8 Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
9 With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
10 And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
11 And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
12 Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch
13 And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
14 My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
15 And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
16 Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
17 In the mountains, there you feel free.
18 I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
8. STARNBERGERSEE, a lake southwest of Munich, was where Bavarian King Ludwig II was found dead in June of 1886, having drowned in shallow waters in much the same way as Hamlet’s Ophelia (see note 172). Ludwig, known as the Mad King or the Swan King, was a dedicated patron of Richard Wagner and even decorated the walls of his palace, Neuschwanstein, with scenes from the operas of Richard Wagner.
WAGNER’S OPERAS, often inspired by Grail legend themes (see note 0.2), appear several times in this poem: see Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde 1.1.5-8 (1865; tr. Richard le Gallienne 1909) at notes 34, 42, 92 and 137 and lines 31-34 and 42; Götterdammerung (The Twilight of the Gods, 1876, tr. Frederick Jameson, ca. 1916) at lines 266-295 and note 266; and Parsifal (1882, tr. Henry Edward Krehbiel, 1920), at line 201.
WALLS THAT TALK, beyond the Wagnerian murals and tapestries at Neuschwanstein, will make several more appearances in this poem, through its allusions if not directly. See the painted walls of Cymbeline’s daughter Imogen (notes 77 and 80); the walls in Cleopatra’s chambers, retelling the story ofPhilomela’s tapestries (lines 99 and 105); the ceiling panoramas of Cleopatra (line 93) and John Day’s Plush Bee (note 197), depicting the hunter Acteon coming across the goddess Diana bathing in the woods (see notes 77 and 197); and, at line 98, the painted sylvan scene of the Golden Bough (see note 0.2). See also Virgil, Aeneid 1.456-493 and 6.14-31, where Aeneas finds his Trojan War retold “in sequent picture” (1.461) in Juno’s shrine, then later finds other stories told on the doors of the Sybil’s temple. Finally, see Whitman, Memories 11:
“O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?”
10. HOFGARTEN is a Munich park with a central pavilion dedicated to Diana, the same goddess with whom Acteon and the Plush Bee and Imogene were infatuated (see note 8 above).
12. ORIGINS: “I am not Russian, I come from Lithuania, I am really a German.” This statement, effectively an intertwining knot of dried up roots, appears to be an overheard fragment, contextually from someone other than the poet or his companion. Compare Virgil’s introduction in Dante, Inferno 1.66-69:
“Not man; man once I was,
And both my parents were of Lombardy,
...Sub Julio' was I born...”
See also Adrian, in Shakespeare, The Tempest: 2.1.82-83:
“Widow Dido, said you? You make me study of that.
She was of Carthage, not of Tunis.”
This refers to Queen Dido of Carthage; see Virgil, Aeneid 1.342-343, where Dido is introduced by her origins:
“Upon the throne is Dido, exiled there from Tyre.”
Tyre, now in Lebanon, was a seaport of ancient Phoenicia; see lines 47 and 312 and note 312 for other Phoenician references. For other Dido and Carthage allusions, see notes 92 and 307.
13. REMEMBERING YOUTH: Not yet feeling old (see note 219), see Ecclesiastes 12:1,5:
“Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; ...when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.”
15. MARIE: These lines derive from Marie Larisch, My Past (1913), and from private visits Eliot had with her in Bavaria. In 1889, Austrian Countess Marie was socially cast out after her cousin Crown-Prince Rudolph (the archduke) and his mistress, for whom Marie had acted as a go-between, died in a suicide-murder scandal. Rudolph was succeeded as crown-prince by Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose 1914 assassination triggered World War I (see note 61). Meanwhile, another Prince Ferdinand, from Shakespeare, The Tempest, will be given repeated attention, beginning with the next passage (see line 26).
17. MOUNTAINS reappear throughout the poem, inspiring freedom but also fear and withdrawal. See the Lenten “thunder of spring over distant mountains” (line 327); the desperate sense of “no water, only rock” (lines 331-359); the unnamed range surrounding Ernest Shackleton’s march (note 361); the inverted mountains beneath a city of decaying earth (line 372), a mountain hole that hides an empty chapel (line 386), and finally the snowy Himavant, a holy mountain in the Himalayas (line 398).
18. GOING SOUTH literally refers to the direction Marie went for winter breaks and Eliot went for recuperation in 1921-22 (see note 300), but it may also refer more figuratively to a decline in value or a departure from responsibility. See, e.g., Elgin (Illinois) Dairy Rep. 11/13/1920: “Meat, grains and provisions generally, are like Douglas Fairbanks, headed south—in other words, going down.” Fairbanks had starred in a 1918 film, no longer available, called “Headin’ South,” about a U.S. ranger who tracks a fugitive to Mexico, joins the fugitive’s gang then falls in love with one of the fugitive’s victims.
MOOD: Right after recalling a feeling of youthful freedom, the tone becomes somber again. The mood of this poem may have been set by the convergence of several key events: the great war and the loss of a friend to that war (see notes 15, 42 and 61), the pain of a dysfunctional marriage and the grappling with sexual identity (notes 92 and 218), recuperation from mental exhaustion (note 300), and, generally, the loss of innocence.
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