The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 178
[Poem I 276–77 · Textual History II 591]
Squire wrote that after several readings of The Waste Land, he was “still unable to make head or tail of it”, despite the impression that “Mr. Eliot does mean something by it, has been at great pains to express himself, and believes himself to be exploring a new avenue · · · Mr. Eliot believes the poem to be about the decay of Western civilisation and his own utter sickness with life · · · A grunt would serve equally well”, London Mercury Oct 1923. For his review of 1925, see headnote to Ash-Wednesday II.
Title Airs of Palestine: John Pierpont, who had attended Harvard Divinity School, established his reputation as a poet with Airs of Palestine (1816, new ed. 1840); see note to 25. No. 2: as a sequel to Pierpont and, in the context of journalism, as though an issue number. Also OED “number” 5f: “number one, a children’s word or euphemism for ‘urine’; similarly number two for ‘fæces’”, citing 1902, “Number two. (nursery). Evacuation.”
1 God from a Cloud to Spender spoke: Exodus 24: 16: “and the seventh day he called unto Moses out of the midst of the cloud”. J. A. Spender edited the Westminster Gazette (founded 1893) from 1896 to 1922: “one of the most remarkable editorships in British journalism”, DNB. Spender in 1940: “Eliot, on his own showing, requires the reading of a whole reference library for the understanding of his Waste Land. I say to him, this may be a curious and interesting new literary product, but there is no definition of poetry to which it corresponds” (Wilson Harris, J. A. Spender, 1946, 60). Stephen Spender was his nephew.
2–3 And breathed command: “Take thou this Rod, | And smite therewith the living Rock”: Numbers 20: 8–11: “And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Take the rod · · · And Moses took the rod from before the Lord, as he commanded him · · · And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly.” Exodus 17: 5–6: “thy rod · · · take in thine hand · · · and thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it”. Browning: “He who smites the rock and spreads the water | Bidding drink and live a crowd beneath him”, One Word More [10] 74–75. TSE quoted from Browning’s poem in a letter to Scofield Thayer, 7 May 1916. the living Rock: OED “living” 2d: “Of rock, stone: Native, in its native condition and site, as part of the earth’s crust.” Widespread, including Wordsworth, Joanna Baillie and Tennyson. From the living Rock there might have issued living waters (biblical; OED 2d (a): “constantly flowing; also refreshing”).
5–6 Cloud · · · the swart tempestuous blast: Shakespeare: “clouds · · · the swart-complexioned night”, Sonnet 28 (in Oxf Bk of English Verse).
6 Riding the · · · blast: Macbeth I vii: “striding the blast”. For the same speech see note to Ode (“Tired. | Subterrene”) 20 (Mahaffey).
9 struck the · · · Rock: Baudelaire: “Je te frapperai · · · Comme Moïse le rocher!” [I shall strike you · · · as Moses struck the rock], L’Héautontimorouménos [The Self-Punisher] 1, 3. Arnold: “Youth rambles on life’s arid mount, | And strikes the rock, and finds the vein”, The Progress of Poesy 1–2.
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11–12 henceforth at twelve o’clock | Issues: the Westminster Gazette was issued at mid-day; Baedeker listed it first of the six “leading evening papers”. Paradise Lost VI 9–10: “Light issues forth, and at the other door | Obsequious darkness enters, till her hour”. Noon is the hour of the Fall in Paradise Lost. Issues: Ezekiel 47: 1, 8, 12: “and, behold, waters issued out from under the threshold · · · These waters issue out toward the east country · · · because their waters they issued out of the sanctuary”. TSE: “‘Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul’”, Animula 1.
13–15 Swift · · · pen · · · viscid torrents · · · dogs: Swift’s A Description of a City Shower, published in The Tatler, has torrential floods in London’s streets feeding into the notorious Fleet ditch at Holborn Bridge, with “Sweepings from Butcher’s Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood, | Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud” (61–62). Pope:
To where Fleet-ditch with disemboguing streams
Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames,
The King of dykes! than whom no sluice of mud
With deeper sable blots the silver flood · · ·
Who flings most filth, and wide pollutes around
The stream, be his the Weekly Journals bound
The Dunciad (1742) II 271–74, 279–80
Fleet ditch, the underground river, gave its name to Fleet Street and hence to “gutter journalism” and “gutter press” (OED, from 1888 and 1899). For the Thames and journalistic corruption (The Spectator) see Le Directeur 1–5 and notes. For Tailhade, “the Seine throws up dead dogs”, see note to Goldfish IV 9.
14 The viscid torrents: the rivers of Hell, Paradise Lost II 577–81, particularly “Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate” and “fierce Phlegeton | Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage”.
14–15 torrents · · · dogs and men: Pope: “streams · · · And men and dogs shall drink him till they burst”, Epistle to Bathurst 177–78. dogs and men: frequently together in the Iliad (Pope’s tr.: “dogs, and voice of men”, XII 164; “dogs and men”, XIII 600; “men and dogs”, XV 308; “the dogs, the men”, XVIII 673). TSE: “the Dog · · · that’s friend to men”, The Waste Land [I] 74.
14–20 The viscid torrents · · · long lanes · · · Bubble those floods of bilious green: Tennyson: “a tide of fierce | Invective seemed to wait behind her lips, | As waits a river level with the dam | Ready to burst and flood the world with foam · · · Long lanes of splendour slanted o’er a press”, The Princess IV 450–57. TSE: “Subterrene laughter · · · bubbling · · · river”, Ode (“Tired. | Subterrene”) 2–5. long lanes: Long Lane runs through what was a working-class area of Southwark.
15–19 of dogs · · · Canning Town and Rotherhithe · · · Bermondsey · · · Wapping Stair · · · Clapham Junction · · · Sheen · · · Leicester · · · Grosvenor Square: on John Davidson: “I have a fellow feeling with the poet who could look with a poet’s eye on the Isle of Dogs and Millwall Dock”, John Davidson (1961). (“Down Greenwich reach | Past the Isle of Dogs”, The Waste Land [III] 275–76.) Wapping Stair: see note to Billy M’Caw: The Remarkable Parrot 33–34.
18–21 Sheen · · · green · · · street of gems: Milton, Comus 893–97 (extracted in Oxf Bk of English Verse):
Thick set with agate, and the azurn sheen
Of turkis blue, and emerald green
That in the channel strays,
Whilst from off the waters fleet
Thus I set my printless feet
[Poem I 276–77 · Textual History II 591]
John Gray: “EMERALD, exceeding green, | Doth present an olive sheen”, The Twelve Precious Stones (1896). Sheen · · · green: Shelley: “And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green | As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen”, The Question 31–32 (in Oxf Bk of English Verse).
20 bilious green: the Westminster Gazette was printed on green paper “which Carlyle would probably have considered a compliment to Robespierre’s complexion” (Spectator 11 Feb 1893). William Morris: “Still beaten by the billows green”, The Life and Death of Jason bk. IV 594, with “two fair streams · · · Drawn down unto the restless sea”, 589–91 (extracted in Oxf Bk English Verse; see note to 27). Baudelaire’s Spleen (“Je suis comme le roi”) ends with: “l’eau verte du Léthé” [Lethe’s green tide]. Pope: “what street, what lane but knows, | Our purgings · · · And the fresh vomit run for ever green”, The Dunciad (1742) II 153–56 (TSE: “lanes”). Shelley: “London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow · · · Vomits its wrecks”, Letter to Maria Gisborne 193–94.
21 Old Bond Street, the street of gems: home to many jewellery firms.
21, 23 gems · · · Thames: rhymed in Spenser’s Prothalamion 11–14. For Spenser’s refrain, “sweet Thames run softly, till I end my Song”, see note to The Waste Land [III] 175–84.<
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21–27 gems · · · the torrent flows · · · pearly wall · · · Mary’s garden: commonplaces of hymns such as The New Jerusalem: “Thy walls are made of precious stones · · · Thy gates are of right orient pearl · · · Thy gardens · · · Quite through the streets, with silver sound, | The flood of Life doth flow · · · Our Lady sings Magnificat” (in Oxf Bk of English Verse). For this anonymous hymn, derived from Revelation 21–22, see note to The Waste Land [III] 231.
25 the torrent flows: John Pierpont: “see at his foot, the cool Cephissus flow”, “On Arno’s bosom, as he calmly flows”, Airs of Palestine 70, 569.
27 Wherein, by Mary’s garden close: close by / garden close. In Andrew Marvell (1927), TSE quoted the first five lines of what, following Oxf Bk of English Verse, he called The Nymph’s Song to Hylas by William Morris, beginning: “I know a little garden close | Set thick with lily and red rose” (The Life and Death of Jason bk. IV 577–79). OED “close” 2d: “The precinct of any sacred place”, with pronunciation “as in the adj.” Despite this, the rhyme “garden close · · · rose” appeared in both Wilde’s Panthea and John Gray’s Fleurs: Imitated from the French of Stéphane Mallarmé, and TSE here rhymes “flows · · · garden close”.
31 all their sin: Milton, Psalm LXXXV 7.
32 navel: Proverbs 3: 7: “fear the Lord · · · it shall be health to thy navel”.
34 Attain · · · the farther shore: OED “attain” 6: “to arrive at”, with 1585: “We quickly shall attain the English shore”; 1854: “attained the opposite shore”. Pope’s Homer: “Now give thy hand, for to the farther shore”, Iliad XXIII 93. Virgil, of the dead in the underworld: “stabant orantes primi transmittere cursum | tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore” [They stood, pleading to be the first ferried across, and stretched out hands in yearning for the farther shore], Aeneid VI 313–14. TSE: “Here between the hither and the farther shore”, The Dry Salvages III 29.
35 Cleansed and rejoiced: “But every week we hear rejoice · · · Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean”, The Hippopotamus 19, 29.
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35–36 rejoiced · · · the Germans: The Education of Henry Adams ch. XX: “Germany was never so powerful, and the Assistant Professor of History had nothing else as his stock in trade. He imposed Germany on his scholars with a heavy hand. He was rejoiced.”
36 hate the Germans: this, despite Spender’s having been considered a German sympathiser before the war.
37–38 redeemed from · · · frowardness: Tennyson: “Redeemed it from the charge of nothingness”, Morte d’Arthur: The Epic 279. frowardness: Proverbs: “the frowardness of the wicked”, 2: 14; “Frowardness is in his heart”, 6: 14; “the mouth of the wicked speaketh frowardness”, 10: 32.
39 The scales are fallen from their eyes: Acts 9: 18: “And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized” (TSE: “Cleansed”, 35).
Petit Epître
Published in March Hare.
Assigned to Mar–Oct 1917 by Rainey 198. TSE wrote to his mother, 11 Apr 1917, that besides his lectures and reviewing, he had “been doing some writing—mostly in French, curiously enough it has taken me that way—and some poems in French which will come out in the Little Review in Chicago”. Of the four French poems published by TSE, three (Le Directeur, Mélange Adultère de Tout and Lune de Miel) appeared in the Little Review in July 1917, along with The Hippopotamus (which adapted a poem by Théophile Gautier). The fourth, Dans le Restaurant, appeared there in Sept 1918. See headnote to “Poems (1920)”, 5. TSE’S PROFICIENCY IN FRENCH.
[Poems I 277–79 · Textual History II 592]
[Little Epistle]
[It’s not to disgust everyone, or to sip from the sewer of my ego, that I made verses out of everyday trivia, smelling somewhat of sauerkraut. But what on earth have I done to bring out the jackals? I said that there’s a male smell and also a female smell, and that these are not the same. (The other day, the third Thursday in Lent, I noted this, in company of one of the latter.) Which is what the priest says, but in other words. Above all in the rutting season. So they made a rumpus and broke both of my windows. What on earth have I done to stir up these crab-lice? I will tell you what I’ve done: I imagined a Paradise where goods were equally shared (where equally I would have yours). The honourable chief of police has had his fill of such vices, and mutters through his bespectacled nose: “This is promiscuity.” So I had to pay him five hundred francs, by way of a fine. The gentlemen of the press and all the rest, blackmailers and the name-tag people one and all, have drawn up their questionnaires for me. “He makes fun of Equality?” —“But he’s a proper reactionary.” —“He bad-mouths our ministers?” —“Why he’s a saboteur, the prig.” —“Is he quoting some German here?” —“He belongs in hell!” —“Does he doubt the afterlife?” —“An immoralist, for sure.” —“Does he not doubt the existence of God?” —“How superstitious of him!” —“Has he no children?” —“He’s a eunuch, clearly.” —“Does he not demand the vote for women?” —“A pederast, undoubtedly.” —“As for his book, who gives a shit!” The gibberish of these monkeys, I hear it wherever I go.]
Tristan Corbière has a sardonic self-portrait, with aggressive officials and gossips:
Le curé se doutait que c’était un lépreux;
Et le maire disait: —Moi, qu’est-ce que j’y peux,
C’est plutôt un Anglais … un Être.
Les femmes avaient su—sans doute par les buses—
Qu’il vivait en concubinage avec des Muses! …
Un hérétique enfin … Quelque Parisien
De Paris ou d’ailleurs
[The parish priest suspected it was a leper; and the mayor said: “As for me, what can I do, it’s pretty sure to be an Englishman … some Being or other”. The women had known—no doubt from the buzzards—that he was living in sin with the Muses! A heretic, and there’s an end of it … Some Parisian from Paris or somewhere else]
Le Poète contumace [The Contumacious Poet] 24–30
Similarly the interrogation in Le Renégat [The Renegade] 15, 22: “son nom?”, “Coup de barre du vice?” [his name? Paying over the odds for vice?]
1–2 dégoute | Ou gout d’égout: Corbière: “—Son goût était dans le dégoût” [His taste was for the distasteful], Epitaphe 47. (For Corbière’s poem see note on the title Mélange Adultère de Tout.) Corbière again: “Moi j’en suis dégoûté.— | Dans mes dégoûts surtout, j’ai des goûts élégants” [In my distastes above all, I have elegant tastes], Le Poète contumace [The Contumacious Poet] 82–83; “Pur, à force d’avoir purgé tous les dégoûts” [Pure, as a result of having purged all disgusts], ending of Le Renégat [The Renegade]. In his copy of Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance ch VI, TSE scored the words: “For the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts”.
8 une odeur fémelle: see note to Rhapsody on a Windy Night 66, “female smells in shuttered rooms”.
37 un suppôt de Satan: Hell-hound. To Paul Elmer More, 7 Nov 1933, about After Strange Gods: “Lawrence appears as a suppôt de Satan”.
43 eunuque: often in Corbière, for instance: “nous avons la police | Et quelque chose en nous d’eunuque et de recors” [We have the police and in us something of the eunuch and of the minion of the law], Féminin singulier 7–8.
Tristan Corbière
Published in March Hare.
Assigned to 1917 by Rainey 198. See Pound to Joyce, 19 Apr 1917, on TSE’s burst of “scurrilous french”, quoted in headnote to “Poems (1920)”, 5. TSE’S PROFICIENCY IN FRENCH.
[Poems I 277–79 · Textual History II 592]
Greene 62 reported that TSE first read Corbière in Poètes d’aujourd’hui, the anthology he acquired in 1909 or soon after, and that he deepened his study in the years 1915–20. Greene is probably incorrect in saying that TSE acquired his copy of Corbière’s Les Amours jaunes during hi
s stay in Paris in 1910, for the copy he kept is dated 1912. In the Table at the back, TSE has marked all six of the Rondels pour après. In the Notebook, after the final blank leaves and stubs, on versos of unnumbered leaves and upside down in relation to the front of the volume, TSE made copies in black ink of two of them, Do, l’enfant do … adding “T. C.” at the end; and that beginning “Il fait noir, enfant” [It’s getting dark, child], adding “Corbière”. Two of the other Rondels are pencilled by TSE on separate leaves laid in at the back of the Notebook: Mirliton [Doggerel] and Petit mort pour rire [Little dead one for fun], the second with the addition of the name and Paris address of Albert Messein, publisher of the 1912 edition of Les Amours jaunes.
[Tristan Corbière]
[“For a moment he became Parisian.”]
[Sailor! I know you, rentier from the fifth floor, watching out the night like an old owl; clearing your throat, you whom they call an Ankou, crouched on a pallet, with pointed beard, ghost-faced. In the next room scandals are hatching, a Portuguese office-clerk and a ten-cent queen of the night: between the whisperings through various holes—the sea batters the Breton coast in gusts. On a warm afternoon in the Luxembourg Gardens, sunbeams show us grizzled gentlemen, frock-coated, winking at pomaded ladies. And Lieutenant Loti, looking very dapper, strolls through the pages of the complacent Reviews like an old retired tart taking up her post on the boulevard.]
Epigraph “Il devint pour un instant parisien”: adapting Verlaine’s essay Tristan Corbière in Les Poètes maudits [The Cursed Poets]: “Il devint Parisien un instant, mais sans le sale esprit mesquin · · · de la bile et de la fièvre s’exaspérant en génie et jusqu’à quelle gaieté!” [He immediately became a Parisian, but in a shabby mean-minded frame of mind · · · bile and fever exacerbating themselves within him to the point of high spirits!] Corbière himself had written of “Quelque Parisien | De Paris ou d’ailleurs” [Some Parisian from Paris or somewhere else], Le Poète contumace [The Contumacious Poet] 29–30.