Subtitle

A CONFLUENCE OF DAYS, WEEKS AND YEARS

by Jonathan Vold

Friday, July 8

TWL, Lines 185-206: Rattling Bones

185 But at my back in a cold blast I hear
186 The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

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

203 Twit twit twit
204 Jug jug jug jug jug jug
205 So rudely forc'd.
206 Tereu

185. A COLD BLAST stifles the weeping and everything is turned around, at least momentarily.  Tears (line 182) are replaced with a  chuckle (line 186), and melancholy becomes musing (line 191).  Each of these lines are malapropisms of the alluded sources: what is heard “at my back” distorts a phrase from Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress (see notes 141 and 197), and the ”musing” at line 191 modifies a line from the Tempest (see note 192).

The cold blast also marks the return of winter (line 190), as the sweet Thames of autumn (lines 173-184) becomes a dull canal beside a gashouse (lines 189-190).  Compare winter’s dull roots being stirred by spring rains at the beginning of the poem (line 4).  As the stir becomes a blast, Eliot also acknowledges the seasonal cycle of his changing emotions, rattled “year to year” (line 195).

186. RATTLING BONES occur here and at lines 22, 116, 195, 316 and 391. See also Whitman, Memories 15:

“I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them.”

See also Shakespeare, Tempest 1.2.398 (“of his bones are coral made”).

For an extended rattling bone image, see Ezekiel 37:1-9:

“The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones,  And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest. Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord. So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came  together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them. Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.”

191. SITTING ON A BANK: Eliot: “Cf. The Tempest, I. ii.”  See Prince Ferdinand at Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.2.390-391:

“...Sitting on a bank
weeping again the king my father's wreck...”

For the moment Eliot has turned sadness to musing and chuckling (line 186), but there was weeping when he first sat down (line 182) and will be yet again (line 298, and see note 182).  The riverbank setting and the somber subject of death remain the same, however, even as the emotions change.

197. HEARING HORNS: Eliot: “Cf. Marvell, To His Coy Mistress.” For the allusion here and at line 185, see Marvell’s impatient plea (see note 141):

“For, Lady, you deserve this state
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.”

See also John Day, Parliament of Bees (1641).  Eliot: “Cf. Day, Parliament of Bees:

‘When of the sudden, listening, you shall hear,
‘A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring
‘Actaeon to Diana in the spring,
‘Where all shall see her naked skin...’”

Day’s Parliament of Bees features a "vainglorious reveler" named Polypragmus the Plush Bee who speaks of a mechanical panorama he wants to build on the ceiling of his hive, depicting the tale of Actaeon and Diana. See Ovid, Metamorphoses (note 0.3) 3:206-312. After Actaeon the hunter saw the goddess Diana naked, she turned him into a stag to be hunted and killed by his own dogs. See also Sophocles, Electra (ca. 400 BCE) for the Greek counterpart with Agamemnon and Artemis. Compare Shakespeare, Cymbeline (note 77), in which Iachimo takes pleasure in seeing an image of Diana bathing on Imogene’s bedchamber walls.

198. SWEENEY is Eliot’s revival of a brutish character he used in three earlier poems, a counterpart to his more sensitive Prufrock (see note 0.4). Here Sweeney takes the place of Actaeon / Agamemnon (note 197), and Diana/Artemis becomes a brothel madame. Compare Eliot, Sweeney Among the Nightingales (1918), which opens with a Greek epigraph of the dying words of Agamemnon, suffering at the hands of his wife and her lover, as told in Aeschylus, Agamemnon 116 (458 BCE, tr. William Watson Goodwin (1906):

“Oh, woe is me! I am struck to the heart with a fatal blow.”

Sweeney Among the Nightingales concludes:

“The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,
And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud
And let their liquid droppings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.”

NIGHTBIRDS: The nightingale is the bird Philomela turns into after her rape (see note 99), but it has also come to symbolize the prostitute.  See the nightbird of note 200, and see Franceschina’s song in John Marston, The Dutch Courtezan (1605) 1.2.220-227:

“The dark is my delight,
  So ‘tis the nightingale’s;
My music’s is the night;
  So is the nightingale’s;
My body is but little,
  So is the nightingale’s;
I love to sleep ‘gainst prickle,
  So doth the nightingale.”

See also Anthony’s affection to his queen, in Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra 4.8.25-26: “My nightingale, we have beat them to their beds. What, girl!”

200. THE SOLDIERS’ SONG: Eliot: “I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia.”  For the song's origin, see Thurland Chattaway, Red Wing (1907):

“Now the moon shines bright on pretty red-wing
the breeze is sighing
the nightbird’s crying.”

Australian soldiers corrupted the song in Gallipoli, Turkey, where Mrs. Porter was a favorite brothel madame among the troops; see C. M. Bowra, The Creative Experiment (1949), and see Ernest Raymond, Tell England: A Study in a Generation (1922):

“Oh the moon shines bright on Mrs Porter
And on her daughter,
A regular snorter;
She has washed her neck in dirty water
She didn’t oughter,
The dirty cat.”

Gallipoli is also where Eliot’s friend Jean Verdenal died at war (see note 42).

201. FOOT-WASHING: See Wagner, Parsifal (note 8) 3: At the end of his quest, Parsifal, the chief Grail knight (see note 0.2), has his feet washed in holy water to “be free from stain; from devious wandering’s dust.” He then continues:

“My feet hast thou anointed,—
Anoint my head, thou venerable knight,
That e’en today as king the guild may hail me.”

See also Paul Verlaine, Parsifal (1886; tr. John Gray 1893):

"He heals the dying king, he sits upon the throne.”
This also alludes to the Lenten event of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples during the Last Supper.  See John 13:1-17 (note 0.5).

202. CHILDREN’S VOICES: Eliot: “V. Verlaine, Parsifal.”  Gray's translation (note 201):

"And oh! the chime of children's voices in the dome."

Compare Whitman, Memories (note 2) 6:

“...with dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn.”

Children’s voices also sing out at line 385. For other voices see notes 321.5, 385, 388 and 400.  See also Sweeney’s birds at note 198. Compare these voices to the nightingale’s song at lines 203-206 and at line 103, again alluding to the story of Tereus’s rape of Philomela (again, see lines 99-103).

203. BIRD SONGS: Lines 203-204 return to the nightingale’s song from line 103. For other bird songs, see the hermit thrush (line 357) and the rooster (line 393), and see their comparison to song syllables at note 172.5.  As to interpreting these songs, see notes 185 and 200, reflecting our human nature to project meaning into the songs we hear and distort them to our own purpose.

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