The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 165
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1 1 complete: TSE argued that Hamlet’s tragedy was not “intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight”, Hamlet (1919). OED “complete” 5: “Of persons: Fully equipped or endowed; perfect, accomplished, consummate.” Henry VIII I ii: “This man so complete”. Troilus and Cressida III iii: “marvel not, thou great and complete man”.
1 2 addressed: OED 2: “Well-ordered, accomplished. Obs.”; 4: “Arrayed, attired, trimmed, dressed. arch.” addressed with sword: Pericles II iii: “Even in your armours, as you are addressed, | Will well become a soldier’s dance.” TSE: “Sweeney addressed full length to shave”; Sweeney Erect 21 (see note).
1 5 Keen to appropriate the man: The Merchant of Venice III ii: “so keen and greedy to confound a man”.
1 6 all these baits: Milton: “vice with all her baits”, Areopagitica; “Yet have they many baits” and “lickerish baits”, Comus 537, 700.
1 7 popular: Coriolanus four times has the pejorative sense (OED 5a: “studious of, or designed to gain, the favour of the common people. Obs.”). TSE’s jacket copy for Louis MacNeice’s Poems (1935): “his work is intelligible but unpopular”.
1 8 merely stands and waits: in his copy of Milton’s Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, & Other Poems, TSE marked the sonnet When I consider how my light is spent, with its last line “They also serve who only stand and wait” (see The O’Possum Strikes Back 33, “when considering how his life is spent”, in Noctes Binanianæ). Paradise Lost V 351–55:
without more train
Accompanied than with his own complete
Perfections, in himself was all his state,
More solemn than the tedious pomp that waits
On princes
(TSE: “his own”, 9; “complete”, 1, also at the line-ending).
1 8–12 He merely stands and waits | Upon his own intrepid dignity; | With fixed regardless eyes— | Looking neither out nor in— | The centre of formalities: TSE in Coriolan I. Triumphal March 28–31:
There he is now, look:
There is no interrogation in his eyes
Or in the hands, quiet over the horse’s neck,
And the eyes watchful, waiting, perceiving, indifferent
With “such a press of people · · · so many crowding the way”, 4–6 (here: “the crowds that ran”, 3).
1 10 With fixed regardless eyes: Keats: “she danced along with vague, regardless eyes”, The Eve of St. Agnes 64.
1 12 centre of formalities: “centre of operation”, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer 4 (and note to 3–4). (“Centre” remained as a formal spelling in the US.)
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1 13–15 A hero! and how much it means; | How much— | The rest is merely shifting scenes: “A hero!—Where would he belong?” Humouresque 23. In his Hamlet, Laforgue has the Prince brood upon shifting scenes: “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!] TSE: “It has often been said that no man is a hero to his own valet; what is much more important is that no honest man can be a hero to himself; for he must be aware how many causes in world history, outside of abilities and genius, have been responsible for greatness”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 289 (Turnbull Lecture III). means · · · shifting scenes: Tennyson: “the shifting scenes · · · what this wild Drama means”, The Play 2, 4. The rest is: Hamlet V ii: “the rest is silence” (TSE’s immediately preceding poem in the Notebook is Silence). “The rest is not our business”, East Coker V 18. “The rest is grace”, Little Gidding II 67–96 first venture in verse [21]. As an ending, Verlaine: “Et tout le reste est littérature”, Art poétique. Théodore de Banville: “Aimer le vin, | La beauté, le printemps divin, | Cela suffit. Le reste est vain”, À Adolphe Gaïffe 4–6; quoted by Symons in Studies in Two Literatures (1897) 265. merely shifting scenes: Poe: “Mere puppets they, who come and go | At the bidding of vast formless things | That shift the scenery to and fro”, The Conqueror Worm 14, within Ligeia (see notes to East Coker III 13–17). TSE: “Prince Hamlet · · · start a scene or two”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 111–13 (with “come and go”, 13, 35). Hawthorne: “in lieu of these shifting scenes, came back · · · all the townspeople assembled and levelling their stern regards”, The Scarlet Letter ch. XI (TSE: “the crowds · · · fixed regardless eyes”, 3, 10).
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2 1 ladies of uncertain age: Byron: “She was not old, nor young, nor at the years | Which certain people call a ‘certain age’, | Which yet the most uncertain age appears”, Beppo xxii. OED “certain” II 7e: “sometimes euphemistically: Which it is not polite or necessary further to define. a certain age: an age when one is no longer young, but which politeness forbids to be specified too minutely: usually, referring to some age between forty and sixty (mostly said of women).” TSE: “A lady of almost any age”, The smoke that gathers blue and sinks 16.
2 3 persiflage: OED cites Hannah More, 1799: “The cold compound of irony, irreligion, selfishness, and sneer, which make up what the French .. so well express by the term persiflage”. Byron: “Whether the mode be persiflage or piety, | But wear the newest mantle of hypocrisy”, Don Juan XVI lii. Rhymed here with “age”; Fowler recommends as though rhyming with badinage.
2 4–6 tranquillity · · · sea: Shelley: “an isle ’twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea, | Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity”, Epipsychidion 457–58; “the full and weary sea | To the depths of its tranquillity”, Rosalind and Helen 971–72.
2 5 Regard: equivocally indicative (“Two ladies · · · Regard · · ·”), or imperative, with French inflection (“Regard that woman · · · Regard the moon”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 16, 50). Laforgue: “Penche, penche ta chère tête, va, | Regarde les grappes des premiers lilas” [Bend, bend your darling head—come, look at the bunches of the first lilacs], Dimanches: C’est l’automne 61–62. For Laforgue’s poem see note to La Figlia Che Piange 2–3, 7; for Laforgue elsewhere in the present poem see notes in March Hare.
2 6 A distant prospect of: Thomas Gray, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. Byron: “a distant prospect”, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV 285.
2 6, 9–10 the sea · · · patterns · · · the floor: “the sea; | Studies the sunlit pattern on the floor”, Animula 10–11.
2 7 outlines delicate and hard: Symons 71 on Rimbaud: “in whom dream is swift, hard in outline”. delicate and hard: “Visionary, and yet hard”, Interlude: in a Bar 8.
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2 8 gowns that fall from neck and knee: “Arms that lie along a table · · · skirts that trail along the floor”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 67, 102.
2 9 Grey and yellow: “Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose”, Portrait of a Lady III 32 (with “sunsets”, II 12; here “sunset”, 13).
2 12–13 they approve | The abstract sunset: OED “approve” 6: “To pronounce to be good, commend”. Pope: “For fools admire, but men of sense approve”, An Essay on Criticism 391.
2 13 The abstract sunset (rich: Tennyson: “Rich was the rose of sunset there”, The Wreck 136. (rich, not crude): on apparel, Hamlet I iii, POLONIUS: “But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy”. TSE: “rich and modest”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 43 (and note to 113, 116). abstract: OED 4d: “In the fine arts, characterized by lack of or freedom from representational qualities”; the first citation is 1915, Forum (N.Y.), but the New Shorter OED (1993) amalgamates 4d and 4e, adding 1868: “treated after a thoroughly abstract fashion” (on decorative wood carving). The Trésor de la langue française gives “abstrait”, of fine art, in opposition to “expressioniste”, with a 1904 citation. The OED entry of 2014 gives 6: “Fine Art. Designating art which is not founded on an attempt to represent external reality, but rather seeks to achieve an effect on the viewer purely by the use of shape, colour, and texture; of or rel
ating to art of this kind. Also (of an artist, esp. a painter): producing art with these characteristics”, with earliest citation 1851: “Abstract painting, which admits of no faithful imitation of nature, but whose forms and colors, though they have their basis in nature, are yet reduced or invented traditionally or conventionally, or by individual caprice or fancy.” Axis magazine (1935–37) described itself as “A Magazine of Contemporary ‘Abstract’ Painting and Sculpture” until its penultimate issue (Autumn 1936), when the quotation marks around “Abstract” were dropped (Brian Webb and Peyton Skipwith, John Piper, 2013, 32–33).
2 16–17 porcelain, | Murmurs a word: “Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 89.
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3 1 the mandarins: see note to title. OED 1e: “transf. A person of much influence, a great man. Often used colloq. of Government officials, leading politicians or writers, etc.” with 1908: the “mandarins of London letters”. 1b: “A toy representing a grotesque seated figure in Chinese costume, so contrived as to continue nodding for a long time after it is shaken.”
3 1–4 eldest · · · in obese repose · · · Regards: Thomas Gray: “Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm; | Regardless of the sweeping Whirlwind’s sway, | That, hushed in grim repose”, The Bard 74–76 (in The Golden Treasury). repose · · · intellectual double chins · · · nose: Byron: “(dogs have such intellectual noses!)” Don Juan II lviii, rhyming with “reposes”. TSE rhymes “nose” with “repose” in Suite Clownesque I 8–11, again of someone obese (“His belly sparkling and immense”, 14). A Practical Possum 60 variant alts: “repose / Nose”. repose: OED 5b: “Painting, etc. Harmonious arrangement of figures or colours, having a restful effect upon the eye”, from 1695, Dryden. Irving Babbitt praised “vital repose” and defended it against “the romanticists”, The New Laokoon (1910) 229–33 (TSE dated his copy 1910).
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3 4 Regards the corner of his nose: “see the corner of her eye”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 21.
3 5 The cranes that fly: TSE quoted Inf. V 46–48 (tr. diverging from Temple Classics): “And as the cranes go chanting their lays, making themselves a long streak in the air, so I saw the wailing shadows come, wailing, carried on the striving wind”, Dante (1929) I.
3 6 Pert, alert: Pertelote, Chaucer’s hen in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Laforgue rhymes “Meurtres, alertes · · · pertes” [murders, alerts · · · losses] in Complainte de l’automne monotone 29, 33.
3 8 variant Attentive intuitionist: in Eeldrop and Appleplex I (1917), Appleplex reports: “Mrs. Howexden recommends me to read Bergson”, and Eeldrop replies that “A philosophy about intuition is somewhat less likely to be intuitive than any other.” In Sept 1927, the Criterion published TSE’s (signed) translation of Charles Mauron’s Concerning “Intuition”, an attack on Middleton Murry’s “new antinomy · · · Intuition and Intelligence”. Calling Murry “a perfect pupil of his master, Bergson”, TSE wrote in the next Criterion: “I mean that intuition must have its place in a world of discourse; there may be room for intuitions both at the top and the bottom, or at the beginning and the end; but that intuition must always be tested, and capable of test, in a whole of experience in which intellect plays a large part”, Mr. Middleton Murry’s Synthesis (1927).
3 8 variant intellectualist: “just as Bergson is an intellectualist”, Eeldrop and Appleplex I (1917).
3 9 World in fist: OED “fist” 1b: 1400, of Christ: “He .. hooldith the world in his feest”. In iconography there is, for instance, Emile Verhaeren, L’Ivresse [Drunkenness] 7: “Des aigles noirs, tenant le globe entre leurs pattes” [black eagles, holding the globe between their claws]. TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934) includes this volume of Verhaeren, Les Visages de la vie (1899).
3 10 Screen and cranes: as though punning with Fr. écran = screen. Laforgue: “l’écran des horizons” [the screen of horizons], Complainte des Mounis du Mont-Martre [Complaint of the Hindu Ascetics from Montmartre] 50.
3 11 And what of all that one has missed!: Laforgue: “Oh, qu’ils sont pittoresques les trains manqués!” [Missed trains! Oh, how picturesque they are!], O géraniums diaphanes 51. TSE quoted from the poem in The Metaphysical Poets (1921).
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3 12 And how life goes on different planes!: “the errors in question are not simple error, but are formed by the compounding of theories belonging to different planes”, The Relationship between Politics and Metaphysics (1914). different planes: Bergson: “S’il y a ainsi des plans différents, en nombre indéfini” [Just as there are these different planes, indefinite in number], Matière et mémoire (1896) ch. III. The running head for these pages was “Les divers plans de conscience”. TSE: “But ‘the greatest poetry’, like the greatest prose, has a doubleness; the poet is talking to you on two planes at once”, The Wheel of Fire by G. Wilson Knight (1930), Introduction. “The perception of life as on several different planes at once, noticeable in Chapman and Dostoevski · · · Keeping dif. planes intersecting. Intersection of planes of reality has been problem of fiction ever since Bleak House [Wilkie Collins’s novel] Armadale. Became final with Joyce”, Lecture Notes as Norton Professor (1933) fols. 37–38. “We sometimes feel, in following the words and behaviour of some of the characters of Dostoevsky, that they are living at once on the plane that we know and on some other plane of reality from which we are shut out”, John Marston (1934). The Family Reunion II i: “They don’t understand what it is to be awake, | To be living on several planes at once | Though one cannot speak with several voices at once.” For other instances, see notes to this poem in March Hare.
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4 1 pen and ink: to his mother, 19 Jan 1919: “little, very little, can ever filter through to pen and ink of what one feels”.
4 1–2 thought · · · spleen: on Donne: “in this loose and desultory form of Satire he found a type of poetry which could convey his random thoughts and reflections, exercise his gift for phrasing, his interest in the streets of London, his irritability and spleen”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 144 (Clark Lecture V). Donne’s Satire III begins: “Kind pity chokes my spleen”. See note on title Spleen. Laforgue: “Puis rien ne | Saurait faire | Que mon spleen ne chemine | Sous les spleens insulaires | De petites pluies fines” [Besides nothing could prevent my gloom following its course under the individual glooms of the fine drizzle], Le brave, brave automne! 17–20. Austin Dobson:
“That is why, in a mist of spleen,
I mourn on this Nankin Plate.
Ah me, but it might have been!”—
Quoth the little blue mandarin.
On a Nankin Plate 16–19
4 1–3 thought for pen and ink · · · How · · · think: Thomas Hood: “Pray only think for pen and ink | How hard to get along”, Lines in a Young Lady’s Album 9–10 (repr. in A Vers de Société Anthology ed. Carolyn Wells, 1907).
4 4 Who see their outlines on the screen: “They see the outlines of their stage”, Convictions 3. “But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 105. “sees on the screen”, WLComposite 285 ^ 286 [14] variant. OED 1d has, as its first cinematic citation, Moving Picture World (1910): “People .. like to see on the screen what they read about”.
4 4 variant Arrange and comprehend the scene: “You have the scene arrange itself”, Portrait of a Lady I 2.
4 4 variant conscient: Symons 107, of Laforgue: “He sees what he calls l’Inconscient in every gesture.” Symons quoted Autre complainte de Lord Pierrot II: “d’un oeil qui vers l’Inconscient s’emballe” [an eye transported towards the Inconscient], tr. eds. TSE of Laforgue: “It is noticeable how often the words ‘inconscient’, ‘néant’, ‘L’absolu’ and such philosophical terms from the vocabulary of Schopenhauer and Hartmann · · · recur”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 215 (Clark Lecture VIII).
4 5–7 good · · · demoiselles: Byron
: “A dashing demoiselle of good estate”, Don Juan XV xlii.
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4 7–9 demoiselles · · · dragons: OED “demoiselle” 2b: “A dragon-fly”, with 1816: “The name given to them in England, ‘Dragon flies’, seems much more applicable than ‘Demoiselles’ by which the French distinguish them”, and Gosse, 1844: “an acquaintance with these demoiselles”. Corbière has the double sense in Idylle coupée 85 and Rondel II. Remy de Gourmont: “La libellule, joliment appelée la demoiselle” [The dragon-fly, gracefully called “la demoiselle”], Physique de l’amour ch. XIII.
4 8–9 cherry · · · dragons: Tennyson: “To catch a dragon in a cherry net”, The Princess V 162.
4 10 Expanded by the breeze: Pope: “expand thy sails · · · and catch the nimble gales”, Odyssey XII 104–105. Shelley: “the expanded sail”, Alastor 398.
4 10–13 by the breeze · · · gay: Tennyson: “gay · · · by the breeze”, Maud I [iv] 103–104.
4 12 Nor intellectual nor mean: Marvell: “He nothing common did or mean”, An Horatian Ode 57. Nor · · · nor: Measure for Measure III i: “Thou hast nor youth nor age” (epigraph to Gerontion). OED 2b: “Chiefly poet.”; no instance after 1832. For “not … nor”, see note to Little Gidding III 33–34.
4 12–13 Nor intellectual nor mean, | And graceful, not too gay: Wordsworth: “An intellectual ruler in the haunts | Of social vanity, he walked the world, | Gay, and affecting graceful gaiety”, The Excursion II 180–82. not too gay: “London’s a little too gay for us”, Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of a Prologue 148 and 150 (David Chinitz, personal communication).
4 15 How life goes well in pink and green!: “in blue and green”, “green | Going in white and blue”, Ash-Wednesday III 15, IV 3–4.