113 “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
114 “I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
115 I think we are in rats' alley
116 Where the dead men lost their bones.
117 “What is that noise?”
118 The wind under the door.
119 “What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
120 Nothing again nothing.
121 “Do
122 “You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you
remember
123 “Nothing?”
124 I remember
125 Those are pearls that were his eyes.
126 “Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”
127 But
128 O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
129 It's so elegant
130 So intelligent
131 “What shall I do now? What shall I do?
132 “I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
133 “With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
134 “What shall we ever do?”
135 The hot water at ten.
136 And if it rains, a closed car at four.
137 And we shall play a game of chess,
138 Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon
the door.
112. SPEAK: See Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.1.127-138 (Hamlet addressing the ghost of his father): “Speak to me.”
113. QUESTIONS keep coming up, don’t they? One is left unmarked, at line 112 (Why do you never speak), but questions are regularly punctuated at lines 20, 34, 72ff, 113ff, 131ff, 164, 299, 360ff, 402 and 426. Questions are also alluded to by the epigraph and by lines 26, 30, 48, 118,182, 186, 309, and 400.
116. RAT’S ALLEY was a World War I slang term for battlefield trenches. See also the recurrence of bones “rattled by the rat’s foot” at lines 194-195, and see note 186.
118. THE WIND: Eliot: “Cf. Webster: ‘Is the wind in that door still?’”
See John Webster, The Devil’s Lawcase 3.2.164 (1623), and see all of scene 2 for the context. Two surgeons come upon a man being stabbed, ostensibly to death; the surgeons consider how they might make money off of the perpetrator by promising to keep quiet, when the victim groans. They first pretend it is only the wind they hear, but they know better and quickly realize that by healing the victim they can profit from both sides.
123. NOTHINGNESS: See Shakespeare, Hamlet 3.4.128-131:
“HAMLET: Do you see nothing there?
QUEEN: Nothing at all, yet all that is I see.
HAMLET: Nor did you nothing hear?
QUEEN: No, nothing but ourselves.”
Nothingness, emptiness and brokenness pervade this poem. See lines 22, 40, 119-126, 173, 177, 303-305, 385, 389, 409, 410, 417 and 427. Compare these lines with the humble thoughts of Kurtz’s “last disciple” in Conrad, Heart of Darkness 3:
“I am a simple man. I have no great thoughts. I want nothing from anybody.”
125. PEARLY EYES: Eliot: “Cf. Part I, l. 37, 48.” This is Eliot’s quiet hint tying the hyacinth prince of line 37 (“...your arms full and your hair wet”) to the drowned sailor of line 48 (“Those are pearls that were his eyes,” alluding to Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.2.399).
126. ALIVE, OR NOT: Wondering about being “alive, or not” follows lines 39-40: “I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing...” which alludes to Dante, Inferno 34:25:
“I did not die, and I alive remained not.”
128. HAMLET’S LAST WORDS: See Shakespeare, Hamlet 5.2.342-349 (Folio ed., 1623):
“O, I die, Horatio.
The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit,
I cannot live to hear the news from England,
But I do prophesy th'election lights
On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice.
So tell him with th’occurrents more and less
Which have solicited – The rest is silence.
O, o, o, o.”
In the earlier Quarto editions, Hamlet’s words end with “silence” (compare line 434, ending this poem with “Shantih shantih shantih”). See also line 172 for an allusion to Ophelia’s farewell words ("Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night"), from Shakespeare, Hamlet 4.5.70-73.
130. RAGTIME: See Gene Buck & Herman Ruby, The Zeigfield Follies, That Shakespearean Rag (1912):
“That Shakespearian rag-- Most intelligent, very elegant,...”
Ragtime literature, a term coined by Clive Bell, criticized Eliot and others for “flout[ing] traditional rhythms and sequences and grammar and logic” and following the less than serious trend of jazz performers. See Bell, Since Cezanne: Plus De Jazz (1922). Eliot was talented, Bell premised, but
“...[his] agonizing labours seem to have been eased somewhat by the comfortable ministrations of a black and grinning muse.”
If anything, though, Eliot's "comfortable" passages are dissonant and uneasy. Socialites talk of their day plans (lines 131-138) in a snippet conspicuously placed between the emptiness of a domestic difference (lines 111-126) and the gossipy ramble of a soldier’s return to the homefront (lines 139-171). These bits are interspersed with brief notes of mortality, a “ministration” based on Hamlet’s fading breaths (line 128) and a string of pub farewells that echo Ophelia’s morbid goodbyes (line 172). There will be more songs in the poem’s next section, and they will become less oblique, but this is, for now, as musical as it gets.
SHAKESPEARE VS. DANTE: In the midst of this Shakespearean “rag,” we are reminded of Dante’s continuing role as escort throughout this poem. Eliot would later pose a comparison of the counterparts in Eliot, Dante: II. The Purgatorio and the Paradiso (1929):
“...Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation. And a further wisdom is reached when we see clearly that this indicates the equality of the two men.”
(For a similar, if tangential, take, see Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, 1934: “...When the question, often put, ‘If on a desert island what one book?’ was again raised, Joyce said: ‘I should hesitate between Dante and Shakespeare but not for long. The Englishman is richer...’” But see Joyce's recapitulation in Richard Ellman, James Joyce (1959): “‘I love Dante almost as much as the Bible. He is my spiritual food, the rest is ballast.’”)
For the record, these annotations have more references to Shakespeare (45 different passages; see note 0.1) than the Bible (34 passages; see note 0.5) or Dante (22; see note 0.1) or any other source. The next most frequently turned to sources are Virgil (9; see note 0.1), Whitman (9; see note 2), Augustine (7; see note 307), Ovid (7; see note 0.3) and Conrad (7; see note 0.3).
131. WHAT SHALL I DO: More questions, and more Hamlet allusions. See Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.4.57, for Hamlet’s reaction after his father’s ghost appears:
“Say, why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?”
See also Hamlet 3.4.178, when the Queen fails to see or hear her late husband’s ghost and asks, even after her son challenges her:
“What shall I do?”
Compare the indecisiveness of Hamlet and his mother in the face of a familiar ghost to those whom death has undone at the gates of hell for having “lived withouten infamy or praise.” See note 63 and Dante, Inferno 3:35-57.
137. DIVERSIONARY GAMES: Eliot: “Cf. the game of chess in Middleton's Women Beware Women.”
See Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess (1624); and see also Middleton, Women Beware Women (1657), in which a girl is seduced while her mother in law is kept busy in the next room playing chess. See also note 76.5 for other games of chess.
138. LIDLESS EYES: See Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Inclusiveness (1881):
“The changing guests, each in a different mood,
Sit at the roadside table and arise:
And every life among them in likewise
Is a soul’s board set daily with new food.
What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?—
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
May not this ancient room thou sit’st in dwell
In separate living souls for joy or pain?
Nay, all its corners may be painted plain
Where Heaven shows pictures of some life spent well;
And may be stamped, a memory all in vain,
Upon the sight of lidless eyes in Hell.”
In an earlier manuscript, in a section edited after Vivienne’s objection, Eliot had referred to the statuary chess pieces in an extra line between “a game of chess” and “pressing lidless eyes”: “The ivory men make company between us.”
Compare the “vials of ivory and coloured glass” at line 86, and also compare the pearly eyes of the hyacinth prince and the drowned sailors (note 125). See also Oscar Wilde, The Sphinx (1894), speaking of the statue that “strains his lidless eyes Across the empty land.”
For an alternative and perhaps more disparate image, see W.B. Yeats, Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation (1916), referring to the eagle’s ability to stare at the sun without blinking, with “the lidless eye that loves the sun.” By way of reconciling this with the chess pieces, compare the image of line 22: “a heap of broken images, where the sun beats,” and see also the white skeletons of soldiers at note 186.
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