III 10–11 of the modern time | Improved and up to date—sublime: Tennyson: “If, in thy second state sublime · · · The perfect flower of human time”, In Memoriam LXI 1, 4. TSE: “Tennyson lived in a time which was already acutely time-conscious · · · a time busy in keeping up to date”, In Memoriam (1936). TSE knew the rhyme also in The Subway Express (words, James O’Dea; music, Jerome Kern), which he quoted to Virginia Woolf, [6 Jan] 1935:
I have another good song, it goes:
I met you first at Spring St.
And then upon my word
I thought I’d known you all my life
When we reached 23d.
I won your heart at Haarlem,
At the Bronx you murmured Yes:
We lost no time
On that ride sublime
On the Subway
Express.
[Poem I 251 · Textual History II 572]
III 11 up to date: recent in the slangy sense. OED “date” 7, from 1890, with 1893: “who invented the Gaiety burlesque ‘up to date’—and gave this detestable phrase to the language”. OED “up to date”: “abreast of the times”, citing W. S. Gilbert, The Gondoliers (1889), “A Grand Inquisitor is always up to date”; and Daily News (1894), “keep them, as the odious modern phrase is, up to date” (1894). TSE: “In a world which is chiefly occupied with the task of keeping up to date with itself”, Imperfect Critics (1919). “Many people give the appearance of progress by shedding the prejudices and irrational postulates of one generation only to acquire those of the next: by ‘keeping up to date’”, Paul Elmer More (1937). But the Criterion of May 1927, announcing a change to monthly publication, declared that it was to be “up-to-time in its appreciation of modern literature”.
III 12 Quite at home in the universe: Tennyson: “Quite sundered from the moving Universe”, The Princess VII 37, with “Deeper”, 36 (TSE: “depths”, 12 ^ 13 variant). TSE: “Do I dare | Disturb the universe?” The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 45–46. at home: OED 11c: “At one’s ease”, citing Tindale, 1528: “The mayde was at home also in heuenly pleasures.” (Hegel: “Nature is a system of known and recognized Laws; Man is at home in it, and that only passes for truth in which he finds himself at home”, Lectures on the Philosophy of History 459. TSE underlined “that · · · home” in his copy.)
III 12 ^ 13 variant Seen from the depths of: Tennyson: “Tears from the depth of some divine despair”, The Princess IV 22.
III 13 Shaking cocktails on a hearse: Wilde: “The troubled plumes of midnight shook | The plumes upon a hearse: | And bitter wine”, The Ballad of Reading Gaol III xviii (for which, see notes to Rhapsody on a Windy Night 9–12 and 11). TSE: “Where’s a cocktail shaker, Ben, here’s plenty of cracked ice”, WLComposite 554. To Polly Tandy, 31 May 1935: “Jellicle cats & dogs all must | Like cocktail mixers, come to dust” (see Five-Finger Exercises II. Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier 10–12).
III 14 ^ 15 stage direction sandboard: not given as a musical instrument in OED or Webster’s Dictionary, so perhaps part of the hearse: OED 2: “Mech. On a vehicle: a sturdy wooden bar running parallel to and above an axle”, 1867, with “in car-building, a spring-plank”, 1895. For music, also “washboard”, OED 3c: “used as a percussion instrument”. bones: OED: “pieces of bone struck or rattled, to make rude music; esp. two pieces of bone or ivory held between the fingers of each hand and rattled together as an accompaniment to the banjo or other instrument; chiefly used by ‘nigger minstrels’”. Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of an Agon, Song, stage-direction: “Swarts as Tambo. Snow as Bones”. W. S. Gilbert in The Bab Ballads: “The first was a highly-accomplished ‘bones’”, The Three Kings of Chickeraboo 5.
III 15, 16, 23 walking on the beach · · · the girls · · · flannel suit: “I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach · · · sea-girls”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 123, 130.
III 21 the absolute: see notes to Conversation Galante 14 and Afternoon 9.
III 21, 23 First born child · · · quintessential: Paradise Lost III 1, 6: “offspring of Heaven first-born · · · bright essence”. Milton has “quintessence”, both atIII 716, “And this ethereal quintessence of Heaven”, and (with “first”) at VII 244–45: “Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure | Sprung from the deep” (TSE: “depths”, 12 ^ 13 variant). quintessential: slangy, OED: “Eldon’s quintessential Toryism”, 1887.
III 22 complete: see note to the opening line of Mandarins, “Stands there, complete”.
[Poem I 251 · Textual History II 572–73]
III 24–25 nothing the matter with us! | —But say, just be serious: Laforgue: “J’aurai un: ‘Ah ça, mais, nous avions De Quoi vivre! | C’était donc sérieux?’” [I’ll react with a: “Drat it, we had the Wherewithal to live on! Was it serious after all?”], closing Autre complainte de Lord Pierrot (see note to Portrait of a Lady III 31). In his Hamlet, Laforgue follows “devenu si sérieux” with “soyons sérieux ici!” TSE’s Nocturne begins: “Romeo, grand sérieux”. Conversation Galante ends “And—‘Are we then so serious?’”
IV
IV 5 Columbine: OED: “A character in Italian Comedy, the mistress of Harlequin, transferred to our Pantomime or Harlequinade”. Verlaine’s Colombine is from the same sequence—Fêtes galantes (1869)—as Le Faune, which influenced Suite Clownesque I (see note to I 2–4).
IV 6 hat in hand: Symons 109, on Laforgue: “He composes love-poems hat in hand.” TSE: “Guitar and hat in hand”, Nocturne 2. “hat and gloves in hand”, Spleen 13.
IV 6, 8 hand · · · saraband: Lovelace: “So you but with a touch from your fair hand, | Turn all to saraband”, To Lucasta: I laugh and sing. When it was suggested that the name Lucasta Angel in The Confidential Clerk should be changed, TSE cited Lovelace (Sackton H75–79).
IV 6, 9 hand · · · The discovered masquerades: “the other masquerades · · · hands”, Preludes II 6–8 (David Chinitz, personal communication).
IV 12 dense: “It is this contrast between the tenuous and the dense which is the contrast between thought and reality · · · a loss of density and richness · · · the greatest philosophies have themselves something of this density and richness, and consequently are · · · almost as difficult and inexhaustible as the world itself”, The Validity of Artificial Distinctions (1914), the first remark being added in the margin.
IV 14 Explodes in laughter: OED “explode” 5b (“To ‘go off’ with a loud noise · · · trans. and fig.”) has this idiom from 1867: “made the crowd explode with laughter”. OED 1a. (Obs.): “To clap and hoot (a player, play, etc.) off the stage”. Paradise Lost X 545–46: “Thus was the applause they meant, | Turned to exploding hiss, triumph to shame”.
The Triumph of Bullshit
Published in March Hare.
Dated Nov. 1910, ms1.
Wyndham Lewis to Pound, [Jan 1915]: “Eliot has sent me Bullshit the Ballad for Big Louise [Ballade pour la grosse Lulu]. They are excellent bits of scholarly ribaldry. I am longing to print them in Blast; but stick to my naif determination to have no ‘Words Ending in -Uck, -Unt and -Ugger.’” Pound replied, [Jan 1915]: “I dare say Eliot will consent to having blanks for the offending words”, but neither poem was published. (Three lines of Pound’s Fratres Minores had been inked over by hand in each copy of the first issue of Blast (June 1914) at the insistence of the publisher, John Lane; O’Keeffe 155–56.)
[Poems I 251–52 · Textual History II 573]
Consisting (strictly) of three stanzas with the same final line and a shorter envoi, the ballade form was scabrously used by François Villon.
Title Triumph of: invoking the tradition of Petrarch’s Triumphs, and then Shelley’s The Triumph of Life and Swinburne’s The Triumph of Time. Bullshit: OED records this first from Wyndham Lewis’s letter to Pound. Partridge: “mostly Australian”. In his copy of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History 431, TSE underlined the words here italicised: “The time-honoured and cherished sincerity of the German people is desti
ned to effect this revolution out of the honest truth and simplicity of its heart”, and wrote in the margin: “BULL”.
6 galamatias: OED “galimatias”: “Confused language, meaningless talk, nonsense”, citing 1653 Urquhart’s Rabelais I ii, “A Galimatia of extravagant conceits.”
9–13] Ottoline Morrell on TSE in 1916: “highly polite and conventional and decorous, and meticulous. I tried to get him to talk more freely by talking French to him, as I thought he might feel freer doing so, but I don’t think it was a great success, although better than English. He speaks French very perfectly, slowly and correctly” (Morrell 1974 101–102). See headnote to “Poems (1920)”, 5. TSE’S PROFICIENCY IN FRENCH.
10, 12 gauche · · · brioche: Laforgue liked off-rhymes on “brioche”: “crèche · · · brioche”, Lunes en détresse 6, 8; “dimanches · · · blanches · · · brioches”, Dimanches: Bref, j’allais 23, 24, 26.
14 attenuate: as participial, Meredith: “The idea is too exquisitely attenuate”, The Egoist (OED).
15 isiculous: formed from an icicle (OED records the obsolete spelling “isicle”).
18 cabotin: OED: “A low-class actor”, 1903. Laforgue of Corbière: “Jamais Cabotin, jamais”, Dragées: Charles Baudelaire, Tristan Corbière (1920) 168. Irving Babbitt on Ernest Renan: “Literature seemed to him to have been invaded by that instinct for posing and stage effect to which, in its lower forms, the French give the name of cabotinage. It would not be easy to exaggerate this element in French character, especially since Rousseau and the romanticists · · · Nero—the imperial cabotin”, The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912) 294.
25–28] FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:
And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass
Among the Guests Star-scatter’d on the Grass,
And in thy joyous Errand reach the Spot
Where I made one—turn down an empty Glass!
(Likewise the concluding lines.) TSE’s first reading had “Among the guests star-scattered on the grass” (see Textual History). For his writing “gloomy quatrains in the form of the Rubáiyát”, see headnote to “Uncollected Poems”, 2. POEMS WRITTEN IN EARLY YOUTH.
26 Theories scattered: the world “swarms with inchoate theories which ultimately perhaps mean the same thing—at the point where all meanings are lost”, The Validity of Artificial Distinctions (1914).
[Poem I 252–53 · Textual History II 573]
25, 28 variant And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass · · · You have the right to stick them up my ass: “Now that we talk of dying— | And should I have the right to smile?” Portrait of a Lady, likewise as the conclusion. All three full stanzas of The Triumph of Bullshit begin with ladies.
Fourth Caprice in Montparnasse
Published in March Hare.
Dated Dec 1910 in Notebook.
Title Fourth: TSE either did not write or did not preserve a Third Caprice. Caprice in Montparnasse: Charles-Louis Philippe on married men thinking of the prostitutes of Montparnasse: “Une petite aventure, un sourire, un caprice pour celle qui passe” [A little adventure, a smile, a moment’s caprice with the girl passing by], Bubu de Montparnasse ch. VII.
1 We turn the corner of the street: Philippe: “Every street-corner spoke to them of memories”, Bubu of Montparnasse ch. VII. TSE: “And at the corner of the street”, Preludes I 11.
1, 7 street · · · blackened trees: “The conscience of a blackened street”, Preludes IV 8.
1, 11 We turn the corner of the street · · · Hand in pocket: Apollinaire: “mains dans les poches · · · Au tournant d’une rue brûlant” [hand in pockets · · · at the corner of a street that was burning hot], La Chanson du Mal-Aimé [The Song of the Ill-Loved] 7, 16. See note to Rhapsody on a Windy Night 16–21.
9 Like mendicants without regrets: Baudelaire: “Et nous alimentons nos aimables remords, | Comme les mendiants nourrissent leur vermine” [And we nourish our fond remorses as beggars suckle their own lice], Au lecteur [To the Reader] 3–4; see The Waste Land [I] 76.
9, 13 regrets · · · Among such scattered thoughts: “Among velleities and carefully caught regrets”, Portrait of a Lady I 15.
11 Hand in pocket, undecided: Laforgue: “Les mains dans les poches, | Le long de la route · · · Sans que tu t’en doutes!” [Hands in pockets, right down the road · · · though you don’t expect it!], Locutions des Pierrots XIV.
11, 15 undecided · · · hard to please: Scott: “O Woman! in our hours of ease, | Uncertain, coy, and hard to please”, Marmion VI xxx.
12 Indifferent if derided: “Which still are unreproved, if undesired · · · And makes a welcome of indifference”, The Waste Land [III] 238, 242.
13–14 scattered · · · corner · · · street: Donne: “scattered in corners of each street do lye”, The Lamentations of Jeremy 272 (with “stand · · · hand”, 275–76; TSE, 8, 11).
[Poems I 253–54 · Textual History II 573–74]
15, draft lines after 15 why are we so hard to please? | The world is full of: Robert Louis Stevenson: “The world is so full of a number of things, | I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings”, Happy Thought in A Child’s Garden of Verses, a collection listed by TSE on his Syllabus: Modern English Literature: Second Year’s Work (1917). “while the mind of man has altered [since 1890], verse has stood still; and the majority of our poets can only touch us as a Child’s Garden of Verses, a heavy trifling; they have nothing to say to the adult, sophisticated, civilized mind; are quite unaware of its tragedies and ecstasies”, A Note on Ezra Pound (1918). why are we so hard to please · · · universities: Laforgue: “l’Université · · · Je m’ennuie, nous nous ennuyons tant! n’est-ce pas, messieurs?” [the University · · · I am tired. All of us are so tired, aren’t we, Gentlemen?], Salomé.
draft lines after 15 The world is · · · full of universities: on William James: “But James has an exceptional quality of always leaving his reader with the feeling that the world is full of possibilities—in a philosopher, a rare and valuable quality”, William James on Immortality (1917). To Conrad Aiken, 16 Nov 1914: “University towns, my dear fellow, are the same all over the world; only they order these matters better in Oxford.” (Sterne: “—They order, said I, these matters better in France—”, A Sentimental Journey opening words.) 31 Dec: “As you know, I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere”. journalists · · · universities: “En Amérique, professeur; | En Angleterre, journaliste”, Mélange Adultère de Tout 1–2.
Inside the gloom
Published in March Hare.
The handwriting suggests a date at the end of 1910.
Laforgue similarly contemplates the heavens in fourteen sardonic couplets, with a rhythm resembling that of TSE’s opening couplets:
Lune bénie
Des insomnies,
Blanc médaillon
Des Endymions,
Astre fossile
Que tout exile
[Blessed moon of insomnias, | White medallion of Endymions, | Fossil star which everything banishes] Litanies des premiers quartiers de la lune [Litanies of the first two quarters of the moon].
TSE returned to the constellations and to gloom: “Death and the Raven drift above · · · Gloomy Orion and the Dog”, Sweeney Among the Nightingales 7–9. Again: “the drift of stars · · · the boarhound and the boar · · · among the stars”, Burnt Norton II 8–15, and “rolling stars · · · and Leonids fly”, East Coker II 8–13.
1–2 Inside the gloom · · · room: “in its · · · gloom · · · drawing-room”, Whispers of Immortality 26–28. “in its own gloom · · · in a dusty room”, Animula 29–30.
[Poems I 254 · Textual History II 574]
1, 3, 4 gloom · · · constellations · · · stations: W. S. Gilbert’s Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old (prod. 1871), begins with a Chorus of Stars: “Throughout the night | The constellations | Have given light | From various stations · · · midnight gloom”.
4 Took up
their stations: “we took up | Our positions”, Defence of the Islands [21–22].
9 tail on fire: legend has it that when ringed with fire, the scorpion stings itself to death with its tail.
11 Cassiopea: mentioned, along with the Great Bear and other constellations, at the close of Laforgue’s Persée et Andromède, which TSE adapted in Ode (“Tired. | Subterrene”).
11–12 Cassiopea | Explained the Pure Idea: Paradise Lost VII 557, the Creation: “Answering his great idea”. Tennyson: “Ida, Ida, Ida · · · Ida · · · Cassiopeia”, The Princess IV 413–18. the Pure Idea: “And yet devoted to the pure idea · · · The pure Idea dies of inanition”, First Debate between the Body and Soul 8, 15 (see notes).
13 Major Bear: Ursa Major. See note to Gerontion 68, “the shuddering Bear”. When he was ten, TSE’s magazine Fireside (No. 13–14, Feb 1899) included chapters of A Voyage to the Great Bear.
13 variant, 27 The dancing bear · · · chattered: “Like a dancing bear · · · chatter”, Portrait of a Lady III 28–29.
14 Balanced a chair: as at a circus, balancing a chair on its nose. Paradise Lost IV 1000: “balanced air”, with the astronomical “scorpion” two lines earlier (TSE, 7). chair: Cassiopeia, invoked in the previous couplet, is the Lady’s Chair (rhymed by Hardy with “Greater Bear” in Shut out that moon, 1909).
16 intellection: OED 1: “the exercise or activity of the intellect”. 1b: “Applied spec. to the kind of immediate knowledge or intelligence ascribed to divine or angelic beings. Obs.” Common to English and French. Berkeley, 1732: “As reason is of kind peculiar to man, so by intellection he [Pico of Mirandola] understands a kind or manner of knowledge peculiar to angels”. TSE on Marianne Moore: “To the moderately intellectual the poems may appear to be intellectual exercises; only to those whose intellection moves more easily will they immediately appear to have emotional value”, Selected Poems of Marianne Moore (1935), Introduction.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 168