250 Hardly aware of her departed lover;
251 Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
252 'Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over.'
253 When lovely woman stoops to folly and
254 Paces about her room again, alone,
255 She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
256 And puts a record on the gramophone.
257 'This music crept by me upon the waters'
258 And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
259 O City city, I can sometimes hear
260 Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
261 The pleasant whining of a mandoline
262 And a clatter and a chatter from within
263 Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
264 Of Magnus Martyr hold
265 Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
250. DEPARTED LOVER: See note 248 for one (Tiresias or the carbuncular guest) “groping away”.
Compare the more painful awareness of the departed nymphs at lines 175-181. See also Revelation 18:14 for the repeated use of the word “departed”:
“And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all.”
252. GLAD IT’S OVER: The reactions to departure have evolved from plaintiveness (see note 176) to being hardly aware (line 250) to gladness. See note 297 for the context of the “event” now done and over.
253. OLIVIA’S SONG: Eliot: “V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield.” See Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) 24:
“The next morning the sun rose with peculiar warmth for the season; so that we agreed to breakfast together on the honey-suckle bank: where while we sat, my youngest daughter, at my request, joined her voice to the concert of the trees about us. It was in this place my poor Olivia first met her seducer, and every object served to recall her sadness. But that melancholy, which is excited by objects of pleasure, or inspired by sounds of harmony, soothes the heart instead of corroding it. Her mother, too, upon this occasion, felt a pleasing distress, and wept, and loved her daughter as before. ....
When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?
The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover
And wring his bosom, is—to die.”
For echoes of Olivia’s song beyond line 253, see line 182 (“By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept”) and note 182 (Rousseau’s “sweetest melancholy”); see also lines 11 (breakfast with Marie on a surprisingly warm day) and 99 (the rape of Philomela, her cries and the nightingale’s forest song resounding through the grove) and notes 0.3 and 63 (the wishes to die of the Sybil and of the undying souls in limbo).
256. THE MODERN WORLD of Eliot’s time was full of new concepts. Record-playing continues the song theme of this section (see note 172.5), but along with the gramophone see also the typewriter, the two career family and ready-to-eat meals (line 223), horns and motors (line 197) and airplanes (note 374). The term automatic (line 255) was itself a burgeoning word. Add to these the modernist movement in literature and art, a development in which Eliot and The Waste Land were key factors. See notes 1, 248, 412 and 418.
257. UNDERTONE: Eliot: “V. The Tempest, as above.” See Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.2.392, and see note 26.
258. THE STRAND, about a mile west of where Eliot worked (see note 66), is a riverside London street once lined with mansions, almost all of which no longer exist. Eliot alluded to the Strand in an early unnamed poem, commonly known as At Graduation (1905):
“Standing upon the shore of all we know
We linger for a moment doubtfully,
Then with a song upon our lips, sail we
Across the harbor bar— no chart to show
No light to warn of rocks that lie below,
But let us yet put forth courageously.
As colonists embarking from the strand
To seek their fortunes on some foreign shore
Well now they lose what time shall not restore,
And when they leave they fully understand
That though again they see their fatherland
They there shall be as citizens no more.”
CITIZENSHIP and its renouncement would be part of Eliot’s own story, although not until several years after The Waste Land and from an opposite direction than the British immigration his 1905 graduation poem spoke of. He was at Harvard when that poem was written, but by 1910 he moved to Paris for a year of undergraduate studies. He eventually ended up at Oxford (1914) and the working world of London (1917), and in 1927 he renounced his American citizenship to become a naturalized Briton.
259. CITY CITY: Eliot vacillated with the Unreal City’s capitalization here; it was capitalized in 1922, lower-cased in 1923 and recapitalized in 1925. Compare line 60, and see Baudelaire’s “city, city” at note 60. For this moment, however, the city is less unreal and more appreciated.
263. TIME’S PASSAGE is unclear here. It is noon again, after Eugenides’s foggy noon (line 208) and Tiresias’s evening hour (line 222); either time has passed or the order of events is not what it appears. See also the limbo states at lines 40, 63, 126, 329 and 344 and the revivals at lines 1-7 and after line 359. See also note 322.
265. ST. MAGNUS MARY: Eliot: “The interior of St. Magnus Martyr is to my mind one of the finest among Wren's interiors. See The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches (P. S. King & Son, Ltd.).” Public outcry to this 1920 proposal from the London County Council spared both Magnus Martyr (line 264) and Mary Woolnoth (line 67) from being razed. Until 1922, St. Magnus Martyr celebrated an annual Fish Harvest Festival. The church was surrounded by pubs and fish, oil and tar (line 268), and whining, clatter and chatter, yet the scene still exuded pleasant music and an “inexplicable splendour.”
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