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2286 / T. S. ELIOT

a horizontal thread 85 that fumes a little with pallor upon the dark.

Is it illusion? or does the pallor fume A little higher? Ah wait, wait, for there's the dawn, the cruel dawn of coming back to life 90 out of oblivion.

Wait, wait, the little ship drifting, beneath the deathly ashy grey of a flood-dawn.

Wait, wait! even so, a flush of yellow 95 and strangely, O chilled wan soul, a flush of rose.

A flush of rose, and the whole thing starts again.

X The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell emerges strange and lovely. And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing IOO on the pink flood, and the frail soul steps out, into her house again filling the heart with peace.

Swings the heart renewed with peace even of oblivion.

105 Oh build your ship of death, oh build it! for you will need it. For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.

1929-30 1933

T. S. ELIOT 1888-1965

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of New England stock. He entered Harvard in 1906 and was influenced there by the anti-Romanticism of Irving Babbitt and the philosophical and critical interests of George Santayana, as well as by the enthusiastic study of Renaissance and of South Asian religions. He wrote his Harvard dissertation on the English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley, whose emphasis on the private nature of individual experience, "a circle enclosed on the outside," influenced Eliot's considerably. He also studied literature and philosophy in France and Germany, before going to England shortly after the out- break of World War I in 1914. He studied Greek philosophy at Oxford, taught school in London, and then obtained a position with Lloyd's Bank. In 1915 he married an English writer, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, but the marriage was not a success. She suf- http://www.englishworld2011.info/

T. S. ELIOT / 2287 fered from poor emotional and physical health. The strain told on Eliot, too. By November 1921 distress and worry had brought him to the verge of a nervous break- down, and on medical advice he went to recuperate in a Swiss sanitorium. Two months later he returned, pausing in Paris long enough to give his early supporter and adviser Ezra Pound the manuscript of . Eliot left his wife in 1933, and she was eventually committed to a mental home, where she died in 1947. Ten years later he was happily remarried to his secretary, Valerie Fletcher. Eliot started writing literary and philosophical reviews soon after settling in London and was assistant editor of The Egoist magazine from 1917 to 1919. In 1922 he founded the influential quarterly The Criterion, which he edited until it ceased pub- lication in 1939. His poetry first appeared in 1915, when, at Pound's urging, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was printed in Poetry magazine (Chicago) and a few other short poems were published in the short-lived periodical Blast. His first pub- lished collection of poems was Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917; two other small collections followed in 1919 and 1920; in 1922 The Waste Land appeared, first in The Criterion in October, then in The Dial (in America) in November, and finally in book form. Meanwhile he was also publishing collections of his critical essays. In 1925 he joined the London publishing firm Faber & Gwyer, and he was made a director when the firm was renamed Faber & Faber. He became a British subject and joined the Church of England in 1927.

"Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and com- plexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into bis meaning." This remark, from Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921), gives one clue to his poetic method from "Prufrock" through The Waste Land. When he settled in London he saw poetry in English as exhausted, with no verbal excitement or original craftsman- ship. He sought to make poetry more subtle, more suggestive, and at the same time more precise. Like the imagists, he emphasized the necessity of clear and precise images. From the philosopher poet T. E. Hulme and from Pound, he learned to fear what was seen as Romantic self-indulgence and vagueness, and to regard the poetic medium rather than the poet's personality as the important factor. At the same time the "hard, dry" images advocated by Hulme were not enough for him; he wanted wit, allusiveness, irony. He saw in the Metaphysical poets how wit and passion could be combined, and he saw in the French symbolists, such as Charles Baudelaire, Ste- phane Mallarme, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud, how an image could be both absolutely precise in what it referred to physically and endlessly suggestive in its meanings because of its relationship to other images. The combination of precision, symbolic suggestion, and ironic mockery in the poetry of the late-nineteenth-century French poet Jules Laforgue attracted and influenced him, as did Laforgue's technique that Eliot described in an interview as "rhyming lines of irregular length, with the coming in irregular places." He also found in the Jacobean drama- tists, such as Thomas Middleton, Cyril Tourneur, and John Webster, a flexible blank verse with overtones of colloquial movement, a way of counterpointing the accent of conversation and the note of terror. Eliot's fluency in French and German, his study of Western and non-Western literary and religious texts in their original languages, his rigorous knowledge of philosophy, his exacting critical intellect, his keen sensitiv- ity to colloquial and idiom, his ability to fuse anguished emotional states with sharply etched intellectual satire—all of these contributed to his crafting one of the twentieth century's most distinctive and influential bodies of poetry. Hulme's protests against the Romantic concept of poetry reinforced what Eliot had learned from Babbitt at Harvard; yet for all his severity with poets such as Percy Shelley and Walt Whitman, for all his cultivation of a classical viewpoint and his insistence on order and discipline rather than on mere self-expression in art, one side http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2288 / T. S. ELIOT of Eliot's poetic genius is Romantic. The symbolist influence on his imagery, his elegiac lamentation over loss and fragmentation, his interest in the evocative and the suggestive, lines such as "And fiddled whisper music on those strings / And bats with baby faces in the violet light / Whistled, and beat their wings," and recurring images such as the hyacinth girl and the rose garden show what could be called a Romantic element in his poetry. But it is combined with a dry ironic allusiveness, a play of wit and satire, and a colloquial element, which are not normally found in poets of the Romantic tradition. Eliot's real novelty—and the cause of much bewilderment when his poems first appeared—was his deliberate elimination of all merely connective and transitional passages, his building up of the total pattern of meaning through the immediate juxtaposition of images without overt explanation of what they are doing, together with his use of oblique references to other works of literature (some of them quite obscure to most readers of his time). "Prufrock" presents a symbolic landscape where the meaning emerges from the mutual interaction of the images, and that meaning is enlarged by echoes, often ironic, of Hesiod and Dante and Shakespeare. The Waste Land is a series of scenes and images with no author's voice intervening to tell us where we are but with the implications developed through multiple contrasts and through analogies with older literary works often referred to in a distorted quotation or half-concealed allusion. Furthermore, the works referred to are not necessarily central in the Western literary tradition: besides Dante and Shakespeare there are pre-Socratic philosophers; major and minor seventeenth-century poets and drama- tists; works of anthropology, history, and philosophy; texts of Buddhism and Hinduism; even popular songs and vaudeville. Ancient and modern voices, high and low art, Western and non-Western languages clash, coincide, jostle alongside one another. In a culture where the poet's public might lack a common cultural heritage, a shared knowledge of works of the past, Eliot felt it necessary to accumulate his own body of references. In this his use of earlier literature differs from, say, 's. Both poets are difficult for the modern reader, who needs editorial assistance in recognizing and understanding many of the allusions—but Milton was drawing on a body of knowledge common to educated people in his day. Nevertheless, this aspect of Eliot can be exaggerated; his imagery and the movement of his verse set the tone he requires, establish the area of meaning to be developed, so that even a reader ignorant of most of the literary allusions can often get the feel of the poem and achieve some understanding of what it says. Eliot's early poetry, until at least the middle 1920s, is mostly concerned in one way or another with the Waste Land, with aspects of cultural decay in the modern Western world. After his formal acceptance of Anglican Christianity, a penitential note appears in much of his verse, a note of quiet searching for spiritual peace, with considerable allusion to biblical, liturgical, and mystical religious literature and to Dante. Ash Wednesday (1930), a poem in six parts, much less fiercely concentrated in style than the earlier poetry, explores with gentle insistence a mood both penitential and ques- tioning. The Ariel poems (so called because published in Faber's Ariel pamphlet series) present or explore aspects of religious doubt or discovery or revelation, some- times, as in "Journey of the Magi," drawing on biblical incident. In Four Quartets (of which the first, "Burnt Norton," appeared in the Collected Poems of 1936, though all four were not completed until 1943, when they were published together), Eliot fur- ther explored essentially religious moods, dealing with the relation between time and eternity and the cultivation of that selfless passivity that can yield the moment of timeless revelation in the midst of time. The mocking irony, the savage humor, the collage of quotations, the deliberately startling juxtaposition of the sordid and the romantic give way in these later poems to a quieter poetic idiom that is less jagged and more abstract, less fragmentary and more formally patterned. As a critic Eliot worked out in his reading of older literature what he needed as a poet to hold and to admire. He lent the growing weight of his authority to a shift in http://www.englishworld2011.info/

THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK / 2289 literary taste that replaced Milton by John Donne as the great seventeenth-century English poet and replaced Alfred, Lord Tennyson in the nineteenth century by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Rewriting English literary history, he saw the late-seventeenth- century "dissociation of sensibility"—the segregation of intellect and emotion—as determining the course of English poetry throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This theory also explained what he was aiming at in his own poetry: the reestablishment of that unified sensibility he found in Donne and other early- seventeenth-century poets and dramatists, who were able, he suggests in "The Meta- physical Poets," to "feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose." His view of tradition, his dislike of the poetic exploitation of the author's personality, his advo- cacy of what he called "orthodoxy," made him suspicious of what he considered eccen- tric geniuses such as William Blake and D. H. Lawrence. On the other side, his dislike of the grandiloquent and his insistence on complexity and on the mingling of the formal with the conversational made him distrust Milton's influence on English poetry. He considered himself a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo- Catholic in religion" (For Lancelot Andrewes, 1928), in favor of order against chaos, tradition against eccentricity, authority against rampant individualism; yet his own poetry is in many respects untraditional and certainly highly individual in tone. His conservative and even authoritarian habit of mind, his anti-Semitic remarks and mis- sionary zeal, alienated some who admire—and some whose own poetry has been much influenced by—his poetry. Eliot's plays address, directly or indirectly, religious themes. Murder in the Cathe- dral (1935) deals in an appropriately ritual manner with the killing of Archbishop Thomas a Becket, using a chorus and presenting its central speech as a sermon by the archbishop. The Family Reunion (1939) deals with the problem of guilt and redemption in a modern upper-class English family; combining choric devices from Greek tragedy with a poetic idiom subdued to the accents of drawing-room conver- sation. In his three later plays, all written in the 1950s, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman, he achieved popular success by casting a serious religious theme in the form of a sophisticated modern social comedy, using a verse that is so conversational in movement that when spoken in the theater it does not sound like verse at all. Critics differ on the degree to which Eliot succeeded in his last plays in combining box-office success with dramatic effectiveness. But there is no disagreement on his importance as one of the great renovators of poetry in English, whose influence on a whole generation of poets, critics, and intellectuals was enormous. His range as a poet is limited, and his interest in the great middle ground of human experience (as distinct from the extremes of saint and sinner) deficient; but when in 1948 he was awarded the rare honor of the Order of Merit by King George VI and also gained the Nobel Prize in literature, his positive qualities were widely and fully recognized—his poetic cunning, his fine craftsmanship, his original accent, his historical importance as the poet of the modern symbolist-Metaphysical tradition.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock1

S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piii scosse. Ma per cio cche giammai di questo fondo non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero, senza tenia d'infamia ti rispondo,2

1. The title implies an ironic contrast between the 2. "If I thought that my reply would be to one who romantic suggestions of "love song" and the dully would ever return to the world, this flame would prosaic name "J. Alfred Prufrock." stay without further movement; but since none has http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2290 / T. S. ELIOT

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question . . . Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?' Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time3 For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands4 That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?' Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— (They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!') My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

ever returned alive from this depth, if what I hear 3. Cf. Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress," is true, I answer you without fear of infamy" line 1: "Had we hut world enough, and time." (Dante, Inferno 27.61—66). Guido da Montefeltro, 4. Works and Days is a poem about the farming shut up in his flame (the punishment given to false year by the Greek poet Hesiod (8th century B.C.E.). counselors), tells the shame of his evil life to Dante Eliot contrasts useful agricultural labor with the because he believes Dante will never return to futile "works and days of hands" engaged in mean- earth to report it. ingless social gesturing. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK / 2291

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin— (They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!') 45 Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all— 50 Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall3 Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume?

55 And I have known the eyes already, known them all— The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin 60 To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all— Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) 65 Is it perfume from a dress That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. And should I then presume? And how should I begin?

70 Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . . I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.6

75 And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! Smoothed by long fingers, Asleep . . . tired ... or it malingers, Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, so Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,7

5. Cf. Shakespeare's Twelfth Nig fit 1.1.4: "That Hamlet 2.2.201—02: "for you yourself, sir, should strain again, it had a dying fall." be old as I am—if, like a crab, you could go back- 6. I.e., he would have been better as a crab on the ward." ocean bed. Perhaps, too, the motion of a crab sug- 7. Like that of John the Baptist. See Mark 6.17- gests futility and growing old. Cf. Shakespeare's 28 and Matthew 14.3-11. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2292 / T. S. ELIOT

I am no prophet—and here's no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, 85 And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, 90 Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball8 To roll it toward some overwhelming question, To say: 'I am Lazarus,9 come from the dead, 95 Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all'— If one, settling a pillow by her head, Should say: 'That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.'

And would it have been worth it, after all, IOO Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor— And this, and so much more?— It is impossible to say just what I mean! 105 But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth while If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say: 'That is not it at all, 110 That is not what I meant, at all.'

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress,1 start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, us Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence,2 but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool.

120 I grow old ... I grow old . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

8. Cf. "To His Coy Mistress," lines 41-44: "Let us made by a royal or noble person. Elizabethan plays roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into sometimes showed such "progresses" crossing the one ball, / And tear our pleasures with rough strife stage. Cf. Chaucer's General Prologue to The Can- / Thorough the iron gates of life." terbury Tales, line 308. 9. Raised by Jesus from the dead (Luke I 6.19—31 2. In its older meanings: "opinions," "sententious- and John 11.1-44). ness." 1. In the Elizabethan sense of a state journey http://www.englishworld2011.info/

SWEENEY AMONG THE NIGHTINGALES / 2293

125 I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea 130 By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

1910-11 1915,1917

Sweeney among the Nightingales

d'j(j.oL, jisjcXr|Y|.iai Kaipiav 3tX.tiyr)v eaco.1

Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees Letting his arms hang down to laugh, The zebra stripes along his jaw Swelling to maculate0 giraffe. spotted, stained

5 The circles of the stormy moon Slide westward toward the River Plate,2 Death and the Raven1 drift above And Sweeney guards the horned gate.4

Gloomy Orion and the Dog 10 Are veiled;5 and hushed the shrunken seas; The person in the Spanish cape Tries to sit on Sweeney's knees

Slips and pulls the table cloth Overturns a coffee-cup, 15 Reorganized upon the floor She yawns and draws a stocking up;

The silent man in mocha brown Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes; The waiter brings in oranges 20 Bananas figs and hothouse grapes;

The silent vertebrate in brown Contracts and concentrates, withdraws; Bachel nee Rabinovitch Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;

1. "Alas, I am struck with a mortal blow within" 3. The constellation Corvus. (Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 1343); the voice of 4. The gates of horn, in Hades, through which Agamemnon heard crying out from the palace as true dreams come to the upper world. he is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra. 5. For Sweeney and his female friend, the gate of 2. Or Rio de la Plata, an estuary on the South vision is blocked and the great myth-making con- American coast between Argentina and Uruguay, stellations—"Orion and the Dog"—are "veiled." formed by the Uruguay and Parana rivers. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2294 / T. S. ELIOT

25 She and the lady in the cape Are suspect, thought to be in league; Therefore the man with heavy eyes Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,

Leaves the room and reappears 30 Outside the window, leaning in, Branches of wistaria Circumscribe a golden grin;

The host with someone indistinct Converses at the door apart, 35 The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud6 And let their liquid siftings fall 40 To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.

1918,1919

The Waste Land In the essay "Ulysses, Order, and Myth" (1923), Eliot hinted at the ambitions of The Waste Land when he declared that others would follow James Joyce "in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity. ... It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. . . . It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible in art." Eliot labeled this new technique "the mythical method." He gave another clue to the theme and structure of The Waste Land in a general note, in which he stated that "not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance [1920]." He further acknowledged a general indebt- edness to Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough (thirteen volumes, 1890—1915), "espe- cially the . . . volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris," in which Frazer deals with ancient vegetation myths and fertility ceremonies. Drawing on material from Frazer and other anthropologists, Weston traces the relationship of these myths and rituals to Chris- tianity and especially to the legend of the Holy Grail. She finds an archetypal fertility myth in the story of the Fisher King, whose death, infirmity, or impotence (there are many forms of the myth) brought drought and desolation to the land and failure of the power to reproduce themselves among both humans and beasts. This symbolic- Waste Land can be revived only if a "questing knight" goes to the Chapel Perilous, situated in the heart of it, and there asks certain ritual questions about the Grail (or Cup) and the Lance—originally fertility symbols, female and male, respectively. The proper asking of these questions revives the king and restores fertility to the land. The relation of this original Grail myth to fertility cults and rituals found in many different civilizations, and represented by stories of a god who dies and is later res- urrected (e.g., Tammuz, Adonis, Attis), shows their common origin in a response to

6. Agamemnon is murdered not in a "bloody ingale), and also with the ancient "bloody wood" of wood" but in his bath. Eliot here telescopes Aga- Nemi, where the old priest was slain by his suc- memnon's murder with the wood where, in Greek cessor (as described in the first chapter of Sir myth, Philomela was raped by her sister's husband, James Frazer's Golden Bough). Tereus (she was subsequently turned into a night- http://www.englishworld2011.info/

THE WASTE LAND / 2295 the cyclical movement of the seasons, with vegetation dying in winter to be resur- rected again in the spring. Christianity, according to Weston, gave its own spiritual meaning to the myth; it "did not hesitate to utilize the already existing medium of instruction, but boldly identified the Deity of Vegetation, regarded as Life Principle, with the God of the Christian Faith." The Fisher King is related to the use of the fish symbol in early Christianity. Weston states "with certainty that the Fish is a Life symbol of immemorial antiquity, and that the title of Fisher has, from the ear- liest ages, been associated with the Deities who were held to be specially connected with the origin and preservation of Life." Eliot, following Weston, thus uses a great variety of mythological and religious material, both Western and Eastern, to paint a symbolic picture of the modern Waste Land and the need for regeneration. He viv- idly presents the terror of that desiccated life—its loneliness, emptiness, and irra- tional apprehensions—as well as its misuse of sexuality, but he paradoxically ends the poem with a benediction. The mass death and social collapse of World War I inform the poem's vision of a Waste Land strewn with corpses, wreckage, and ruin. Another significant general source for the poem is the German composer Richard Wagner's operas Gotterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods), Parsifal, Das Rheingold, and Tristan und Isolde. The poem as published owes a great deal to the severe pruning of Ezra Pound; the original manuscript, with Pound's excisions and comments, provides fascinating information about the genesis and development of the poem, and was reproduced in facsimile in 1971, edited by Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot. Reprinted below is the text as first published in book form in December 1922, including Eliot's notes, which are supplemented by the present editors' notes.

The Waste Land

"NAM Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: 2L[3uXA.a Tl OE/XLC;; respondebat ilia: curaOciveiv 0eko."'

FOR EZRA POUND il miglior fabbro2

I. The Burial of the Dead3 April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee4

1. From the Satyricon of Petronius (1st century nally paid to the Provencal poet Arnaut Daniel in C.E.): "For once I myself saw with my own eyes the Dante's Purgatorio 26.117. Ezra Pound (1885— Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the 1972), American expatriate poet who was a key fig- boys said to her 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she ure in the modern movement in poetry, helped replied, 'I want to die.' " (The Greek may be trans- Eliot massively revise the manuscript. literated, "Sibylla tl theleis?" and "apothanein 3. The title comes from the Anglican burial ser- thelo.") The Cumaean Sibyl was the most famous vice. of the Sibyls, the prophetic old women of Greek 4. Lake a few miles south of Munich, where the mythology; she guided Aeneas through Hades in "mad" King Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned in 1886 Virgil's Aeneid. She had been granted immortality in mysterious circumstances. This romantic, mel- by Apollo, but because she forgot to ask for per- ancholy king passionately admired Richard Wag- petual youth, she shrank into withered old age and ner and especially Wagner's opera Tristan und her authority declined. Isolde, which plays a significant part in The Waste 2. The better craftsman (Italian); a tribute origi- Land. Ludwig's suffering of "death by water" in the http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2296 / T. S. ELIOT

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,5 And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.6 And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,7 You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,8 And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock,9 (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zn, Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du?l

"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; "They called me the hyacinth girl." —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth2 garden, Yours arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Oed' und leer das Meer.3

Starnbergersee thus evokes a cluster of themes hopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail." central to the poem. Eliot had met King Ludwig's 9. Cf. Isaiah 32.2: the "righteous king" "shall be second cousin Countess Marie Larisch and talked ... as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow with her. Although he had probably not read the of a great rock in a weary land." countess's book My Past, which discusses King 1. V. [see] Tristan und Isolde, I, verses 5—8 [Eliot's Ludwig at length, he got information about her life note]. In Wagner's opera a sailor recalls the girl he and times from her in person, and the remarks has left behind: "Fresh blows the wind to the made in lines 8—18 are hers. homeland; my Irish child, where are you waiting?" 5. A small public park in Munich. 2. Name of a young man loved and accidentally 6. I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, killed by Apollo in Greek mythology; from his blood a true German (German). sprang the flower named for him, inscribed with 7. Cf. Ezelael II, i [Eliot's note]. God, addressing "AI," a cry of grief. Ezekiel, continues: "stand upon thy feet, and I will 3. Id. [Ibid] III, verse 24 [Eliot's note]. In act 3 of speak unto thee." Tristan und Isolde, Tristan lies dying. He is waiting 8. Cf. Ecclesiastes XII, v [Eliot's note]. The verse for Isolde to come to him from Cornwall, but a Eliot cites is part of the preacher's picture of the shepherd, appointed to watch for her sail, can desolation of old age, "when they shall be afraid of report only, "Waste and empty is the sea." Oed' (or that which is high, and fears shall be in the way Od') was originally misspelled Od'. and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grass- http://www.englishworld2011.info/

THE WASTE LAND / 2297

Madame Sosostris,4 famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless 45 Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards.5 Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,6 (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna,7 the Lady of the Rocks, 50 The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,8 And here is the one-eyed merchant,9 and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find 55 The Hanged Man.1 Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days.

60 Unreal City,2 Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,3 I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,4

4. A mock Egyptian name (suggested to Eliot by nand is associated with Phlebas and Mr. Eugeni- "Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana," the name des and, therefore, with the "drowned Phoenician assumed by a character in Aldous Huxley's novel Sailor." Crome Yellow [1921] who dresses up as a gypsy to 7. Beautiful lady (Italian). The word also suggests tell fortunes at a fair). Madonna (the Virgin Mar)') and, therefore, the 5. I.e., the deck of Tarot cards. The four suits of Madonna of the Rocks (as in Leonardo da Vinci's the Tarot pack, discussed by Jessie Weston in From painting); the rocks symbolize the Church. Bella- Ritual to Romance, are the cup, lance, sword, and donna is also an eye cosmetic and a poison—the dish—the life symbols found in the Grail story. deadly nightshade. Weston noted that "today the Tarot has fallen 8. I.e., the wheel of fortune, whose turning rep- somewhat into disrepute, being principally used resents the reversals of human life. for purposes of divination." Some of the cards 9. I.e., Mr. Eugenides, "one-eyed" because the fig- mentioned in lines 46—56 are discussed by Eliot in ure is in profile on the card. Unlike the man with his note to this passage: "I am not familiar with the three staves and the wheel, which are Tarot cards, exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from he is Eliot's creation. which I have obviously departed to suit my own 1. On his card in the Tarot pack he is shown hang- convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the ing by one foot from a T-shaped cross. He sym- traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: bolizes the self-sacrifice of the fertility god who is because he is associated in my mind with the killed so that his resurrection may restore fertility Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate to land and people. him with the hooded figure in the passage of the 2. Cf. Baudelaire: "Fourmillante cite, cite pleine disciples to Emmaus in part V. The Phoenician de reves, / Ou le spectre en plein jour raccroche le Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the passant" [Eliot's note]. The lines are quoted from 'crowds of people,' and Death by Water is executed "Les Sept Vieillards" ("The Seven Old Men") of Les in part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authen- Fletirs du Mai (The Flowers of Evil), by the French tic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite poet Charles Baudelaire (1821—1867): "Swarming arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself." city, city full of dreams, / Where the specter in 6. See part 4. Phlebas the Phoenician and Mr. broad daylight accosts the passerby." The word Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant—both of whom reve was originally misspelled reve. appear later in the poem—are different phases of 3. Cf. Inferno III, 55-57 [Eliot's note]. The note the same symbolic character, here identified as the goes on to quote Dante's lines, which maybe trans- "Phoenician Sailor." Mr. Eugenides exports "cur- lated: "So long a train of people, / that I should rants" (line 210); the drowned Phlebas floats in the never have believed / That death had undone so "current" (line 315). Line 48 draws from Ariel's many." Dante, just outside the gate of hell, has song in Shakespeare's The Tempest (1.2.400—08) seen "the wretched souls of those who lived with- to the shipwrecked Ferdinand, who was "sitting on out disgrace and without praise." a bank / Weeping again the King my father's 4. Cf. Inferno IV, 25-27 [Eliot's note]. In Limbo, wrack," when "this music crept by me on the the first circle of hell, Dante has found the virtuous waters." The song is about the supposed drowning heathens, who lived before Christianity and are, of Ferdinand's father, Alonso. The Waste Land therefore, eternally unable to achieve their desire contains many references to The Tempest. Ferdi- http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2298 / T. S. ELIOT

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.5 There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson!6 "You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!7 "That corpse you planted last year in your garden, "Has it begun to sprout?8 Will it bloom this year? "Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? "Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, "Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!9 "You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable—mon frere!"1

II. A Game of Chess2 \ ^ The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,3 Glowed on the marble, where the glass Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines From which a golden Cupidon peeped out (Another hid his eyes behind his wing) Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra Reflecting light upon the table as The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it, From satin cases poured in rich profusion; In vials of ivory and coloured glass Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air That freshened from the window, these ascended In fattening the prolonged candle-flames, Flung their smoke into the laquearia,4 Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling. of seeing God. Dante's lines, cited by Eliot, mean "Hypocrite reader!—my likeness—my brother!" "Here, so far as I could tell by listening, / there was "Au Lecteur" describes humans as sunk in stupid- no lamentation except sighs, / which caused the ity, sin, and evil, but the worst in "each man's foul eternal air to tremble." menagerie of sin" is boredom, the "monstre deli- 5. A phenomenon which I have often noticed cat"—"You know him, reader." [Eliot's note]. St. Mary Woolnoth is a church in 2. The title suggests two plays by Thomas Middle- the City of London (the financial district); the ton (1580—1627): A Game at Chess and, more sig- crowd is flowing across London Bridge to work in nificant, Women Beware Women, which has a the City. According to the Bible, Jesus died at the scene in which a mother-in-law is distracted by a ninth hour. game of chess while her daughter-in-law is 6. Presumably representing the "average business- seduced: every move in the chess game represents man." a move in the seduction. 7. The battle of Mylae (260 B.C.E.) in the First 3. Cf. Antony and Cleopatra, II, ii, 1. 190 [Eliot's Punic War, which, in some measure like World note]. In Shakespeare's play, Enobarbus's famous War I, was fought for economic reasons. description of the first meeting of Antony and Cle- 8. A distortion of the fertility god's ritual death, opatra begins, "The barge she sat in, like a bur- which heralded rebirth. nish'd throne, / Burn'd on the water." Eliot's 9. Cf. the Dirge in Webster's White Devil [Eliot's language in the opening lines of part 2 echoes iron- note]. In the play by John Webster (d. 1625), the ically Enobarbus's speech. dirge, sung by Cornelia, has the lines "But keep 4. Laquearia. V. Aeneid, I, 726 [Eliot's note]. the wolf far thence, that's foe to men, / For with Laquearia means "a paneled ceiling," and Eliot's his nails he'll dig them up again." Eliot makes the note quotes the passage in the Aeneid that was his "wolf" into a "dog," which is not a foe but a friend source for the word. The passage may be trans- to humans. lated: "Blazing torches hang from the gold-paneled 1. V. Baudelaire, Preface to Fleurs du Mai [Eliot's ceiling [laquearibus aureis], and torches conquer note]. The passage is the last line of the introduc- the night with flames." Virgil is describing the ban- tory poem "Au Lecteur" ("To the Reader"), in quet given by Dido, queen of Carthage, for Aeneas, Baudelaire's Fleurs dii Mai; it may be translated: with whom she fell in love. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

THE WASTE LAND / 2299

Huge sea-wood fed with copper 95 Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone, In which sad light a carved dolphin swam. Above the antique mantel was displayed As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene5 The change of Philomel,6 by the barbarous king 100 So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, "Jug Jug"7 to dirty ears. And other withered stumps of time 105 Were told upon the walls; staring forms Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed. Footsteps shuffled on the stair. Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery points no Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

"My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. "Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. "What are you thinking of ? What thinking? What? "I never know what you are thinking. Think."

115 I think we are in rats' alley8 Where the dead men lost their bones.

"What is that noise?" The wind under the door.9 "What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?" 120 Nothing again nothing. "Do "You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember "Nothing?"

I remember 125 Those are pearls that were his eyes.1 "Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?" But O O O O that Shakespeherian Bag2— It's so elegant BO So intelligent

"What shall I do now? What shall I do?" "I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

5. Sylvan scene. V. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV. 140 8. Cf. Part 111, I. 195 [Eliot's note]. [Eliot's note]. The phrase is part of the first 9. Cf. Webster: "Is the wind in that door still?" description of Eden, seen through Satan's eyes. [Eliot's note]. In John Webster's The Devil's Law 6. V. Ovid, Metamorphoses, VT, Philomela [Eliot's Case (3.2.162), a physician asks this question on note]. Philomela was raped by "the barbarous king" finding that the victim of a murderous attack is still Tereus, husband of her sister, Procne. Philomela breathing, meaning "Is he still alive?" was then transformed into a nightingale. Eliot's 1. Cf. Part I, 1. 37. 48 [Eliot's note]. note for line 100 refers ahead to his elaboration of 2. American ragtime song, which was a hit of Zieg- the nightingale's song. feld's Follies in 1912. The chorus is "That Shake- 7. Conventional representation of nightingale's spherean Rag, most intelligent, very elegant." song in Elizabethan poetry. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2300 / T. S. ELIOT

"With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow? "What shall we ever do?" 135 The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess,3 Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

When Lil's husband got demobbed,4 I said— 140 I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself, HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME5 Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart. He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there, us You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set, He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you. And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert, He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time, And if you dont give it him, there's others will, I said, iso Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said. Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look. HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME If you dont like it you can get on with it, I said, Others can pick and choose if you can't. 155 But if Albert makes off, it wont be for lack of telling. You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one.) I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face, It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. 160 (She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.) The chemist6 said it would be alright, but I've never been the same. You are a proper fool, I said. Well, if Albert wont leave you alone, there it is, I said, What you get married for if you dont want children? 165 HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,0 ham, bacon And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot— HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME i7o Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight. Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.7

III. The Fire Sermon8 The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind

3. Cf. the game of chess in Middleton's Women tion. Beware Women (Eliot's note]. The significance 7. Cf. the mad Ophelia's departing words (Shake- of this chess game is discussed in the first note to speare, Hamlet 4.5.69—70). Ophelia, too, met part 2. "death by water." Cf. also the popular song lyric 4. British slang for "demobilized" (discharged "Good night ladies, we're going to leave you now." from the army after World War I). 8. The Buddha preached the Fire Sermon, against 5. The traditional call of the British bartender at the fires of lust and other passions that destroy closing time. people and prevent their regeneration. 6. Pharmacist. "To bring it off: to cause an abor- http://www.englishworld2011.info/

THE WASTE LAND / 2301

175 Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.9 The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. 180 And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; Departed, have left no addresses. By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept1 . . . Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. 185 But at my back in a cold blast I hear2 The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

A rat crept softly through the vegetation Dragging its slimy belly on the bank While I was fishing in the dull canal 190 On a winter evening round behind the gashouse Musing upon the king my brother s wreck And on the king my father's death before him.3 White bodies naked on the low damp ground And bones cast in a little low dry garret, 195 Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year. But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors,4 which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.5 O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter 200 And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water6 Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupoleI7

Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug 205 So rudely forc'd. Tereus

9. V. Spenser, Prothalamion (Eliot's note]. Eliot's (1574-ca. 1640), English poet. line is the refrain from Edmund Spenser's marriage 6. I do not know the origin of the ballad from song, which is also set by the river Thames in Lon- which these lines are taken; it was reported to me don. from Sydney, Australia [Eliot's note]. One of the 1. Cf. Psalms 137.1, in which the exiled Hebrews less bawdy versions of the song, which was popular mourn for their homeland: "By the rivers of Bab- among Australian troops in World War I, went as ylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we follows: "O the moon shines bright on Mrs. Porter remembered Zion." Lake Leman is another name /And on the daughter / Of Mrs. Porter. /They wash for Lake Geneva, in Switzerland; Eliot wrote The their feet in soda water / And so they oughter / To Waste Land in Lausanne, by that lake. The noun keep them clean." leman is an archaic word meaning lover. 7. V. Verlaine, Parsifal [Eliot's note]: "And O those 2. An ironic distortion of Andrew Marvell's "To children's voices singing in the dome!" The sonnet His Coy Mistress," lines 21—22: "But at my back I by the French poet Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) always hear/Time's winged chariot hurrvingnear." describes Parsifal, the questing knight, resisting all Cf. lines 196-97. sensual temptations to keep himself pure for the 3. Cf. The Tempest, 1, ii [Eliot's note]. See line 48. Grail and heal the Fisher King; Wagner's Parsifal 4. Cf. Marvell, To His Coy Mistress [Eliot's note]. had his feet washed before entering the castle of 5. Cf. Day, Parliament of Bees: "When of the sud- the Grail. den, listening, you shall hear, / A noise of horns 8. A reference to Tereus, who "rudely forc'd" Phil- and hunting, which shall bring/Actaeon to Diana omela; it was also one of the conventional words in the spring, / Where all shall see her naked skin" for a nightingale's song in Elizabethan poetry. Cf. [Eliot's note]. Actaeon was changed to a stag and the song from John Lyly's Alexander and Campaspe hunted to death after he saw Diana, the goddess (1564): "Oh, 'tis the ravished nightingale. / Jug, of chastity, bathing with her nymphs. John Day jug, jug, pig, tereu! she cries." Cf. also lines lOOff. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2302 / T. S. ELIOT

Unreal City Under the brown fog of a winter noon Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna9 merchant 210 Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants C.i.f.1 London: documents at sight, Asked me in demotic0 French colloquial To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.2

215 At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, I Tiresias,3 though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see 220 At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,4 The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Out of the window perilously spread 225 Her drying combinations0 touched by the sun's last rays, undergarments On the divan are piled (at night her bed) Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.0 corset I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest— 230 I too awaited the expected guest. He, the young man carbuncular,0 arrives, pimply A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a Bradford5 millionaire.

9. Now Izmir, a seaport in western Turkey; here aspects of love. For once, with a blow of his staff, associated with Carthage and the ancient Phoe- he had committed violence on two huge snakes as nician and Syrian merchants, who spread the old they copulated in the green forest; and—wonder- mystery cults. ful to tell—was turned from a man into a woman 1. The currants were quoted at a price "carriage and thus spent seven years. In the eighth year he and insurance free to London"; and the Bill of Lad- saw the same snakes again and said: 'If a blow ing etc. were to be handed to the buyer upon pay- struck at you is so powerful that it changes the sex ment of the sight draft [Eliot's note]. Another gloss of the giver, I will now strike at you again.' With of C.i.f. is "cost, insurance and freight." these words she struck the snakes, and again 2. Luxury hotel in the seaside resort of Brighton. became a man. So he was appointed arbitrator in Cannon Street Hotel, near the station that was the playful quarrel, and supported Jove's state- then chief terminus for travelers to the Continent, ment. It is said that Saturnia [i.e., Juno] was quite was a favorite meeting place for businesspeople disproportionately upset, and condemned the arbi- going or coming from abroad; it was also a locale trator to perpetual blindness. But the almighty for homosexual liaisons. father (for no god may undo what has been done 3. Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not by another god), in return for the sight that was indeed a "character," is yet the most important per- taken away, gave him the power to know the future sonage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the and so lightened the penalty paid by the honor." one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into 4. This may not appear as exact as Sappho's lines, the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly but I had in mind the "longshore" or "dory" fish- distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the erman, who returns at nightfall [Eliot's note]. Sap- women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in pho's poem addressed Hesperus, the evening star, Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the sub- as the star that brings everyone home from work stance of the poem. The whole passage from Ovid to evening rest; her poem is here distorted by Eliot. is of great anthropological interest [Eliot's note]. There is also an echo of the 19th-century Scottish The note then quotes, from the Latin text of Ovid's writer Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem," line Metamorphoses, the story of Tiresias's change of 221: "Home is the sailor, home from sea." sex: "[The story goes that once Jove, having drunk 5. Either the Yorkshire woolen manufacturing a great deal,] jested with Juno. He said, 'Your plea- town, where many fortunes were made in World sure in love is really greater than that enjoyed by War I, or the pioneer oil town of Bradford, Penn- men.' She denied it; so they decided to seek the sylvania, the home of one of Eliot's wealthy Har- opinion of the wise Tiresias, for he knew both vard contemporaries, T. E. Hanley. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

THE WASTE LAND / 2303

235 The time is now propitious, as he guesses, The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Endeavours to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired. Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; 240 Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; 245 I who have sat by Thebes6 below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead.) Bestows one final patronising kiss, And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

She turns and looks a moment in the glass, 250 Hardly aware of her departed lover; Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: "Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over." When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, 255 She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.7

"This music crept by me upon the waters"8 And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street. O City, City, I can sometimes hear 260 Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, The pleasant whining of a mandoline And a clatter and a chatter from within Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls Of Magnus Martyr hold 265 Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.9

The river sweats' Oil and tar The barges drift With the turning tide

6. For many generations, Tiresias lived in Thebes, 9. The interior of St. Magnus Martyr is to my where he witnessed the tragic fates of Oedipus and mind one of the finest among [Sir Christopher] Creon; he prophesied in the marketplace by the Wren's interiors. See The Proposed Demolition of wall of Thebes. Nineteen City Churches: (P. S. King & Son, Ltd.) 7. V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wake- [Eliot's note]. In these lines the "pleasant" music, field [Eliot's note]. Olivia, a character in Oliver the "fishmen" resting after labor, and the splendor Goldsmith's 1766 novel, sings the following song of the church interior suggest a world of true val- when she returns to the place where she was ues, where work and relaxation are both real and seduced: "When lovely woman stoops to folly/And take place in a context of religious meaning. finds too late that men betray / What charm can 1. The Song of the (three) Thames-daughters soothe her melancholy, / What art can wash her begins here. From line 292 to 306 inclusive they guilt away? / The only art her guilt to cover, / To speak in turn. V. Gotterdammerung, III, i: the hide her shame from every eye, / To give repen- Rhinedaughters [Eliot's note]. Eliot parallels the tance to her lover / And wring his bosom—is to Thames-daughters with the Rhinemaidens in Wag- die." ner's opera Gotterdammerung (The Twilight of the 8. V. The Tempest, as above [Eliot's note]. Cf. line Gods), who lament that, with the gold of the Rhine 48. The line is from Ferdinand's speech, continu- stolen, the beauty of the river is gone. The refrain ing after "weeping again the King my father's in lines 277—78 is borrowed from Wagner. wTack." http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2304 / T. S. ELIOT

270 Red sails Wide To leeward, swing on the heavy spar. The barges wash Drifting logs 275 Down Greenwich reach Past the Isle of Dogs.2 Weialala leia Wallala leialala

Elizabeth and Leicester' 280 Beating oars The stern was formed A gilded shell Red and gold The brisk swell 285 Rippled both shores Southwest wind Carried down stream The peal of bells White towers 290 Weialala leia Wallala leialala

"Trams and dusty trees. Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew Undid me.4 By Richmond I raised my knees 295 Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe."

"My feet are at Moorgate,'5 and my heart Under my feet. After the event He wept. He promised 'a new start.' I made no comment. What should I resent?"

300 "On Margate6 Sands. I can connect Nothing with nothing. The broken fingernails of dirty hands. My people humble people who expect 305 Nothing." la la

To Carthage then I came7

2. Greenwich is a borough in London on the south Greenwich Hospital now stands. side of the Thames; opposite is the Isle of Dogs (a 4. Cf. Purgatorio, V, 133 [Eliot's note]. The Piir- peninsula). gatorio lines, which Eliot here parodies, may be 3. The fruitless love of Queen Elizabeth and the translated: "Remember me, who am La Pia. / Siena earl of Leicester (Robert Dudley) is recalled in made me, Maremma undid me." "Highbury": a res- Eliot's note: "V. [J. A.] Froude, Elizabeth, Vol. I, idential London suburb. "Richmond": a pleasant eh. iv, letter of De Quadra to Philip of Spain: 'In part of London westward up the Thames, with the afternoon we were in a barge, watching the boating and riverside hotels. "Kew": adjoining games on the river. (The queen) was alone with Richmond, has the famous Kew Gardens. Lord Robert and myself on the poop, when they 5. Underground (i.e., subway) station Eliot used began to talk nonsense, and went so far that Lord daily while working at Lloyds Bank. Robert at last said, as I was on the spot there was 6. Popular seaside resort on the Thames estuary. no reason why they should not be married if the 7. V. St. Augustine's Confessions: "to Carthage queen pleased.' " Queen Elizabeth 1 was born in then 1 came, where a caldron of unholy loves sang the old Greenwich House, by the river, where all about mine ears" [Eliot's note]. The passage http://www.englishworld2011.info/

THE WASTE LAND / 2305

Burning burning burning burning8 O Lord Thou pluckest me out9 310 O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

TV. Death by Water] Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss. 315 A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool. Gentile or Jew 320 O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

V. Wliat the Thunder Said2 After the torchlight red on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places 325 The shouting and the crying Prison and palace and reverberation Of thunder of spring over distant mountains He who was living is now dead3 We who were living are now dying 330 With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water and the sandy road The road winding above among the mountains Which are mountains of rock without water 335 If there were water we should stop and drink Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand If there were only water amongst the rock

from the Confessions quoted here occurs in St. infatuation." For Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, see Augustine's account of his youthful life of lust. Cf. Matthew 5-7. line 92 and its note. 9. From St. Augustine's Confessions again. The 8. The complete text of the Buddha's Fire Sermon collocation of these two representatives of eastern (which corresponds in importance to the Sermon and western asceticism, as the culmination of this on the Mount) from which these words are taken, part of the poem, is not an accident [Eliot's note]. will be found translated in the late Henry Clarke 1. This section has been interpreted as signifying Warren's Buddhism in Translation (Harvard Orien- death by water without resurrection or as symbol- tal Series). Mr. Warren was one of the great pio- izing the sacrificial death that precedes rebirth. neers of Buddhist studies in the Occident [Eliot's 2. In the first part of Part V three themes are note]. In the sermon, the Buddha instructs his employed: the journey to Emmaus, the approach priests that all things "are on fire. . . . The eye . . . to the Chapel Perilous (see Miss Weston's book), is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is and the present decay of eastern Europe [Eliot's on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire; note]. On the journey to Emmaus, the resurrected and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or Jesus walks alongside and converses with two dis- indifferent, originates in dependence on impres- ciples, who think he is a stranger until he reveals sions received by the eye, that also is on fire. And his identity (Luke 24.13-14). with what are these on fire? With the fire of pas- 3. These lines allude to Jesus' agony in the Garden sion, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of of Gethsemane, his trial, and his crucifixion. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2306 / T. S. ELIOT

Dead mountain mouth of carious0 teeth that cannot spit decked 340 Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain There is not even solitude in the mountains But red sullen faces sneer and snarl 345 From doors of mudcracked houses If there were water And no rock If there were rock And also water 350 And water A spring A pool among the rock If there were the sound of water only Not the cicada4 355 And dry grass singing But sound of water over a rock Where the hermit-thrush5 sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop But there is no water

360 Who is the third who walks always beside you?6 When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded 365 I do not know whether a man or a woman —But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air7 Murmur of maternal lamentation Who are those hooded hordes swarming 370 Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth Ringed by the flat horizon only What is the city over the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers 375 Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Unreal

4. Cf. Ecclesiastes' prophecy "the grasshopper of their strength, had the constant delusion that shall be a burden, and desire shall fail." Cf. also there was one more member than could actually be line 23 and its note. counted [Eliot's note]. This reminiscence is asso- 5. This is Tiirdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the her- ciated with Jesus' unrecognized presence on the mit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec County. way to Emmaus. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds of Eastern North 7. Eliot's note for lines 367—77 is: "Cf. Herman America) "it is most at home in secluded woodland Hesse, Blick ins Chaos ["A Glimpse into Chaos"]." and thickety retreats. ... Its notes are not remark- The note then quotes a passage from the German able for variety or volume, but in purity and sweet- text, which is translated: "Already half of Europe, ness of tone and exquisite modulation they are already at least half of Eastern Europe, on the way unequaled." Its "water-dripping song" is justly cel- to Chaos, drives drunk in sacred infatuation along ebrated [Eliot's note]. the edge of the precipice, sings drunkenly, as 6. The following lines were stimulated by the though hymn singing, as Dmitri Karamazov [in account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I for- Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov] sang. The get which, but 1 think one of Shackleton's): it was offended bourgeois laughs at the songs; the saint related that the party of explorers, at the extremity and the seer hear them with tears." http://www.englishworld2011.info/

THE WASTE LAND / 2307

A woman drew her long black hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings 380 And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings And crawled head downward down a blackened wall And upside down in air were towers Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours 385 And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.8 390 It has no windows, and the door swings, Dry bones can harm no one. Only a cock stood on the rooftree Co co rico co co rico9 In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust 395 Bringing rain

Ganga1 was sunken, and the limp leaves Waited for rain, while the black clouds Gathered far distant, over Himavant.2 The jungle crouched, humped in silence. 400 Then spoke the thunder DA3 Datta: what have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment's surrender 405 Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed Which is not to be found in our obituaries Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider4 Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor0 lawyer 410 In our empty rooms DA Dayadhvam: I have heard the key5

8. Suggesting the moment of near despair before demons, naturally cruel, as "Be compassionate" the Chapel Perilous, when the questing knight (Dayadhvam); "That very thing is repeated even sees nothing there but decay. This illusion of noth- today by the heavenly voice, in the form of thunder ingness is the knight's final test. as 'DA' 'DA' 'DA,' which means 'Control your- 9. The crowing of the cock signals the departure selves,' 'Give,' and 'Have compassion.' Therefore of ghosts and evil spirits. Cf. Hamlet 1.1.157ff. In one should practice these three things: self- Matthew 26.34 and 74 the cock crows after Peter control, giving, and mercy." The Upanishads are betrays Jesus three times. ancient philosophical dialogues in Sanskrit. They 1. Sanskrit name for the major sacred river in are primary texts for an early form of Hinduism India. sometimes called Brahminism. 2. I.e., snowy mountain (Sanskrit); usually applied 4. Cf. Webster, The White Devil, V, vi: . . they'll to the Himalayas. remarry / Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, 3. Datta, dayadhvam, damyata (Give, sympathize, ere the spider / Make a thin curtain for your epi- control). The fable of the meaning of the Thunder taphs" [Eliot's note]. is found in the Brihadaranyaka—Upanishad, 5, 1. 5. Cf. Inferno, XXXIII, 46 [Eliot's note]. In this A translation is found in Deussen's Sechzig Upan- passage from the Inferno Ugolino recalls his ishads des Veda, p. 489 [Eliot's note]. In the Old imprisonment in the tower with his children, Indian fable The Three Great Disciplines, the Cre- where they starved to death: "And I heard below ator God Prajapati utters the enigmatic DA the door of the horrible tower being nailed shut." to three groups. Lesser gods, naturally unruly, Eliot's note for this line goes on to quote F. H. interpret it as "Control yourselves" (Damyata)-, Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346: " 'My humans, naturally greedy, as "Give" (Datta)-, external sensations are no less private to myself http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2308 / T. S. ELIOT

Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison 415 Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison Only at nightfall, sethereal rumours Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus6 DA Damyata: The boat responded 420 Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands

I sat upon the shore 425 Fishing,7 with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order?8

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down9 Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affma] Ouando fiam uti chelidon2—O swallow swallow3 430 Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolieA These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then lie fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.' Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih''

1921 1922

than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case the late Latin poem "Pewigiliuni Veneris" ("Vigil of my experience falls within my own circle, a circle Venus"), "When will my spring come? When shall closed on the outside; and, with all its elements I be as the swallow that I may cease to be silent? I alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which have lost the Muse in silence, and Apollo regards surround it. ... In brief, regarded as an existence me not." which appears in a soul, the whole world for each 3. Cf. A. C. Swinburne's "Itylus," which begins, is peculiar and private to that soul.' " Eliot wrote "Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow, / How can his doctoral thesis on Bradley's philosophy. thine heart be full of spring?" and Tennyson's lyric 6. Coriolanus, who acted out of pride rather than in The Princess: "O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying duty, exemplifies a man locked in the prison of south." himself. He led the enemy against his native city 4. V. Gerard de Nerval, Sonnet El Desdichado out of injured pride (cf. Shakespeare's Coriolanus). [Eliot's note]. The French line may be translated: 7. V. Weston: From Ritual to Romance; chapter "The Prince of Aquitaine in the ruined tower." One on the Fisher King [Eliot's note]. of the cards in the Tarot pack is "the tower struck 8. Cf. Isaiah 38.1: "Thus saith the Lord, Set thine by lightning." house in order, for thou shalt die, and not live." 5. V. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy [Eliot's note]. Subti- 9. One of the later lines of this nursery is tled Hieronymo's Mad Againe, Kyd's play (1594) is "Take the kev and lock her up, my fair lady." an early example of the Elizabethan tragedy of 1. V. Purgatorio, XXVI, 148 [Eliot's note]. The revenge. Hieronymo, driven mad by the murder of note goes on to quote lines 145—148 of the Pur- his son, has his revenge when he is asked to write gatorio, in which the Provencal poet Arnaut Daniel a court entertainment. He replies, "Why then lie addresses Dante: " 'Now I pray you, by that virtue fit you!" (i.e., accommodate you), and assigns the which guides you to the summit of the stairway, be parts in the entertainment so that, in the course of mindful in due time of my pain.' " Then (in the line the action, his son's murderers are killed. Eliot quotes here) "he hid himself in the fire which 6. Shantih. Repeated as here, a formal ending to refines them." an Upanishad. "The Peace which passeth under- 2. V. Pervigilium Veneris. Cf. Philomela in parts standing" is a feeble translation of the content of II and III [Eliot's note]. The Latin phrase in the this word [Eliot's note]. On the Upanishads see the text, originally misquoting uti as ceu, means, note to line 401 above. "When shall I be as the swallow?" It comes from http://www.englishworld2011.info/

THE HOLLOW MEN / 2309

The Hollow Men

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.1 A penny for the Old Guy2

I We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! ; Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry glass Or rats' feet over broken glass 10 In our dry cellar3

Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom 15 Remember us—if at all—not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.

II Eyes I dare not meet in dreams 20 In death's dream kingdom4 These do not appear: There, the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There, is a tree swinging 25 And voices are In the wind's singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer 30 In death's dream kingdom Let me also wear Such deliberate disguises Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves

1. From Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (see For some days before this, they ask people in the p. 1941). streets for pennies with which to buy fireworks. 2. Every year on Nov. 5, British children build 3. Cf. The Waste Land, lines 115 and 195. bonfires, on which thev burn a scarecrow effigy of 4. At the end of Dante's Purgatorio and in Paradiso the traitor Guido [Guy] Fawkes, who in 1605 4, he cannot meet the gaze of Beatrice (see Eliot's attempted to blow up the Parliament buildings. 1929 essay "Dante"). http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2310 / T. S. ELIOT

In a field5 35 Behaving as the wind behaves No nearer-—

Not that final meeting In the twilight kingdom6

III This is the dead land 40 This is cactus land Here the stone images7 Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man's hand Under the twinkle of a fading star.

45 Is it like this In death's other kingdom Waking alone At the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness so Lips that would kiss Form prayers to broken stone.

IV The eyes are not here There are no eyes here In this valley of dying stars 55 In this hollow valley This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech 60 Gathered on this beach of the tumid river8

Sightless, unless The eyes reappear As the perpetual star Multifoliate rose9 65 Of death's twilight kingdom The hope only Of empty men.

5. The traditional British scarecrow is made from reminded of his sins, he is allowed to proceed to two sticks tied in the form of a cross (the vertical Paradise (Purgatorio 30). one stuck in the ground), dressed in cast-off 7. Cf. The Waste Land, line 22. clothes, and sometimes draped with dead vermin. 8. Dante's Acheron, which encircles hell, and the 6. Perhaps a reference to Dante's meeting with Congo of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Beatrice after he has crossed the river Lethe. There 9. The image of heaven in Dante's Paradiso 32. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

THE HOLLOW MEN / 2311

V Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear 70 Here we go round the prickly pear At five o'clock in the morning.1

Between the idea And the reality Between the motion 75 And the act2 Falls the Shadow3 For Thine is the Kingdom4

Between the conception And the creation so Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow Life is very long

Between the desire 85 And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent 90 Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is Life is For Thine is the

95 This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang hut a whimper.

1924-25 1925

1. Parodic version of the children's rhyme ending or a hideous dream." "Here we go round the mulberry bush / On a cold 3. Cf. Ernest Dowson's "Now sum qualis eram and frosty morning." bonae sub regno Cynarae," lines 1—2: "Last night, 2. Cf. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar 2.1.63—5: ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine / There "Between the acting of a dreadful thing / And the fell thy shadow, Cynara!" first motion, all the interim is / Like a phantasma 4. Cf. The Lord's Prayer. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2312 / T. S. ELIOT

Journey of the Magi1

'A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, 5 The very dead of winter.'2 And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, 10 And the silken girls bringing sherbet. Then the camel men cursing and grumbling And running away, and wanting their liquor and women, And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly is And the villages dirty and charging high prices: A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, saying 20 That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation; With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness, And three trees on the low sky.' 25 And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow. Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel, Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver, And feet kicking the empty wine-skins. But there was no information, and so we continued 30 And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down 35 This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. 40 We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

1. One of the wise men who came from the east weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, to Jerusalem to do homage to the infant Jesus in solstitio bmmali, 'the very dead of winter." " (Matthew 2.1—12) is recalling in old age the mean- 3. The "three trees" suggest the three crosses, with ing of the experience. Jesus crucified on the center one; the men "dicing 2. Adapted from a passage in a 1622 Christmas for pieces of silver" (line 27) suggest the soldiers sermon by Bishop Lancelot Andrewes: "A cold dicing for Jesus' garments and Judas's betrayal of coming they had of it at this time of the year, just him for thirty pieces of silver; the empty wineskins the worst time of the year to take a journey, and recall one of Jesus' parables of old and new (Mark specially a long journey in. The ways deep, the 2.22). http://www.englishworld2011.info/

LITTLE GIDDING / 2313

With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.

1927

FROM FOUR QUARTETS

Little Gidding1 I Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal0 though sodden towards sundown, eternal, everlasting Suspended in time, between pole and tropic, When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, 5 The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, In windless cold that is the heart's heat, Reflecting in a watery mirror A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon. And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier, 10 Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire2 In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell Or smell of living thing. This is the springtime But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow i5 Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom Of snow, a bloom more sudden Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading, Not in the scheme of generation. Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer?

20 If you came this way, Taking the route you would be likely to take From the place you would be likely to come from, If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness. 25 It would be the same at the end of the journey, If you came at night like a broken king,1

1. This is the last of Eliot's Four Quartets, four community was broken up in 1647, toward the end related poems each divided into five "movements" of the English Civil War, by the victorious Puri- in a manner reminiscent of the structure of a quar- tans; the chapel, however, was rebuilt in the 19th tet or a sonata and each dealing with some aspect century and still exists. Eliot WTOte the poem in of the relation of time and eternity, the meaning 1942, when he was taking his turn as a nighttime of history, the achievement of the moment of time- fire-watcher during the incendiary bombings of less insight. Although the Four Quartets constitute London in World War II. a unified sequence, they were each written sepa- 2. On the Pentecost day after the death and res- rately and can be read as individual poems. "Little urrection of Jesus, there appeared to his apostles Gidding can be understood by itself, without ref- "cloven tongues like as of fire . . . And they were erence to the preceding poems, which it yet so all filled with the Holy Ghost" (Acts 2). beautifully completes" (Helen Gardner, The Com- 3. King Charles I visited Ferrar's communitymore position of Four Quartets). Each of the four is than once and is said to have paid his last visit in named after a place. Little Gidding is a village in secret after his final defeat at the battle of Naseby Huntingdonshire where in 1625 Nicholas Ferrar in the civil war. established an Anglican religious community; the http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2314 / T. S. ELIOT

If you came by day not knowing what you came for, It would be the same, when you leave the rough road And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade 30 And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for Is only a shell, a husk of meaning From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled If at all. Either you had no purpose Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured 35 And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws, Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city1— But this is the nearest, in place and time, Now and in England.

If you came this way, 40 Taking any route, starting from anywhere, At any time or at any season, It would always be the same: you would have to put off Sense and notion. You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity 45 Or carry report. You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more Than an order of words, the conscious occupation Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. And what the dead had no speech for, when living, 50 They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. Here, the intersection of the timeless moment Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

II Ash on an old man's sleeve 55 Is all the ash the burnt roses leave. Dust in the air suspended Marks the place where a story ended.5 Dust inbreathed was a house— The wall, the wainscot, and the mouse. 60 The death of hope and despair, This is the death of air/'

There are flood and drouth Over the eyes and in the mouth, Dead water and dead sand

4. "The 'sea jaws' [Eliot] associated with lona and would slowly descend and cover one's sleeves and St. Columba and with Lindisfarne and St. Cuth- coat with a fine white ash." bert: the 'dark lake' with the lake of Glendalough 6. "The death of air," like that of "earth" and of and St. Kevin's hermitage in County Wicldow: the "water and fire" in the succeeding , recalls desert with the hermits of the Thebaid and St. the theory of the creative strife of the four elements Antony: the city with Padua and the other St. propounded by Heraclitus (Greek philosopher of Antony" (Gardner). 4th and 5th centuries B.C.E.): "Fire lives in the 5. Eliot wrote to a friend: "During the Blitz [bomb- death of air; water lives in the death of earth; and ing] the accumulated debris was suspended in the earth lives in the death of water." London air for hours after a bombing. Then it http://www.englishworld2011.info/

LITTLE GIDDING / 2315

65 Contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil Gapes at the vanity of toil, Laughs without mirth. This is the death of earth.

70 Water and fire succeed The town, the pasture, and the weed. Water and fire deride The sacrifice that we denied. Water and fire shall rot 75 The marred foundations we forgot, Of sanctuary and choir. This is the death of water and fire.

In the uncertain hour before the morning7 Near the ending of interminable night 80 At the recurrent end of the unending After the dark dove with the flickering tongue" Had passed below the horizon of his homing While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin Over the asphalt where no other sound was 85 Between three districts whence the smoke arose I met one walking, loitering and hurried As if blown towards me like the metal leaves Before the urban dawn wind unresisting. And as I fixed upon the down-turned face 90 That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge The first-met stranger in the waning dusk I caught the sudden look of some dead master Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled Both one and many; in the brown baked features 9 95 The eyes of a familiar compound ghost Both intimate and unidentifiable. So I assumed a double part, and cried And heard another's voice cry: 'What! are you here?' Although we were not. I was still the same, 100 Knowing myself yet being someone other— And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed To compel the recognition they preceded. And so, compliant to the common wind, Too strange to each other for misunderstanding, 105 In concord at this intersection time Of meeting nowhere, no before and after, We trod the pavement in a dead patrol. I said: 'The wonder that I feel is easy, Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:

7. The pattern of indentation in the left margin of W. B. Yeats and his fellow Irishman Jonathan lines 78—149, their movement and elevated dic- Swift is modeled on Dante's meeting with Brunetto tion, are meant to suggest the terza rima of Dante's Latini (Inferno 15), including a direct translation Divine Comedy. (line 98) of Dante's cry of horrified recognition: 8. The German dive bomber. "Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?" Cf. also Shakespeare's 9. This encounter with a ghost "compounded" of sonnet 86, line 9: "that affable familiar ghost." http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2316 / T. S. ELIOT no I may not comprehend, may not remember.' And he: 'I am not eager to rehearse My thought and theory which you have forgotten. These things have served their purpose: let them be. So with your own, and pray they be forgiven 115 By others, as I pray you to forgive Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eaten And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail. For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice. 120 But, as the passage now presents no hindrance To the spirit unappeased and peregrine" foreign, wandering Between two worlds become much like each other, So I find words I never thought to speak In streets I never thought I should revisit 125 When I left my body on a distant shore.1 Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us To purify the dialect of the tribe2 And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight, Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age BO To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort. First, the cold friction of expiring sense Without enchantment, offering no promise But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit As body and soul begin to fall asunder. 135 Second, the conscious impotence of rage3 At human folly, and the laceration Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.4 And last, the rending pain of re-enactment Of all that you have done, and been;5 the shame MO Of motives late revealed, and the awareness Of things ill done and done to others' harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue. Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains. From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit 145 Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire6 Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'7 The day was breaking. In the disfigured street He left me, with a kind of valediction, And faded on the blowing of the horn.8

]. Yeats died on Jan. 28, 1939, at Roquebrune in 6. Cf. The Waste Land, line 428 and its note; also the south of France. the refining fire in Yeats's "Byzantium," lines 25— 2. A rendering of the line "Donner tin setts plus pur 32. aux mots de la tribu" in Stephane Mallarme's 1877 7. Cf. Yeats's "Among School Children," line 64: sonnet "Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe" ("The Tomb of "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" Edgar Poe"). 8. Cf.Hamlet 1.2.157: "It faded on the crowing of 3. Cf. Yeats's "The Spur": "You think it horrible the cock." The horn is the all-clear signal after an that lust and rage / Should dance attention upon air raid (the dialogue has taken place between the my old age." dropping of the last bomb and the sounding of the 4. Cf. Yeats's "Swift's Epitaph" (translated from all clear). Eliot called the section that ends with Swift's own Latin): "Savage indignation there / this line "the nearest equivalent to a canto of the Cannot lacerate his breast." Inferno or Ptirgatorio" that he could achieve and 5. Cf. Yeats's "Man and the Echo": "All that 1 have spoke of his intention to present "a parallel, by said and done, / Now that 1 am old and ill, / Turns means of contrast, between the Inferno and the into a question till / I lie awake night after night / Purgatorio . . . and a hallucinated scene after an air And never get the answer right. / Did that play of raid." mine send out / Certain men the English shot?" http://www.englishworld2011.info/

LITTLE GIDDING / 2317

III 150 There are three conditions which often look alike Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference Which resembles the others as death resembles life, 155 Being between two lives—unflowering, between The live and the dead nettle.9 This is the use of memory: For liberation—not less of love but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country 160 Begins as attachment to our own field of action And comes to find that action of little importance Though never indifferent. History may be servitude, History may be freedom. See, now they vanish, The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, 165 To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Sin is Behovely, but All shall be well, and All manner of thing shall be well.1 If I think, again, of this place, 170 And of people, not wholly commendable, Of no immediate kin or kindness, But some of peculiar genius, All touched by a common genius, United in the strife which divided them; 175 If I think of a king at nightfall,2 Of three men, and more, on the scaffold And a few who died forgotten In other places, here and abroad, And of one who died blind and quiet3 iso Why should we celebrate These dead men more than the dying? It is not to ring the bell backward Nor is it an incantation To summon the spectre of a Rose. 185 We cannot revive old factions We cannot restore old policies Or follow an antique drum. These men, and those who opposed them And those whom they opposed 190 Accept the constitution of silence And are folded in a single party.

9. Eliot wrote to a friend: "The dead nettle is the shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well." family of flowering plants of which the White 2. I.e., Charles I. He died "on the scaffold" in Archangel is one of the commonest and closely 1649, while his principal advisers, Archbishop resembles the stinging nettle and is found in its Laud and Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, company." were both executed earlier by the victorious parlia- 1. A quotation from the 14th-century English mentary forces. mystic Dame Julian of Norwich: "Sin is behovabil 3. I.e., Milton, who sided with Cromwell against [inevitable and fitting], but all shall be well and all the king. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2318 / T. S. ELIOT

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate We have taken from the defeated What they had to leave us—a symbol: 195 A symbol perfected in death. And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well By the purification of the motive In the ground of our beseeching.4

IV 200 The dove' descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair 205 Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre— To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove 210 The intolerable shirt of flame6 Which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire0 breathe, sigh Consumed by either fire or fire.

V What we call the beginning is often the end 215 And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. And every phrase And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, Taking its place to support the others, The word neither diffident nor ostentatious, 220 And easy commerce of the old and the new, The common word exact without vulgarity, The formal word precise but not pedantic, The complete consort7 dancing together) Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, 225 Every poem an epitaph. And any action Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start. We die with the dying: See, they depart, and we go with them. 230 We are born with the dead: See, they return, and bring us with them. The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree8

4. Dame Julian of Norwich was instructed in a been told that it would increase his love for her, vision that "the ground of our beseeching" is love. but instead it so corroded his flesh that in his agony 5. Both a dive bomber and the Holy Spirit with its he mounted a funeral pyre and burned himself to Pentecostal tongues of fire. death. 6. Out of love for her husband, Hercules, Deianira 7. Company; also harmony of sounds. gave him the poisoned shirt of Nessus. She had 8. Traditional symbol of death and grief. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT / 2319

Are of equal duration. A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern 235 Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling9

We shall not cease from exploration 240 And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate When the last of earth left to discover 245 Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple tree Not known, because not looked for 250 But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea.1 Quick now, here, now, always— A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) 255 And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.

1942 1942,1943

Tradition and the Individual Talent'

I In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to 'the tradition' or to 'a tradition'; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is 'traditional' or even 'too traditional.' Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely appro- bative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology. Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its

9. This line is from the Cloud of Unknowing, an garden has a like meaning: "Sudden in a shaft of anonymous 14th-century mystical work. sunlight / Even while the dust moves / There rises 1. The voices of the children in the apple tree sym- the hidden laughter / Of children in the foliage / bolize the sudden moment of insight. Cf. the con- Quick now, here, now, always." clusion to "Burnt Norton" (the first of the Four 1. First published in The Egoist magazine (1919) Quartets), where the laughter of the children in the and later collected in Tl le Sacred Wood (1920). http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2320 / T. S. ELIOT own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are 'more critical' than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity. Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, 'tradition' should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inher- ited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity. No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His signifi- cance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT / 2321

Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities. In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value—a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other. To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus,2 nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmis- sible, the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleas- ant and highly desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distin- guished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind—is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian3 draftsmen. That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show. Someone said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know. I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the metier1 of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge,

2. A round mass of anything: a large pill. leine, France). 3. The most advanced culture of the European 4. Vocation (French). Paleolithic period (from discoveries at La Made- http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2322 / T. S. ELIOT the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch'5 than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the conscious- ness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career. What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. There remains to define this process of depersonalisation and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated6 platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.

II Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus7 of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue-book8 knowledge but the enjoy- ment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it. I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of 'personality,' not being necessarily more interest- ing, or having 'more to say,' but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations. The analogy was that of the catalyst.9 When the two gases previously men- tioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sul- phurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material. The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art. It may be formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several; and various feelings, inhering for the writer

5. Greek biographer (1st century c.E.) of famous 7. Murmuring, buzzing (Latin). Greeks and Romans; from his work Shakespeare 8. British government publication. drew the plots of his Roman plays. 9. Substance that triggers a chemical change 6. Drawn out like a thread. without being affected by the reaction. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT / 2323 in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result. Or great poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely. Canto XV of the Inferno (Brunetto Latini)1 is a working up of the emotion evident in the situation; but the effect, though single as that of any work of art, is obtained by considerable complexity of detail. The last gives an image, a feeling attaching to an image, which 'came,' which did not develop simply out of what precedes, but which was probably in suspension in the poet's mind until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to.2 The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together. If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of 'sublimity' misses the mark. For it is not the 'greatness,' the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts. The episode of Paolo and Francesca3 employs a definite emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression of. It is no more intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI,4 the voyage of Ulysses, which has not the direct dependence upon an emotion. Great variety is pos- sible in the process of transmutation of emotion: the murder of Agamemnon, or the agony of Othello,5 gives an artistic effect apparently closer to a possible original than the scenes from Dante. In the Agamemnon, the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator; in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the difference between art and the event is always absolute; the combination which is the murder of Agamemnon is prob- ably as complex as that which is the voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of elements. The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the night- ingale, partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together. The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a 'personality' to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with fresh attention in the light—or darkness—of these observations:

1. Dante meets in hell his old master, Brunetto 3. Illicit lovers whom Dante meets in the second Latini, suffering eternal punishment for unnatural circle of hell (Inferno 5) and at whose punishment lust yet still loved and admired by Dante, who and sorrows he swoons with pity. addresses him with affectionate courtesy. 4. Of the Inferno. Ulysses, suffering in hell for 2. Dante's strange interview with Brunetto is over, "false counseling," tells Dante of his final voyage. and Brunetto moves off to continue his punish- 5. Shakespeare's character kills himself after ment: "Then he turned round, and seemed like one being duped into jealously murdering his wife. In of those / Who run for the green cloth [in the foot- Aeschylus's play Agamemnon the title character is race] at Verona / In the field; and he seemed among murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra. them / Not the loser but the winner." http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2324 / T. S. ELIOT

And now methinks I could e'en chide myself For doating on her beauty, though her death Shall be revenged after no common action. Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours For thee? For thee does she undo herself? Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute? Why does yon fellow falsify highways, And put his life between the judge's lips, To refine such a thing—keeps horse and men To beat their valours for her? ... 6

In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it. This balance of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech is pertinent, but that situation alone is inade- quate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion. It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The busi- ness of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'7 is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not 'recollected,' and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is 'tranquil' only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and delib- erate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be con- scious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him 'personal.' Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from per- sonality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

6. From Cyril Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy 3.4 1800), Wordsworth writes that poetry "takes its (1607). origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." 7. In his preface to Lyrical Ballads (2nd ed., http://www.englishworld2011.info/

THE METAPHYSICAL POETS / 233 1

III

o 6E vout i'oco^ Geio repov TL Kai ajtaSe^ EOTIV.8

This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad. There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is an expression of sig- nificant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

1919, 1920

The Metaphysical Poets

By collecting these poems' from the work of a generation more often named than read, and more often read than profitably studied, Professor Grierson has rendered a service of some importance. Certainly the reader will meet with many poems already preserved in other anthologies, at the same time that he discovers poems such as those of Aurelian Townshend or Lord Herbert of Cherbury here included. But the function of such an anthology as this is neither that of Professor Saintsbury's admirable edition of Caroline poets nor that of the Oxford Book of English Verse. Mr. Grierson's book is in itself a piece of criticism and a provocation of criticism; and we think that he was right in including so many poems of Donne, elsewhere (though not in many editions) accessible, as documents in the case of 'metaphysical poetry.' The phrase has long done duty as a term of abuse or as the label of a quaint and pleasant taste. The question is to what extent the so-called metaphysicals formed a school (in our own time we should say a 'movement'), and how far this so- called school or movement is a digression from the main current. Not only is it extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry, but difficult to decide what poets practise it and in which of their verses. The poetry of Donne (to whom Marvell and Bishop King are sometimes nearer than any of the other authors) is late Elizabethan, its feeling often very close to that of Chapman. The 'courtly' poetry is derivative from Jonson, who borrowed lib- erally from the Latin; it expires in the next century with the sentiment and witticism of Prior. There is finally the devotional verse of Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw (echoed long after by Christina Rossetti and Francis Thompson); Crashaw, sometimes more profound and less sectarian than the others, has a

8. Aristotle's "De Anima" ("On the Soul") 1.4: teenth Century: Donne to Butler (1921), selected "The mind is doubtless something more divine and and edited, with an essay, by Herbert J. C. Grier- unimpressionable." son. Eliot's essay was originally a review of this 1. Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seven- book in the London Times Literary Supplement. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2326 / T. S. ELIOT quality which returns through the Elizabethan period to the early Italians. It is difficult to find any precise use of metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is common to all the poets and at the same time important enough as an element of style to isolate these poets as a group. Donne, and often Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically 'metaphys- ical'; the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the furthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a chess-board through long stanzas (To Destiny), and Donne, with more grace, in A Valediction,2 the com- parison of two lovers to a pair of compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere explication of the content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader. On a round ball A xvorkeman that hath copies by, can lay An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia, And quickly make that, which was nothing, All, So doth each teare, Which thee doth weare, A globe, yea world by that impression grow, Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow This world, b)> waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.1 Here we find at least two connexions which are not implicit in the first figure, but are forced upon it by the poet: from the geographer's globe to the tear, and the tear to the deluge. On the other hand, some of Donne's most suc- cessful and characteristic effects are secured by brief words and sudden contrasts: A bracelet of bright hair about the bone/ where the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden contrast of asso- ciations of 'bright hair' and of 'bone'. This telescoping of images and multiplied associations is characteristic of the phrase of some of the dramatists of the period which Donne knew: not to mention Shakespeare, it is frequent in Mid- dleton, Webster, and Tourneur, and is one of the sources of the vitality of their language. Johnson, who employed the term 'metaphysical poets', apparently having Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley chiefly in mind, remarks of them that 'the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together'.5 The force of this impeachment lies in the failure of the conjunction, the fact that often the ideas are yoked but not united; and if we are to judge of styles of poetry by their abuse, enough examples may be found in Cleveland to justify Johnson's condemnation. But a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet's mind is omnipresent in poetry. We need not select for illustration such a line as: Notre ame est un trois-mats cherchant son Icarie;6

2. I.e., "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning." 6. From Charles Baudelaire's "Le Voyage": "Our 3. Donne's "A Valediction: Of Weeping," lines sou] is a three-masted ship searching for her 10-18. Icarie"; Icarie is an imaginary Utopia in Voyage en 4. "The Relic," line 6. Icarie (1840), a novel by the French socialist 5. See Samuel Johnson's Cowley. Etienne Cabet. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

THE METAPHYSICAL POETS / 233 1 we may find it in some of the best lines of Johnson himself (The Vanity of Human Wishes): His fate was destined to a barren strand, A petty fortress, and a dubious hand; He left a name at which the world grew -pale, To -point a moral, or adorn a tale. where the effect is due to a contrast of ideas, different in degree but the same in principle, as that which Johnson mildly reprehended. And in one of the finest poems of the age (a poem which could not have been written in any other age), the Exequy of Bishop King, the extended comparison is used with perfect success: the idea and the simile become one, in the passage in which the Bishop illustrates his impatience to see his dead wife, under the figure of a journey: Stay for me there; I will notfaile To meet thee in that hollow Vale. And think not much of my delay; I am already on the way, And follow thee with all the speed Desire can make, or sorrows breed. Each minute is a short degree, And ev'ry hour a step towards thee, At night when I betake to rest, Next morn I rise nearer my West Of life, almost by eight houres sail, Than when sleep breath'd his drowsy gale. . . . But hearkl My Pulse, like a soft Drum Beats my approach, tells Thee I come; And slow howere my marches be, I shall at last sit down by Thee. (In the last few lines there is that effect of terror which is several times attained by one of Bishop King's admirers, Edgar Poe.) Again, we may justly take these from Lord Herbert's Ode,7 stanzas which would, we think, be imme- diately pronounced to be of the metaphysical school: So when from hence we shall be gone, And be no more, nor you, nor I, As one another's mystery, Each shall be both, yet both but one.

This said, in her up-lifted face, Her eyes, which did that beauty crown, Were like two stars, that having fain down, Look up again to find their place:

While such a moveless silent peace Did seize on their becalmed sense, One woidd have thought some influence Their ravished spirits did possess.

7. Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583—1648), brother of George Herbert. The "Ode" is his "Ode upon a Question moved, whether Love should continue forever?" http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2328 / T. S. ELIOT

There is nothing in these lines (with the possible exception of the stars, a simile not at once grasped, but lovely and justified) which fits Johnson's gen- eral observations on the metaphysical poets in his essay on Cowley. A good deal resides in the richness of association which is at the same time borrowed from and given to the word 'becalmed'; but the meaning is clear, the language simple and elegant. It is to be observed that the language of these poets is as a rule simple and pure; in the verse of George Herbert this simplicity is carried as far as it can go—a simplicity emulated without success by numerous mod- ern poets. The structure of the sentences, on the other hand, is sometimes far from simple, but this is not a vice; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling. The effect, at its best, is far less artificial than that of an ode by Gray. And as this fidelity induces variety of thought and feeling, so it induces variety of music. We doubt whether, in the eighteenth century, could be found two poems in nominally the same , so dissimilar as Marvell's Coy Mistress and Crashaw's Saint Teresa; the one producing an effect of great speed by the use of short , and the other an ecclesiastical solemnity by the use of long ones: Love, thou art absolute sole lord Of life and death. If so shrewd and sensitive (though so limited) a critic as Johnson failed to define metaphysical poetry by its faults, it is worth while to inquire whether we may not have more success by adopting the opposite method: by assuming that the poets of the seventeenth century (up to the Revolution)8 were the direct and normal development of the precedent age; and, without prejudicing their case by the adjective 'metaphysical', consider whether their virtue was not something permanently valuable, which subsequently disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared. Johnson has hit, perhaps by accident, on one of their peculiarities, when he observes that 'their attempts were always ana- lytic'; he would not agree that, after the dissociation, they put the material together again in a new unity. It is certain that the dramatic verse of the later Elizabethan and early Jac- obean poets expresses a degree of development of sensibility which is not found in any of the , good as it often is. If we except Marlowe, a man of prodigious intelligence, these dramatists were directly or indirectly (it is at least a tenable theory) affected by Montaigne.9 Even if we except also Jonson and Chapman, these two were probably erudite, and were notably men who incorporated their erudition into their sensibility: their mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered by their reading and thought. In Chapman espe- cially there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling, which is exactly what we find in Donne: in this one thing, all the discipline Of manners and of manhood is contained; A man to join himself with th' Universe In his main sway, and make in all things fit One with that All, and go on, round as it; Not plucking from the whole his wretched part, And into straits, or into nought revert,

8. Of 1688; when James II was replaced by Wil- 9. Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), French liam and Mary. essayist. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

THE METAPHYSICAL POETS / 233 1

Wishing the complete Universe might he Subject to such a rag of it as he; But to consider great Necessity.1 We compare this with some modern passage: No, when the fight begins within himself, A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head, Satan looks up between his feet—both tug— He's left, himself, i' the middle; the soul wakes And grows. Prolong that battle through his life!2 It is perhaps somewhat less fair, though very tempting (as both poets are concerned with the perpetuation of love by offspring), to compare with the stanzas already quoted from Lord Herbert's Ode the following from Tennyson: One walked between his wife and child, With measured footfall firm and mild, And now and then he gravely smiled. The prudent partner of his blood Leaned on him, faithful, gentle, good, Wearing the rose of womanhood. And in their double love secure, The little maiden walked demure, Pacing with downward eyelids pure. These three made unity so sweet, My frozen heart began to heat, Remembering its ancient heat,3

The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is some- thing which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's expe- rience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spi- noza,"1 and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. We may express the difference by the following theory: The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, pos- sessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, or Cino.5 In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.

1. From The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois (4.1.137- 5. These last three poets, all of whom lived in the 46). 13th century, were members of the Tuscan school 2. Robert Browning, "Bishop Blougram's Apol- of lyric love poets. Guido Guinicelli was hailed by ogy," lines 693-97. Dante in the Purgatorio as "father of Italian poets." 3. "The Two Voices," lines 412—23. Cino da Pistoia was a friend of Dante and Petrarch. 4. 17th-century Dutch philosopher. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2330 / T. S. ELIOT

Each of these men performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the magnitude of the effect concealed the absence of others. The language went on and in some respects improved; the best verse of Collins, Gray, John- son, and even Goldsmith satisfies some of our fastidious demands better than that of Donne or Marvell or King. But while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude. The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in the Country Churchyard'' (to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in the Coy Mistress. The second effect of the influence of Milton and Dryden followed from the first, and was therefore slow in manifestation. The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets revolted against the rati- ocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley's Triumph of Life, in the second Hyperion, there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died, and Tennyson and Browning ruminated. After this brief exposition of a theory—too brief, perhaps, to carry convic- tion—we may ask, what would have been the fate of the 'metaphysical' had the current of poetry descended in a direct line from them, as it descended in a direct line to them? They would not, certainly, be classified as metaphysical. The possible interests of a poet are unlimited; the more intelligent he is the better; the more intelligent he is the more likely that he will have interests: our only condition is that he turn them into poetry, and not merely meditate on them poetically. A philosophical theory which has entered into poetry is established, for its truth or falsity in one sense ceases to matter, and its truth in another sense is proved. The poets in question have, like other poets, various faults. But they were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling. And this means both that they are more mature, and that they wear better, than later poets of certainly not less literary ability. It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization compre- hends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. (A brilliant and extreme statement of this view, with which it is not requisite to associate oneself, is that of M Jean Epstein, La Poesie d'aujourd'hui.7) Hence we get something which looks very much like the conceit—we get, in fact, a method curiously similar to that of the 'metaphysical poets', similar also in its use of obscure words and of simple phrasing. O geraniums diaphanes, guerroyeurs sortileges, Sacrileges monomanes! Emhallages, devergondages, douches! O pressoirs Des vendanges des grands soirs! Layettes aux ahois, Thyrses au fond des hois! Transfusions, represailles,

6. I.e., "An Elegy Written ill a Country Church- 7. Poetry of today (French), yard," by Thomas Gray (1716—1771). http://www.englishworld2011.info/

THE METAPHYSICAL POETS / 233 1

Relevailles, compresses et Veternal potion, Angelus! n'en pouvoir plus De debacles nuptiales! de debacles nuptiales!8 The same poet could write also simply: Elle est bien loin, elle pleure, Le grand vent se lamente aussi . . .9 Jules Laforgue, and Tristan Corbiere1 in many of his poems, are nearer to the 'school of Donne' than any modern English poet. But poets more classical than they have the same essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind. Pour I'enfant, amoureux de cartes et d'estampes, L'univers est egal a son vaste appetit. Ah, que le monde est grand a la clarte des lampes! Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit!2 In French literature the great master of the seventeenth century—Racine— and the great master of the nineteenth—Baudelaire—are in some ways more like each other than they are like anyone else. The greatest two masters of diction are also the greatest two psychologists, the most curious explorers of the soul. It is interesting to speculate whether it is not a misfortune that two of the greatest masters of diction in our language, Milton and Dryden, triumph with a dazzling disregard of the soul. If we continued to produce Miltons and Drydens it might not so much matter, but as things are it is a pity that English poetry has remained so incomplete. Those who object to the 'artificiality' of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to 'look into our hearts and write.'3 But that is not looking deep enough; Bacine or Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts. May we not conclude, then, that Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert and Lord Herbert, Marvell, King, Cowley at his best, are in the direct current of English poetry, and that their faults should be reprimanded by this standard rather than coddled by antiquarian affection? They have been enough praised in terms which are implicit limitations because they are 'metaphysical' or 'witty,' 'quaint' or 'obscure,' though at their best they have not these attributes more than other serious poets. On the other hand, we must not reject the criticism of Johnson (a dangerous person to disagree with) without having mastered it, without having assimilated the Johnsonian canons of taste. In reading the celebrated passage in his essay on Cowley we must remember that by wit he clearly means something more serious than we usually mean to-day; in his criticism of their versification we must remember in what a narrow discipline he was trained, but also how well trained; we must remember that

8. From Derniers Vers (Last Poems, 1890) 10, by a Dead Woman"): "She is far away, she weeps / Jules Laforgue (1860-1887): "O transparent The great wind mourns also." geraniums, warrior incantations, / Monomaniac 1. French symbolist poet (1845-1875). sacrileges! / Packing materials, shamelessnesses, 2. From Charles Baudelaire's "Le Voyage": "For shower baths! O wine presses / Of great evening the child, in love with maps and prints, / The uni- vintages! / Hard-pressed baby linen, /Thyrsis in the verse matches his vast appetite. / Ah, how big the depths of the woods! / Transfusions, reprisals, / world is by lamplight! How small the world is to Churchings, compresses, and the eternal potion, / the eyes of memory!" Angelus! no longer to be borne [are] / Catastrophic 3. An adaptation of the last line of the first sonnet marriages! catastrophic marriages!" of Astrophil and Stella, bv Sir Philip Sidnev (1 554— 9. From Derniers Vers 11, "Sur une Defunte" ("On 1586). http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2332 / {CATHERINE MANSFIELD

Johnson tortures chiefly the chief offenders, Cowley and Cleveland. It would be a fruitful work, and one requiring a substantial book, to break up the clas- sification of Johnson (for there has been none since) and exhibit these poets in all their difference of kind and of degree, from the massive music of Donne to the faint, pleasing tinkle of Aurelian Townshend—whose Dialogue between a Pilgrim and Time is one of the few regrettable omissions from the excellent anthology of Professor Grierson.

1921

KATHERINE MANSFIELD 1888-1923

Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born in Wellington, New Zealand, daughter of a respected businessman who was later knighted. In 1903 the family moved to Lon- don, where Kathleen and her sisters entered Queen's College, the first institution in England founded expressly for the higher education of women. The family returned to New Zealand, leaving the girls in London, but the Beauchamps brought their daughters home in 1906. By this time Kathleen had written a number of poems, sketches, and stories; and after experimenting with different pen names, she adopted that of Katherine Mansfield. She was restless and ambitious and chafed against the narrowness of middle-class life in New Zealand, at that time still very much a new country in the shadow of the British Empire. In July 1908 Mansfield left again for London; she never returned to New Zealand. In 1909 she suddenly married G. C. Bowden, a teacher of singing and elocution, but left him the same evening. Shortly afterward she became pregnant by another man and went to Germany to await the birth, but she had a miscarriage there. Her expe- riences in Germany are told in carefully observed sketches full of ironic detail in her first published book, In a German Pension (191 1). In 1910 she briefly resumed life with Bowden, who put her in touch with A. R. Orage, editor of the avant-garde periodical The New Age. There she published a num- ber of her stories and sketches. At the end of 1911 she met the critic John Middleton Murry, editor of the modernist magazine Rhythm, and eventually married him. She developed intense but conflicted friendships with D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and other writers of the day. During all this time Mansfield experimented in technique and refined her art, attempting within the short story to illuminate the ambivalences and complexities of friendship and family, gender and class. The death in World War I in October 1915 of her much-loved younger brother sent her imagination back to their childhood days in New Zealand and in doing so gave a fresh charge and signif- icance to her writing. Using her newly developed style with an ever greater subtlety and sensitivity, she now produced her best stories, including "Prelude," "Daughters of the Late Colonel," "At the Bay," and "The Garden Party." With the publication of The Garden Party and Other Stories in February 1922, Mansfield's place as a master of the modern short story was ensured. But she was gravely ill with tuberculosis and died suddenly at the age of thirty-four in Fontainebleau, France, where she had gone to try to find a cure by adopting the methods of the controversial mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Mansfield produced her best and most characteristic work in her last years, when she combined incident, image, symbol, and structure in a way comparable with, yet interestingly different from, James Joyce's method in Dubliners, both writers sharing