Subtitle

A CONFLUENCE OF DAYS, WEEKS AND YEARS

by Jonathan Vold

Friday, August 5

TWL, Lines 266-295: Songs Beyond The Isle Of Dogs

  266 The river sweats
  267 Oil and tar
  268 The barges drift
  269 With the turning tide
  270 Red sails
  271 Wide
  272 To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
  273 The barges wash
  274 Drifting logs
  275 Down Greenwich reach
  276 Past the Isle of Dogs.
  277    Weialala leia
  278    Wallala leialala

  279 Elizabeth and Leicester
  280 Beating oars
  281 The stern was formed
  282 A gilded shell
  283 Red and gold
  284 The brisk swell
  285 Rippled both shores
  286 Southwest wind
  287 Carried down stream
  288 The peal of bells
  289 White towers
  290   Weialala leia
  291   Wallala leialala
 292 ‘Trams and dusty trees.
  293 Highbury bore me.  Richmond and Kew
  294 Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
  295 Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.’

  266. THE RIVER THAMES is central to this section of the poem, but see also lines 173-184 and note 209.  For London Bridge, see lines 62 and 427.  For other river allusions, see lines 4 (the Lethe), 25 (Isaiah’s river), 41 (the Congo), 77 (the Cydnus), 172 (Ophelia’s river), 266 (the Rhine), 293 (the Arno) and 396 (the Ganges) and note 430 (the Acheron).
 
  THE THAMES-DAUGHTERS’ SONG: Eliot: “The Song of the (three) Thames-daughters begins here. From line 292 to 306 inclusive they speak in turn.  V. Götterdammerung, III. I: the Rhine-daughters.”

  See Richard Wagner, Götterdammerung (note 8). The Thames-daughters’ song is directly derived from that of Wagner’s Rhine-daughters. The chorus lines "Weialala leia, Wallala leialala" (lines 277-278) and the more terse “la la”(line 306) are Wagner’s own, and Eliot also uses gold forging (lines 282-284) and assimilates Wagner’s clipped pace and spritely tone (lines 266-289) to contrast the song’s grimmer content.  In the opera, the nymphs take turns singing one line at a time, with some of the same curse and restoration motifs of the Grail legend (note 0.2).  See Götterdammerung 3.1.81-92:

  “From the Rhine's pure gold
was the ring once wrought.
He who craftily shaped it
and lost it in shame
laid a curse thereon
for time to come to doometh
its lord surely to death
...if thou the ring wilt not yield
to rest for aye in the waters
this stream alone stayeth the curse!”  NYMPHS, or singing spirits, hearken back to the airy spirits of Ariels’ song in the Tempest (see note 26).  Eliot's Thames-daughters also follow the nymphs of Edmund Spenser, Prothalamion (see note 176):

“Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song...
  There, in a meadow, by the river's side,
  A flock of nymphs I chanced to espy,
  All lovely daughters of the flood thereby....”
 
  See also lines 176, 183 and 184.  For the meaning of what Eliot’s nymphs sing, see note 293.

272. BARGES DRIFTING: See Conrad, Heart of Darkness 1:
 
  “The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits.”
 
  276. THE ISLE OF DOGS, once an island, is now a peninsula at one of the larger meanders in the Thames River, just north and west of Greenwich Reach, a straight section of the Thames. The royal dogs of King Henry VIII, and later Queen Elizabeth I, were said to be kenneled here, although there is no record of the name being used prior to 1588, when it first appeared on a map. It is, in any case, just across the river from the erstwhile grounds of the Palace of Placentia, the royal residence where Elizabeth was born in 1533 and where her Privy Council later met.  In 1597, Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe wrote a satirical play called The Isle of Dogs, which allegedly offended the queen and crossed lines of propriety to the point that Jonson and two of his fellow actors were arrested and all copies of the play were destroyed. The matter was referred to the Privy Council, which found the actors guilty of “leude and mutynous behavior” and recommended a three month prison term and a ban on all public plays for the rest of the summer. Queen Elizabeth was generally a supportive patron of London’s theater scene, but she carried out the Council’s recommendations, effectively imposing a ban usually reserved for the lenten season.

  For commentary within a year of this event, see Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598):

  "As Actæon was worried of his owne hounds: so is Tom Nash of his Isle of Dogs.  Dogges were the death of Euripedes; but bee not disconsolate, gallant young Iuuenall, Linus, the sonne of Apollo died the same death. Yet God forbid that so braue a witte should so basely perish! Thine are but paper doggies, neither is thy banishment like Ouids, eternally to conuerse with the barbarous Getæ. Therefore comfort thyselfe sweete Tom, with Cicero's glorious return to Rome, and with the counsel Æneas gives to his seabeaten soldiers.”
 
  Palladis Tamia, subtitled Wit’s Treasury, was used in the 1600's as a schoolbook covering English literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare.  Pallas, or Athena, was the goddess of wisdom, or wit (see Pallas Bathing, note 298), and Tamia means household attendant or, in this case, treasurer.  The cited Pallas Tarnia passage refers to Actaeon’s death by his own dogs (see note 197), Euripides’s death by dogs (see note 198) and the death of Apollo’s son Linus by sheepdogs (see Pausanius, Description of Greece (ca. 180 ACE)).  It also refers to the exiles of Juvenal, a second century Roman satirist; of Ovid, who was banished to Getae for “a poem and a mistake” (See Ovid, Tristia, ca. 8 ACE); and of Cicero, who returned to a cheering senate after a yearlong political exile in 58 BCE.  Finally it refers to Aeneas’s morale-boosting speech to his troops at Virgil, Aeneid (note 0.1) 1:198-207.
 
  DOGS appear only one other time in The Waste Land, when the poet bids his friend to keep the dog from digging up a corpse (line 74), but there are other seemingly related references within the poem’s principal allusions: besides the attacks by dogs of Actaeon and Euripides, noted above, barking watchdogs appear in Ariel’s song (see Shakespeare, The Tempest, at note 26), and Lilith is sent to the desert where the wild dogs dwell (see Jesus ben Sira, Alphabeta, at note 145).  See also Penteus’s gruesome demise by the Maenads in Euripides, The Bacchae (note 248).  Finally, see Sophocles, Antigone 5: 79-83 (note 248), in which Tiresias speaks of:

  “...mangled warriors who have found a grave
  I' the maw of wolf or hound.”

  279. ELIZABETH AND LEICESTER refers to Queen Elizabeth I, the so-called Virgin Queen, and her alleged long time lover, Lord Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester.

  Eliot: “V. Froude, Elizabeth, vol. I, ch. iv, letter of De Quadra to Philip of Spain...” See James Anthony Froude, The Reign of Elizabeth (1911) 1.4:

  “In the afternoon we were in a barge, watching the games on the river. [The queen] was alone with Lord Robert and myself on the poop, when they began to talk nonsense, and went so far that Lord Robert at last said, as I was on the spot there was no reason why they should not be married if the queen pleased.”

  In this 1561 letter to King Philip, Spanish Ambassador Alvaro de la Quadra supported talk that Elizabeth I, known as the Virgin Queen, and Lord Robert Dudley were lovers who would rendezvous at the Queen’s home in Greenwich, past the Isle of Dogs. A year earlier, Lord Robert’s first wife, Amy Robsart, had  died from a fall down a flight of stairs.  The coroner officially ruled her death an accident, but rumors persisted that he had arranged for her death in order to be free to marry the Queen.  In  1564, four years after the accident, the Queen appointed him Earl of Leicester, but she never did marry Lord Robert or anyone else, and Lord Robert did not remarry for eighteen years.

  Elizabeth ruled by the precepts of “semper eadem” (“always the same”) and "video et taceo" ("I see, and say nothing").  Compare these to the comfortable forgetfulness of winter before the season’s change (line 6), and the dismissive inability to see of Madame Sosostris (line 54).  For more on perceptiveness and the lack thereof, see notes 219 and 308.

  280. BEATING OARS are mentioned twice in the poem, here and at line 420, but there are also several indirect references, first through the adapted description of Cleopatra’s chambers (see note 77) and then in the allusion to Philomela’s abduction (see note 99).

  283. RED AND GOLD are the colors of the Spanish flag. In 1588, the Earl of Leicester ostensibly defended the Thames to keep the Spanish Armada from advancing towards London.

  291. THE PEAL OF BELLS from white towers suggest the festive trappings of a wedding, forever out of reach for Elizabeth and Leicester; bells would ring in the Tower of London and St. Paul’s  Cathedral, which were once white before taking on the dinge of time, pollution and war.  See also line 68 for St. Mary Woolnoth’s  bells with a “dead sound at the final stroke of nine” and lines 383-384: “...towers tolling reminiscent bells.”  See also Whitman, Memories 6:

  “With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang.”

  Compare the bells ringing in Ariel’s song (note 26), at Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.2.405.

  295. THE PIA’S LAMENT: To make sense of what was carried downstream (see line 287), we are brought upstream to suburbs southwest of the City, where the dinge on the white towers is now reflected by “trams and dusty trees.”  First, Highbury is a working class London suburb, north of the river, presented here as an earlier point of origin; nothing more is said about Highbury, although Eliot had considered several digressive lines to further describe a somewhat pastoral, though still dusty, suburban scene.  The action, however, is at Kew and Richmond, communities along the River Thames in southwest London, with the Royal Botanic Gardens, commonly called Kew Gardens, situated between them.
   
  Eliot’s use of this multi-suburban allusion may have been initially inspired by Ezra Pound; see Pound, Ode to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), an autobiographical London satire with eighteen short poems, the seventh called “Siena mi fè, disfecemi Maremma.” As recognized by Eliot, this is a quote from “la Pia” in Dante’s Purgatorio, telling her life and death story in a few brief lines.  Eliot:
 
  “Cf. Purgatorio, V. 133:
  'Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia;
  Siena mi fe', disfecemi Maremma.'”

  See Dante, Purgatorio 5:133-134:
 
  “Do Thou remember me who am the Pia;
  Siena made me, unmade me Maremma”
 
  Pia de Tolemei, born to a noble family in Siena, was the gentle wife of a thirteenth century Tuscan captain, the lord of Castel di Pietra in Maremma.  She met her end when her husband, heart set on his next marriage, threw her from a castle window.  Compare this to the alleged murder of Amy Robsart (see note 279).
 
  The Pia’s displacement is similar to that of the Russian/German/ Lithuanian of line 12, or Aeneas from Troy to Carthage, or Queen Dido from Tyre to Carthage (see notes 12 and 92); her making and unmaking also reflects the doing and undoing of Queen Dido by Cupid and Aeneas, as described in Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.208 (see note 80):
 
  “...and what they undid did.”
 
  The reflection is backwards, however: Queen Dido fell for Aeneas when Cupid intervened, but they never married and her love drove her to suicide when Aeneas left, while the Pia had been married until her husband murdered her.  The Pia’s lament continues at Purgatorio 5:135-136:
 
  “‘He knoweth it, who had encircled first,
  Espousing me, my finger with his gem.’”
 
  THE RICHMOND NYMPH:  This is the first of three parts to the Thames-daughters' song (see note 266). Three nymphic singers each relate a loss of innocence from a different perspective.  See notes 297, 298 and 303.  But more than just innocence is lost: in this first song, similar to the next two, there is a vulgar sexual act that marks an end of virginity, or at least of any sense of romance: in this first song the victim’s knees are raised, she is flat on her back on the bottom of a boat and she is undone.  At the same time, although the Pia ostensibly did nothing wrong, there is a lingering sense of shame and guilt in Eliot’s retelling.  Dante encountered the Pia in the second spur of ante-purgatorio, where those who died a violent death had repented of their sins just before dying.  Without such timely repentance the victim might have been found elsewhere in Dante’s journey.

No comments:

Post a Comment