60 Unreal City,
61 Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
62 A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
63 I had not thought death had undone so many.
64 Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
65 And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
66 Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
67 To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
68 With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
60. THE UNREAL CITY: Eliot: “Cf. Baudelaire:
‘Fourmillante cite; cite; pleine de rêves,
‘Ou le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant.’”
See Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal: Les Sept Vieillards (The Flowers of Evil: The Seven Old Men, 1867, tr. James Huneker, 1919):
“O Swarming city, city full of dreams,
Where in full day the sceptre walks and speaks.”
The Unreal City recurs at lines 60, 207, 259 and 377, and see also notes 208, 209, 248, 259, 374 and 376. Unreal or not, the City is also the name of London's long-standing financial district.
LONDON, the City and beyond, gets other nods at lines 60-66, 180, 207-208, 211-214, 258-260, 264, 275-276, 289, 293, 296 and 376, and see notes 66, 67, 69, 115, 209, 210, 215, 248, 258, 265, 266, 276, 283, 291, 293, 297 and 376.
61. THE BROWN FOG may allude to “the embrowned air” in Dante, Inferno 2.1:
“Day was departing, and the embrowned air
Released the animals that are on earth
From their fatigues; and I the only one
Made myself ready to sustain the war,
Both of the way and likewise of the woe,
Which memory that errs not shall retrace”
THE GREAT WAR, now known as World War I, casts its shadow throughout this poem; see also notes 15, 18, 70, 115, 139, 200, 291, 331, 374 and 419. The crowd of lifeless city workers flows over the bridge, up the hill and down the street, with no mention of any water flowing under the bridge and only a brown fog above them. The human flow suggests a metaphor for the stream of dead and injured soldiers being sent home after the war. See Whitman, Memories 6 (which in turn alludes to “the heads of the tired, miserable brothers” in Dante Inferno 32.21):
“With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads”
63. DEATH’S UNDOING: Eliot: “Cf. Inferno III, 55-57:
‘si lunga tratta
di gente, ch’io non avrei mai creduto
che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta.’”
See Dante Inferno 3.55-57:
“... so long a train
Of people, that I ne'er would have believed
That ever Death so many had undone.”
See also Inferno 3:35-36, 43-46, where Dante sees, at the gates of hell, how death has undone them by denying them:
“ ...the melancholy souls of those
Who lived withouten infamy or praise.
...And I: ‘O Master, what so grievous is
To these, that maketh them lament so sore?’
He answered: ‘I will tell thee very briefly.
These have no longer any hope of death...’”
Compare the Sybil’s wish to die at note 0.3: “‘I would that I were dead.’”
64. SIGHS AND THE DEATH OF AIR: Eliot: “Cf. Inferno IV, 25-27:
‘Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare,
non avea pianto, ma’ che di sospiri,
che l’aura eterna facevan tremare.’”
See Dante Inferno 4.25-27:
“There, as it seemed to me from listening,
Were lamentations none, but only sighs,
That tremble made the everlasting air.”
Dante and Virgil have now passed through the gates of hell and are entering a suspended state of Limbo and an even lower level of hopelessness; see Inferno 4:41-42:
“For such defects, and not for other guilt,
Lost are we and are only so far punished,
That without hope we live on in desire.”
Compare Eliot, Little Gidding (1942) 2:60-61:
“The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.”
Little Gidding would later be made part of Eliot’s Four Quartets (see note 0.5).
See also Heracleitus, On Nature (ca 475 BCE):
“Fire lives in the death of air; water lives in the death of earth;
and earth lives in the death of water.”
66. KING WILLIAM STREET runs from Lombard Street to London Bridge over the River Thames (see note 266). Eliot worked at the Lombard end of King Williams’ Street as a Lloyd’s Bank clerk from 1917 to 1926, a “stopgap” to make ends meet. See Eliot, Letters. See also notes 67, 68, 69, 209 and 214 for other references to Eliot’s employment.
67.CHURCHES appear several times in this poem. See lines 67 (St. Mary Woolnoth), 202 (voices in the dome), 265 (St. Magnus Martyr) and 389 (the empty chapel) and their corresponding notes. See also note 71 (God’s Acre).
St. Mary Woolnoth Church is at the southeast corner of Lombard and King William Streets, just across the street from where Eliot worked. The current structure was built in 1666, but the first Wilnotmaricherche dates back to 1191 and evidence of even earlier Roman and pagan worship at the site has been discovered beneath the building’s foundation.
68. NUMBER NINE: Eliot: “A phenomenon which I have often noticed.”
In passing, Eliot hears “a dead sound on the final stroke.“ The ninth hour is the start of the workday, but nine also marks the hour of Jesus’s death, Beethoven’s ultimate symphony and the final circle of Dante’s Hell (see Inferno, Cantos 31-34). Compare this to the first part of Eliot’s epitaph, at note 306: “In my beginning is my end.”
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