Subtitle

A CONFLUENCE OF DAYS, WEEKS AND YEARS

by Jonathan Vold

Friday, August 12

TWL, Lines 296-306: Epigraphs And Epitaphs

  296  ‘My feet are at Moorgate and my heart  
  297  Under my feet.  After the event
  298  He wept.  He promised “a new start.”
  299  I made no comment.  What should I resent?’
  300  'On Margate Sands.
  301  I can connect
  302  Nothing with nothing.
  303  The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

  304  My people humble people who expect
  305  Nothing.'
  306   la la

  296. THE MOORGATE NYMPH: Moorgate is an Underground stop in London’s financial district.  This is the second of three Thames-daughters nymphs speaking, suggesting either three separate events or three perspectives of the same event.  See note 18 for the general events that set the mood of this poem (the war, the loss of a friend, a troubled marriage), and see note 263 for the possibility of events being out of order.  More immediately, and perhaps allegorically, consider the carnality of the event that “undid” the first of the Thames-daughters (line 294), with her knees supine (line 295), and compare this to the second position of one with “heart under my feet,” i.e., on her back.  See also the event perceived in the violet hour (line 220), an enactment both foresuffered by Tiresias (lines 243-244) and foresworn by the lovely woman’s half-formed thought: “Well now that's done: and  I'm glad it's over” (line 252).  In the present telling, note that however much thoughts are formed they are left unspoken; likewise, even the nymph’s emotion is reserved, with resentment only half-formed, this as her counterpart weeps and speaks.

  298. HE WEPT, HE PROMISED: “He wept” repeats the convalescent’s lament (see line 182: “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept...”) but also recalls the two word verse after the event of Lazarus’s death: “Jesus wept.”  See John 11:35.  Jesus had seen Lazarus’s sister Mary weeping and those with her weeping, and this had troubled him (John 11:33).  Note that the “he” of line 298 is not necessarily the perpetrator but could be, like Tiresias or Jesus, an observer of the event, or, as in line 360, the one “who walks always beside.”

  EPIGRAPHS: By recalling the story of Lazarus, “he wept” returns us to this poem’s opening allusion from the Order of the Burial of the Dead (see note 0.5), and it also conjures the earlier allusion of the Sibyl wishing to die in the poem’s epigraph (note 0.3).  This might be considered the poem’s “old start,” and it is comparable to what Eliot had considered as an alternative epigraph, from Conrad, Heart of Darkness 3:
 
  “The horror! The horror!”
 
  But whether one weeps over death, curses life or is horrified over humanity, there is now the hope of a “new start.”  Consider the epigraph that starts the Order of the Burial of the Dead, a passage at the heart of the Lazarus event from John 11:26 (note 0.5):
 
  “...whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.”
 
  And in response to both the weeping and the horror, see Heart of Darkness 3 for Marlow’s comment on Kurtz’s last words:
 
  “Better his cry—much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats ...But it was a victory!”  Compare Herman Hesse, A Glimpse of Chaos: The Brothers Karamazov, or The Downfall of Europe (1920; tr. Sydney Schiff):

  “Those who cling definitely to the past, those who venerate time-honoured cultural forms, the Knights of a treasured morality, must seek to delay this Downfall and will mourn it inconsolably when it passes. For them the Downfall is the End; for the others, it is the Beginning.”
 
  Eliot met Hesse in Switzerland in 1922 and published this translation of Hesse’s essay in the first issue of his magazine The Criterion (October 1922), the same issue in which he offered his debut of The Waste Land.

  EPITAPHS: See note 306 for more of this turnaround from beginning to end and end to beginning.

  300. RECUPERATION: Margate is the southern England coastal town along a seaside cliff where Eliot, suffering from mental exhaustion, began a course of recuperation in the fall of 1921. He followed this with more formal treatment in Switzerland (see note 182), where he met Herman Hesse (see note 298).

  303. BROKENNESS: See note 123 for recurrent images of nothingness, emptiness and brokenness.  In this case, broken nails and dirty hands suggest a continuation of the carnality of the nymphs’ event-telling (see note 297).  For more broken and dirty nails, see the nails of the corpse-digging dog at line 75.

  THE MARGATE NYMPH, third of the three Thames-daughters, has not yet reached the resolution of a new start (see note 298).  None of the nymphs have made this connection, and with the Margate nymph’s lines their disconnection and lack of expectation is made even more apparent (see lines 299, 301-302 and 304-305), but their songs, sung at the end of this fire section of songs, are all part of the purgation.

 306. FINAL NOTES: The three Thames-daughters’ songs end with a brief “la la” epitaph, a feeble echo of their opening choruses  at lines 277-79 and 290-291, uttered with a tone of defeat.  The curtain appears to be drawn, even as it is done by the “beneficent spider” (line 408, and see Webster, note 408), who would “make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.”   Yet quietly tucked into their songs was that promise of a new start (line 298).
 
  ELIOT’S EPITAPH: Eliot’s hope for a new beginning and his appreciation for Hesse’s end to beginning turnaround (see note 298) would be developed further in his Four Quartets collection (see notes 0.5 and 64).  First, from East Coker (1940):
 
  “In my beginning is my end...
 
  ...Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
  Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure...
 
  ...In my end is my beginning.”

  Eliot would take the East Coker bookends,“In my beginning is my end... In my end is my beginning,” as his own epitaph.
 
  See also Little Gidding (1942), the final part of Eliot‘s Four Quartets:
 
  “Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
  Every poem an epitaph.”
 
  Thus, while the conclusion is not yet drawn, even in the nymphs’ songs as they reserve comment and fail to connect or expect, there is hope.
 
  Finally, or not so finally, compare Eliot’s “He wept. He promised...” (Line 298) and  Herman Hesse’s “For them the Downfall is the End; for the others, it is the Beginning” (note 298) to the epigraph Dostoevsky chose for his Brother’s Karamazov (note 248), from John 12:24 (note 0.5):  “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

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