307 To Carthage then I came
308 Burning burning burning burning
309 O Lord Thou pluckest me out
310 O Lord Thou pluckest
311 burning
307. CARTHAGE, literally “new city,” second home of Queen Dido and the site of her tragic affair with Aeneus (see Virgil, Aeneid (note 92), was for St. Augustine a new world. See Augustine, Confessions (398 AD) 3.1.1, as cited by Eliot (translation not identified).
Eliot: “V. St. Augustine’s Confessions: ‘to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears.’”
See also Confessions 10.16.25 (tr. E. B. Pusey, 1838):
“For thus do I remember Carthage, thus all places where I have been, thus men's faces whom I have seen, and things reported by the other senses; thus the health or sickness of the body.”
Augustine, born in Thagaste, North Africa, in what is now Algeria, first moved to Carthage, now in neighboring Tunisia, for schooling at the age of 16. From the start he struggled between his faith and the hedonistic lifestyle of the “subverters” he saw all around him. See Confessions 3.3.6. See also Confessions 8.7.17:
“But I wretched, most wretched, in the very commencement of my early youth, had begged chastity of Thee, and said, ‘Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.’ For I feared lest Thou shouldest hear me soon, and soon cure me of the disease of concupiscence, which I wished to have satisfied, rather than extinguished.”
At the age of 19, Augustine returned to Thagaste to teach, and while there he became greatly disturbed at the death of a close friend (compare Eliot’s loss of his friend Jean Verdenal, note 42), causing him to return to Carthage two years later.
Augustine converted to Christianity relatively late in life, at the age of 34, after being especially moved by a random passage from Romans 13:13-14 (see Confessions 8.12.29):
“Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.”
See also Confessions 10.6.8-9, and compare this to Eliot’s tour of the classical elements (notes 0.5, 26):
“This is it which I love when I love my God. And what is this? I asked the earth, and it answered me, ‘I am not He’; and whatsoever are in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps, and the living creeping things, and they answered, ‘We are not thy God, seek above us.’ I asked the moving air; and the whole air with his inhabitants answered, ‘Anaximenes was deceived, I am not God.’ I asked the heavens, sun, moon, stars, ‘Nor (say they) are we the God whom thou seekest.’ And I replied unto all the things which encompass the door of my flesh: ‘Ye have told me of my God, that ye are not He; tell me something of Him.’ And they cried out with a loud voice, ‘He made us.’” Finally, see Confessions 10.27.38:
“Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever
new! too late I loved Thee! And behold, Thou wert within, and I abroad, and there I searched for Thee; deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms which Thou hadst made. Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee. Things held me far from Thee, which, unless they were in Thee, were not at all. Thou calledst, and shoutedst, and burstest my deafness. Thou flashedst, shonest, and scatteredst my blindness. Thou breathedst odours, and I drew in breath and panted for Thee. I tasted, and hunger and thirst. Thou touchedst me, and I burned for Thy peace.”
308. BURNING: Following the image of Augustine’s cauldron (note 307), see Shakespeare, Macbeth 4.1.10-11 for the witches’ chorus:
“Double, Double toil and trouble:
Fire, burn; and cauldron, bubble.”
See also the witches call of “‘Tis time, tis time,” at note 141.
For another reference to burning, see Joyce, Ulysses (note 111).
THE FIRE SERMON: Eliot: “The complete text of the Buddha's Fire Sermon, (which corresponds in importance to the Sermon on the Mount) from which these words are taken, will be found translated in the late Henry Clarke Warren's Buddhism in Translation (Harvard Oriental Series). Mr. Warren was one of the great pioneers of Buddhist studies in the Occident.”
The Fire Sermon is a central Buddhist text. See Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, Adittapariyaya Sutta, Samyutta Nikaya 35.28 (483 BCE, tr. Warren, 1896)):
“The eye, O priests, is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, that also is on fire. And with what are these on fire? With the fire of passions, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation, with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire.
...Perceiving this, O priests, the learned and noble disciple conceives an aversion for the eye, conceives an aversion for forms, an aversion for eye-consciousness, an aversion for the impressions received by the eye; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye.
...And in conceiving this aversion, he becomes divested of passion, and by the absence of passion he becomes free, and when he is free he becomes aware that he is free; and he knows that rebirth is exhausted, that he has lived the holy life, that he has done what it behooved him to do, and that he is no more for this world.”
THE EYE, throughout this poem, is veiled or averted: it fails (line 39), is forbidden (line 54), fixes on the feet (line 65), hides behind wings (line 81), presses lidless (line 138), weeps (line 182), turns upward from the desk (line 216) and is covered, then opened (lines 360-363). See also note 219 for the spectrum of perceptiveness in this poem.
311. PLUCKED OUT: Eliot: “From St. Augustine's Confessions again. The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident.”
See Confessions (note 307) 10.34.53:
“And I, though I speak and see this, entangle my steps with these outward beauties; but Thou pluckest me out, O Lord, Thou pluckest me out; because Thy loving-kindness is before my eyes. For I am taken miserably, and Thou pluckest me out mercifully; sometimes not perceiving it, when I had but lightly lighted upon them; otherwhiles with pain, because I had stuck fast in them.”
Augustine’s reference to being plucked out mercifully comes from Psalm 25:15:
“Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord; for he shall pluck my feet out of the net.”
But for a different kind of plucking, see Matthew 5:29:
“And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.”
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT, the source for this merciless plucking, turns everything around. At Eliot’s own prompting, compare the ascetic representations (note 309) of Buddha’s Fire Sermon and St. Augustine’s Confessions with the “corresponding importance “ (note 308) of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, his most extensively preserved public speech delivered at the beginning of his ministry, not long after he had been tested in the wilderness. The Sermon includes many well known lessons, such as the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer and the salt and light metaphors; see Matthew 5: 13, 14:
“Ye are the salt of the earth... Ye are the light of the world”
but also some harsh morality checks. Following the above eye plucking passage, which spoke the one whose eye wanders lustfully towards adultery, consider this extension to the “eye” passage on how to react to the evil of others, at Matthew 5: 38-39:
“Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” There is also a stern turn of both the eye and the light metaphors at Matthew 6: 22-23:
“The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!”
Compare Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster (note 28):
“Preach to birds and beasts
What woman is, and help to save them from you;
How heaven is in your eyes, but in your hearts
More hell than hell has
...How all the good you have is but a shadow,
I' the morning with you, and at night behind you
Past and forgotten.”
This refers back to lines 27-29: “...Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you.”
See also line 41: “looking into the heart of light, the silence.”
The Sermon on the Mount concludes at Matthew 7: 26-27:
“And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.”
Friday, August 19
Thursday, August 18
Moleskin 4.5: Transplanted
Our second suburban home had been four blocks away from the drainage ditch, and in the summer of twelve we moved even further away, to a place that seemed to be removed from rivers altogether. As before, I don’t remember much about the U-Hauling, maybe because it was mostly Dodge Darting, but oddly I can’t recall anything about the wedding either. We were just suddenly transplanted one suburb south, into a single family home with not much more yard than the townhouse had and with a new person in Dad’s place, someone who also wanted to be called “Dad.” My younger brothers obliged, but I insisted in calling him “Don.” Don was an engineer, and the house was his; he had shared the space with his parents, who were also suddenly transplanted that summer: out with the old, in with the new. Except that Don was old, too, forty four years old, never before married, never had kids. Didn’t have a clue. He was a loving uncle to his sister’s daughter, but that was hardly the same.
Wednesday, August 17
Sialia Sialis
I
The sun is somewhere in a cloudy sky
And I can’t tell the hour, nor east from west,
But though the dusk my spirit would deny
My body’s telling me it’s time to rest,
And what has carried me these miles beyond
My starting point, that dawn so far away
The fundamental memories are gone,
Would somewhere in the middle of the day
Turn to its history of winding roads
And heaving hills and shifting winds and rain.
But if what breathes can bear the pains and loads
What lives will take each step as gift and gain
And claim the highways leveled and unbending,
And dream the better day of its unending.
II
Somewhere, past the fog, up in the trees,
A bluebird sings its timeless song to me
And to the world of possibilities
Of heaven unsophisticatedly
Descending on a sunless day, a song
So sweet and sad and simple that the air
At once intoxicates and makes me strong,
Uplifts me and abandons me. Somewhere,
I must believe, my destiny awaits,
And at the final turn, this history
Will end and leave its luggage at the gates:
This road, this day, this bird that sings to me,
And all these weary words will cease to be
And I will fly into eternity.
The sun is somewhere in a cloudy sky
And I can’t tell the hour, nor east from west,
But though the dusk my spirit would deny
My body’s telling me it’s time to rest,
And what has carried me these miles beyond
My starting point, that dawn so far away
The fundamental memories are gone,
Would somewhere in the middle of the day
Turn to its history of winding roads
And heaving hills and shifting winds and rain.
But if what breathes can bear the pains and loads
What lives will take each step as gift and gain
And claim the highways leveled and unbending,
And dream the better day of its unending.
II
Somewhere, past the fog, up in the trees,
A bluebird sings its timeless song to me
And to the world of possibilities
Of heaven unsophisticatedly
Descending on a sunless day, a song
So sweet and sad and simple that the air
At once intoxicates and makes me strong,
Uplifts me and abandons me. Somewhere,
I must believe, my destiny awaits,
And at the final turn, this history
Will end and leave its luggage at the gates:
This road, this day, this bird that sings to me,
And all these weary words will cease to be
And I will fly into eternity.
Tuesday, August 16
Following The Path
from Walled Gardens
A Restatement from David Pendlebury’s Garden
The non-existent have come to serve
at the door of true existence,
nor is it just today that this is so
but since time began
dervishes have come
bereft of wealth and power,
swarming like ants at the door of love.
...No one knows how far it is
from nothingness to God,
but the self will wander right and left
day and night
for years and years
turning around itself like an ox in the mill;
break free from yourself,
free yourself from yourself
and in little time the wandering will cease
and the door will open to you.
A Restatement from David Pendlebury’s Garden
The non-existent have come to serve
at the door of true existence,
nor is it just today that this is so
but since time began
dervishes have come
bereft of wealth and power,
swarming like ants at the door of love.
...No one knows how far it is
from nothingness to God,
but the self will wander right and left
day and night
for years and years
turning around itself like an ox in the mill;
break free from yourself,
free yourself from yourself
and in little time the wandering will cease
and the door will open to you.
Monday, August 15
Positure
Once, looking back, my tracks left in the snow
Seemed pigeon-toed and rambling hereandthere
And barely showing where I meant to go
And never really getting anywhere,
So I resolved to walk a straighter line
With better posture and a clearer goal,
And in my mind the tracks I left behind
Were perfect pictures of a pristine soul,
Until, unsatisfied, I turned around
To see my legacy and take account,
Which caused my steps to weave from
edge to edge;
My back re-bent, and I began to sway;
And on my cue, a pigeon on a ledge
Stretched out its sturdy wings
and flew away.
Seemed pigeon-toed and rambling hereandthere
And barely showing where I meant to go
And never really getting anywhere,
So I resolved to walk a straighter line
With better posture and a clearer goal,
And in my mind the tracks I left behind
Were perfect pictures of a pristine soul,
Until, unsatisfied, I turned around
To see my legacy and take account,
Which caused my steps to weave from
edge to edge;
My back re-bent, and I began to sway;
And on my cue, a pigeon on a ledge
Stretched out its sturdy wings
and flew away.
Sunday, August 14
Reason, Persisting
from Walled Gardens
And the son arose and started walking
back towards his father’s place...
Reason, the traveler, never gets to God:
the traveler’s heart and soul are dust upon the road;
reason’s eyes are dry, unwashed by the love of God,
and blind, unwise to the holiness of God.
Reason, the innocent child, stirs up imagination
out of darkness; the child is moved to discuss eternity
with thoughtfulness and sensuality
until God shows up and sweeps it all away.
Reason, the ambitious bird, takes to the air,
a sparrow claiming the ranks of Gabriel,
but Reason too, like every Gabriel before the Lord,
must one day bow its head and fold its wing.
How can one describe God
if Reason denies that God’s the One,
the step at the start of the journey,
and the image before the dream?
How can one discuss God
if God is just an argument
and heaven is some distant place
beyond the rank and file? O Lone Traveler, stumbling on your wicked soul,
O Raw Youth, caught up in your shallow sense,
O Poor Sparrow, making your way to majesty:
submit yourself to the One without a place.
And the son arose and started walking
back towards his father’s place...
Reason, the traveler, never gets to God:
the traveler’s heart and soul are dust upon the road;
reason’s eyes are dry, unwashed by the love of God,
and blind, unwise to the holiness of God.
Reason, the innocent child, stirs up imagination
out of darkness; the child is moved to discuss eternity
with thoughtfulness and sensuality
until God shows up and sweeps it all away.
Reason, the ambitious bird, takes to the air,
a sparrow claiming the ranks of Gabriel,
but Reason too, like every Gabriel before the Lord,
must one day bow its head and fold its wing.
How can one describe God
if Reason denies that God’s the One,
the step at the start of the journey,
and the image before the dream?
How can one discuss God
if God is just an argument
and heaven is some distant place
beyond the rank and file? O Lone Traveler, stumbling on your wicked soul,
O Raw Youth, caught up in your shallow sense,
O Poor Sparrow, making your way to majesty:
submit yourself to the One without a place.
Saturday, August 13
The End Of Reason
from Walled Gardens
How can one describe God?
What wins the argument?
I tried reasoning my way to God: it did not work;
How can one know a way that cannot be known?
Reason took me no further than the door,
But in the end God’s presence let me in.
I tried willing the door to open: it would not move.
How can one see a face before it’s shown?
My willfulness had gotten me this far,
But in the end God’s presence let me in.
If reason is incompetent to know its own nature
And will is incapable of knowing itself,
If I don’t seem to know the first thing about knowledge,
Why would I think I could ever know God?
I tried willing myself to God, but I lost my will;
I tried reasoning my way to God, but in the end
it was God’s love and kindness that opened the door;
it was God’s grace and presence that let me in.
How can one describe God?
What wins the argument?
I tried reasoning my way to God: it did not work;
How can one know a way that cannot be known?
Reason took me no further than the door,
But in the end God’s presence let me in.
I tried willing the door to open: it would not move.
How can one see a face before it’s shown?
My willfulness had gotten me this far,
But in the end God’s presence let me in.
If reason is incompetent to know its own nature
And will is incapable of knowing itself,
If I don’t seem to know the first thing about knowledge,
Why would I think I could ever know God?
I tried willing myself to God, but I lost my will;
I tried reasoning my way to God, but in the end
it was God’s love and kindness that opened the door;
it was God’s grace and presence that let me in.
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.”
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.”
Thursday, August 11
Moleskin 4.4: The Summer Of Twelve
Put yourself in my shoes, just for a moment: it is the summer of ‘75, or for the sake of otherness, the summer of twelve. Your father and mother are working hard to raise you, and working together, but something isn’t right. They are living in separate places, looking in different directions; they are often consumed by their own challenges, facing their own futures apart from yours. So it is, with varying degrees of consumption and challenge, for every parent, but this does not occur to you in your youth, and it troubles you even more as parent one starts to talk about moving away to relaunch a career, and as parent two seems to be lonely, in need of a partner. And all of a sudden parent two finds that new partner to finally replace parent one, and in the same sudden, and the order doesn’t matter here, parent one moves two states away, happily accepting a call to a new beginning. And the world seems happy for both of them, but you’re left punching your Christmas present, wondering why.
Wednesday, August 10
Yoshi: My Walking Song
I
Lately my life revolves around a dog
Who knows whose leash it is and whose routine
We follow, stretching thin the line between
Our independent wills.
I see the dog
As one who needs a master, while the dog
Sees one who needs a friend, and if I’ve been
One caught up on commands the dog has seen
Me friendly now and then.
So man and dog
Since time began have tugged upon this leash
And traveled down the trails of this routine
Each morning looking forward to the walk.
Man and dog,
Unequally assigned, but side by side
Man walks the dog, dog walks the man, and each
One seems to keep the other satisfied.
I am the man. This is my dog
What would I hear if my dog could talk?
What would I want to say
if I were the dog?
What would I think? What would I know?
Where would I run to? How far would I go?
And would I run away
if I were the dog?
Let me stretch this leash from here to heaven,
Let me sometimes think I know the way
But let me take the paths that I’ve been given
And learn what I should say.
I am the man. This is my dog.
I try to listen whenever we walk.
But what can there be to say
when you’re a dog?
II
Sometimes I find myself spinning around
And chasing after things that aren’t there,
Entangling the one whose leash I share
And losing sight of where we might be bound.
I think it’s good to have someone around
To take my side, to set the pace, to bear
The distance and to gently lead me where
I know I need to go,
But I have found
Myself spinning around things I don’t know.
I’m leaping after birds up in the air
And tracking common scents into the ground,
But I have found
The one whose leash I share at every turn
Keeps telling me the things I ought to know
But giving me the time I need to learn.
God is the man. I am the dog.
I’m not the man I once thought I was.
He seems so far away.
I am the dog.
Prayer is the leash. This is my prayer,
Drawing me close to the man up there.
I don’t have words to say.
I am the dog.
But I’ll stretch this leash from here to heaven,
And sometimes I’ll think I know the way,
But I’ll take the paths that I’ve been given
And learn what I should say.
God is the man, but I am the one
Who walks with him when the day is done
And with each breaking dawn.
I am the dog.
III
Lately my mind has turned the metaphor
Of man and dog, the leash and the routine
Upon its head. What can these verses mean
If I’m still learning what the walking’s for?
And can there even be a metaphor
Sufficient for the poetry I’ve seen
Along the way, when every step has been
Part of a song I’ve never sung before?
All the more,
I will walk, and in my walking sing,
And with my singing cherish the routine
And through routine embrace each metaphor
All the more,
Of God and man, of learning how to pray,
Of never understanding everything
About this life but walking anyway. \
And I’ll stretch this leash from here to heaven,
And sometimes I’ll think I know the way,
But I’ll take the paths that I’ve been given.
I’m learning how to pray.
Prayer is the leash. This is my prayer,
Keeping me close to the man up there,
And he’s not so far away.
I am the dog.
Lately my life revolves around a dog
Who knows whose leash it is and whose routine
We follow, stretching thin the line between
Our independent wills.
I see the dog
As one who needs a master, while the dog
Sees one who needs a friend, and if I’ve been
One caught up on commands the dog has seen
Me friendly now and then.
So man and dog
Since time began have tugged upon this leash
And traveled down the trails of this routine
Each morning looking forward to the walk.
Man and dog,
Unequally assigned, but side by side
Man walks the dog, dog walks the man, and each
One seems to keep the other satisfied.
I am the man. This is my dog
What would I hear if my dog could talk?
What would I want to say
if I were the dog?
What would I think? What would I know?
Where would I run to? How far would I go?
And would I run away
if I were the dog?
Let me stretch this leash from here to heaven,
Let me sometimes think I know the way
But let me take the paths that I’ve been given
And learn what I should say.
I am the man. This is my dog.
I try to listen whenever we walk.
But what can there be to say
when you’re a dog?
II
Sometimes I find myself spinning around
And chasing after things that aren’t there,
Entangling the one whose leash I share
And losing sight of where we might be bound.
I think it’s good to have someone around
To take my side, to set the pace, to bear
The distance and to gently lead me where
I know I need to go,
But I have found
Myself spinning around things I don’t know.
I’m leaping after birds up in the air
And tracking common scents into the ground,
But I have found
The one whose leash I share at every turn
Keeps telling me the things I ought to know
But giving me the time I need to learn.
God is the man. I am the dog.
I’m not the man I once thought I was.
He seems so far away.
I am the dog.
Prayer is the leash. This is my prayer,
Drawing me close to the man up there.
I don’t have words to say.
I am the dog.
But I’ll stretch this leash from here to heaven,
And sometimes I’ll think I know the way,
But I’ll take the paths that I’ve been given
And learn what I should say.
God is the man, but I am the one
Who walks with him when the day is done
And with each breaking dawn.
I am the dog.
III
Lately my mind has turned the metaphor
Of man and dog, the leash and the routine
Upon its head. What can these verses mean
If I’m still learning what the walking’s for?
And can there even be a metaphor
Sufficient for the poetry I’ve seen
Along the way, when every step has been
Part of a song I’ve never sung before?
All the more,
I will walk, and in my walking sing,
And with my singing cherish the routine
And through routine embrace each metaphor
All the more,
Of God and man, of learning how to pray,
Of never understanding everything
About this life but walking anyway. \
And I’ll stretch this leash from here to heaven,
And sometimes I’ll think I know the way,
But I’ll take the paths that I’ve been given.
I’m learning how to pray.
Prayer is the leash. This is my prayer,
Keeping me close to the man up there,
And he’s not so far away.
I am the dog.
Tuesday, August 9
Bruiser: By Way Of An Introduction
This is my walking song.
Everyone should have a walking song,
to break the silence,
to add to the routine,
to keep life's conversation going.
A walking song helps one appreciate
the world along the pathway,
and the companions of the day.
It's a talk to go with the walk,
a song to sing when no one else is there.
Best of all, a walking song is a daily discipline,
putting to practice the challenge of Paul
from 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18:
Rejoice always,
pray without ceasing,
give thanks in all circumstances...
Which leads to verse 19: "Do not quench the spirit."
Everyone should have a walking song,
to break the silence,
to add to the routine,
to keep life's conversation going.
A walking song helps one appreciate
the world along the pathway,
and the companions of the day.
It's a talk to go with the walk,
a song to sing when no one else is there.
Best of all, a walking song is a daily discipline,
putting to practice the challenge of Paul
from 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18:
Rejoice always,
pray without ceasing,
give thanks in all circumstances...
Which leads to verse 19: "Do not quench the spirit."
Monday, August 8
Duncan And The Closet Monster
or Never Fear, by Dog
Most of the time, there is absolutely nothing to worry about. The thing is usually not much more than an inanimate object. Right now, for instance, it seems to be sleeping in a corner of the hall closet, minding its own business, not making a sound. Of course, it is evening now, and the thing has never been known to stir at night, but even in the daytime, as long as the closet door is closed and it keeps to the shadows, it maintains a harmless peace that even a dutiful watchdog might begin to accept.
But don’t be alarmed, my two-legged friends, for you have not only a dutiful dog but a wise one, who knows a deceptive calm when he sees one. I don’t mean to scare you, but there is a beast in our house, a savage monster behind that closet door, with a spine-chilling howl and armor-plated skin and hidden teeth. But rest assured, good people, you shall not be bothered. I am your guard dog, and I am keen to the monster’s ways. If that closet door cracks open even the slightest bit, I’ll perk up my eyes and ears. If the monster wakes, I promise to let you know. And if it dares to emerge from its shadows, never fear, people, I will be on my feet even before the demon lets out its first hair-raising screech. I will not allow it to take over the house. I will scare it back into the closet, so that all of you may stay safe and sound this evening. That is my job, after all, and I intend, as always, to do it right.
Perhaps some of you aren’t even aware of the monster’s existence. I’m not surprised. The animal rarely comes out when everyone is home, largely due, I’m sure, to my persistent guarding. Right now, for instance, I do not allow it to intrude on you while you’re all eating your dinner, or later when you look at your television, or after that when you’ve fallen asleep. I am doubly alert with the whole family around, and in times like these the monster stays put, probably because it knows better.
Likewise, the beast seems to have enough sense to keep to the shadows when no one is around —no one, that is, but me. It knows, I believe, that without the restraint that looking out for your safety puts on me, I would tear out its very heart. I swear, by dog, I would have no tolerance. In fact, more than once on those solitary days, I’ve thought of busting the door down and attacking the monster in cold blood, while it sleeps. Even now that is an appealing thought.
But don’t be concerned, people, I am hardly a beast myself. I will control my temper, for your sake, even if just one of you is in the house.
It is precisely those times, however, that the creature always seems to wait for. It’s as if it knows that I’m not the brutal savage then that I would be in an empty house, nor the alert guard, as I’m trying to be right now, with the house full. I guess it thinks that with just one or two people home, I’m not as much on my toes. And so it has been, I confess. In the winter afternoons, for instance, like the one we had today, the sun looks so inviting as it shines on the living room carpet. And from time to time, I’m sorry to say, I lapse from my basic duties, in favor of that carpet, giving the enemy more opportunity than it deserves.
Usually only one of you is around. Maybe you’re in the kitchen, playing with dishes, or walking around the house rubbing windows. I glance at the hall closet and see it closed. I peek in the kitchen and see you safe, and —just for a while, mind you —I stretch out and catch my breath, and I relax my guard. Oh, but forgive me, gentle people, for being less than diligent. Forgive me for thinking too much of myself. For it is in just this setting, me stretched out on the floor and you roaming unprotected through the house, that the creature suddenly roars. I jump up and run for the closet, but it is too late. You are no longer in the kitchen, playing with dishes, but in the hallway, gripping tightly at the monster’s neck. Oh, what a sorry dog I am! If only I had been lying against that door to keep, or if only I had not been lying down at all, then you would never have been involved.
But the sly beast had waited for this opportunity. And what can I do now? As the battle gets under way, you have its neck, and I can only be ready on the side in case you lose your grip. Oh, how I wish that it could be me who has the throat-hold. By dog, I would rip that neck in two.
As it is, though, I can’t do much more than cheer you on. I try to bark louder than the beast, but the beast is deafening, and has incredible endurance. I try to keep the beast at bay, but it is a very clever creature and cunningly expands the battlefield, pulling you slowly from one room to the next. I try to bite the beast, but it is a thick-skinned animal, impervious to my attacks. Only its neck appears to be vulnerable, and that is in your clutches. As you whip it here and there, I can only encourage you to tighten your hold. Of course I suggest, now and then, that maybe you ought to turn its pitiful neck over to me.
But I can see that you’re afraid. You start speaking to me, perhaps asking me how and when you should let go of its neck. But because of the monster’s terrible screaming, I can’t make out exactly what you’re saying, and you don’t seem to hear my reply.
The battle goes on, throughout the entire house. We move into the living room, and the animal spends an extra amount of time right over the area of carpet where I had been sprawled out on moments before. This really steams me, and I start barking even louder. You seem to apply more pressure on your strangle-hold, and yet the monster continues to roar. It could be, I consider, that the neck is thicker than I thought. But I keep barking back at the beast, hoping always that I might at least frighten it back into its shadows.
We wrestle through every room of the house, and then suddenly, even as my barks are starting to crack, the roaring stops. The animal’s endurance has proven to be less than mine, and I keep on barking, triumphantly, as you drag the silent body back to the closet and firmly close the door.
It is evening, and you are all in the house again. I always notice on nights like this that one of you —the recent warrior, I mean —never wants to say anything about the incident. I understand. You’re still a little shaky, or maybe you don’t want to concern the others. Maybe you know as well as I do that the beast isn’t dead yet. Well, rest assured. The next time I get a chance, I swear, I’m going to bust in and kill that thing for good. In the mean time, never fear, eat your dinner in peace, and enjoy complete safety. Your guard dog is on patrol. My ears are tuned to the closet door, and I will sense the slightest movement in the hallway. I will protect you from the evil monster of the shadows, and you fine people may continue your peaceful meal without any interruption.
But say, I sure would appreciate it if you would put a plate of food aside for me.
Most of the time, there is absolutely nothing to worry about. The thing is usually not much more than an inanimate object. Right now, for instance, it seems to be sleeping in a corner of the hall closet, minding its own business, not making a sound. Of course, it is evening now, and the thing has never been known to stir at night, but even in the daytime, as long as the closet door is closed and it keeps to the shadows, it maintains a harmless peace that even a dutiful watchdog might begin to accept.
But don’t be alarmed, my two-legged friends, for you have not only a dutiful dog but a wise one, who knows a deceptive calm when he sees one. I don’t mean to scare you, but there is a beast in our house, a savage monster behind that closet door, with a spine-chilling howl and armor-plated skin and hidden teeth. But rest assured, good people, you shall not be bothered. I am your guard dog, and I am keen to the monster’s ways. If that closet door cracks open even the slightest bit, I’ll perk up my eyes and ears. If the monster wakes, I promise to let you know. And if it dares to emerge from its shadows, never fear, people, I will be on my feet even before the demon lets out its first hair-raising screech. I will not allow it to take over the house. I will scare it back into the closet, so that all of you may stay safe and sound this evening. That is my job, after all, and I intend, as always, to do it right.
Perhaps some of you aren’t even aware of the monster’s existence. I’m not surprised. The animal rarely comes out when everyone is home, largely due, I’m sure, to my persistent guarding. Right now, for instance, I do not allow it to intrude on you while you’re all eating your dinner, or later when you look at your television, or after that when you’ve fallen asleep. I am doubly alert with the whole family around, and in times like these the monster stays put, probably because it knows better.
Likewise, the beast seems to have enough sense to keep to the shadows when no one is around —no one, that is, but me. It knows, I believe, that without the restraint that looking out for your safety puts on me, I would tear out its very heart. I swear, by dog, I would have no tolerance. In fact, more than once on those solitary days, I’ve thought of busting the door down and attacking the monster in cold blood, while it sleeps. Even now that is an appealing thought.
But don’t be concerned, people, I am hardly a beast myself. I will control my temper, for your sake, even if just one of you is in the house.
It is precisely those times, however, that the creature always seems to wait for. It’s as if it knows that I’m not the brutal savage then that I would be in an empty house, nor the alert guard, as I’m trying to be right now, with the house full. I guess it thinks that with just one or two people home, I’m not as much on my toes. And so it has been, I confess. In the winter afternoons, for instance, like the one we had today, the sun looks so inviting as it shines on the living room carpet. And from time to time, I’m sorry to say, I lapse from my basic duties, in favor of that carpet, giving the enemy more opportunity than it deserves.
Usually only one of you is around. Maybe you’re in the kitchen, playing with dishes, or walking around the house rubbing windows. I glance at the hall closet and see it closed. I peek in the kitchen and see you safe, and —just for a while, mind you —I stretch out and catch my breath, and I relax my guard. Oh, but forgive me, gentle people, for being less than diligent. Forgive me for thinking too much of myself. For it is in just this setting, me stretched out on the floor and you roaming unprotected through the house, that the creature suddenly roars. I jump up and run for the closet, but it is too late. You are no longer in the kitchen, playing with dishes, but in the hallway, gripping tightly at the monster’s neck. Oh, what a sorry dog I am! If only I had been lying against that door to keep, or if only I had not been lying down at all, then you would never have been involved.
But the sly beast had waited for this opportunity. And what can I do now? As the battle gets under way, you have its neck, and I can only be ready on the side in case you lose your grip. Oh, how I wish that it could be me who has the throat-hold. By dog, I would rip that neck in two.
As it is, though, I can’t do much more than cheer you on. I try to bark louder than the beast, but the beast is deafening, and has incredible endurance. I try to keep the beast at bay, but it is a very clever creature and cunningly expands the battlefield, pulling you slowly from one room to the next. I try to bite the beast, but it is a thick-skinned animal, impervious to my attacks. Only its neck appears to be vulnerable, and that is in your clutches. As you whip it here and there, I can only encourage you to tighten your hold. Of course I suggest, now and then, that maybe you ought to turn its pitiful neck over to me.
But I can see that you’re afraid. You start speaking to me, perhaps asking me how and when you should let go of its neck. But because of the monster’s terrible screaming, I can’t make out exactly what you’re saying, and you don’t seem to hear my reply.
The battle goes on, throughout the entire house. We move into the living room, and the animal spends an extra amount of time right over the area of carpet where I had been sprawled out on moments before. This really steams me, and I start barking even louder. You seem to apply more pressure on your strangle-hold, and yet the monster continues to roar. It could be, I consider, that the neck is thicker than I thought. But I keep barking back at the beast, hoping always that I might at least frighten it back into its shadows.
We wrestle through every room of the house, and then suddenly, even as my barks are starting to crack, the roaring stops. The animal’s endurance has proven to be less than mine, and I keep on barking, triumphantly, as you drag the silent body back to the closet and firmly close the door.
It is evening, and you are all in the house again. I always notice on nights like this that one of you —the recent warrior, I mean —never wants to say anything about the incident. I understand. You’re still a little shaky, or maybe you don’t want to concern the others. Maybe you know as well as I do that the beast isn’t dead yet. Well, rest assured. The next time I get a chance, I swear, I’m going to bust in and kill that thing for good. In the mean time, never fear, eat your dinner in peace, and enjoy complete safety. Your guard dog is on patrol. My ears are tuned to the closet door, and I will sense the slightest movement in the hallway. I will protect you from the evil monster of the shadows, and you fine people may continue your peaceful meal without any interruption.
But say, I sure would appreciate it if you would put a plate of food aside for me.
Sunday, August 7
Walter
Sir Walter Dog was not the knight
we wanted him to be, and yet
he struck a pose on our front steps,
perusing distant fields.
Nor was he quite the Scottish writer
we would have him answer to,
although I’d bet he had his own
adventures to reveal.
He was a dog, we’ll give him that,
but nothing of the pedigree
some said he was —more terrier,
less cocka, mostly poo.
But you’re one for the ages, Walter,
living on in memories
for more than thirty years, and we’re
still calling out to you.
we wanted him to be, and yet
he struck a pose on our front steps,
perusing distant fields.
Nor was he quite the Scottish writer
we would have him answer to,
although I’d bet he had his own
adventures to reveal.
He was a dog, we’ll give him that,
but nothing of the pedigree
some said he was —more terrier,
less cocka, mostly poo.
But you’re one for the ages, Walter,
living on in memories
for more than thirty years, and we’re
still calling out to you.
Saturday, August 6
Leopold
King Leopold of Vold once ruled
that portion of our Glyndon jungle
where the grass was not quite wild
and the river didn’t reach.
We kept a chain around his golden
neck for his own good, we said,
but when he grumbled now and then
we’d let him off the leash.
I want what Leo wanted then,
to have the lion’s share of life,
to run along the jungle’s edge,
to chase what I desire.
But in a dog’s life, just a taste
of freedom turns into an urge
to hit the roads and try to bite
the tires off of cars.
that portion of our Glyndon jungle
where the grass was not quite wild
and the river didn’t reach.
We kept a chain around his golden
neck for his own good, we said,
but when he grumbled now and then
we’d let him off the leash.
I want what Leo wanted then,
to have the lion’s share of life,
to run along the jungle’s edge,
to chase what I desire.
But in a dog’s life, just a taste
of freedom turns into an urge
to hit the roads and try to bite
the tires off of cars.
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.
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.
Thursday, August 4
Moleskin 4.3: For What It’s Worth
I should say, too, that I don’t actually know you. I may pretend to know exactly who you are, in order to relate to you, but you, my other, are a stranger to me; I will believe I can see you in a mirror, as I have seen my parents’ faces (or maybe more arrestingly, the other way around), yet I will admit to only imagining there is even a glimmer of their faces in mine or mine in yours. But I am speaking to you all the same, hoping you might get something out of my story. As I write this I’m fairly certain you aren’t even listening, barely noticing me scribbling away, or maybe years away from hearing me at all. But this story is for you, all the more, the point for my point: to show you, dear other, that beyond birth and life is more life, more than you might expect; to share some of the river secrets that can help you pass the time; not to tell you who you are —you know that more than I ever will— but to tell you an “other” story, for all that it is worth.
Wednesday, August 3
The Farmer
I
There was once a farmer who with a smile endured
The test of memory and in time inspired
The stuff of legend: once a man became
The hero and the villain and the dream
Behind the smile became the memory
Of someone else. There was once a farmer, and he
Worked hard to plow his thousand acre field
Each spring, preparing someone else’s food
With modern tools. Allow this tale to start
With shares of metal dragging through dirt
And give the man a toil hardened grin
And a severed hand; then let this truth be told
Of every farmer whose every smile reveals
Defiance, grit, survival, victory,
But leave it there: a hundred stories end
Where one begins and all of history
Breathes the air of every once upon a time.
II
There was once a time when smiles disappeared
Throughout the county, turning to a hard
Reality: the cruelest of crimes
Came to their world and crushed the quiet dreams
Of an adolescent girl and of the whole
Community. There was once a time when all
Work stopped to hear the echoes of a gun,
And it felt like everyone who heard the sound Had pulled the trigger. Oh dear audience
Expecting simple songs and sweet romance
Imagine you were there holding the gun
That fateful Friday night; and picture this,
A steadfast smile suddenly replaced
With emptiness, then guilt, then rage and blame,
And there you were, the gun still in your hand
Above your victim, for the rest of time
The final breath of a thirteen year old girl.
III
She was once a summer smile that never feared
Forever, thought forever was a word
That didn’t end: she smiled like it was summer
All the time, and by persistent dreams
And distant memories her ghost pretends
That nothing’s changed. There was once, and there remains
Worked in the weave of our surviving souls,
The strand of innocence of teenaged smiles
On summer nights. Forgive us, farmer, for the blood
We can’t unspill, collect the tears we’ve shed
But let us smile that she may live again
To find forever; let this be her truth,
The ultimate discovery of youth:
Not liberty, not passion, not abandon
But innocence: accept this first and final
Plea, the strand of our salvation and
The breath that gives us immortality.
There was once a farmer who with a smile endured
The test of memory and in time inspired
The stuff of legend: once a man became
The hero and the villain and the dream
Behind the smile became the memory
Of someone else. There was once a farmer, and he
Worked hard to plow his thousand acre field
Each spring, preparing someone else’s food
With modern tools. Allow this tale to start
With shares of metal dragging through dirt
And give the man a toil hardened grin
And a severed hand; then let this truth be told
Of every farmer whose every smile reveals
Defiance, grit, survival, victory,
But leave it there: a hundred stories end
Where one begins and all of history
Breathes the air of every once upon a time.
II
There was once a time when smiles disappeared
Throughout the county, turning to a hard
Reality: the cruelest of crimes
Came to their world and crushed the quiet dreams
Of an adolescent girl and of the whole
Community. There was once a time when all
Work stopped to hear the echoes of a gun,
And it felt like everyone who heard the sound Had pulled the trigger. Oh dear audience
Expecting simple songs and sweet romance
Imagine you were there holding the gun
That fateful Friday night; and picture this,
A steadfast smile suddenly replaced
With emptiness, then guilt, then rage and blame,
And there you were, the gun still in your hand
Above your victim, for the rest of time
The final breath of a thirteen year old girl.
III
She was once a summer smile that never feared
Forever, thought forever was a word
That didn’t end: she smiled like it was summer
All the time, and by persistent dreams
And distant memories her ghost pretends
That nothing’s changed. There was once, and there remains
Worked in the weave of our surviving souls,
The strand of innocence of teenaged smiles
On summer nights. Forgive us, farmer, for the blood
We can’t unspill, collect the tears we’ve shed
But let us smile that she may live again
To find forever; let this be her truth,
The ultimate discovery of youth:
Not liberty, not passion, not abandon
But innocence: accept this first and final
Plea, the strand of our salvation and
The breath that gives us immortality.
Tuesday, August 2
One Summer : A Song
She rode on a beautiful horse, rode up the hill and across my lawn. Roxanne! She smiled bold and shy, beaming the bold-shy age of thirteen years. Roxanne, 1979: there was a Top 40 hit that year, but she was a different tune. Beyond the pure, but in the days before mature, she was not so grown up as a red light song, and none of us were as old as we pretended.
We used to laugh at her: she had what Matt used to call a “cute duck butt,” and what Jim called a “ski-jump nose.” We drank beer in the dark —she never drank, but she stayed out late with us; she teased us all, and she smoked Salem cigarettes and she swore.
And one day she rode that beautiful horse up the hill of my lawn and smiled, and said, “Hey, Sol, want to go for a ride?” I looked up at her on her big beautiful horse and smiled back, and Sugar took the opportunity to munch on my lawn.
“Ro-o-0-OX! Anne! —that was another tune, by the Police, and Sting sounded like a reggae rooster on the radio. We crowed that song all summer, thinking we liked it before we knew what it was about, knowing only that we too knew a girl named Roxanne. Then we learned, learned to understand every word, and for a while that summer we sang it louder, and then in the fall we didn’t sing it anymore.
She rode Sugar up to me —bold and shy —and asked if I wanted to ride with her. And I smiled, not ready to answer, giving Sugar time to chew the grass. Nights later, in the fall, I’d try to write a better song for her: “Roxanne, sweet thirteen, before she knew the world was mean...” “Those days are over,” I might have added. Nights later, we would turn the radio off.
She smiled, bold and shy. Sure, I said. Great, she said, jump on. We rode down the street and into a field, Roxanne and Sugar and I —we broke from a trot to a gallop, and I, sitting in back, clung on to Roxanne, held her near me, felt her warm and sweaty against me and felt safe in the saddle. We were still closer to pure than mature, and I still remember Sugar munching quietly on the grass. But then we were both well aware of where we were, on this beautiful horse galloping swiftly across the field.
Another tune began playing on the radio, and we turned the volume higher.
One night we all went to a party at Adam’s. His parents weren’t home. We drank beer in the dark, but Roxy still wouldn’t drink. “Ro-o-0-OX! Anne,” squawked Adam. She never did like that song. Adam took out a gun and started playing with it, as if it were a Saturday afternoon and he was shooting at beer cans on fence posts. Wait, said Matt, let me set them up again.
Sugar munched quietly on the grass —a big horse, with a big saddle. Come on, said Roxanne, there’s room for both of us. And I jumped on, fitting snugly into the saddle behind her, and we trotted off my lawn and down the hill, down a country road and across a field.
She lit up a cigarette, while Adam started playing with his shotgun, shooting it into the air. Come on, said Adam, Come on, bitch, or I’ll kill you. He laughed. We drank more beer. She never did like that song. And Adam started fooling around with his shotgun, holding it up to her throat. Wait, said Matt, let me check the chamber.
We used to laugh at her, and she teased us all, and she swore. And she rode on a beautiful horse, up the hill and across the lawn, and she asked if I wanted to go for a ride.
I held her near me. She was warm and sweaty, and I clung to her.
And we turned the radio off.
Adam started playing with his shotgun, pulling the trigger, and the shot went into her head.
Wait, said Matt, it was supposed to be empty. Someone called the police, and we turned the radio off.
We had been singing another tune, beyond the pure, before the mature. And Sugar broke to a gallop from a trot.
We used to laugh at her: she had what Matt used to call a “cute duck butt,” and what Jim called a “ski-jump nose.” We drank beer in the dark —she never drank, but she stayed out late with us; she teased us all, and she smoked Salem cigarettes and she swore.
And one day she rode that beautiful horse up the hill of my lawn and smiled, and said, “Hey, Sol, want to go for a ride?” I looked up at her on her big beautiful horse and smiled back, and Sugar took the opportunity to munch on my lawn.
“Ro-o-0-OX! Anne! —that was another tune, by the Police, and Sting sounded like a reggae rooster on the radio. We crowed that song all summer, thinking we liked it before we knew what it was about, knowing only that we too knew a girl named Roxanne. Then we learned, learned to understand every word, and for a while that summer we sang it louder, and then in the fall we didn’t sing it anymore.
She rode Sugar up to me —bold and shy —and asked if I wanted to ride with her. And I smiled, not ready to answer, giving Sugar time to chew the grass. Nights later, in the fall, I’d try to write a better song for her: “Roxanne, sweet thirteen, before she knew the world was mean...” “Those days are over,” I might have added. Nights later, we would turn the radio off.
She smiled, bold and shy. Sure, I said. Great, she said, jump on. We rode down the street and into a field, Roxanne and Sugar and I —we broke from a trot to a gallop, and I, sitting in back, clung on to Roxanne, held her near me, felt her warm and sweaty against me and felt safe in the saddle. We were still closer to pure than mature, and I still remember Sugar munching quietly on the grass. But then we were both well aware of where we were, on this beautiful horse galloping swiftly across the field.
Another tune began playing on the radio, and we turned the volume higher.
One night we all went to a party at Adam’s. His parents weren’t home. We drank beer in the dark, but Roxy still wouldn’t drink. “Ro-o-0-OX! Anne,” squawked Adam. She never did like that song. Adam took out a gun and started playing with it, as if it were a Saturday afternoon and he was shooting at beer cans on fence posts. Wait, said Matt, let me set them up again.
Sugar munched quietly on the grass —a big horse, with a big saddle. Come on, said Roxanne, there’s room for both of us. And I jumped on, fitting snugly into the saddle behind her, and we trotted off my lawn and down the hill, down a country road and across a field.
She lit up a cigarette, while Adam started playing with his shotgun, shooting it into the air. Come on, said Adam, Come on, bitch, or I’ll kill you. He laughed. We drank more beer. She never did like that song. And Adam started fooling around with his shotgun, holding it up to her throat. Wait, said Matt, let me check the chamber.
We used to laugh at her, and she teased us all, and she swore. And she rode on a beautiful horse, up the hill and across the lawn, and she asked if I wanted to go for a ride.
I held her near me. She was warm and sweaty, and I clung to her.
And we turned the radio off.
Adam started playing with his shotgun, pulling the trigger, and the shot went into her head.
Wait, said Matt, it was supposed to be empty. Someone called the police, and we turned the radio off.
We had been singing another tune, beyond the pure, before the mature. And Sugar broke to a gallop from a trot.
Monday, August 1
One Summer : An Aspersion
“You guys killed her,” she said.
“What are you talking about,” Sol said quietly.
“You had the party, you knew he was playing with guns.”
Our accuser was my father’s age, and a friend of his. She had silver-blond hair and a pleasantly trim figure; her skin was smooth and unwrinkled and her smile and the warm humor that accompanied it gave her the appearance of youth. But on this day she did not smile and wasn’t warm, and suddenly and permanently to me she was as old and cold as a cackling, bony-nosed witch. For the first time I noticed the wart on her neck, and it would stand out every time after that. I noticed the way her dishwater gray hair was never combed. Her humor, I began to realize, was full of secret sarcasm and based largely on hate.
It was two days after my friend Adam accidentally killed my friend Roxanne. Adam was messing around with a shotgun at a party. He had forgotten to check the chamber, and when he playfully grabbed Roxanne and put the gun to her temple, when he jokingly pulled the trigger, ready to say “bang” in verbal mime, the noise was suddenly real and there was real, red blood, and she really collapsed to the ground in a slow motion you never see in the movies.
We were all there to see it, and for a long time it was a very traumatic memory.
“What are you talking about,” Sol said quietly.
“You had the party, you knew he was playing with guns.”
Our accuser was my father’s age, and a friend of his. She had silver-blond hair and a pleasantly trim figure; her skin was smooth and unwrinkled and her smile and the warm humor that accompanied it gave her the appearance of youth. But on this day she did not smile and wasn’t warm, and suddenly and permanently to me she was as old and cold as a cackling, bony-nosed witch. For the first time I noticed the wart on her neck, and it would stand out every time after that. I noticed the way her dishwater gray hair was never combed. Her humor, I began to realize, was full of secret sarcasm and based largely on hate.
It was two days after my friend Adam accidentally killed my friend Roxanne. Adam was messing around with a shotgun at a party. He had forgotten to check the chamber, and when he playfully grabbed Roxanne and put the gun to her temple, when he jokingly pulled the trigger, ready to say “bang” in verbal mime, the noise was suddenly real and there was real, red blood, and she really collapsed to the ground in a slow motion you never see in the movies.
We were all there to see it, and for a long time it was a very traumatic memory.
Sunday, July 31
One Summer : A True Story
Sol didn’t cry, all through the night, but he was very quiet. And the next day, Sunday, when his friends got together and talked about it, he still didn’t say much, even when they found out that Roxanne was actually dead.
Everyone reacted differently. Brandon wanted most to get the details straight. Chad felt bad for Adam: “I wonder what’s going to happen to him,” he said. Lenny cried, a whole lot, and he wasn’t ashamed. And Al was a complete contrast: it was spooky how he just stared blankly into space and at the ground with a cold face. But they were all quiet to some degree.
There wasn’t much else to say. One of their friends was dead, shot in the head by another friend, Adam. Except for Sol, they had all witnessed it. An ambulance rushed her to the hospital, but she took six hours to die, and the fact that she was dead was the news the morning brought.
Around noon they all decided to go out to Adam’s house to see how he was doing. They took Chad’s car. Chad put the key in the ignition and suddenly Black Sabbath blared where it had left off; he reached forward and ejected the tape. “Not today,” he said quietly, smiling. He started the car and they drove back to the scene of their party the night before.
Sol had left early, before the third keg was cracked, but he had known the basic details of the shooting almost as soon as it had happened. He hadn’t been home fifteen minutes when his father, the town pastor, got a midnight call, and when he came home he told Sol, who had stayed up waiting, what had happened. For the benefit of Sol, before they went up the steps to Adam’s doorway they all stopped together and pointed to the place on the front lawn where Roxanne’s head had fallen. The blood was dried to the color of dirt on the grass. A couple of rains, maybe even the dew, would make it go away.
Inside, Adam sat on the couch in his living room, his eyes red from crying. Two of his cousins were there with him. One of them got up to answer the door, and he immediately ushered everyone into the kitchen and offered them beer. He said the police had come and gone and would be back later; apparently they had been convinced that Adam wasn’t going to go anywhere.
They all went into the next room and sat with Adam. They each made a few lame attempts at encouragement, then Chad got up and turned on the television. A football game was on, and they watched it for a while without talking. When it was halftime, Chad got up again and turned the television off.
“I guess we should go,” he said, but they didn’t stand up right away.
“Thanks for coming out here, guys,” Adam said finally, and they each went over to him and one at a time put a hand on his shoulder.
“We’ll stick with you on this,” they all said, and Sol said it too, but at the same time it hurt for each of them to say this, because they knew that their next stop was to go visit Roxanne’s boyfriend, Bobby, who had been out of town the night before.
The same odd silence was at Bobby’s house, even though Bobby’s position was hardly the same as Adam’s. He offered them all sodas and they watched the rest of the football game, and they all got up to leave after that, saying few words.
Sol still didn’t cry, not yet, but he decided he would go back later, alone, to the spot that Roxanne had fallen.
Everyone reacted differently. Brandon wanted most to get the details straight. Chad felt bad for Adam: “I wonder what’s going to happen to him,” he said. Lenny cried, a whole lot, and he wasn’t ashamed. And Al was a complete contrast: it was spooky how he just stared blankly into space and at the ground with a cold face. But they were all quiet to some degree.
There wasn’t much else to say. One of their friends was dead, shot in the head by another friend, Adam. Except for Sol, they had all witnessed it. An ambulance rushed her to the hospital, but she took six hours to die, and the fact that she was dead was the news the morning brought.
Around noon they all decided to go out to Adam’s house to see how he was doing. They took Chad’s car. Chad put the key in the ignition and suddenly Black Sabbath blared where it had left off; he reached forward and ejected the tape. “Not today,” he said quietly, smiling. He started the car and they drove back to the scene of their party the night before.
Sol had left early, before the third keg was cracked, but he had known the basic details of the shooting almost as soon as it had happened. He hadn’t been home fifteen minutes when his father, the town pastor, got a midnight call, and when he came home he told Sol, who had stayed up waiting, what had happened. For the benefit of Sol, before they went up the steps to Adam’s doorway they all stopped together and pointed to the place on the front lawn where Roxanne’s head had fallen. The blood was dried to the color of dirt on the grass. A couple of rains, maybe even the dew, would make it go away.
Inside, Adam sat on the couch in his living room, his eyes red from crying. Two of his cousins were there with him. One of them got up to answer the door, and he immediately ushered everyone into the kitchen and offered them beer. He said the police had come and gone and would be back later; apparently they had been convinced that Adam wasn’t going to go anywhere.
They all went into the next room and sat with Adam. They each made a few lame attempts at encouragement, then Chad got up and turned on the television. A football game was on, and they watched it for a while without talking. When it was halftime, Chad got up again and turned the television off.
“I guess we should go,” he said, but they didn’t stand up right away.
“Thanks for coming out here, guys,” Adam said finally, and they each went over to him and one at a time put a hand on his shoulder.
“We’ll stick with you on this,” they all said, and Sol said it too, but at the same time it hurt for each of them to say this, because they knew that their next stop was to go visit Roxanne’s boyfriend, Bobby, who had been out of town the night before.
The same odd silence was at Bobby’s house, even though Bobby’s position was hardly the same as Adam’s. He offered them all sodas and they watched the rest of the football game, and they all got up to leave after that, saying few words.
Sol still didn’t cry, not yet, but he decided he would go back later, alone, to the spot that Roxanne had fallen.
Saturday, July 30
Review, Sweet Charity
You will remember this...
I watched a play, Sweet Charity, so full of social choreography and the edges of emotion, so typical a musical with everything on display, pleasantly raw, that I forgot for two hours, even more, that I was there alone. Intermission reminded me, temporarily, while the house filtered into the lobby and the actors were left stuck in an elevator in the dark, but fifteen minutes later I sat down and got right back into the play, naively sweet yet cloyingly real how he was afraid to kiss her and she was avoiding the backstory. And I admit, I was even close to tears, close to feeling my feet in their shoes, until the ending, oh. An artless set of lies, an unrelented pause in the music, and awkward, beatless moves from stage left to stage right, until... an hour later I'm alone, and painfully aware.
I watched a play, Sweet Charity, so full of social choreography and the edges of emotion, so typical a musical with everything on display, pleasantly raw, that I forgot for two hours, even more, that I was there alone. Intermission reminded me, temporarily, while the house filtered into the lobby and the actors were left stuck in an elevator in the dark, but fifteen minutes later I sat down and got right back into the play, naively sweet yet cloyingly real how he was afraid to kiss her and she was avoiding the backstory. And I admit, I was even close to tears, close to feeling my feet in their shoes, until the ending, oh. An artless set of lies, an unrelented pause in the music, and awkward, beatless moves from stage left to stage right, until... an hour later I'm alone, and painfully aware.
Friday, July 29
TWL, Lines 249-265: Olivia's Song
249 She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
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.”
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.”
Thursday, July 28
Moleskin 4.2: To The Eavesdroppers
It is probably best that I do not divulge which one of you I am thinking of now. Eventually, privately perhaps, I will tell you, but first let me quickly assure you all who it is not. I am not speaking to anyone left behind in my past: not my ex-wife, not my forgotten friends, not my departed father. This is also not particularly addressed to those who most inspire me, though each of you deserve more appreciation (which will follow). Nor is this to one of my children, though both of you should know you are worth my undivided attention and will always have the whole of my love. Finally, this is not just a note to myself, no more than it is a vain pitch to everyone in the room. Each of you are invited to listen to my story and I am happy to have you all here, but I am speaking less to the rest of you, more to the other.
Wednesday, July 27
Filling In Blanks: Matins
John wrote: your random choice
for a moment of devotion, my sound request
in the midst of anger, sudden vespers
to escape the disorderly storm... and now
the soundless stream of consciousness
that flows into matins the morning after,
Where it is silent if not peaceful. I write
as you quietly sleep. I read:
the Word, capital W. I underline:
it is the Word of Life, capital L, made visible.
And I think of what I have learned,
what I would share, what I should write, small w,
that this journey may be complete.
I write, little ones, to you,
that your storms will be forgiven
because you would believe
in the creator and the forgiver.
I write, son and daughter,
that you will always be full of life
because your spirits within
have existed since the beginning.
I write to you, children,
that you never fear the path before you,
that you would walk beyond the darkness
and come to know the light.
I write to each of you now
that you always seek to be strong,
continually asking questions
and challenging the tangents,
but that you discover the Word
that has always been there,
follow the One who first forgave
and hear those morning words,
“Let there be Light.”
Beautiful spark, beautiful premise,
my children, children of God.
There will be anger and insolence
and there will be times of silence too,
but you, each of you, are beautiful
the way you complete my Joy
and help me fill in the blanks.
for a moment of devotion, my sound request
in the midst of anger, sudden vespers
to escape the disorderly storm... and now
the soundless stream of consciousness
that flows into matins the morning after,
Where it is silent if not peaceful. I write
as you quietly sleep. I read:
the Word, capital W. I underline:
it is the Word of Life, capital L, made visible.
And I think of what I have learned,
what I would share, what I should write, small w,
that this journey may be complete.
I write, little ones, to you,
that your storms will be forgiven
because you would believe
in the creator and the forgiver.
I write, son and daughter,
that you will always be full of life
because your spirits within
have existed since the beginning.
I write to you, children,
that you never fear the path before you,
that you would walk beyond the darkness
and come to know the light.
I write to each of you now
that you always seek to be strong,
continually asking questions
and challenging the tangents,
but that you discover the Word
that has always been there,
follow the One who first forgave
and hear those morning words,
“Let there be Light.”
Beautiful spark, beautiful premise,
my children, children of God.
There will be anger and insolence
and there will be times of silence too,
but you, each of you, are beautiful
the way you complete my Joy
and help me fill in the blanks.
Tuesday, July 26
To Those Who Never Get To Verse 3...
To say that God knows those who don’t know God
Should not offend those who do not believe
In the existence or the mind of God,
But they might be insulted who do not
Find comfort in whatever they believe,
Those for whatever reason knowing God
As one who doesn’t care or won’t receive
Their prayers, the hopeless souls who think that God
Is never there, and anyone who’s thought
That God hates those who struggle to believe
That God is love...
But this I do believe,
That God will walk with those who don’t know God
And weep with those who say he wasn’t there
And listen to an unbeliever’s prayer.
Should not offend those who do not believe
In the existence or the mind of God,
But they might be insulted who do not
Find comfort in whatever they believe,
Those for whatever reason knowing God
As one who doesn’t care or won’t receive
Their prayers, the hopeless souls who think that God
Is never there, and anyone who’s thought
That God hates those who struggle to believe
That God is love...
But this I do believe,
That God will walk with those who don’t know God
And weep with those who say he wasn’t there
And listen to an unbeliever’s prayer.
Monday, July 25
Filling In Blanks: Vespers
Theistic evolution,
that god plus evolution equals now
is your answer, and all that remains
is deciding who God is. Yes,
and who are you and what is now
and where are we going from here?
I believe — do you want to know what I believe?
Not really, you say. Clever little
conversation stopper, and yet
you have learned that you can
tell everyone what you believe,
believe it and impose it and
leave it at that, never leading
with a question.
But I believe you are right.
(Now do you want to know?)
Blank plus evolution is, you say,
and we fill in the blank with
Buddha, Christ, Mohammed.
Or godlessness, emptiness, chance.
You get to choose what leads you to now:
the blank is true, and beyond this
we may never know the empirical
but we will rest in our faith.
But I believe — a statement, not a question,
that Genesis is true, setting us free,
that God is the beginning and the end,
the Big Bang and the final Word,
the constant Grace and the now,
Immanuel. This is what I believe.
And you can call me, as you suggest,
a theistic evolutionist with a neat little formula,
and you can rest in this, but now,
let me show you more of how
that blank can be filled with the poetry
of John and the songs of David,
the trial of Job and the angst of Qoheleth,
the emotions of the prophets.
Read the Gospels and Acts
and the letters to the early churches.
Read Revelation, and argue with it all,
question back if you must, but register
the incompetent hyper-human
history of that corner of the world,
the bumbling children of God,
trying to get to now, trying to understand.
that god plus evolution equals now
is your answer, and all that remains
is deciding who God is. Yes,
and who are you and what is now
and where are we going from here?
I believe — do you want to know what I believe?
Not really, you say. Clever little
conversation stopper, and yet
you have learned that you can
tell everyone what you believe,
believe it and impose it and
leave it at that, never leading
with a question.
But I believe you are right.
(Now do you want to know?)
Blank plus evolution is, you say,
and we fill in the blank with
Buddha, Christ, Mohammed.
Or godlessness, emptiness, chance.
You get to choose what leads you to now:
the blank is true, and beyond this
we may never know the empirical
but we will rest in our faith.
But I believe — a statement, not a question,
that Genesis is true, setting us free,
that God is the beginning and the end,
the Big Bang and the final Word,
the constant Grace and the now,
Immanuel. This is what I believe.
And you can call me, as you suggest,
a theistic evolutionist with a neat little formula,
and you can rest in this, but now,
let me show you more of how
that blank can be filled with the poetry
of John and the songs of David,
the trial of Job and the angst of Qoheleth,
the emotions of the prophets.
Read the Gospels and Acts
and the letters to the early churches.
Read Revelation, and argue with it all,
question back if you must, but register
the incompetent hyper-human
history of that corner of the world,
the bumbling children of God,
trying to get to now, trying to understand.
Sunday, July 24
A Conversation
The people hold themselves as unaccountable:
Their inner souls are theirs (and theirs) alone
To be revealed but never to be known.
They build their walls and shields of insurmountable
Disclosure, every bit (of it) discountable
With very (very) little substance shown
Beyond the names and faces they would own,
Convenient tags and masks of empty countenance.
It’s funny how you never (really) see
Someone until the day she isn’t looking,
Never hear her (un)til she’s finished talking,
Never know her (un)til she goes away
(And how, when asked to give her eulogy,
You find she’s left you something good to say).
You people claim to have your own identity
And you pretend to bare (and share) your soul
With every handshake touch and every cold
Embrace, as if you gripped me with intensity,
But who (the hell) are you with this propensity
To speak in (cryptic) poetry, to hold
Me with a stranger’s words, to seek control
Beyond a time that’s silent, dark and meant to be?
Yet as I stare you (deeply) in the eye
I will admit to liking how you look at me
But never (truly) see me, how you talk to me
But never (really) have too much to say
(And even as I offer a reply
You didn’t seek, you get it anyway).
Their inner souls are theirs (and theirs) alone
To be revealed but never to be known.
They build their walls and shields of insurmountable
Disclosure, every bit (of it) discountable
With very (very) little substance shown
Beyond the names and faces they would own,
Convenient tags and masks of empty countenance.
It’s funny how you never (really) see
Someone until the day she isn’t looking,
Never hear her (un)til she’s finished talking,
Never know her (un)til she goes away
(And how, when asked to give her eulogy,
You find she’s left you something good to say).
You people claim to have your own identity
And you pretend to bare (and share) your soul
With every handshake touch and every cold
Embrace, as if you gripped me with intensity,
But who (the hell) are you with this propensity
To speak in (cryptic) poetry, to hold
Me with a stranger’s words, to seek control
Beyond a time that’s silent, dark and meant to be?
Yet as I stare you (deeply) in the eye
I will admit to liking how you look at me
But never (truly) see me, how you talk to me
But never (really) have too much to say
(And even as I offer a reply
You didn’t seek, you get it anyway).
Saturday, July 23
A Matter of Perspective
Dostoevsky Final (Russian 141, 11/30/90, Prof. Rubchak)
In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan “Grand Inquisitor” poem and Father Zossima’s last words are polar opposites, yet they share similar themes. Separately, they discuss the concepts of freedom and happiness and the values of miracle, mystery, and authority. The two speakers even begin to agree on some points, although their differences on these issues are numerous, to say the least. But the main distinction that separates Ivan’s Inquisitor and Father Zossima more than points on any of the individual concepts is the difference of the speakers’ perspectives.
The Inquisitor lectures pedantically as from a podium, but only one person is meant to hear him; Father Zossima bears witness to only a few people around his deathbed, but it is a testimony for the world. As the Inquisitor speaks, he sees the universe with the conditions of “them” and “us”; Father Zossima does not separate as such, but says, here is what I have seen, how it has been for me, and how it can be for you.
This difference in perspective is evident in all the individual issues. Freedom, the Inquisitor says, brings “unrest, confusion, and unhappiness” (301), and so “[we] have vanquished freedom... in order to make [them] happy” (294). “...They will submit themselves to us gladly and cheerfully” (304).
Father Zossima, too, sees negative aspects in the world’s idea of freedom: it brings “slavery and self destruction... separation and isolation” (369). His response, however, is not to perpetuate the us/them separation and enslavement, but to acknowledge the alternative, truer freedom of a Christian. Zossima does not quote the apostle Paul, but the allusion is implied: “For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all” (1 Cor. 9:19). There is no us and them in Zossima’s kind of servitude, because it is universal.
Meanwhile, the Inquisitor is concerned with conquering people and holding them captive for the sake of their happiness. “We shall reach onr goal and be Caesars... [for] the universal happiness of man,” he says (302). “We shall give them quiet, humble happiness, the happiness of weak creatures” (303).
Father Zossima also talks about happiness in terms of humility and the universe, but again he does so with a different perspective. He speaks of being “consumed by a universal love, as though in a sort of ecstacy” (376). He also addresses global conquest: “...by humble love... you may be able to conquer the world” (376). Thus, he reverses the role of the happily humble, making them captors, not captives, with the force of love.
The Inquisitor’s forces are threefold: “miracle, mystery and authority” (299), the three things denied us when Christ resisted the devil’s temptations and established our dreaded freedom. But the church resumes control of these forces, providing the bread of satisfaction, possessing people’s consciences, and wielding dominion to make the world “happy;” thus, man knows “whom to worship, to whom to entrust his conscience and how... to unite all” (302).
For Father Zossima, love remains “the strongest [force] of all” (376), although he too values the forces of miracle, mystery, authority; unlike the Inquisitor, though, he appreciates this triune on the same plane as the recipients, and furthermore, he sees their combined force as inclusive of God’s plans. In fact, he finds miracle, mystery, and authority not only in God’s world and in God’s people, but also in the Word of God itself: “What a miracle and what strength is given with [the Holy Bible] to man!... And how many solved and revealed mysteries!” (343). And he sees this power in “sorrow... [passing] gradually into quiet, tender joy” (343); in “Divine Justice, tender reconciling and all forgiving,” and in the central promise of a future life.
It is all a matter of perspective.
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