The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 180
I 5, 8 They know what they are to feel and what to think · · · They know what to think and what to feel: Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think? (first line).
I 10 what is there for you and me: “you and I · · · time for you and time for me · · · among some talk of you and me”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1, 31, 89.
I 12 What is there for us to do: “Where shall we go next?” Suite Clownesque II 22. “‘What shall we do tomorrow? | ‘What shall we ever do?’” The Waste Land [II] 133–34.
II
II 1 In the evening people hang upon the bridge rail: Tennyson: “I waited for the train at Coventry; | I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge”, Godiva 1–2.
II 3, 15 In the square they lean against each other · · · The people leaning against another in the square: “evil houses leaning all together”, Prufrock’s Pervigilium [15]. “Leaning together”, The Hollow Men I 3 (WLFacs notes). (“leaning against another” may be a mistyping of “people leaning against one another”.)
II 4–5 like · · · on a table · · · over the table: “Like a patient etherised upon a table”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 3.
II 7–10, 16–17 heads of birds | Beaks and no words, | | What words have we? | | I should like to be in a crowd of beaks without words · · · other bird things · · · but no wings : Browning:
As to catch a hawk, some falcon-lanner,
And thrust her broad wings like a banner
Into a coop for a vulgar pigeon;
And if day by day and week by week
You cut her claws, and sealed her eyes,
And clipped her wings, and tied her beak,
and “For here her voice changed like a bird’s; | There grew more of the music and less of the words”, The Flight of the Duchess 269–74 and 690–91 (see Textual History description of ts1). Valerie Eliot may have been confusing this with Webster’s Duchess or with the allusion to The White Devil (see note to II 34) when she said “There is a reflection of the bird imagery of The White Devil” (BBC broadcast 2 Nov 1971).
II 10–12 I should like to be · · · marble floors: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws | Scuttling across the floors of silent seas”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 73–74 (James Longenbach, ELH Summer 1985).
II 13 firelight on your hair: “(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)” The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 64.
[Poem I 281–82 · Textual History II 594]
II 13–15, 20–22 firelight on your hair · · · footsteps up and down the stair · · · people leaning · · · Under the brush · · · still: “Leaned out, leaning · · · Footsteps shuffled on the stair. | Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair | Spread out in fiery points | Glowed into words, then would be savagely still”, The Waste Land [II] 106–110.
II 20–21, 35 Under the brush her hair | Spread out · · · the brush proceed: in The Duchess of Malfi III ii, the Duchess brushes her hair; see note to II 54–58. (The scenic form of Webster’s IV ii, in which Cariola attends the Duchess, is partly based on Othello IV iii, in which Emila unpins Desdemona’s hair and, traditionally, brushes it as Desdemona sings. See note to II 26, 28.)
II 22 suddenly still: Silence 13.
II 23–24, 51–53] In WLFacs notes, Valerie Eliot points to The Duchess of Malfi III ii:
DUCHESS: Doth not the colour of my hair ’gin to change?
When I wax gray, I shall have all the court
Powder their hair with arras, to be like me.
You have cause to love me; I entered you into my heart
Before you would vouchsafe to call for the keys.
TSE made use of this passage three times. The fourth and fifth lines appeared in Reflections on “vers libre” (1917), the fourth line being misquoted as “You have cause to love me, I did enter you in my heart”. TSE then changed the order of Webster’s lines for this poem, where
“You have cause to love me, I did enter you in my heart
Before ever you vouchsafed to ask for the key”
(II 23–24)
is followed some thirty lines later by
“When I grow old I shall have all the court
Powder their hair with arras, to be like me.
But I know you love me, it must be that you love me”
(II 51–53).
Of these five lines, only II 52 is given accurately from Webster, with II 23 varying in the same way as in Reflections on “vers libre” (1917).
Finally, in “The Duchess of Malfi” at the Lyric: and Poetic Drama (1919/20), TSE gave three lines, criticising the actor for “interpreting” them:
“… does not my hair ’gin to change?
When I grow old, I shall have all the court
Powder their hair with arras, to be like me.”
Here the first line is compressed, the second varies from Webster in the same way (but for a comma) as in this poem, and the third is quoted accurately. For other departures from the texts of 17th-century drama, see notes to Gerontion 54–56 and its epigraph.
II 25–26 her arms were bare | Fixed for a question, her hands behind her hair: “fix · · · Arms that are braceleted and white and bare · · · hair”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 56, 63–64 (with “question” three times in the poem).
II 26, 28 her hair · · · tangled: The Duchess of Malfi III ii, DUCHESS: “When were we so merry?—My hair tangles.”
[Poem I 282 · Textual History II 594]
II 28 My thoughts in a tangled bunch of heads and tails: “My brain is twisted in a tangled skein”, Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think? 23. “head having swallowed his tail”, Introspection 3–4.
II 30 One that I knew: “There I saw one I knew”, The Waste Land [I] 69.
II 31 Time to regain the door: WLFacs notes: “This is not a quotation from Prufrock, but another example of ‘cadence reproduction’” (referring to Pound’s annotation “Pruf—” on the ts, and quoting his comment from two lines later). The cadence is that of “Time to turn back and descend the stair”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 39.
II 33 And if I said “I love you” should we breathe: Pound comments “cadence reproduction from Pr.[ufrock] or Por[trait of a Lady]”: the cadence is that of “if she should die · · · should I have the right to smile”, Portrait of a Lady III 31, 41. Pound: “Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement; e.g. Saxon charms, Hebridean folk songs, the verse of Dante, and the lyrics of Shakespeare—if he can dissociate the vocabulary from the cadence”, A Stray Document (1912/13) collected in Make It New and quoted in TSE’s Ezra Pound (1946).
II 34 Hear music, go a-hunting, as before?: Webster: “What do the dead do, uncle? do they eat, | Hear music, go a hunting, and be merry, | As we that live?” The White Devil III i (Mermaid ed.; commonly III ii) (WLFacs notes).
II 40–44 If I said · · · We should say: “If one · · · Should say”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 96–97.
II 43, 49 knock upon the door · · · waiting for a knock upon the door: The Duchess of Malfi III ii, ANTONIO: “How now? who knocks?” (perhaps also IV ii, where the Duchess awaits her executioners).
II 45–49] Adapted as The Waste Land [II] 136–39.
II 52 arras: powdered orris-root, smelling of violets (The Duchess of Malfi IV ii: “Strew your hair with powders sweet”).
II 54–58 Then I suppose · · · I know she knew: Valerie Eliot on The Duchess of Malfi III ii: “The Duchess and Antonio, formerly her steward, now her husband, are in her bed-chamber. She is brushing her hair, with her back to him, and for a joke he and the maid Cariola slip away unnoticed. She continues talking, and when there is no reply, turns with ‘Have you lost your tongue?’ to find that her brother Ferdinand, who is also her enemy, has been listening to her. Antonio and Cariola do not return until after he has left. Eliot
remarked on the ‘breathless tension’ of this scene, and the poignancy of the Duchess’s words in a talk he gave on the Indian Service of the B.B.C.” (WLFacs notes); the talk was “The Duchess of Malfy” (1941).
Song (“The golden foot I may not kiss or clutch”)
Published with the pseudonym “Gus Krutzsch” in Tyro Apr 1921 as Song to the Opherian; then WLFacs from ts1, which is tentatively assigned to Jan 1921 by Rainey 15–17, and is annotated by Pound. See headnote to The Waste Land, 1. COMPOSITION, for relation to this poem.
[Poems I 282-84 · Textual History II 594–95]
Originally entitled Song for the Opherion, ts1 was probably not setting copy for the printer (which presumably included the pseudonym), and may have been made before or after publication of the poem in Wyndham Lewis’s Tyro. The inaccuracies in Blast’s printing of other poems by TSE show that as an editor Lewis could be textually negligent. Blast had changed another of TSE’s titles to Rhapsody of a Windy Night, so it is possible that in this case the variant preposition “to” and the spelling of “Opherian” were not as the author intended.
Pound’s annotation was almost certainly subsequent to the poem’s publication, for he deleted what was printed as the third line, “Perhaps it does not come to very much” (2 ^ 3), calling it “georgian”. Two further lines, “Waiting that touch | After thirty years.”, which concluded ts1 but did not appear in Tyro, were also deleted, probably by Pound (although the deletion is attributed to TSE in WLFacs 98/99). Likewise, it was probably Pound who reduced the title to Song.
TSE to Donald Gallup, 26 Nov 1946: “I don’t remember which verses I called Song to the Opherian but I think it was one of the short poems which were called the Dream Songs. It may or may not have been one of those included as interludes in the first draft of The Waste Land. It is impossible to settle this point now. I preserved no copies of those Waste Land lyrics; the copies that I know of were those with the original manuscript which was in the possession of John Quinn, and it disappeared from sight after Mr. Quinn’s death.” To Grover Smith, 4 July 1949: “I haven’t the slightest idea now what the Song to the Opherian was and am extremely thankful from one point of view that the manuscript in which it occurs has disappeared without trace.”
After its pseudonymous publication, TSE wished to re-use Song in The Waste Land but had difficulty finding a place for it. Probably one of the “interludes”, it may first have been stationed between Part II and Part III. It was then moved to the end, but Pound urged abolition of everything but the five parts.
Pound to TSE, [24 Jan 1922]: “The song has only two lines which you can use in the body of the poem.” These were presumably the lines he braced, “When the surface of the blackened river | Is a face that sweats with tears?” (although the transcript of ts1 in WLFacs interprets this brace as spanning 8–11).
When TSE typed Part III of The Waste Land, he had not included the 25–line passage beginning “The river sweats | Oil and tar” (ms2), but his mention to Pound on [26? Jan] of “Drifting logs” confirms that it had since been incorporated. He needed to avoid the duplication of “the blackened river · · · sweats” (from Song) and “The river sweats | Oil and tar”, and he wrote to Pound that he was “working sweats with tears etc. into nerves monologue” in Part II. It is not clear how the lines from Song could have been incorporated there, and on [28? Jan] Pound replied: “I dare say sweats with tears will wait.”
Later TSE used the second stanza of Song, in modified form, in The wind sprang up at four o’clock, which was originally published as the second of Doris’s Dream Songs in Chapbook [Nov] 1924. By pointing out the resemblance between that Dream Song and the “poem of two stanzas by ‘Gus Krutzsch’” from “an old copy of · · · The Tyro”, a hostile editorial in Poetry: A Magazine of New Lyrics Sept 1925 then effectively revealed the authorship of Song to the Opherian.
The present edition gives not the text published in Tyro but that of ts1 as it was finally left by TSE and Pound.
[Poem I 284 · Textual History II 595]
Unadopted title Song to the Opherian (variant Song for the Opherion): WLFacs notes: “There is no such word as ‘Opherian’, and it is possible that Eliot meant ‘Orpharion’ (from Orpheus and Arion), ‘an instrument of the cittern family · · · essentially the poor man’s lute’ (Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1954).” OED gives variant spelling “orpherian”, and quotes Drayton: “Set the Cornet with the Flute, | The Orpharion to the Lute”, Eclogues III 111. The title page of John Dowland’s First Book of Songes (1597) says they may be sung “to the Lute, Orpherian, or Viol de gambo” (Oliver Soden, personal communication). As the title of an interlude between Parts II and III of The Waste Land, this would have anticipated “The pleasant whining of a mandoline”, [III] 261 (OED quotes Smollett: “An excellent performer on the lute and mandolin”).
Pseudonym on first publication Gus Krutzsch: see note to WLComposite 45 variant. TSE to Gallup, 25 July 1962, denying authorship of Café Cannibale, by John Adams, which also appeared in Tyro Apr 1921: “I can throw no light whatever now upon the authorship · · · All I can tell you is that Gus Krutzsch was a pseudonym for T. S. Eliot, who decided later that the verses were not good enough for him to wish to acknowledge them under his own name.” Sencourt 67 (giving no source): “In 1921 he was to add to these disguises that of Gus Krutzsch, the pedant who refused to go to China because it had no native cheese.”
1 The golden foot I may not kiss or clutch: Kipling: “a-wastin’ Christian kisses on an ’eathen idol’s foot”, Mandalay 14 (in A Choice of Kipling’s Verse) (Grover Smith 101).
5 between two lives: The Waste Land [III] 218 (see note).
9–10 the surface of the blackened river | Is a face that sweats with tears: Blake: “I wander thro’ each charter’d street, | Near where the charter’d Thames does flow · · · black’ning”, London (Songs of Experience, 1794). “The river sweats | Oil and tar”, The Waste Land [III] 266–67 (with “blackened wall”, [V] 381). See headnote.
12 The campfire shake the spears: “the shaking spears and flickering lights”, After the turning of the inspired days 9.
[Poems I 284–85 · Textual History II 595–96]
Elegy
Published in WLFacs 116/117. See headnote to The Waste Land, 1. COMPOSITION, for relation to this poem.
Pencilled manuscript with ms1 of Dirge on verso. Assigned to Oct–Nov 1921 by Rainey.
The top of the leaf is slightly torn, but the lines begin so far up as to leave no space for a title (though TSE added one later in the top left corner). Apparently, then, not a new poem, but a continuation, although no preceding leaf survives. Given that the paper matches ms1 and ms2 of The Waste Land (torn off TSE’s pad apparently at the same time as ms2), these lines were almost certainly drafted in Margate. If they were for Part III of The Waste Land, which TSE composed there, they may have been intended as its concluding lines, with the draft of Dirge on the verso following in sequence as an interlude between Part III and Part IV. (For TSE’s word “interlude” and the arrangement of the poem, see headnote to The Waste Land, 1. COMPOSITION.) The leaf probably survived because Dirge is on the other side.
Valerie Eliot, BBC broadcast, 2 Nov 1971: “As a boy, Eliot read steadily through the works of Poe, kept in his dentist’s waiting room, and Elegy is · · · infected by Poe the poet, as well as by Poe the teller of tales, who is mentioned. There is an allusion to The Maid’s Tragedy and an echo of The Hound of Heaven.” (See headnote to Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar for TSE’s reading of Poe at the dentist, where he first saw lines quoted from Henry King’s An Exequy To his Matchless never to be forgotten Friend. King’s poem includes the words “elegy” and “dirges”.)
1–2 Our prayers dismiss the parting shade | And breathe a hypocrites’s amen: “Our sighs pursue th’ elusive shade · · · Our sighs pursue the vanishd shade | And breathe a sanctified amen”, Whispers of Immortality 11, 21–22 variants (for “the hypocrite’s amen
” in Lancelot Andrewes, see note).
3 Aspatia: Beaumont and Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy. Valerie Eliot: “Deserted by her lover, Amintor, for Evadne, Aspatia disguises herself as her brother seeking to avenge his sister’s wrong, and forces Amintor to kill her in a duel. Eliot quoted Aspatia’s words [from earlier in the play] as the epigraph to Sweeney Erect” (WLFacs notes). Joyce: “He gave them then a much admirable hymen minim by those delicate poets Master John Fletcher and Master Francis Beaumont that is in their Maid’s Tragedy that was writ for a like twining of lovers: To bed, to bed, was the burden of it to be played with accompanable concent upon the virginals. Well met they were, said Master Dixon, but, harkee, better were they named Beau Mont and Lecher”, Ulysses episode XIV (The Oxen of the Sun) in Little Review Sept–Dec 1920.
3–4 The wronged Aspatia returned | Wreathed: The Maid’s Tragedy II i, ASPATIA: “With flattering ivy clasp my coffin round; | Write on my brow my fortune.”
4 the wingèd cyclamen: “the cyclamen spreads its wings”, Coriolan II. Difficulties of a Statesman 35 (WLFacs notes).
5–6 I should have mourned: “I should have lost”, La Figlia Che Piange 22.
5–8, 11 I should have mourned · · · Were’t not for dreams: a dream restores | The always inconvenient dead · · · a tale by Poe: Schuchard 126 identifies Ligeia, a tale of “marriages ill-omened”, in which a grieving husband remarries unhappily and finds his second wife’s deathbed haunted by memories of his first wife (see note to The Waste Land [II] 79–120). Ligeia—with “naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, ‘hyacinthine!’”—is a Rhine maiden, in that her husband believes they met in a city on the Rhine (see note to The Waste Land [III] 277–78, 290–91). For The Conqueror Worm, the poem within the tale, see note to East Coker III 13–17.