The copy sent to Hayward in Dec 1936 (King’s) is followed by The cowlover’s retort; or, an answer to the late poem, entitled “The country walk”, a poem by Hayward with extensive criticisms and revisions by TSE (see Smart 103). TSE to Pound, 30 Dec (Beinecke): “for a Cow’s best friend is her udder— | And the milk streamed in the pail | For the sake of dear old Yale”.
Title] Aldous Huxley had published a story called A Country Walk in Coterie Autumn 1920, having in the previous issue, Easter 1920, published a play called Permutations Among the Nightingales. (A Cooking Egg was published in Coterie May 1919.) For Huxley’s indebtedness to TSE’s 1920 poems, see McCue 2013b.
Unadopted subtitle An Epistle to Miss E––– H–– with the humble Compliments of her obliged servant, the Author: Popeian, as for instance Epistle To Miss Blount on her leaving the Town, after the Coronation (“As some fond virgin, whom her mother’s care | Drags from the town to wholsom country air”, 1–2); see Burnt Norton III 17, “Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs”, and note. Substitution of dashes was frequent, as in An Epistle to Mr. B----- by Francis Knapp (c. 1705). Miss E––– H––: Emily Hale. Tissington Tatlow: general secretary of the Student Christian Movement, and rector of St. Nicholas, Acorns, in the City, in succession to H. H. Pereira.
2–3 In England’s green and pleasant land · · · the Cows: Blake: “the holy Lamb · · · in England’s green and pleasant land”, from Milton (“And did those feet”) 3, 16.
26 horns · · · tossed: “horns that toss and toss”, The Burnt Dancer 35 (see note).
30, 32 sober wishes never stray · · · away: Thomas Gray: “Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife | Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray · · · way”, Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard 73–76.
33–34 I could take sanctuary | In any oak or apple tree: Marvell: “I · · · Take Sanctuary in the Wood”, Upon Appleton House 481–82. After the Battle of Worcester in 1651, Charles II took sanctuary in an oak tree (the Royal Oak).
34 In any oak or apple tree: “Children’s voices in the orchard · · · Swing up into the apple-tree”, Landscapes I. New Hampshire 1, 12. “the children in the apple-tree”, Little Gidding V 35. “the O’Possum | As he swings from a neighbouring tree”, How to Pick a Possum 7–8.
[Poem I 296–97 · Textual History II 605–606]
I am asked by my friend, the Man in White Spats
To Alison Tandy, 6 Jan 1937, introducing The Rum Tum Tugger and signed “Your fexnite | Possum”.
For the identity of the Man in White Spats, see note on the Preface to Practical Cats.
A Proclamation
With a letter to John Hayward, 27 Jan 1937, alluding to Housman’s The Name and Nature of Poetry (“if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act”): “You know my aversion to Modernism in all forms, and especially in Poetry; and you know that Movements like Surrealism are things that I cannot make Head or Tail of. But occasionally something comes my way, that makes me catch my breath, rub my eyes, pinch myself, sit up, cut myself shaving, and behave like Housman thinking of one of his poems—I mean that we old fogies have something to learn after all from the younger generation, and perhaps it’s good for us to have a rude jolt now and again before we get too fossilised. Such a poem came my way yesterday, and I send it to you at once in the hope that you will be able to tell me whether I am awake or dreaming? Is this, or am I mistaken, the dawn of a new era, to which we must learn to adapt ourselves. I feel that what we old ones lack is Understanding, and I mean especially sympathetic Understanding. What I enclose is of the modern Allusive kind. I fear that I have not caught all its Allusions—though the subtle reference in line 23 to the ‘Othello music’ could escape no sensitive reader; it has that reference to ‘old, forgotten far off things’ that is so fascinating—with that vein of mocking irony running through it so characteristic of the Moderns—there must be many more allusions that you will be able to identify. Am I Right or am I Wrong? Please return it with any marginal notes you think fit to make. Perhaps you will laugh me to scorn, in your keen incisive Voltairean way, but it still seems to me that I have felt the authentic breath of genius. It was certainly a breath. But was it authentic? That is the question. Yours exaltedly, TP”. (For Old Possum as “the real surrealist poet we have been waiting for”, see the comic report supposedly by Herbert Read but actually by TSE about his own Book of Practical Cats, quoted in the headnote to the volume, 5. PUBLICATION.)
The editor and communist Roger Roughton, to whom A Proclamation is comically attributed, had just published Sliding Scale, a surrealist poem likewise in quatrains (Poetry Jan 1937).
TSE to Lawrence Durrell, July 1949: “It is refreshing always to find a poet who does understand that prose sense comes first, and that poetry is merely prose developed by a knowledge of aeronautics.”
1 Fair stood the wind for France: Drayton, To the Cambro-Britons. Agincourt 1. (H. E. Bates’s novel of this title was not published until 1944.)
[Poems I 298 · Textual History II 607]
2 Cat jumped out: “I knew how to let the cat out of the bag”, Gus: The Theatre Cat 24. Roughton: “Hurrying kittens refer to the source”, Sliding Scale 5. TSE to Tom Faber, 7 Nov 1947, referring to Hugh Dalton’s Budget of 12 Nov: “I reply with somewhat more than my usual promptitude · · · in response to your judicious observation about the necessity of spending as much money as possible before the odious Mr. Dalton lets his cats out of the bag.”
3 But O for the touch of a vanished hand: Tennyson, Break, break, break 11.
4 And sixpenny‑worth of stout: Roughton: “enclose a penny-halfpenny stamp; | For I must go at ten to one, | Ten to one it’s guineas time”, Soluble Noughts and Crosses 8–10 in Contemporary Poetry and Prose July 1936 (after the advertising slogan “Any time is Guinness time”).
7, 19 The face that launched a thousand ships · · · Helen of Troy set out to sea: Marlowe: “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships | And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” Doctor Faustus sc. XIV.
8 Had a knowing look in its eye: Dickens: “‘And with him?’ asked the boy, with a knowing look in his eye”, Howard’s Son in All the Year Round 7 Sept 1867.
9 the mossy bank: Amelia Welby, The Green Mossy Bank where the Buttercups Grew in Poems (1845).
9–10 The toadstool on the mossy bank | Muttered aloud in its sleep: Tennyson: “The white lake-blossom fell into the lake | As the pimpernel dozed on the lea”, Maud I [xxii] 896–97.
12 They sow and they also reap: Galatians 6: 7: “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap”.
13 Once more unto the breach, dear friend: Henry V III i: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”
14 The Jellicle hosts proclaim: “whom heav’n’s high hosts proclaim”, Hark, a chorus in the skies, no. 444 in Psalms and Hymns ed. J. Bickersteth (6th ed. 1838).
15 Make wing at once to the rooky wood: Macbeth III ii: “Light thickens, and the crow | Makes wing to the rooky wood.”
17 Ring out the old, ring in the new: Tennyson, In Memoriam CVI 5.
18 Jellicle Cats have got the vote: suffrage was extended to all men in 1918 and to all women in 1928.
19–20 set out to sea | In a beautiful pea-green boat: Edward Lear: “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea | In a beautiful pea-green boat”, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat.
21 come blow up your horn: “Little boy blue, come blow your horn”, nursery rhyme.
22 The year’s at the spring: Browning: “The year’s at the spring | And day’s at the morn · · · God’s in his heaven— | All’s right with the world!” Pippa Passes, Song (I 221–28). too‑wit too‑woo: Love’s Labour’s Lost V ii: “Tu-who · · · | Tu-whit to-who”. To John Hayward, 26 Oct 1936: “Chatterton (the something boy who perisht in his pride), to wit (to who)”. (Wordsworth: “I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, | The sleepless Soul that perished in its pride”, Resolution and Independence 43–44.) See
letter including That bird wych in the dark time of the yeerë in “Improper Rhymes”.
[Poem I 298–99 · Textual History II 607]
23, 27 Cassia buds and Venetian blinds · · · Cats: Othello, the Moor of Venice I iii, IAGO: “drown cats and blind puppies” and “Cassio’s a proper man, let me see now”. See headnote for “the Othello music” (the title of an essay by G. Wilson Knight in The Wheel of Fire).
24 And never a spray of rue: Arnold: “Strew on her roses, roses, | And never a spray of yew!” Requiescat 1–2. (Hamlet IV v, OPHELIA: “There’s rosemary · · · there’s rue for you.”)
25 Let Jellicle joy be unconfined: Byron: “On with the dance! let joy be unconfined”, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III 12.
26 bring down the sky: Wordsworth: “In some calm season, when these lofty rocks | At night’s approach bring down the unclouded sky”, The Excursion IV 1158.
27 For Cats may come since Cats must go: Tennyson: “For men may come and men may go, | But I go on for ever”, The Brook 33–34.
28 For an annual holiday: the Holidays with Pay Bill was under discussion in 1937 (passed 1938).
after 28 Cetera desunt: the rest is missing (L.) “Cætera desunt——” appears after the last line of Herrick’s The Country life, to the honoured M. End. Porter, Groome of the Bed-Chamber to His Maj., and “Desunt cætera” after the last lines of Donne’s poems Resurrection, imperfect and To the Countesse of Bedford. Begun in France but never perfected.
A Practical Possum
Written Autumn 1940. To Polly Tandy, 22 Oct 1940: “I have been very evil not to write before · · · to thank Alison for the Lavender Bag” (used to freshen laundry). To Alison, 17 Dec: “I never thanked you properly either for the practical Lavender Bag, which is at work on my shirts”. (TSE had signed himself “Lavender Possum” when writing to Polly Tandy, 4 Sept 1935.)
Colophon of the edition of 1947:
This poem, one of Mr. Eliot’s “occasional verse effusions,” was composed as a letter to a little girl who had sent him a lavender bag. Mr. Eliot, who has already identified himself in “The Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats”, needs no introduction as a poet.
The very kind permission of the author of the verses, the owner of the manuscript, Mr. Henry Ware Eliot, and the Printing and Graphic Arts Department of Harvard Library makes possible this first printing · · · The edition is limited to eighty copies of which this is number [ ].
Donald Gallup later recalled that it was he who had suggested the poem for printing, and that the Houghton already owned “the original longhand draft”, Gallup 1988 103.
[Poems I 299–301 · Textual History II 607]
TSE to Philip Hofer, 15 Aug 1947: “The printing seems to me an excellent piece of work · · · I must, however, raise a protest and a note of exclamation against their having printed as many as eighty copies. When you first raised the question and desired to sell some copies you suggested · · · that you would print sixty copies and send me twenty for myself. You were certainly very courteous when I declined to allow the poem to be printed for public circulation, but in your letter of December 3rd you said: ‘The boys will print a few copies for private circulation solely and will send you some of these.’ Well eighty copies does seem to me a good deal more than a few. It is almost certain that with as many as eighty copies released some of them will eventually get into the market and become collector’s pieces, and I have no desire that this should come to pass. It really seems to me that you or your pupils have very considerably exceeded my licence and certainly there is a discrepancy between the original proposal to print sixty copies and send me twenty and the eventual printing of eighty copies and sending me only six.”
To I. A. Richards, then teaching at Harvard, 8 Sept 1955: “The · · · incidents of the plot have pretty well vanished from my memory, but · · · I know that I was very annoyed, that I wrote him a letter · · · and that I subsequently received a list (either directly or indirectly) of the people to whom copies had been sent, and of those from whom copies had been retrieved. I remember remarking the fact that the people from whom he had recovered the copies were for the most part people like yourself, whom I didn’t mind having copies, and I wished that he had got back some of the other copies instead · · · The point is that when I was in America in June, my cousin Aimée Lamb told me · · · that I had written a cruel letter · · · that Hofer had been deeply hurt; that there were circumstances which excused or extenuated his fault or error; and that my letter was so extreme as to make it impossible for him to explain these circumstances to me · · · If my cousin’s assertion is correct, i.e. that my reproof was wholly out of proportion to the offense committed, I should like to apologise to this Mr. Hofer.” (For TSE’s “exasperation” in 1949 at the printing of his Undergraduate Poems, see headnote to “Uncollected Poems”, 2. POEMS WRITTEN IN EARLY YOUTH.)
In TSE’s nonsense botany series Old Possum’s “Children Shown to the Flowers” (Faber archive), Plate 7 is “Possum Pie”, with a coloured drawing at the head: “POSSUM PIE (N. Possumus): locally known in Bloomsbury as ‘Humble Pie’; in Chelsea as ‘Sweetie Pie’—many other local variants). The usual complaint against this undeservedly unpopular perennial is that its flowers are small and sparse, of irregular appearance, and of an uninteresting dull purple · · · Possum Pie benefits by transplantation, but even under the most scientific care takes from ten to twenty years to attain maturity. Nevertheless, under the most favourable conditions this is undoubtedly a handsome plant of decorative use.” (OED: “non possumus [= we can not, L.] A statement or answer expressing inability to act or move in a matter.”)
To Virginia Woolf, 1 Dec [1937]: “I suppose you will be off to Rodmell towards the end of the month to eat a Fortnum & Mason Yorkshire Pye”. To Enid Faber, 24 Apr 1940: “I don’t quite identify Tristram Pye. Is he one of the Hertfordshire Pyes? One of them was Poet Laureate some years ago.” (Henry James Pye, Poet Laureate 1790–1813.) TSE to Enid Faber, 1 Oct 1942: “I was particularly sorry to postpone my introduction to Auntie Pye (if she meets with approval, she must be promoted to the honorary title of Sweetie Pye) · · · Does Auntie Pye smell of lavender?” To Tom Faber, 19 Aug 1943: “I hope that you slept soundly in an Auntie Pye Bed · · · picking lavender · · · I enclose a small Subscription so that you may purchase a sponge, a scrubbing brush, and a packet of Lux.” (OED, “apple-pie bed”: “ a bed in which, as a practical joke, the sheets are so folded that a person cannot get his legs down”.)
[Poem I 299–301 · Textual History II 607]
J. G. Wood, of the possum: “When captured it is easily tamed, and falls into the habit of domestication with great ease. It is, however, not very agreeable as a domestic companion, as it is gifted with a powerful and very unpleasant odour”, The Illustrated Natural History (see headnote to Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats 1. POSSUM).
1 once lived in a Pye: “Four and twenty blackbirds, | Baked in a pie”, nursery rhyme. Byron: “A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye | Like ‘four and twenty blackbirds in a pye;’ | | ‘Which pye being open’d they began to sing’”, Dedication to Don Juan, first two stanzas, referring to Robert Southey’s appointment to succeed Henry James Pye as Poet Laureate.
2 Surrounded by Gravy and Sweet Pertaters: to Ezra Pound, 23 Dec 1937: “what can pore ole possum do to help except to allow himself to be baked with sweet pertaters which he is always ready to do, knowin what savoury gravoury he exudes under sufficient heat and with the judicious garnishments etc.” (OED “potato”: “illit. pertater”.)
3 Glass in his Eye: another cat with a monocle (and cane) is Cumberleylaude, the Gourmet Cat.
4–8 And a clerical hat and an apron and gaiters · · · And everyone said · · · isn’t he Well Preserved: “My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin · · · (They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’)” The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 41–44. a clerical hat: “features of clerical cut”, Five-Finger Exercises V. L
ines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg 1–2. Tippett 51 recorded a visit to Frank Morley, c. 1939: “mooching about on the grass I could see Eliot, wearing his famous clerical hat” (Oliver Soden, personal communication). Well Preserved: OED: “Often used to describe elderly persons who carry their years well.”
28 Condy’s Fluid: disinfectant. Keating’s Powder: insecticide.
30 Life Buoy: soap; correctly “Lifebuoy” (see Textual History).
32–33 variant But the Possum answered “No Sir,” | And he winked his other eye: Kipling: “The sergeant arst no questions, but ’e winked the other eye”, “Back to the Army Again” (in A Choice of Kipling’s Verse).
35 Chemist (whose name was Boot): Boots the Chemist, est. John Boot, 1849.
39 Eno’s Salt: digestive powder.
40 iodoform: OED: “A compound of iodine · · · having an odour of saffron and a sweet taste; used medicinally, and as an antiseptic”.
60 Possum’s Nose: to Polly Tandy, 14 Nov [1935]: “The great thing to begin with is that the Nose should be a Projection and not a Recession, because after that, once you have the material to work upon, it can be worked up into Roman or Norman by will power, prayer, absent treatment or manipulative surgery, but you cant make bricks without straw or a nose out of a dimple or a silk purse either · · · The main thing about a nose is that the bearer should be able to breathe through it, that is where I have always been a sufferer in life’s handicap. If she can breathe through her nose, she has a chance; which I wish her, never having had a chance myself.”
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 183