Goldfish (Essence of Summer Magazines)
Published in March Hare.
Goldfish is dated Sept 1910 at the end, in Notebook.
Title Goldfish: Henry James: “As for the younger persons, of whom there were many, as for the young girls in especial, they were as perfectly in their element as goldfish in a crystal jar: a form of exhibition suggesting but one question or mystery. Was it they who had invented it, or had it inscrutably invented them?” Florida V in The American Scene. (See note to First Debate between the Body and Soul 27.)
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Title I, I 1 Summer Magazines · · · August evenings: Francis Jammes: “J’aime dans les temps Clara · · · qui allait, les soirs chauds · · · lire les magazines d’autrefois” [Through the years I go on loving Clara · · · who walked, on warm evenings · · · reading magazines of bygone days], J’aime dans les temps 1–4 (with “des fins d’Eté” [the ends of summer], 12). In this volume, De l’Angelus de l’aube à l’Angelus du soir (1898)—which appears in TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934)—Jammes describes himself as “moi qui chante les anciens magazines” [I who hymn the ancient magazines], On m’éreinte [They criticise me savagely] 2. (W. G. Tinckom-Fernandez: “It was Eliot who first told me of the Vers Libre movement, of the work of Paul Fort and Francis Jammes”, Harvard Advocate Dec 1938. Both French poets appeared in Poètes d’aujourd’hui.)
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I 1–2 Always the August evenings come | With: “The winter evening settles down | With”, Preludes I 1–2. Laforgue: “Aux soirs d’août”, Clair de lune 4; “ce soir d’août”, Dimanches 23; “En ce soir d’août”, Complainte des blackboulés 15; and “O crépuscules d’août!” Les deux Pigeons.
I 2 With preparation for the waltz: “An Invitation to the Dance”, A Cooking Egg 8 (see note).
I 1–2; IV 7, 17, 20, 37 the August evenings come | With preparation for the waltz · · · October · · · the news from either Pole · · · soul · · · street pianos and small beers!: “Pole · · · soul · · · drink our bocks · · · Reading the comics and the sporting page · · · a Polish dance · · · street piano · · · The October night comes down”, Portrait of a Lady I 8, 10, 40; II 32, 35, 39; III 1.
I 1, 4, 6–8 evenings · · · all · · · call, recall | So many nights and afternoons · · · all: “For I have known them all already, known them all— | Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 49–50.
I 5 The Merry Widow: by Franz Lehar, 1905. Valerie Eliot noted that TSE’s brother “took him to his first Broadway musical, The Merry Widow, which remained a favourite”, Letters (1988) 54. E. N. P. (unidentified) in Harvard Advocate 13 Nov 1908 (which included TSE’s Before Morning): “Now a word about the Merry Widow Waltz. We have always liked this waltz, and we like it still. It is melodious, graceful, seductive. But no mere amateur should attempt it · · · It requires a complete mastery of all the resources of the piano, and an ideal grasp of the aesthetic principle, to interpret it adequately before an intelligent audience.”
I 8 August, with all its faults!: Cowper: “England, with all thy faults, I love thee still— | My country!” The Task II 206–207. Byron: “‘England! with all thy faults I love thee still’, | I said at Calais, and have not forgot it”, Beppo xlvii.
I 8–9 all its faults · · · waltzes: Byron, on Germany: “Who sent us—so be pardoned all her faults, | A dozen Dukes—some Kings, a Queen—and ‘Waltz’”, The Waltz 53–54. all its faults · · · turn, return: Hamlet IV vii: “all his faults · · · turneth wood to stone” (David Coleman, personal communication).
I 9–10 the waltzes turn, return; | The Chocolate Soldier assaults: Byron: “sans armour thou shalt take the field, | And own—impregnable to most assaults, | Thy not too lawfully begotten ‘Waltz’”, The Waltz 12–14. The Chocolate Soldier: operetta by Oskar Straus (performed in Vienna, 1908), adapting Shaw’s Arms and the Man. TSE to Henry Sherek, 3 May 1957: “I sometimes think that Shaw is best at musical comedy for The Chocolate Soldier and My Fair Lady are the only two of his works which I should like to see again and again.”
I 10–11 Soldier assaults | The · · · sphinx: popular belief had it that a French soldier shot off the nose of the Sphinx during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign of 1798. Byron’s The Waltz mentions both “Buonaparte” and Egypt (56, 127). James Thomson: “A warrior leaning on his sword alone | Now watched the sphinx”, The City of Dreadful Night XX 27–28. assaults | The tired: “she is bored and tired · · · he assaults”, The Waste Land [III] 236–39.
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I 11 tired Sphinx: Gautier: “Des sphinx, lassés de l’attitude” [Of sphinxes, tired by the pose], Nostalgies d’obélisques II 31. Emerson: “The Sphinx is drowsy”, The Sphinx 1. Wilde: “my lovely languorous Sphinx!” The Sphinx 13. (In his Introduction to Selected Poems of Marianne Moore (1935), TSE speaks of the “typographical caprice” of internal rhyme in Wilde’s poem.)
I 12 variant that we not discern: syntactically closer than the final reading (“We cannot discern”) to Dante’s “non discerno” (Purg XXVII 129; “discern no further”) with which TSE ended What is a Classic? (1944). Paradiso IX 103: “Non però qui si pente, ma si ride” [Yet here we not repent, but smile]; TSE scored the Italian in the copy his mother gave him.
I 13–15 turn · · · Float and fall, | Like the cigarettes: Tennyson: “The folded leaf · · · turning yellow | Falls, and floats”, The Lotos-Eaters 71–76. Float and fall: John Addington Symonds: “Where dingy lamplight floats and falls”, In the Key of Blue 38.
I 15–16 cigarettes · · · marionettes: Wilde: “Sometimes a horrible marionette | Came out, and smoked its cigarette”, The Harlot’s House (1908) 22–23 (with “waltz”, 32).
II
Title Embarquement pour Cythère: Watteau’s painting (Louvre, submitted 1717) initiated the term fête galante. Baudelaire: “Watteau, ce carnaval où bien des cœurs illustres, | Comme des papillons, errent en flamboyant, | Décors frais et légers éclairés par des lustres | Qui versent la folie à ce bal tournoyant” [Watteau, that carnival in which so many illustrious hearts wander incandescent like butterflies, in cool and frivolous settings, where chandeliers pour down the garish light of madness on the swirling dance], Les Phares [The Beacons] 21–24. Watteau’s Embarquement pour l’Ile de Cythère became Baudelaire’s Un Voyage à Cythère, from which TSE quoted “well-known lines” in Baudelaire in Our Time (1927). TSE queried Symons’s translation of the Baudelaire: “We wonder even whether Mr Symons has not confused · · · Cythera with Cytherea” (this stricture was dropped when TSE reprinted his review in For Lancelot Andrewes).
Symons 107: “In his acceptance of the fragility of things as actually a principle of art, Laforgue is a sort of transformed Watteau, showing his disdain for the world which fascinates him, in quite a different way.” Laforgue: “Et comment quelques couples vraiment distingués | Un soir ici ont débarqué” [and how several really refined couples disembarked here one evening], Cythère 11–12. Also: “Allez, hup! à Cythère!” [Mount! We are leaving this island for an island ruled by the Goddess of Love!], Persée et Andromède; for which, see headnote to Ode (“Tired. | Subterrene”). In Laforgue’s Pierrot Fumiste, Pierrot exclaims: “‘Cochers! Tous à Cythère! Au pays de Watteau!’ (Il remonte dans la voiture. La noce qui était redescendue remonte. On va partir)” [“Coachmen! Everybody to the island ruled by the Goddess of Love! To the land of Watteau!” (He ascends the carriage again. Having once descended, the wedding party ascended again. They are departing)]. Austin Dobson’s After Watteau begins “Embarquonsnous!” and ends:
“Allons, embarquons pour Cythère”;
You will not? Press her, then, PIERROT,—
“Embarquons-nous!”
II 4–5 let us embark— | The night is anything but dark: “Let us go then, you and I, | When the evening is spread out against the sky”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1–2.
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II 5–6 The night is anything but dark, | Almost as clear as day: André Salmon: “ô nuit tendre | Où je vois si clair en mon coeur” [oh tender night where I see so clearly within my heart], Le Festin sous la lune [The Banquet beneath the Moon] (1910) 43–44; with “Des artistes boivent et mangent” [artists drink and eat] 3.
II 11–12 cigarette · · · light it at the evening star: Salmon: “Parmi le clair de lune bleu, | L’autre, moins fou, ne se propose | Que d’allumer sa pipe aux cieux” [In the light of the blue moon, the other, less mad, proposes only to light his pipe at the heavens], Le Festin sous la lune 10–12. Paradise Lost VIII 519–20: “bid haste the evening star | On his hill top, to light the bridal lamp.” evening star: Tennyson: “Sunset and evening star”, Crossing the Bar; with “Turns again · · · dark · · · embark” (TSE: “Embarquement · · · dark · · · return”, title, 5, 9).
II 12–13 star) | To porcelain land, what avatar: Browning: “Oh, never star | Was lost here but it rose afar! · · · In Vishnu-land what Avatar?” conclusion of Waring, a story of embarkation. porcelain land: “the porcelain department”, In the Department Store 1 (see note).
II 13–14 land · · · blue-: Jean Lorrain (embarking for “Cythère”): “bleu pays”, Embarquement (1887) 5, 26. The poem is in the edition of Poètes d’aujourd’hui that TSE owned.
II 13, 15 avatar · · · Philosophy: “It becomes clear after a little inspection that this type of thought, the Word made Flesh, so to speak, is more restricted in the times and places of its avatar than is immediately evident”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 54 (Clark Lecture I).
II 14 blue-delft-romance: blue delft is invoked in Laforgue’s mockery of romance, Le Miracle des roses, as the heroine’s inkwell: “Ruth était exorcisée de ses hallucinations, et pouvait désormais s’adonner sans partage au seul et pur travail de sa tuberculose, dont elle reprit le journal d’une plume trempée dans un encrier à fleurs bleues genre Delft” [Ruth was exorcised of her hallucinations, and from that day she could give herself entirely to the duties of her consumption, whose record she began again with a pen dipped in a blue-flowered ink-well manufactured at Delft].
II 15 Philosophy through a paper straw: Swinburne: “and she | Drank lightly deep of his philosophy | In that warm wine of amorous words which is | Sweet with all truths of all philosophies”, The Queen’s Pleasance. Meredith: “through, | To teach philosophers the thirst of thieves”, A Ballad of Fair Ladies in Revolt 4–5 (TSE: “Ladies” II 1). For Meredith’s poem, see note to III 7. TSE: “the philosophy of Aristotle strained through the schools”, Dante (1920). “Even philosophy, when divorced from theology and from the knowledge of life and of ascertainable facts, is but a famishing pabulum, or a draught stimulating for a moment, leaving behind drought and disillusion”, Modern Education and the Classics (1932). Conrad Aiken recalled the sing-song of their Harvard friend W. G. Tinckom-Fernandez with his “exquisite English diction—‘a cup of chocolate—one farthing is the rate—you suck it through a straw, a straw, a straw’”, Ushant (1952) 135.
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III 2 have the call: OED “call” 14b: “to be in chief or greatest demand; to be the favourite: in Long Whist, to be entitled to ‘call honours’”; from 1840: “Youth has the call”.
III 3 White flannel ceremonial: “I shall wear white flannel trousers”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 123. ceremonial: including OED 4: “A robe or garment worn on some ceremonial occasion (obs.)”
III 4 With cakes and tea: “after tea and cakes and ices”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 79.
III 5 guesses at eternal truths: Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers (Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, 1827, much reprinted). Symons on Réjane’s acting: “It is like an accusing confirmation of some of one’s guesses at truth, before the realities of the flesh and of the affections of the flesh. Scepticism is no longer possible”, Plays, Acting, and Music (1903) 45. eternal truths: “And with the eternal truth the local error”, Little Gidding II 67–96 second venture in verse (msB) [21]. eternal: for “infinite and eternal”, see note to Ash-Wednesday IV 6.
III 6 Sounding the depths with a silver spoon: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 51. TSE to Frank Morley, 4 Aug 1938: “I hope you liked the spoon · · · S. Paul, S. Augustine, and of course S. John of the Cross · · · I should be glad to think that that spoon might be of use · · · S. John of the Cross (I hope that you can make some use of that spoon) · · · As for the abyss (do you think you can make any use of that spoon?) the ordinary mistake is to think that ‘Religion’ saves one from it.” with a silver spoon: OED “spoon” 3c: “to be born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth, to be born in affluent or lucky auspices” from 1801 (the first citation being American).
III 7 And dusty roses · · · sunlight: “a paper rose, | That smells of dust”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 57–58. “Dust in sunlight”, A Song for Simeon 6. “Sudden in a shaft of sunlight | Even while the dust moves”, Burnt Norton V 33–34. “Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves”, Burnt Norton I 17. sunlight on the sea: Meredith: “But now they dream like sunlight on a sea”, A Ballad of Fair Ladies in Revolt 22. TSE: “Pleasure in the wind, the sunlight and the sea”, Animula 10.
III 11 Essence of summer magazines: Laforgue: “deux dames-jeannes d’essences-bouquets de printemps et d’automne” [two demijohns of essence of spring and autumn], Salomé.
III 13–15 How much · · · How much · · · How much one means: “A hero! and how much it means; | How much—”, Mandarins 1 13–14. “‘You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends, | And how, how rare · · ·’”, Portrait of a Lady I 19–20. knows · · · means: Tennyson: “Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean”, The Princess IV 21.
III 18, 20 Play · · · conscience · · · crown: HAMLET: “The play’s the thing | Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” (II ii).
III 19 means and ways: OED “ways” records that “ways and means” formerly took this form (last citation, 1561: Hoby tr. Castiglione’s Courtyer “Ech honest louer .. vseth so manye meanes and wayes to please the woman whome hee loueth”).
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III 20 wear the crown: Tennyson: “Of those that wear the Poet’s crown”, To ——, After Reading a Life and Letters 10.
III 20, 22 crown of your ideal · · · rose: Tennyson: “as though there were | One rose in all the world, your Highness that, | He worships your ideal”, The Princess II 36–38.
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IV 3, 6 Old letters, programmes, unpaid bills · · · The limbo of a bureau drawer: Baudelaire: “Un gros meuble à tiroirs encombré de bilans, | De vers, de billets doux, de procés, de romances, | Avec de lourds cheveux roulés dans des quittances, | Cache moins de secrets que mon triste cerveau” [Even an enormous chest of drawers stuffed with accounts and verses, love-letters and law-suits, drawing-room ballads, and heavy plaits of hair rolled in receipts, has fewer secrets to hide than has my unhappy brain], Spleen (“J’ai plus de souvenirs”) 1–5. bureau drawer: at the line-ending: “He likes to lie in the bureau drawer”, The Rum Tum Tugger 16.
IV 9 Barcarolle: OED: “A song sung by Venetian barcaruoli as they row their gondolas; a song or piece of music composed in imitation or reminiscence of such songs.” Often invoked by 19th-century French poets. Gautier has Barcarolle; the first poem in the first book of poems by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam is Barcarolle; and Verlaine’s A Clymène begins: “Mystiques barcarolles”. Laurent Tailhade: “Combien qu’autour d’eux la Seine | Regorge de chiens crevés” [How often around them the Seine throws up dead dogs], Barcarolle 5–6, included in the anthology Poètes d’aujourd’hui (TSE: “barking”, IV 11). Apollinaire: “La barque au barcarols chantants” [The barque with barcarolles being sung], La Chanson du Mal-Aimé [Song of the Ill-loved] final sec
tion, 22 (TSE: “barking”, 11). For Apollinaire’s poem, see note to Interlude in London 1. Eric Griffiths (personal communication): “Given his other allusions in this period to Chopin, TSE may have had in mind Op. 60, but the Barcarolle from act IV of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann may also be relevant, with the mechanical doll in act II (‘marionettes’, 15) and the resurrected mother of act III (‘leave their graves’, 15).”
IV 10 wet paths: Homeric. Shelley: “watery paths”, and shapes “Which walk upon the sea”, Prometheus Unbound II v 106, 110.
IV 10–11, 14 the sea · · · barking waves · · · the neuropathic: Symons 12–13 on Gérard de Nerval: “and when, one day, he was found in the Palais-Royal, leading a lobster at the end of a blue ribbon (because, he said, it does not bark, and knows the secrets of the sea), the visionary had simply lost control of his visions, and had to be sent to Dr. Blanche’s asylum.” barking waves: Milton: “Scylla wept, | And chid her barking waves into attention”, Comus 257–58. Kirke White: “He had words | To soothe the barking waves”, Christmas-Day (c. 1800, OED). waves pursue: Milton: “Like waves they me pursue”, Psalm LXXXVIII 68.
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IV 14 neuropathic winds: Apollinaire: “au vent dément” [in the mad wind], Les Colchiques [The Crocuses] (1907) 12. OED: “Relating to, or caused or distinguished by nervous disease or functional weakness of the nervous system”, from 1857; the citations are strictly medical. Laforgue has “les névropathes” four times within four paragraphs of Le Miracle des roses. renew: Shelley: “The earth doth like a snake renew | Her winter weeds outworn” and “Although a subtler Sphinx renew | Riddles of death Thebes never knew”, Chorus, Hellas 1062–63, 1082–83, the first quoted by TSE in John Dryden (1921) and The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 174 (Clark Lecture VI). Shelley’s Chorus (“The world’s great age begins anew”) was printed on its own in Oxf Bk of English Verse.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 166