TWL, Lines 139-172 : Lil And Albert And The Pub Farewells

139   When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said —
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.

Moleskin 3.6: Noticing The World

In 1974 the world started creeping in. This was the year Nixon resigned, right after the Tribune published the Watergate tapes. I had apparently lived a sheltered life up to this point, rarely if ever hearing people use “expletive deleted” in their conversations, and suddenly here was the president for all the world to read, absolutely full of it. Prior to this, for all the craziness going on in our country in those days, I only seemed to notice the upbeat news: watching the first moonlanding at Hank and Vi’s Minnesota cottage, for instance, or sharing Dad’s late interest in the Beatles. Even when he went out and bought John Lennon’s Imagine, I heard none of the blue chords, only the harmonies. Even Give Me Some Truth was a cool sort of anger. But then came Tricky Dick, daring me to take a peek behind the curtain.

God In The Abstract

with apologies to Concise American Heritage Dictionary, 1980

God
  adj.
I AM: considered apart
  from concrete
  existence
  or
(AM I)    a specification
  thereof.
I AM: theoretical;
  not applied
  or
(AM I)    capable of being
  put into effect.
I AM: thought of
  or
(AM I)    stated without
  reference
  to a specific
  instance.
I AM: Fine Arts. with
  nonobjective
  design, form
  or
(AM I)    content.

Every Thought Is A Prayer

Journal Entries from June 1990, continued

How about this:

Every thought is a prayer to God, and every prayer has an answer within it.  God is with us all the time, and when we remember this and believe this, his spirit responds in us and directs us.   God directs us as long as we acknowledge his presence (Proverbs 3:6), but when we forget this, where are our thoughts, our prayers?  Even then, God is still with us, waiting for us to call on him again.

Every thought is a prayer, how about that?  But every day —isn’t it a shame? —we spend so much time being thoughtless.  And still God is with us, waiting for us to come to our senses, to think, to pray.

God is more than an abstract thought, however.  The proof is not, and cannot be, my own, but it is this: our thoughts do not sustain themselves.  One private thought cannot sustain another, yet there is an answer, always, like the voice that came to Moses and said “I am.”  God is an answer.  Yahweh is the answer to our prayers.  God is not a thought; God is “I am,” the answer.

But what about the so-called great thinkers of the world, those who say they do not pray because “there is no God”?  God is still the answer, waiting for the question to be asked, the prayer to be prayed, the thought to occur (There are thoughts that have not yet occurred, even to the greatest thinkers).  Every thought is a prayer, I said.

So what about the thought that God does not exist (and who has never cried, “Where are you, God?”)?  Isn’t this simply thinking without direction, aimlessly pondering, oblivious meditation?  Thoughtlessness, really.  And still God waits with an answer.  Is there a God?  Yes, Yahweh say, I am.

Thoughts And Prayers

Journal Entries from June 1990, continued

Faith: such that I long for, a faith of such power to give me the strength to recognize my weakness, to repulse all illusions of my own credits, to relinquish my whole self —faith to say no more me, just God.  Faith, trust, that I could walk within every shadow of darkness, that I could believe that light awaits me, that darkness will be defeated.

God, you lay it all out for us.  You give us a one word direction and it ought to be easy.  But I... the self gets in the way, and yet you have given us the self, too, God; you leave us all sorts of mysteries and then you give us this mind, that wants so much to know.

Thank you God, for the promises you have given Josh today and for the strength you have given to Don; for the smile you have given to Parul today and for the grace you have given her family.  Thank you God for everyone close to me —Annie, Mom, Dan —and thank you too for everyday people, most of whose names I do not know, but thank you God for their patience —your patience —and acceptance of a man with measly faith.  I am afraid to be weak, God, and I am afraid of relinquishing myself, even to my maker, but thank you God for your ears and your hand and your presence.   Thank you for your strength and your smile and your grace, your light and your direction.

P.S., just one thing more:  God bless my studies and my tests this week.  I need you.

~~~~

The thought occurred to me that things will never be the same.

This wasn’t a pessimistic thought, either.  Josh has realistic hope of a lasting remission.  Don went to work today; he’s feeling much stronger and it makes me consider that with the extent of last week’s pain for him followed by this week’s recovery, the chemo might really be doing what we want it to do.

So I thought: what if Don’s tumor disappeared and Josh’s remission were complete?  Things wouldn’t be the same; they would be better for the ways we would —and will! —be stronger: in spirits, in confidence, in faith.  There is, of course, a “best case” scenario, to believe that Josh and Don will live forever.  And why not?  By faith, God promises that they will!

For now, however, I must continue to pray.

Prayers As They Occur

Journal Entries from June 1990

God, when the job at hand is more than I can handle,
God, when the pressure weighs heavy upon me,
God, when things are out of my hands,
when I am helpless, lost and looking for answers,
God, when I’ve buried my head in the sand,
sulked in my sorrows and wondered aloud
in a roomful of sufferers, selfishly cried “Why me?”
God, when I don’t know the answers,
God, when I think I need to know
as a matter of survival, life and death,
God, the power and the glory
and the answer, God, is yours.

~~~~

Parul is not happy with her mother today.  They don’t want her going to India —because of money, because of safety, some other time maybe —and she’s disappointed.  She threw some shoes at her mother and walked out of the house, eleven miles to 520 Stewart.  She got rained on several times along the way.

She’s never been anywhere, she says, and now, forget it, she doesn’t want to go to India.  “One day we’ll go together,” I said, and she said, “No, I don’t want to go.”

 I brought her to her uncle’s house.  She’s not sure what will happen next.  She’s even having second thoughts about medical school.

“This too...” I said, but she wasn’t ready to believe me.

Tomorrow, God, I pray for Parul.

~~~~

“I talk to God a lot.  In the shower, in the car.  Some people might call it prayer, but I like to think of it as a kind of thought process, a figuring out.”

“Does he hear you?”

“God?  Sure.  God hears us whether we’re talking to him or not.”

“Hey, Joe, come on, what makes you think God would take the time to listen to you?

“I don’t know, Jim.  I don’t know why.  I just know he does.”

“How do you know?”

“He answers.”

TWL, Lines 112-138: Talk Of Wind And Nothingness

112   “Speak to me.  Why do you never speak.  Speak.
113     “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
114 “I never know what you are thinking.  Think.”

115 I think we are in rats' alley
116 Where the dead men lost their bones.

 117 “What is that noise?”
118  The wind under the door.
119 “What is that noise now?  What is the wind doing?”
120 Nothing again nothing.
121 “Do
122 “You know nothing?  Do you see nothing?  Do you
              remember
123 “Nothing?”

124   I remember
125 Those are pearls that were his eyes.
126 “Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”
127             But

128  O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
129 It's so elegant
130 So intelligent
131   “What shall I do now?  What shall I do?
132   “I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
133   “With my hair down, so.  What shall we do tomorrow?
134   “What shall we ever do?”
135   The hot water at ten.
136   And if it rains, a closed car at four.
137   And we shall play a game of chess,
138   Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon
                 the door.

112. SPEAK: See Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.1.127-138 (Hamlet addressing the ghost of his father): “Speak to me.”

113. QUESTIONS keep coming up, don’t they?  One is left unmarked, at line 112 (Why do you never speak), but questions are regularly punctuated at lines 20, 34, 72ff, 113ff, 131ff, 164, 299, 360ff, 402 and 426. Questions are also alluded to by the epigraph and by lines 26, 30, 48, 118,182, 186, 309, and 400.

116. RAT’S ALLEY was a World War I slang term for battlefield trenches.  See also the recurrence of bones “rattled by the rat’s foot” at lines 194-195, and see note 186.

118. THE WIND: Eliot: “Cf. Webster: ‘Is the wind in that door still?’”

See John Webster, The Devil’s Lawcase 3.2.164 (1623), and see all of scene 2 for the context.  Two surgeons come upon a man being stabbed, ostensibly to death; the surgeons consider how they might make money off of the perpetrator by promising to keep quiet, when the victim groans.  They first pretend it is only the wind they hear, but they know better and quickly realize that by healing the victim they can profit from both sides.

123. NOTHINGNESS: See Shakespeare, Hamlet 3.4.128-131:

“HAMLET: Do you see nothing there?
QUEEN: Nothing at all, yet all that is I see.
HAMLET: Nor did you nothing hear?
QUEEN: No, nothing but ourselves.”

Nothingness, emptiness and brokenness pervade this poem. See lines 22, 40, 119-126, 173, 177, 303-305, 385, 389, 409, 410, 417 and 427. Compare these lines with the humble thoughts of Kurtz’s “last disciple” in Conrad, Heart of Darkness 3:

“I am a simple man. I have no great thoughts. I want nothing from anybody.”

125. PEARLY EYES: Eliot: “Cf. Part I, l. 37, 48.” This is Eliot’s quiet hint tying the hyacinth prince of line 37 (“...your arms full and your hair wet”) to the drowned sailor of line 48 (“Those are pearls that were his eyes,” alluding to Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.2.399).

126. ALIVE, OR NOT: Wondering about being “alive, or not” follows lines 39-40: “I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing...” which alludes to Dante, Inferno 34:25:

“I did not die, and I alive remained not.”

128. HAMLET’S LAST WORDS: See Shakespeare, Hamlet 5.2.342-349 (Folio ed., 1623):

“O, I die, Horatio.
The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit,
I cannot live to hear the news from England,
But I do prophesy th'election lights
On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice.
So tell him with th’occurrents more and less
Which have solicited – The rest is silence.
O, o, o, o.”

In the earlier Quarto editions, Hamlet’s words end with “silence” (compare line 434, ending this poem with “Shantih shantih shantih”).  See also line 172 for an allusion to Ophelia’s farewell words ("Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night"), from Shakespeare, Hamlet 4.5.70-73.

130. RAGTIME: See Gene Buck & Herman Ruby, The Zeigfield Follies, That Shakespearean Rag (1912):

“That Shakespearian rag-- Most intelligent, very elegant,...”

Ragtime literature, a term coined by Clive Bell, criticized Eliot and others for “flout[ing] traditional rhythms and sequences and grammar and logic” and following the less than serious trend of jazz performers.  See Bell, Since Cezanne: Plus De Jazz (1922).  Eliot was talented, Bell premised, but

“...[his] agonizing labours seem to have been eased somewhat by the comfortable ministrations of a black and grinning muse.”

If anything, though, Eliot's "comfortable" passages are dissonant and uneasy. Socialites talk of their day plans (lines 131-138) in a snippet conspicuously placed between the emptiness of a domestic difference (lines 111-126) and the gossipy ramble of a soldier’s return to the homefront (lines 139-171).  These bits are interspersed with brief notes of mortality, a “ministration” based on Hamlet’s fading breaths (line 128) and a string of pub farewells that echo Ophelia’s morbid goodbyes (line 172).  There will be more songs in the poem’s next section, and they will become less oblique, but this is, for now, as musical as it gets.

SHAKESPEARE VS. DANTE: In the midst of this Shakespearean “rag,” we are reminded of Dante’s continuing role as escort throughout this poem.  Eliot would later pose a comparison of the counterparts in Eliot, Dante: II. The Purgatorio and the Paradiso (1929):

“...Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation.  And a further wisdom is reached when we see clearly that this indicates the equality of the two men.”

(For a similar, if tangential, take, see Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, 1934: “...When the question, often put, ‘If on a desert island what one book?’ was again raised, Joyce said: ‘I should hesitate between Dante and Shakespeare but not for long. The Englishman is richer...’”  But see Joyce's recapitulation in Richard Ellman, James Joyce (1959): “‘I love Dante almost as much as the Bible. He is my spiritual food, the rest is ballast.’”)

For the record, these annotations have more references to Shakespeare (45 different passages; see note 0.1) than the Bible (34 passages; see note 0.5) or Dante (22; see note 0.1) or any other source.  The next most frequently turned to sources are Virgil (9; see note 0.1), Whitman (9; see note 2), Augustine (7; see note 307), Ovid (7; see note 0.3) and Conrad (7; see note 0.3).

131. WHAT SHALL I DO: More questions, and more Hamlet allusions.  See Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.4.57, for Hamlet’s reaction after his father’s ghost appears:

“Say, why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?”

See also Hamlet 3.4.178, when the Queen fails to see or hear her late husband’s ghost and asks, even after her son challenges her:

“What shall I do?”

Compare the indecisiveness of Hamlet and his mother in the face of a familiar ghost to those whom death has undone at the gates of hell for having “lived withouten infamy or praise.” See note 63 and Dante, Inferno 3:35-57.

137. DIVERSIONARY GAMES: Eliot: “Cf. the game of chess in Middleton's Women Beware Women.”

See Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess (1624); and see also Middleton, Women Beware Women (1657), in which a girl is seduced while her mother in law is kept busy in the next room playing chess.  See also note 76.5 for other games of chess.

138.  LIDLESS EYES: See Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Inclusiveness (1881):

“The changing guests, each in a different mood,
Sit at the roadside table and arise:
And every life among them in likewise
Is a soul’s board set daily with new food.
What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?—
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
May not this ancient room thou sit’st in dwell
In separate living souls for joy or pain?
Nay, all its corners may be painted plain
Where Heaven shows pictures of some life spent well;
And may be stamped, a memory all in vain,
Upon the sight of lidless eyes in Hell.”

In an earlier manuscript, in a section edited after Vivienne’s objection, Eliot had referred to the statuary chess pieces in an extra line between “a game of chess” and “pressing lidless eyes”: “The ivory men make company between us.”

Compare the “vials of ivory and coloured glass” at line 86, and also compare the pearly eyes of the hyacinth prince and the drowned sailors (note 125).  See also Oscar Wilde, The Sphinx (1894), speaking of the statue that “strains his lidless eyes Across the empty land.”

For an alternative and perhaps more disparate image, see W.B. Yeats, Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation (1916), referring to the eagle’s ability to stare at the sun without blinking, with “the lidless eye that loves the sun.”  By way of reconciling this with the chess pieces, compare the image of  line 22: “a heap of broken images, where the sun beats,” and see also the white skeletons of soldiers at note 186.

TWL, Line 111: The Nervous Speaker

111 “My nerves are bad to-night.  Yes, bad.  Stay with me...”

111. CAST OF CHARACTERS: This is the fifth directly quoted passage of The Waste Land, after THE SYBIL’s wish to die (line 0.3), THE HYACINTH GIRL remembering how she was named (lines 35-36), THE POET calling out to his reader STETSON (lines 69-76) and the inviolable cry of THE NIGHTINGALE (line 103, and see lines 203-206).  Only three more direct quotes will follow: single lines from THE LOVELY WOMAN (line 252) and the Tempest’s ARIEL (line 257), then the songs of THE THREE THAMES DAUGHTERS (lines 292-305).

With a total of fourteen lines (lines 111-14, 117, 119, 121-123, 126, 131-134), THE NERVOUS SPEAKER has the most extended of the quoted passages, and it is interspersed, sans quotation marks, by the responsive dialogue of THE SPEAKER’S COMPANION.  The two speakers hear one another, so the lack of quotations of the companion appears to be simply a means to distinguish them.  This also happens, though without interactive dialogue, after the Hyacinth Girl speaks (lines 37-41), and the two passages are even related: “I knew nothing,” says the Hyacinth Girl’s respondent (line 40); “Do you know nothing?” the nervous speaker retorts (lines 121-122); the Hyacinth Girl’s respondent observes “your hair wet” (line 37) while the nervous speaker mentions going outside with her hair down (line 133), after which her companion considers that it might rain (line 136).

Separately, several other characters appear without quotation marks, often in pairs: before this, MARIE and a GERMAN COFFEE DRINKER (lines 5-18), a PROPHET speaking to THE SON OF MAN (lines 19-30), a VIGILANT SAILOR (lines 31-34, 42), MADAME SOSOSTRIS (lines 46-59); after this, LIL and a BARTENDER (lines 139-172) and the blind TIRESIUS (lines 215-248), endured by the Lovely Woman.

Beyond these, there are no clearly distinguishable speeches in the poem, though myriad other voices, or “fragments,” as the Poet suggests (line 431), can be heard within the flow of musings and allusions.  One could cast these fragments as separate characters, but really they are more reflections of either the Poet, e.g., THE FISHER KING (lines 182-202 and 424-426), or the city around him, e.g, BABY-FACED BATS (lines 380-385).  There are also at least six prominent characters in the poem who do not speak: the spoken-to STETSON (lines 69-76), the Cleopatra-like QUEEN (lines 77-110), MR. EUGENIDES (lines 207-214), PHLEBAS THE PHOENICIAN (lines 312-321), THE WALKING COMPANION (lines 360-366) and a BLACK-HAIRED WOMAN (lines 378-385).

So who is the nervous speaker?  There are ambiguities tying all the characters together throughout the poem (see note 39), and here it is no different: by the context of dialog, the nervous speaker would seem to be the Hyacinth Girl or the walking companion; by appearance she might be the lovely woman or the black-haired woman; by her melancholy she could be the Sybil or the nightingale or one of the Thames daughters; by her spouse-like behavior she could be Lil or the queen or, with an external reference, Eliot’s wife Vivienne. Perhaps most conclusively, within the continual stream of fragments she, or he, would seem to be an extension of the Poet himself.

DIFFERENT VOICES: See F&T*: Before it was The Waste Land, this poem’s working title was “He Do The Police In Different Voices.” See James Joyce, Ulysses, Circe 555 (1922), and compare the echo of this passage at lines 308-311:

“VOICES

Police!

DISTANT VOICES

Dublin's burning! Dublin's burning! On fire, on fire!”

Moleskin 3.5: Scrabble Days

Meanwhile we always had our dad’s living arrangements to remind us to be thankful. In the course of two years, before finally leaving the Chicago chapter of his life story, Dad lived in a series of three gritty, minimalist spaces, mirroring a temporal nightshift existence. The series showed gradual improvement, from the third floor inner city SRO with wire mesh in the windows and boilerplates across the ceilings to, eventually, the suburban arrangement with a roommate who was singularly record-obsessed, with wall to ceiling milk rates full of vinyl. My brother Dan and I (Josh at four and five stayed with Mom more) spent weekends at each of these places, but it was the middle one, the Dolphin Motel, I remember most. It was a small room with water stains and signs of rodents and a bar/lounge off the lobby, but it had a pool! And it was here at the Dolphin that my dad taught me to enjoy the simple pace of a Saturday game of Scrabble —with an eleven year old allowance to use the dictionary as much as I needed.

Hawk Block

A Palinode to an Earlier Draft

Effectively I killed my poem
like a hawk that kills the weak, the sick, the old;
Defined it by the second line
as a predator that seizes stumbling souls;
Declared its features unsubdued
like shrieks across a universal sky;
Discovered Death in stanza two
as a bird reflecting dinner in its eye,
Foreshadowing the obvious,
the destiny of creatures great and small
And celebrating the irony
of grace within three pounds of caterwaul.
Repeatedly analogies
went flying through the predatory air
Pronouncing the mortality
of all who are alive, awake, aware.
 
The sad thing is, I love this bird:
I watch it catch the kettles high above
On muscled wings, remote controlled,
in the spirit of the words I’m dreaming of
But never grasp: I watch it soar
untethered to the world till all I see
Is the distance of its silhouette
becoming an enigma over me:
A mystery, yet clearly made
of more than Death compressed onto a page
Of whiteness, more than irony
observed within an origami cage,
And more than all my heavy paint
can capture.  Now, beyond all odes, this bird
That let me love it from afar
lives on but flies away without a word.

Denouement

For my daughter

If I were the falconer
I might never let go;
I’d hold on to the tether

and you’d learn how to fly
in small circles around me:
I’d want you to know

the spirit of freedom,
so I’d give you the sky
in gradual increments,

ever so slowly
releasing you outward
and upward, and I

would remain in the center

within and below you,
the turn of your wild
and the ground to your sky,

the tame of your will
and the stage for your show,
but the one who allows you

the power to fly
is the one who eventually
has to let go.

I am not the falconer;
I don’t rule your sky,
nor would I deny you

the winds of your freedom,
but I will stand fast
in the fields you came from

calling your name out
and watching you fly.

More From The Archives: Another Introduction

Denouement.

That's a fancy French word for untangling, and in literature it applies to the point of the story where everything turns towards the final resolutions.

In most stories, we might expect this to happen on the final pages or in the final chapter, but in a good story you might start to see this even from the beginning.  I like the way John Ylvisaker puts it in his song, Borning Cry, which begins:

I was there to hear your borning cry.
I'll be there when you grow old.
I was there the day you were baptized
To see your life unfold.

Unfolding: Untangling: Denouement

I thought of this about four years ago when my daughter crossed the stage for her eighth grade graduation. And I'll be thinking of it all over again this June as she graduates from high school, and I have had, and will have, the same thoughts at my son's graduations.

As parents, we'd like to think that we have so much to do with the plots of our children's lives, but we really don't, and when it comes down to it, we are just fortunate - blessed - to be in the audience, cheering them on.

Ramadan

The rock behind the rock we're on
was hidden from our point of view
until it caught the setting sun
and nothing but a sliver to
paint shadows on our faces and
give us a dusky hint of who
we are at night:  we're all the same,
imperfect sinners turning to
the stars, a cross, a crescent moon
and taking time for penance: you
have Lent and we have Ramadan
and each of us is hoping to
make it to heaven somehow and
get through life on this rock we're on.

I don't pretend to understand
the purpose of the fasting or
the reason we should watch the moon.
I guess it meant something before
they called it Lent or Ramadan,
before we rested faith upon
the Prophet's revelations or
the resurrection of the Son,
but this is what we're looking for:
salvation past the ceremonies,
focus in our daily worship,
sustenance beyond the sunset,
anything to make us more
at peace and not at odds upon
this hot, dry dessert rock we're on.

Hawk Diode

You are predator, defined by what you eat
And how you singularly look for food,
Your every feature focused, unsubdued
To rightly seize the daily running meat:
Head down, tail flared and talons out for blood,
Lean muscles tensed and dinner in your eyes
With mercenary sense to recognize
Your victims from afar, and yet you would
Toll from your scythian beak a curling call
And let your ancient raptor’s feathers cast
Their moving shadow on the ground. We earthly
Creatures feel the shadow’s chill and pall
And all that it foretells; our hearts beat faster
Still as you pronounce our mortal worth.

You are pacifist, designed to fly above
The fray, to find your spirit in the sky
On wings extended and uplifting, high
Above the inevitable chaos of
Our gravity, beyond our battlegrounds
And burial grounds, intractable and free.
Your revolutions of serenity
Enlist us all to tarry out of bounds,
To turn aside from where we find ourselves
If only to appreciate the strength
Of heavenly peace and how you always seem
So far away from where you ought to be:
There you are, a predator at length,
And here are we, lost in our mortal dream.

TWL, Lines 94-110: Withered Stumps Of Time

94     Huge sea-wood fed with copper
95     Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
96     In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.
97     Above the antique mantel was displayed
98     As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
99     The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
100   So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
101   Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
102   And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
103   “Jug Jug” to dirty ears.
104   And other withered stumps of time
105   Were told upon the walls; staring forms
106   Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
107   Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
108   Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
109   Spread out in fiery points
110   Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

98. THE SYLVAN SCENE: Eliot:  “Sylvan scene. V. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV, 140.”

See John Milton, Paradise Lost 137-142 (1667), where Satan is describing Eden:

“...and over head up grew
Insuperable highth of loftiest shade,
Cedar, and Pine, and Firr, and branching Palm
A Silvan Scene, and as the ranks ascend
Shade above shade, a woodie
Theatre Of stateliest view.”

Compare the “sylvan landscape” of Frazer and Turner (note 0.2).

99. THE CHANGE OF PHILOMEL: Eliot:

“V. Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, Philomela.”

This is a rape and revenge tale from Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.635-1053.  Procne, far from home, had longed for a visit from her sister Philomela, so the girls’ father let Philomela sail home with Procne’s husband Tereus:

“Now Philomela, scarce receiv'd on board,
And in the royal gilded bark secur'd,
Beheld the dashes of the bending oar,
The ruffled sea, and the receding shore;
When strait (his joy impatient of disguise)
We've gain'd our point, the rough Barbarian cries;
Now I possess the dear, the blissful hour,
And ev'ry wish subjected to my pow'r.
Then, before bringing her home,
the false tyrant seiz'd the princely maid,
And to a lodge in distant woods convey'd;...”

and there with “rude haste” he raped her.  She cried out to her sister and father in vain but then promised:

“...Tho' I'm prison'd in this lonely den,
Obscur'd, and bury'd from the sight of men,
My mournful voice the pitying rocks shall move,
And my complainings echo thro' the grove...”

This provoked the king to cut off her tongue, but she still later told her sister what had happened by weaving the episode into a wall tapestry (compare note 8 and lines 97 and 104-110); she fulfilled her promise further by filling the forest air with a song of her story after they were all changed into birds, Philomela and Procne into a nightingale and a swallow (sometimes interpreted vice versa), Tereus into a hoopoe.

103. THE NIGHTINGALE’S SONG: Eliot: “Cf. Part III, l. 204."

This refers us forward to the nightingale at lines 203-206.  See also note 198, where nightbirds are likened to prostitutes.  For the song itself, see John Lyly, Alexander and Campaspe (1584):

“Jug, jug, jug, jug, tereu,’ she cries,
And still her woes at midnight rise.”

Moleskin 3.4: Another Move

The following spring found us settling into our second urban home. It wasn’t a big move, four blocks, and I kept the same friends and the same paper route. I don’t even remember the U-Haul this time, but the transition was still remarkable: our townhome life was now squeezed into an apartment, with dinner smells in the hallways and yappy dogs behind neighbors’ doors. Dad’s station wagon was no longer the primary transportation; now it was a coupe: Mom’s no-frills Dodge Dart. We no longer had our own garbage cans: now it was a big dumpster a dozen yards down the sidewalk from our doors. We never had much of a yard to mow at the townhome, but now we were limited to garden pots on a 3 x 6 patio. It was what our mother could afford on nursing home wages.  Not that there was much to grumble about: my friends all lived in townhomes and duplexes, if not apartments, and we were hardly the only latchkey kids in the neighborhood. None of us lived very far away from the drainage ditch, and everything was still an adventure.

Crossing Quatrains

How long
    will this river flow
the country’s culminated streams
connecting unseen mountain sources
    to the ocean,
bringing dreams to distant dreams?

How long
    will the water run
beneath this road turned into bridge,
    beneath the feet
of all who pass from bank to bank
half grateful for this lifted street?

How long
    will this stretch of street
    in time remain
suspended shore to shifting shore
above the rise and sink of seasons,
of mountain trickle and ocean roar?

    This river will
outlast us, all our lives combined
and every street along the way,
and even as I form these words,
    I feel
the bridge begin to sway.

This bolted iron in the wind
is likely to outlast us too;
    we may
grow old together, but
if time’s the measure we cannot do
    what bridges do.

The Swan

by Rainer Maria Rilke (a new translation)

This toil through life as yet undone
is hard; we move with ropes around
us like the artless waddle of the swan

and then death and the letting go
of a life of walking on the ground
is the swan nervously slipping in

to a water that receives him gently,
happily taking what has passed
from under him, wave by wave,

while the swan, with perfect peace and calm,
becomes forthright and regal
upon the water, rested and relaxed.

River Cinquains

water secrets
ever bending untold stories
discovers the ocean ducking behind corners
delivers the distant mountain hiding beyond the horizons
water secrets




river                                             journey
slowly turning stretching travel
reveals only ripples to a destination
of its whitewater history left to the imagination
river                                            journey



                 bridges
                 river crossings
                 giving me perspective
                 over the ever-bending water
                 bridges

Bridge Sonnet

Each road’s another story:  paved or gravel-
Roughed or leveled, mud or dirt,
   always life extending ridge to ridge;
Down one of them I came upon a bridge
Across a valley’s hidden hurt,
   of bolted metal topped with graded gravel
Stretched from bank to bank across a river.
If not for journeys of my own
   I would take time to learn the river’s song,
The something pushing pulling it along;
   instead I turn to what is known:
The road that takes my path across the river.

God grant me all the power I have to travel
   through the shadows of each vale,
Look after me God, bless my soul, deliver
My heart my weary way from ridge to ridge
   and road to road, and with each tale to tell
Apply me steadfast to the grinding gravel
But lead me not into the mystic river
   of unknown sources heavened or helled
And let me walk instead across this bridge.

Here And Now

I’ve other things to think about than you
and me and whether we will ever be
together anymore if ever we
were there before.  I’ve better things to do,
considering my separate point of view,
than parse the existentiality
of “us.”

(I could lose myself in metaphors
that never end (ground, sun, river and wind)
and feel the power of presence and the force
of perpetuity that even in
a moment lets me glimpse the greater course
from whence I come to where I would pretend.)

You are too far away from me
for me to see, so why should I pursue
the possibility of “we”?  And who
am I to presuppose the theory
that I am yours and you belong to me?
You are not mine, I don’t belong to you,
and maybe I was never meant for you,
and maybe we were never meant to be.

(There is a bend that hides each metaphor’s
beginning and a bend that hides each end;
I have no certainty about my source
or my conclusion.  I can’t see beyond
my current place and yet I can’t divorce
my here from there or sever now from then.
I am what I have been, will ever be
the steel, the spark, the sweat, the breath of me.)

TWL, Lines 77-93: Upon The River Of Cydnus

77     The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
78     Glowed on the marble, where the glass
79     Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
80     From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
81     (Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
82     Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
83     Reflecting light upon the table as
84     The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
85     From satin cases poured in rich profusion.
86     In vials of ivory and coloured glass
87     Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
88     Unguent, powdered, or liquid — troubled, confused
89     And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
90     That freshened from the window, these ascended
91     In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
92     Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
93     Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

77. A BURNISH’D THRONE: Eliot: “Cf. Antony and Cleopatra, II, ii, l. 190.”

See Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.190, 195-201.  Antony’s friend Enobarbus describes Cleopatra:

“she purs’d up his heart, upon the river of Cydnus.
...The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.”

IMOGEN’S CHAMBERS: See also Shakespeare, Cymbeline  2.4.84-94, 102-105, where Iachimo allusively describes what he saw of Imogen’s chambers to her husband Posthumous:

“...First, her bedchamber,
Where, I confess, I slept not, but profess
Had that was well worth watching--it was hanged
With tapestry of silk and silver; the story
Proud Cleopatra, when she met her Roman,
And Cydnus swelled above the banks, or for
The press of boats or pride: a piece of work
So bravely done, so rich, that it did strive
In workmanship and value; which I wondered
Could be so rarely and exactly wrought,
Since the true life on't was–
....The chimney
Is south the chamber, and the chimney-piece
Chaste Dian bathing: never saw I figures
So likely to report themselves.”

Dian is the wood goddess Diana, whom the hunter Actaeon saw naked while she was bathing in the forest.  See Ovid, Metamorphoses 3:206-312.  For other allusions to Actaeon and Diana, see lines 10 and 197.

80. A GOLDEN CUPIDON: Enobarbus (see note 77) continues, at Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.202-208:

“...O'er- picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
  Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.”

Venus was the mother of Cupid and Aeneas, further alluded to in the lines to follow (see note 92, with reference to Virgil, Aeneid.  Compare the undoing and doing by the “Cupids” with the Pia being made and unmade at line 293.

See also Cymbelline 2.4.111-115 (see note 77):

“.... The roof o' the chamber
With golden cherubins is fretted: her andirons–
I had forgot them--were two winking Cupids
Of silver, each on one foot standing, nicely
Depending on their brands.”

87. STRANGE PERFUMES, which are “stirred by the air” (line 89), establish the atmosphere of this section, full of meaningful words made empty in their presentation. See note 76.5.  For the “vials of ivory” (line 86), compare the ivory pieces standing between the chess players at note 138.

92. THE LACQUEARIA: Eliot: “Laquearia. V. Aeneid, I. 726:
‘dependent lychni laquearibus aureis incensi, et noctem flammis funalia vincunt.’”

See Virgil, Aeneid 1.726-727, where laquearibus, a paneled ceiling, is translated as “gilded roofs”:

“From gilded roofs depending lamps display
Nocturnal beams, that emulate the day.”

DIDO AND AENEAS: This passage is from Virgil’s telling of the tragic romance of Carthigian Queen Dido and Aeneas from Troy; see also line 307 and notes 12, 34, 70, 231 and 307.  For the full story, see Virgil, Aeneid Books 1 and 4.  After leaving a besieged Troy, Aeneas, in search of a new homeland, came to Carthage, home of Juno, goddess of marriage. To welcome him, Dido, the Queen of Carthage, had prepared a lavish banquet.  With the intervention of Venus, Aeneas’s mother, and Cupid, his brother, Dido became smitten with Aeneas.  This would prove fateful for both Dido and Carthage.  Dido fell in love with Aeneas, and for a time they would even live together, but Aeneas would never marry her and would leave Carthage without her, ultimately finding his own place as the founder of Rome. Dido, left behind, would kill herself, and eventually Carthage would be defeated and destroyed by the Romans in the Battle of Mylae (see note 70).

Compare Dido’s feast with the royal engagement efforts for the granddaughter of Catherine the Great, wisest woman in Europe (note 45).  See also the failed efforts of Hellawes the Sorceress to seduce Sir Lancelot (note 388).

DYSFUNCTIONAL COUPLES populate, or dispopulate, the poem beyond Dido and Aeneus.  See lines 111-126 (empty talkers) and 139-172 (Lil & Albert), and notes 34 (Isolde & King Mark), (Adolf and Alexandra), 99 (Tereus & Procne), 128 (Hamlet & Ophelia) 145 (Lilith & Adam), 198 (Agamemnon & Clytemnestra), 279 (Lord Robert Dudley & Amy Robsart), 293 (Pia de Tolemei) 365 (the traveling bones wife), 388 (Hellawes and Lancelot) and 408 (howling wives, men on death beds).  For more blissful rivers, see notes 165 (a lustfully-paced courtship), 176 (a double marriage) and 291 (wedding bells).

ELIOT’S MARRIAGE was especially dysfunctional.  His wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, was perpetually troubled from 1915 until her death in 1947.  They separated in 1932 and were permanently estranged in 1938 when she was committed to a mental hospital.  See the preface to Eliot, Letters, quoting T.S. Eliot:

“To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought
the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.”

Moleskin 3.3: First Job

At the somewhat ripe age of ten I got a job delivering Tribune newspapers up and down the halls of apartment buildings. The way I remember it, I took the initiative to get that job, clipping an application out of the Sunday comics section and mailing it in. It was the beginning of fifth grade, and I had seen a classmate coming to school with an inky canvas bag hanging at his side, and it immediately stirred me with envy. But more reconciling: I was never alone in that first employ; my parents must have approved, probably encouraged. I don’t recall them leading the way, but I know they were right there all along. I learned to wake up at 5 a.m. without rousing the whole house, but Mom was there at the onset, shaking me awake when my body wasn’t used to it. On Sundays, when the papers were thick and heavy, there was my dad with his station wagon, helping me to make the deliveries. Mom opened up a savings account for me and taught me how to deposit my $50.00 paychecks, and on Saturdays there was Dad again, taking me to Mr. Donut after the job was done.

God Birds

    In the wood, God was manifest, 
    as he was not in the sermon.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson  


Woodpeckers the size of giant crows
With jackhammers as long as their heads are wide
Drum against the hearts of hollow trees
Reverberatingly, and yet they hide
And months and years go by with nothing heard
From the great and legendary Lord God Bird.

Meanwhile, smaller packages descend
Without the tools for enigmatic echoes,
With flourishes of black and white and red
Reduced to sparrow size, and yet they peck
Away their beating purpose next to me,
Reporting how to live and simply be.
I’ve been off in the forest seeking drums,
Yet sometimes with a tap God speaks to me.

Rumination

from Walled Gardens

I cannot wrap my mind
around God’s ways. I cannot comprehend
the shape of God, nor deign to understand
the details of God’s intricate design,
though I would try.

I cannot stretch my soul
around the grace of God. I cannot hold
the scope of God, delivered and revealed
so perfectly within my failing field
of vision. I am blind,

and yet I see
that God occurs to me as God allows,
despite these thoughts that drag their mortal chains,
beyond these dreams that lag reality,
and though my span of reason God restrains
God’s wisdom will prevail.

Within God’s house,
my reason is a guest; as God allows,
a servant soul invited to the host’s
parade; a child perpetually enrolled
in the master’s school, rewriting what’s assigned
with a crooked scrawl.