course, is some way of salvation in which both the mind and the feelings, the soul and the body, shall cooperate towards fulness of life”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 285 (Turnbull Lecture III). Bradley: “Can we say that bare soul ever acts upon body, and can soul exist at all without matter · · ·? In our experience assuredly bare soul is not found. Its existence there, and its action, are inseparable from matter”, Appearance and Reality ch. XXIII, “Body and Soul”. TSE scored the passage and underlined the middle sentence. He persistently put his mind to this question. At Harvard in 1912–13 he took Hugo Munsterberg’s “Seminary in Psychology” (subject for the year: “Mind and Body”), and two courses by Charles Bakewell, “The Kantian Philosophy” and “Seminary in Metaphysics”. In his copy of Bakewell’s Source Book in Ancient Philosophy 241–42, he underlined in the account of Aristotle the remark that the “soul may be regarded as a sort of form and idea”; the previous sentence had spoken of “our sensation” (“our sensations”, 7), and on the next page TSE jotted down six terms, including sensation and Imagination. Bergson’s Matière et mémoire (1896) is subtitled Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit. TSE’s Clark Lectures in 1926 were devoted to body and soul, as in the dismissal of Descartes’ Meditation VI (Of the Existence of Material Things, and of the real distinction between the Soul and Body of Man), The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 81–82 (Lecture II). Annotating the fourth Ennead in his Plotinus, TSE wrote: “He looks at soul 1st as possessed of faculties wh. refer to sensible world (Aristotle) 2 as rising above the world to union with God · · · Plotinus is a two substance man as against Aristotle’s reduction of the soul to functions of the body” (quoted in notes to The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 114). “As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised, | As the mind deserts the body it has used”, La Figlia Che Piange 11–12, where the internal rhyme “imagination · · · cogitations” (18, 23) recalls the refrain here. See March Hare 230 for TSE’s engagement with body and soul in Leibniz, Bradley, Donne and Sir John Davies. Debate: Ronald Bush wrote that TSE “was still thinking of going on with the ‘Debate’ as late as March 1918” (Bush 19), but in the letter he cites, “my dialogue” refers to Eeldrop and Appleplex.
Unadopted title Reflections in a Square: the following year TSE wrote Entretien dans un parc.
[Poems I 239 · Textual History II 569]
2–4 A blind old man who coughs and spits sputters | Stumbling among the alleys and the gutters | | He pokes: Henry Adams: “one fumbled over it as feebly as ever. In such labyrinths, the staff is a force almost more necessary than the legs; the pen becomes a sort of blind-man’s dog, to keep him from falling into the gutters”, The Education of Henry Adams ch. XXV. TSE: “A blind old drunken man who sings and mutters, | With broken boot heels stained in many gutters”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [30–31]. “poking the peevish gutter. | I an old man”, Gerontion 14–15.
3, 5, 7 gutters · · · With senile patience · · · sensations: “gutter with sordid patience · · · considerations”, First Caprice in North Cambridge 9–10. “patience · · · irritations”, O lord, have patience 1, 3. “With a little patience · · · reverberation”, The Waste Land [V] 330, 336. With senile patience: Paradise Lost II 569: “With stubborn patience” (in Hell).
6–7 The withered leaves | Of our sensations: Hawthorne: “On the soil of thought and in the garden of the heart, as well as in the sensual world, lie withered leaves—the ideas and feelings that we have done with”, Buds and Bird Voices (Mosses from an Old Manse) (TSE: “Idea”, 15). Shelley: “Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! | And, by the incantation of this verse”, Ode to the West Wind 64–65 (TSE: “August wind”, 1). Keats: “blown vagrant in the wind · · · blind · · · throw | Himself on withered leaves · · · muttered”, Endymion II 562–67 (TSE: “blind”, 2, 10; “mutters”, 2 variant). Byron: “the languid rout | Of our Sensations”, Don Juan IX lxxv. sensations: Bergson: “si l’art qui ne donne que des sensations est un art inférieur, c’est que l’analyse ne démêle pas souvent dans une sensation autre chose que cette sensation même” [If the art which gives only sensations is an inferior art, the reason is that analysis often fails to discover in a sensation anything beyond the sensation itself], Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889) ch. I; tr. F. L. Pogson as Time and Free Will (1910). TSE referred to the translation in The Relationship Between Politics and Metaphysics (1914).
6, 9 withered leaves · · · vacant square: “Of withered leaves about your feet | And newspapers from vacant lots”, Preludes I 7–8.
8 devoted to the pure idea: for Remy de Gourmont’s fascination with “l’idée pure”, see March Hare 232. “Explained the Pure Idea”, Inside the gloom 12. “the idea pure as salt”, Anabasis I ix (variant “the pure idea”).
9–10 in the vacant square · · · blind: Cavalcanti, tr. Rossetti: “Over the curse of blindness she prevails, | And heals sick languors in the public squares”, To Guido Orlandi: Sonnet. Of a consecrated Image resembling his Lady (in The Early Italian Poets). TSE’s Syllabus: Elizabethan Literature (1918) told his students “Read: A few translations of Italian Sonnets in Rossetti’s Early Italian Poets, and sonnets in Golden Treasury or in the Oxford Book of English Verse” (elided in Schuchard as “Italian sonnets in Golden Treasury or in the Oxford Book of English Verse”).
10 inconscient: adapting Laforgue; see note to Afternoon 9.
11–12 exude | The odour: OED “exude”: ex-sudare, “To ooze out like sweat”. TSE: “La sueur aestivale, et une forte odeur”, Lune de Miel 4.
[Poem I 239–40 · Textual History II 569]
12 turpitude: markedly sexual in French. Remy de Gourmont describes marriage as “la bonté de Dieu à la turpitude humaine” [God’s grace towards human turpitude], and “La vieille opposition entre la virginité et la turpitude” [the old conflict between chastity and turpitude], La Morale de l’amour in La Culture des idées. In Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet ch. VII, “sa turpitude” reveals itself in syphilis, “une maladie secrète”. TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934) includes both these French titles. TSE: “Francis Bacon is neither the first nor the last man to combine intellectual power with moral turpitude”, Elizabeth and Essex (1928). “these abominations, the turpitudes”, Choruses from “The Rock” V 7. “the soul body · · · human folly turpitude pusillanimity”, Little Gidding II 76–93 prose draft (for affinities with this poem
, see note to Little Gidding II 25–96).
13 And a street piano through the dusty trees: “A street-piano, garrulous and frail”, First Caprice in North Cambridge 1 (see note).
15 The pure Idea dies of inanition: Emerson: “Give me truths; | For I am weary of the surfaces, | And die of inanition”, Blight 1–3. Louis Bertrand, tr. Stuart Merrill: “the salamander died of inanition”, The Salamander in Pastels in Prose. (For Merrill, see headnote to “Poems (1920)”, 5. TSE’S PROFICIENCY IN FRENCH.) TSE: “idealism, having sold his mess of pottage for a birth-right, is perhaps beginning to show signs of inanition”, The Relativity of the Moral Judgment (1915). inanition: OED: “The action or process of emptying; the condition of being empty; spec. the exhausted condition resulting from want or insufficiency of nourishment.”
15, 23 dies of inanition · · · brain: Bergson: “chez des animaux morts de faim, on trouve le cerveau à peu près intact” [in animals that have died of hunger the brain is found to be almost unimpaired]; with note: “Récemment, des observations analogues ont été faites sur un homme mort d’inanition” [Recently, analogous observations have been made on a man who died of inanition], L’Evolution créatrice (1907) ch. II.
18 Imaginations: The Merry Wives of Windsor IV ii: “you must pray, and not follow the imaginations of your own heart”. Hamlet III ii: “And my imaginations are as foul | As Vulcan’s stithy”. King Lear IV vi: “wrong imaginations”.
18–19 Imaginations | Masturbations: “took their recreation · · · And practiced masturbation”, The Columbiad st. 16. Byron to John Murray, 9 Nov 1820: “such writing is a sort of mental **** — ******** his Imagination.—I don’t mean he is indecent, but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state”, Letters and Journals ed. R. E. Prothero, V (1901) 117. The expurgated text was expanded in Leslie Marchand’s edition: “mental masturbation—he is always f—gg—g his Imagination”, Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 7, 1977. TSE to Aiken, 19 July 1914, “Dr. Hans Frigger (the celebrated poet)”.
27 The cosmic smudge of an enormous thumb: Henry James: “Charming places, charming objects, languish, all round him, under designations that seem to leave on them the smudge of a great vulgar thumb”, New England: An Autumn Impression III in The American Scene. TSE to his mother, 2 June 1918: “James was a fine writer—his book of impressions of America, written about 1907 I think, is wonderfully well written.” James again: “the month of August; a spectacle that I am far from speaking of as the finest flower of my old and perhaps even a little faded cluster of impressions, but which smudges that special sojourn as with the big thumb-mark”, Siena Early and Late II in Italian Hours (TSE: “August”, 1).
[Poem I 240 · Textual History II 569]
29 variant the sanctuary of the soul: Samuel Rogers: “And may the secret of thy soul | Remain within its sanctuary!” The Sleeping Beauty 15–16. The poem is in The Golden Treasury, which was a set text for TSE at Smith Academy in 1905 (Stayer). TSE: “For in the sanctuaries of the soul”, To the Class of 1905 49.
32–33 Imagination’s | Poor Relations: see Bradley on “The relation of body to soul” in note on title. Henry James has “poor relation” and “imagination” in the second paragraph of The Beast in the Jungle (1903). OED “poor” 8: poor relation “relative or kinsman in humble circumstances (also transf.)”, from 1720.
32–37 Imagination’s · · · Absolute! · · · supersubtle: “The Absolute, we find, does not fall within any of the classes of objects: it is neither real nor unreal nor imaginary. But I do not think that supersubtle defence is necessary”, Knowledge and Experience 169.
33, 35 Relations · · · our sensations: T. H. Green: “A sensation is the unalterable effect of its conditions, whatever those conditions may be. It is unalterably related to other sensations. Our opinion about its conditions or relations may vary, but not the conditions or relations themselves, or the sensation determined by them”, Prolegomena to Ethics (1906) 30. TSE marked the first two of these sentences in his copy.
36–37 Absolute! complete idealist · · · peasant: Symons 53, on Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: “too sincere an idealist, too absolute in his idealism, to hesitate”, a dozen lines after “a peasant”.
37 A supersubtle peasant: Othello I iii: “a super-subtle Venetian”. Henry James is very fond of “supersubtle”. TSE: “Donne, or a supersubtle heroine of one of Racine’s tragedies”; “I am not presenting Marino as a supersubtle Italian who led the simple Englishman Crashaw astray”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 88, 177–78 (Clark Lectures II, VI).
37 variant supersensitive: Tennyson: “a supersensual sensual bond”, Merlin and Vivien 107. TSE: “a supersensuous experience”, “many super-sensuous feelings”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 120, 133 (Clark Lecture IV). For Madame Blavatsky’s “super-sensuous status”, see note to A Cooking Egg 21–23.
42–43 a little while | Standing: Wordsworth: “A little while I stood”, Nutting 21, with “withered leaves”, 18 (TSE, four times) and “the trees”, 25 (TSE, 46).
42, 44 a little while · · · life · · · a smile: Shelley: “My father lived a little while, | But all might see that he was dying, | He smiled with such a woeful smile!” Rosalind and Helen 315–17.
42, 44–45 a little while · · · a smile | Simple and profound: Laforgue’s Hamlet:
“Oh! cloître-toi! L’amour, l’amour
S’échange, par le temps qui court,
Simple et sans foi comme un bonjour”
—C’est en effet bien curieux, assure l’acteur.
Et Hamlet, prince de Danemark et créature infortunée, exulte!
[“Oh! cloister yourself ! Love, love is spoken and returned, during this time that is current, simply and faithlessly as good morning.”—“Really, it is extremely unusual,” the actor assures the author. And Hamlet, Prince of Denmark and unfortunate creature, exults!]
[Poem I 240–41 · Textual History II 569–70]
Emile Verhaeren: “Et réunir notre esprit et le monde, | Dans les deux mains d’une très simple loi profonde” [And reunite our spirit with the world, in the two hands of a very simple profound law], L’Attente [Waiting] closing lines. TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934) includes this volume of Verhaeren’s, Les Visages de la vie (1899). TSE: “simple and faithless as a smile”, La Figlia Che Piange 16. “His laughter was submarine and profound”, Mr. Apollinax 8.
44 Till life evaporates into a smile: “Life departs with a feeble smile”, Opera 12. “An aimless smile that hovers in the air | And vanishes”, Morning at the Window 8–9 (see note).
49 Defecations: OED 2: “Purification of the mind or soul from what is gross or low”; with Jeremy Taylor (1649): “A defecation of his faculties and an opportunity of Prayer”. Two lines of Coleridge’s Reason gained particular currency because Matthew Arnold applied them to one form of poetic achievement in On Translating Homer I:
Coleridge says, in his strange language, speaking of the union of the human soul with the divine essence, that this takes place
Whene’er the mist, which stands ’twixt God and thee,
Defecates to a pure transparency;
and so, too, it may be said of the translator with his original, which alone can produce a good translation, that it takes place when the mist which stands between them—the mist of alien modes of thinking, speaking, and feeling on the translator’s part—“defecates to a pure transparency,” and disappears.
TSE: “Mind in this pure and defecated state is a figment; and true as these laws may be of mind, they are not true of the world as I experience it, at least, for this world contains many things besides mind, and it does not even contain mind unadulterated”, The Relativity of the Moral Judgment (1915). “the world would be pure form defecated of particularity”, Thought and Reality in Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” (1915). To Robert Nichols, 8 Aug 1917: “This struggle to preserve the advantages of practice and at the same time to defecate the emotions one has expressed already is one of the hardest I know.”
To Herbert Read, 18 Sept 1942: “I think that Little Gidding is now about as good as I can make it · · · This defecation OUGHT to make it possible to attend to Murder [in the Cathedral].” Again: “I think that what stimulates me to write a poem is that I have something inside me that I want to get rid of. I have to get it out. It is almost a kind of defecation, if you like”, Talking Freely (1961). OED has “defecation” 3: “discharging of the fæces” from 1830.
49 variant desquamations: OED 1: “The removal of scales or of any scaly crust.” 2: “A coming off in scales or scaly patches”, but also the more positive aspect of this “removal of scales”. TSE: “The scales are fallen from their eyes”, Airs of Palestine, No. 2 39.
Easter: Sensations of April
Published in March Hare. Part II had been printed in the limited edition of Letters (1988), with a facsimile of the leaf that was laid into the Notebook.
Part I dated Apr 1910 in Notebook; Part II dated May 1910 in ms1.
[Poems I 241 · Textual History II 570]
Beginning “The little negro girl”, TSE’s poem asks comparison with Blake’s The Little Black Boy, which four times mentions the “heat” (TSE, 7), and twice “God” (TSE, 3); it too has “flowers” (TSE: “geranium”, 2, 13). Blake’s poem is about being “taught” a childlike religious lesson (TSE: “Sunday school”, 14).
The opening of ch. VII of C. F. G. Masterman’s From the Abyss (1902) has many elements of TSE’s poem: “It is Sunday evening, and the tinkling of numerous church bells is fretfully protesting the desirability of public worship. The temperature has been anything over a hundred and twenty in the sunshine, the asphalt has become soft and bubbly, and in the narrow street”, with “the heat”, “upper windows” and “children, the girls in white” in the next few lines. (James Kissane proposed From the Abyss as a source for The Waste Land; Yeats Eliot Review Spring 1979.) John Gray’s sonnet Poem (1893), beginning “Geranium”, has “A wistful child” and “The asphalt burns”.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 163