140 I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,
141 Hurry up please its time
142 Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
143 He'll want to know what you done with that money he
gave you
144 To get herself some teeth. He did, I was there.
145 You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
146 He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you.
147 And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
148 He's been in the army for four years, he wants a good time,
149 And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.
150 Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said.
151 Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a
straight look.
152 Hurry up please its time
153 If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said.
154 Others can pick and choose if you can't.
155 But if Albert makes off, it won't be for a lack of telling.
156 You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
157 (And her only thirty-one.)
158 I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,
159 It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
160 (She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
161 The chemist said it would be all right, but I've never been
the same.
162 You are a proper fool, I said.
163 Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,
164 What you get married for if you don't want children?
165 Hurry up please its time
166 Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot
gammon,
167 And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it
hot—
168 Hurry up please its time
169 Hurry up please its time
170 Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
171 Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
172 Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night,
good night.
139. THE MAID’S STORY: See Eliot, F&T: This story was said to be related to the Eliots by their maid at the end of the war. To be demobbed, or demobilized, is to be discharged from military service.
141. TIME’S WINGED CHARIOT: “Hurry up please its time” reflects a common last call in English pubs. See also the witches before their boiling cauldron in Shakespeare, Macbeth 4.1.3:
“Harpier, cries:—‘’Tis time, ‘tis time.”
The cauldron over the fire is later alluded to at lines 307 and 308. The present “time” line repeats at lines 141, 152, 165, 168 and 169; this also follows the five counterpart repetitions of a less frantic mantra in Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
“There will be time.”
Compare the bartender’s reminders, and the concurrent advice being given to Lil, to the urgent “carpe diem” call of Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress (1681):
“Had we but world enough and time”
The mistress’s lover begins to wish they had time but quickly concludes that they don’t. See Eliot, Andrew Marvel (Times Literary Supplement, 03/31/1921), finding in Marvel’s Coy Mistress:
“an alliance of wit and seriousness (by which the seriousness is intensified).”
Coy Mistress allusions also appear at lines 185, 196 and 235. See especially note 197, for a modern variation to these lines:
“But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near.”
For some counterpace to Coy, compare the similar pub setting of line 260 and the poet’s unexpected appreciation for the music sometimes heard “beside a public bar.”
THE SEASONAL CYCLE: In response to the mistress’s master, and to the bartender, the wicked sisters of Macbeth, Lil’s advisor and Mr. Prufrock, see Ecclesiastes 3:1-8:
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”
The seasonal cycle of Ecclesiastes is central to many of Eliot’s allusions. See note 0.2 for the many references to renewal and note 0.3 for the consideration of ephemerality. For more specific references to the seasons, see notes 1 (Chaucer’s spring), 71 (the season of sowing and sprouting) 185 (the rattling bones of winter), 219 (the dry season of Gerontion), 253 (an unseasonal warmth) 276 (the strictures of the lenten season) and 311.5 (the seasonal wheel).
145. LILITH may be her full name. See Jesus ben Sira, Alphabeta (ca.AD 700-900; tr. M. Stein-Schneider, 1858):
“When the Almighty - may His name be praised - created the first, solitary man, He said: It is not good for man to be alone. And he fashioned for man a woman from the earth, like him, and called her Lilith. Soon, they began to quarrel with each other. She said to him: I will not lie underneath, and he said: I will not lie underneath but above, for you are meant to lie underneath and I to lie above. She said to him: We are both equal, because we are both created from the earth. But they didn’t listen to each other. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced God’s avowed name and flew into the air. ...Immediately, the Almighty - may his name be praised - said to him: If she decides to return, it is good, but if not, then she must take it upon herself to ensure that a hundred of her children die each day.”
For a biblical reference to Lilith in the wilderness, see Isaiah 34:9-14 (Darby, 1890):
“And the torrents thereof shall be turned into pitch, and its dust into brimstone; yea, the land thereof shall become burning pitch: it shall not be quenched night nor day; the smoke thereof shall go up for ever: from generation to generation it shall lie waste; ...And he shall stretch out upon it the line of waste, and the plummets of emptiness. ...And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in her fortresses; and it shall be a dwelling-place of wild dogs, a court for ostriches. And there shall the beasts of the desert meet with the jackals, and the wild goat shall cry to his fellow; the lilith also shall settle there, and find for herself a place of rest.”
Many other common translations interpret “lilith” more generically; the King James Version (1611) describes the lilith as a screech owl.
152. TIME: See note 141.
161. LIL’S ABORTION: To bring it off (line 159) is to have an abortion. The chemist is a pharmacist.
165. TIME: See note 141.
167. ANTISEMITISM, one of Eliot’s more notorious flaws, rears its ugly head rears here, as the Lil story first alludes to the outspoken Lilith from Jewish folk literature then concludes with a vulgar pork meal. Gammon is smoked ham; as used here, it also suggests a slang term for sexual intercourse.
The absence in this poem of any further antisemitic recurrence is thanks in part to Ezra Pound’s editing. A preliminary draft had contained a reference to a Jewish slur from one of Eliot’s earlier poems, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar (1920), in which Eliot had written:
“The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs.”
Eliot had inserted Bleistein into The Waste Land with yet another reference to Ariel’s song (see note 26):
“Full fathom five your Bleistein lies
Under the flatfish and the squids,”
but Pound prevailed in having these lines deleted.
Pound also succeeded in having Eliot remove the whole of the poem Gerontion (1920), which included a reference to a stereotypically Jewish landlord:
“My house is a decayed house,
And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.”
Eliot’s anti-semitism has relatively limited exposure within his poems, with these Bleistein and Gerontion infractions being the primary instances, but for more prominent examples see his social commentary in After Strange Gods (1934), The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes toward a Definition of Culture (1948), in which, collectively, he spoke out against a more pluralistic, secular society. Most directly, in After Strange Gods, he commented that a society with “too many free-thinking Jews” was undesirable. However, Eliot refused to have this essay republished beyond its limited first printing and conceded that it reflected a “disturbed” state of mind. See Michiko Kakutani, Critic's Notebook; Examining T. S. Eliot And Anti-Semitism: How Bad Was It? (New York Times, August 22, 1989). For a more unforgiving look, see Anthony Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (1996).
170. GOONIGHT: A colloquial slurred version of goodbye from the regulars.
171. TA TA: A uniquely British, generally working-class goodbye, closing out this section and beginning to introduce the next. See note 172.5 for the recurrence of song syllables, especially in Part III.
172. OPHELIA’S FAREWELL, if not quite her final words, are alluded to here. See Shakespeare, Hamlet 4.5.70-73:
“And so I thank you for your good counsel. Come, my coach! Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.”
And thus ends the air section. Ophelia has a few more lines in the play, but already she has lost her mind and the air about her is dying. Her words, mourning her father’s death at the hands of Hamlet, become fragmentary and nonsensical as she wanders off, and soon it will be reported that she had fallen into shallow waters and drowned. See the Queen’s report in Shakespeare, Hamlet 4.7.164-181:
“There is a willow grows askant the brook
That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream.
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.
There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up.
...But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.”
For additional looks at the collection of flowers, see notes 74 and 214.
Ophelia’s death by water is further alluded to by lines 173-174 (“The river's tent is broken; the
last fingers of leaf / Clutch and sink into the wet bank”). See also note 42 for a list of the other
watery deaths in this poem.
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