Being Alive...

Every Thought...

Week 25: The End Of Spring

Eliot’s Waste Land is stirred by the beginning of spring, when roots start to move the sleeping ground: in this time of newness, we become awake and alive, but also, by the end of spring, aware of the loss of innocence.


06/17:

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

139   When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said —
140   I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,
141   Hurry up please its time
142   Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
143   He'll want to know what you done with that money he
              gave you
144   To get herself some teeth.  He did, I was there.
145   You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
146   He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you.
147   And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
148   He's been in the army for four years, he wants a good time,
149   And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.
150   Oh is there, she said.  Something o' that, I said.
151   Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a
              straight look.
152   Hurry up please its time
153   If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said.
154   Others can pick and choose if you can't.
155   But if Albert makes off, it won't be for a lack of telling.
156   You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
157   (And her only thirty-one.)
158   I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,
159   It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
160   (She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
161   The chemist said it would be all right, but I've never been
              the same.
162   You are a proper fool, I said.
163   Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,
164   What you get married for if you don't want children?
165   Hurry up please its time
166   Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot
              gammon,
167   And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it
            hot—
168   Hurry up please its time
169   Hurry up please its time
170   Goonight Bill.  Goonight Lou.  Goonight May.  Goonight.
171   Ta ta.  Goonight.  Goonight.
172   Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night,
              good night.

139. THE MAID’S STORY: See Eliot, F&T: This story was said to be related to the Eliots by their maid at the end of the war. To be demobbed, or demobilized, is to be discharged from military service.

141. TIME’S WINGED CHARIOT: “Hurry up please its time” reflects a common last call in English pubs.  See also the witches before their boiling cauldron in Shakespeare, Macbeth 4.1.3:

“Harpier, cries:—‘’Tis time, ‘tis time.”

The cauldron over the fire is later alluded to at lines 307 and 308.  The present “time” line repeats at lines 141, 152, 165, 168 and 169; this also follows the five counterpart repetitions of a less frantic mantra in Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

“There will be time.”

Compare the bartender’s reminders, and the concurrent advice being given to Lil, to the urgent “carpe diem” call of Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress (1681):

“Had we but world enough and time”

The mistress’s lover begins to wish they had time but quickly concludes that they don’t. See Eliot, Andrew Marvel (Times Literary Supplement, 03/31/1921), finding in Marvel’s Coy Mistress:

“an alliance of wit and seriousness (by which the seriousness is intensified).”

Coy Mistress allusions also appear at lines 185, 196 and 235. See especially note 197, for a modern variation to these lines:

“But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near.”

For some counterpace to Coy, compare the similar pub setting of line 260 and the poet’s unexpected appreciation for the music sometimes heard “beside a public bar.”

THE SEASONAL CYCLE: In response to the mistress’s master, and to the bartender, the wicked sisters of Macbeth, Lil’s advisor and Mr. Prufrock, see Ecclesiastes 3:1-8:

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”

The seasonal cycle of Ecclesiastes is central to many of Eliot’s allusions.  See note 0.2 for the many references to renewal and  note 0.3 for the consideration of ephemerality.  For more specific references to the seasons, see notes 1 (Chaucer’s spring), 71 (the season of sowing and sprouting) 185 (the rattling bones of winter), 219 (the dry season of Gerontion), 253 (an unseasonal warmth) 276 (the strictures of the lenten season) and 311.5 (the seasonal wheel).

145. LILITH may be her full name. See Jesus ben Sira, Alphabeta (ca.AD 700-900; tr. M. Stein-Schneider, 1858):

“When the Almighty - may His name be praised - created the first, solitary man, He said: It is not good for man to be alone. And he fashioned for man a woman from the earth, like him, and called her Lilith. Soon, they began to quarrel with each other.  She said to him: I will not lie underneath, and he said: I will not lie underneath but above, for you are meant to lie underneath and I to lie above. She said to him: We are both equal, because we are both created from the earth. But they didn’t listen to each other. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced God’s avowed name and flew into the air. ...Immediately, the Almighty - may his name be praised - said to him: If she decides to return, it is good, but if not, then she must take it upon herself to ensure that a hundred of her children die each day.”

For a biblical reference to Lilith in the wilderness, see Isaiah 34:9-14 (Darby, 1890):

“And the torrents thereof shall be turned into pitch, and its dust into brimstone; yea, the land thereof shall become burning pitch: it shall not be quenched night nor day; the smoke thereof shall go up for ever: from generation to generation it shall lie waste; ...And he shall stretch out upon it the line of waste, and the plummets of emptiness.  ...And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in her fortresses; and it shall be a dwelling-place of wild dogs, a court for ostriches. And there shall the beasts of the desert meet with the jackals, and the wild goat shall cry to his fellow; the lilith also shall settle there, and find for herself a place of rest.”

Many other common translations interpret “lilith” more generically; the King James Version (1611) describes the lilith as a screech owl.

152. TIME: See note 141.

161. LIL’S ABORTION: To bring it off (line 159) is to have an abortion. The chemist is a pharmacist.

165. TIME: See note 141.

167. ANTISEMITISM, one of Eliot’s more notorious flaws, rears its ugly head rears here, as the Lil story first alludes to the outspoken Lilith from Jewish folk literature then concludes with a vulgar pork meal. Gammon is smoked ham; as used here, it also suggests a slang term for sexual intercourse.

The absence in this poem of any further antisemitic recurrence is thanks in part to Ezra Pound’s editing.  A preliminary draft had contained a reference to a Jewish slur from one of Eliot’s earlier poems, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar (1920), in which Eliot had written:

“The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs.”

Eliot had inserted Bleistein into The Waste Land with yet another reference to Ariel’s song (see note 26):

“Full fathom five your Bleistein lies
Under the flatfish and the squids,”

but Pound prevailed in having these lines deleted.

Pound also succeeded in having Eliot remove the whole of the poem Gerontion (1920), which included a reference to a stereotypically Jewish landlord:

“My house is a decayed house,
And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.”

Eliot’s anti-semitism has relatively limited exposure within his poems, with these Bleistein and Gerontion infractions being the primary instances, but for more prominent examples see his social commentary in After Strange Gods (1934), The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes toward a Definition of Culture (1948), in which, collectively, he spoke out against a more pluralistic, secular society.  Most directly, in After Strange Gods, he commented that a society with “too many free-thinking Jews” was undesirable.  However, Eliot refused to have this essay republished beyond its limited first printing and conceded that it reflected a “disturbed” state of mind.  See Michiko Kakutani, Critic's Notebook; Examining T. S. Eliot And Anti-Semitism: How Bad Was It? (New York Times, August 22, 1989).  For a more unforgiving look, see Anthony Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (1996).

170. GOONIGHT: A colloquial slurred version of goodbye from the regulars.

171. TA TA: A uniquely British, generally working-class  goodbye, closing out this section and beginning to introduce the next.  See note 172.5 for the recurrence of song syllables, especially in Part III.

172. OPHELIA’S FAREWELL, if not quite her final words, are alluded to here.  See Shakespeare, Hamlet 4.5.70-73:

“And so I thank you for your good counsel. Come, my coach! Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.”

And thus ends the air section. Ophelia has a few more lines in the play, but already she has lost her mind and the air about her is dying. Her words, mourning her father’s death at the hands of Hamlet, become fragmentary and nonsensical as she wanders off, and soon it will be reported that she had fallen into shallow waters and drowned. See the Queen’s report in Shakespeare, Hamlet 4.7.164-181:

“There is a willow grows askant the brook
That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream.
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.
There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up.
...But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.”

For additional looks at the collection of flowers, see notes 74 and 214.

Ophelia’s death by water is further alluded to by lines 173-174 (“The river's tent is broken; the 
last fingers of leaf / Clutch and sink into the wet bank”). See also note 42 for a list of the other 
watery deaths in this poem.



  06/18:

gray

if you could read my mind it would be gray
i mean to say
  the color of a stone
without distinction neither right no wrong
without apology no will no wont
be coming home tonight
how was your day
you said i said its funny but i dont
remember much about the black or white
of it the colors turn to monotone
and the lines begin to fade
away
i find myself with nothing more to say
and nowhere else to go the day
  is done
and i am going home to you tonight
instead of going off somewhere alone
to lose myself in my private shades
of gray


06:19:

Chasing Wind

The walls shake with anger.
The wind wakes the dead, stirs
the sleeping, makes it difficult to dream.
The world’s moment blows against
This house: letting be known
What is so frequently forgotten:
We stand at the whim of nature
And we breathe as the wind allows.


06/20:

Parulogy

Rows, half empty, of wishers well followed me with emotional eyes
and held their breath, all as one, waiting for a verdict, wanting to know.

I took my position, for a moment missing the security of invisibility,
where once I had been sitting, then for the next brief believing

I needed, though there was none, a podium to hide behind.  But one
continues, as I suppose one must, and in this frame I cleared my throat

and started, cued by the piano of my heart and an andante pace of mind,
to sing:

She never knew how to whisper...

And hearing myself now, too, neither did I.

Without giving herself away,
or how to make people listen
when she had something to say
She never kept any mysteries
that might have made me stay
and draw close to her.
We grew apart until I barely knew her.

I want so much to whisper this, to make them strain to understand
and hear beyond pity.  Listen.  Pause...  (listen)...

She never left an impression
in a confidential tone
or tendered any emotions
that were meant for one alone.
We never had conversations
where she let me be the only
one to hear her,
but here I was, the person standing near her.

As I was today, though all these stony faces would contest.
No I do not whisper, and though your eyes mutter back

with hard cast sentiment, a numbness prevails in mine,
from all those stand-by years...

I used to love the way she wore
her passions on her sleeve
and how she spoke her mind
and bared her soul,
but lately I’ve been missing
what was never there to see
and waiting for her secrets to be told.

Look at me, and how I’ve held myself thus far, pretending my tears
and shedding my pain.  But look at her, lying there: this is about her, not me.

She never knew how to whisper...

...and I stop now, for a maybe moment, as at the beginning,
longing again for the security of cover.  I want so much

to scream elaboration, a poem to remember if not words
to understand.  But in the end, and so on, I’d just like them to listen.

I never thought I would miss her
unreserved verbosity
or how she held her position
with such acrimony.  She
was never able to whisper
but she freely showed her feelings
if you let her.
But I let her leave, and still I can’t forget her.


06/21:

End Of Spring

The end of spring’s beginning never fails
to bode a mournful middle, even as
the grass seems greener than it ever has
been, flowers are in fullest bloom and sails
are carrying the winds of summer across
the bay: it always takes me by surprise
to finish rubbing winter from my eyes
and rudely find the unexpected loss
of innocence that comes and goes too soon.

My spring has sprung and all the birds have flown
away.  My spring has sprung and all that was
awakening begins to settle down,
and even as the warmer dawns of June
exhilarate, I hesitate, because,
as morning dews of May dry with the sun,
my innocence, by the toll of noon, is gone.

Now middle age begins, yet I feel young
and ready as I ever will be to
leave spring behind and shake away the dew
that never satisfied me.  Spring, if sprung,
be damned: the summer’s beckoning me now
and I’ve got vernal promises to break
and miles to go before I let sleep take
me; that will be a cold night anyhow
when the ghosts of innocence steal me away.

My spring has sprung; all memories of birth-
days celebrated have blown out their fires.
June’s been stuck on the wall for months and months,
mocking the paper trails of time and youth.
I’m never home; it’s not home anymore;
I’ve gone away for summer, for all it’s worth,
forgetting spring, refraining innocence.


06/22:

Passing Storm

Great storms
are not the final storms
no more than sweet calms
are the ever after;
any more my faith turns
toward eternity,
trying so hard to see
around the bend.

Earth, sun, river and wind...
I’m looking for the quintessential
Truth, something woven in
To every calm and storm.

This time
won’t be the only time,
neither the first rhyme
nor the closing chapter,
more and more I move to
the perpetuity
of things that never change
and never end.

Rock, fire, spirit and flow...
The more I move the less I know, but
Truth, where I want to go,
Is with me all the time.

I AM
as certain as the journey journeys on,
each setting sun returns to where it rose,
each river flows into a timeless sea
and endlessly the wind replenishes.

I AM
as certain as the ground I stand upon
a fire within me burns eternally
and living water pulses through my veins
and hope, the spirit in my soul, remains.

This storm
may be a passing storm,
but let the rains come
and let me feel the thunder
and let its music be
part of the symphony
of where I’m going to
and where I’ve been.

Earth, sun, river and wind...
Rock, fire, spirit and flow...
I’m looking for the quintessential
Truth: it's where I want to go.


06/23:

Moleskin 3.7: Being Alive

How nice it might have been to keep the curtains drawn, to deliver the papers without having to read them; how sweet, to never have to move beyond the banks of a gentle stream —still a powerful stream, bigger than a child’s wild imagination, yet gentle all the same; how great it would be, to stay this age forever! For all that was spinning around me —my parents’ barely mentioned divorce and downplayed poverty, the reality of suddenly having to make new friends and forge new adventures, not to mention that big world starting to show from behind the curtain —it was a perfect time, being a sixth grader, being the oldest of three, being duly employed in the big city, being able to play Huck Finn with friends, being a traveler through seventeen states, being a Cubs fan, a Scrabble player, a preacher’s kid, the son of an English teacher —in a word, being alive— and yes, just beginning to be one who liked to read the papers.