A. The Waste Land: Annotated
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The Waste Land 1
by T.S. Eliot (1922) 2
‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla
pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σἰβυλλα τἱ θἐλεις ; respondebat
illa: ἀποθανεἱν θἑλωa.’ 3
For Ezra Pound
il miglior fabbro. 4
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1 Regular font footnotes are T.S. Eliot’s own endnotes. Bold-faced notes expand on Eliot’s notes with direct translations and sources. Italicized notes provide further elaboration and comment. The headnotes are my own choice of focus for each section.
2 Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan) (1920). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890); I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies. Weston’s The Quest of the Holy Grail (1913) provides this introductory summary: “In Arthurian legend, a Fisher King (the fish being an ancient symbol of life) has been maimed or killed, and his country has therefore become a dry Waste Land; he can only be regenerated and his land restored to fertility by a knight (Parsifal) who perseveres through various ordeals to the Perilous Chapel and learns the answers to certain ritual questions about the Grail.” Weston concludes in From Ritual to Romance, Chapter 2, that “the woes of the land are directly dependent upon the sickness, or maiming, of the King, and in no wise caused by the failure of the Quester.”
3 Petronius, Satyricon, ch. 48 (ca. AD 60): “(Trimalchio:) ‘...And then, there's the Sibyl: with my own eyes I saw her, at Cumae, hanging up in a basket; and whenever the boys would say to her “Sibyl, Sibyl, what do you want?” she would answer, “I want to die.”’ Sibyl had been granted eternal life by Apollo but shrivelled up when she failed to ask for eternal youth.
4 Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy: Purgatorio 26.117 (ca. 1321): “The better craftsman.” Dante’s tribute to 12th century Provencal poet Arnaut Daniel.
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B. Chaucer: A spring pilgrimage
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I. The Burial of the Dead 5
April is the cruellest month, breeding 6
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing 7
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering ---------------------------5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding 8
A little life with dried tubers. 9
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5 The Church of England, The Book of Common Prayer (1662), The Order for the Burial of the Dead. The order of service begins with a passage from John 11: 25-26: “...whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.” The five principal characters in this section (Countess Marie, God of the Prophets, the Hyacinth Prince, the Clairvoyante and the Reader’s Brother) each are eager to speak and be heard, but death lingers around them.
6 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, 1-5 (ca. 1372): Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, / And bathed every veyne in swich licóur / Of which vertú engendred is the flour; / ...Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages. (When April’s gentle showers have pierced the drought / of March right to the root and bathed each sprout / Through every vein with liquid of such power it brings forth the engendering of the flower ...On pilgrimage then folks desire to start.)” Chaucer is known as the Father of English Literature, much as Eliot would become known by this poem as the progenitor of modern poetry. More to the point, Chaucer, in Canterbury Tales, and Eliot, in this poem, each are commencing on a pilgrimage with tales to tell along the way, but where Chaucer begins with gentle, sweet rains and the first flowers of spring, Eliot views the end of a mindless winter as cruel and the season ahead as dry and barren; and where Chaucer’s stories are told to pass the time, Eliot’s are painful voices from the past. And yet the modern pilgrim proceeds, like the medieval seekers of the Holy Grail before him, on a crucial quest for life and healing.
7 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Memories of President Lincoln (1892): “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, / And the great star early droop’d in the Western sky in the night, I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”
8 This is commonly called the poem’s “earth” section, the first of four sections using the classical elements of earth, air, fire and water as themes; Eliot would later repeat this structure in Four Quartets (1943). See further explanation of the classical elements at note 130.
9 James Thompson, The City of Dreadful Night (1861): “Our Mother feedeth thus our little life That we in turn may feed her with our death...”
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C. Melancholy Marie: When we were children
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Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee 10
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 11 ---------------------------10
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. 12
And when we were children, 13 staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie, ---------------------------15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free. 14
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. 15
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10 Starnbergersee is a lake southwest of Munich and the site of the 1886 death of Bavarian King Ludwig II, also known as the Mad King or the Swan King. He was found dead in shallow waters in 1886; compare this to the death of Ophelia (see note 74). Ludwig was a dedicated patron of Richard Wagner, whose operas will be referenced several times in this poem.
11 Hofgarten is a Munich park.
12 “I am not Russian, I come from Lithuania, I am really a German.” This statement, an intertwining knot of dried up roots, appears to be an overheard fragment; the speaker is not identified, and in context it seems to be someone other than the poet or his companion, Austrian Countess Marie Larisch, to whom we are just being introduced. See note 15. Also compare William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I. ii., 85-86 (1611): “ADRIAN: [to Gonzalo] ‘Widow Dido’ said you? You make me study of that: she was of Carthage, not of Tunis.” Dido and Carthage will reappear later: see lines 70, 92 and 307.
13 Ecclesiastes 12:1, 5 (NIV) (here and at lines 22-23): “(The Teacher:) ‘...Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, “I find no pleasure in them. ...when men are afraid of heights and of dangers in the streets; when the almond tree blossoms and the grasshopper drags himself along and desire no longer is stirred. Then man goes to his eternal home and mourners go about the streets.’”
14 See also the reference to Himavant, literally a snowy mountain, in Section V, line 398.
15 Marie Larisch, My Past (1913); and private conversations Eliot had with her in Bavaria. In 1889, Austrian Countess Marie was socially cast out after her cousin Crown-Prince Rudolph (the archduke) and his mistress, for whom Marie had acted as a go-between, died in a suicide-murder scandal. Rudolph was eventually succeeded as crown-prince by Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose 1914 assassination triggered World War I, a chief (but not only) cause of the Waste Land that was troubling Eliot as he wrote this poem. Meanwhile, another Prince Ferdinand, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, will be given repeated attention, beginning with the next passage. See note 19.
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D. God of the Prophets: A separate shadow
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What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, 16 ---------------------------20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, 17
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock, 18 ---------------------------25
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock), 19
And I will show you something different from either 20
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; 21
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. 22 ---------------------------30
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16 Cf. Ezekiel 2:1. (NIV): “[The LORD] said to me, ‘Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you.’” See also Ezekiel 37:3: “Son of man, can these bones live?” The extended “valley of the bones” passage is at note 79.
17 Cf. Ecclesiastes 12:5. See note 13.
18 Isaiah 32:1-2 (NIV): “See, a king will reign in righteousness and rulers will rule with justice. Each man will be like a shelter from the wind and a refuge from the storm, like streams of water in the desert and the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land.”
19 Shakespeare, The Tempest, I. ii., 537: “ARIEL: ‘Come unto these yellow sands...’” This is Eliot’s first reference to a passage he would frequently turn to, at lines 26, 38, 48, 125, 191, 257 and 393. For the extended passage, see note 33.
20 Jeremiah 33: 2-11 (excerpts; NIV): “This is what the LORD says, he who made the earth...: ‘Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know. ...You say about this place, “It is a desolate waste, without men or animals.” Yet in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem that are deserted, inhabited by neither men nor animals, there will be heard once more the sounds of joy and gladness... For I will restore the fortunes of the land as they were before.’”
21 T.S. Eliot, The Death of Narcissus (1915): “Come in under the shadow of this gray rock, / And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow sprawling over the sand at daybreak, or / Your shadow leaping behind the fire against the red rock...”
22 John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: The Physician Is Sent For (1638): “What’s become of man’s great extent and proportion, when himself shrinks himself and consumes himself to a handful of dust; what’s become of his soaring thoughts, his compassing thoughts, when himself brings himself to the ignorance, to the thoughtlessness, of the grave?”
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E. The Hyacinth Prince: Remembering
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Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du? 23
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; ---------------------------35
“They called me the hyacinth girl.” 24
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, 25 I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, 26 and I knew nothing, 27 ---------------------------40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence. 28
Oed’ und leer das Meer. 29
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23 V. Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, i. 1, verses 5-8. (1865): “Freshly blows the wind to the homeland; my Irish darling, where are you waiting?” This sailor’s song is overheard by Irish Princess Isolde, en route to her loveless marriage to King Mark of Cornwall; Isolde wants to drink poison to escape her fate, but her maid substitutes the poison with a love potion. Upon realizing this, she asks Tristan, “Must I live?” See also Sir Thomas Mallory, Le Morte D-Arthur: The First and Second Books of Sir Tristams de Lione (1485).
24 Ovid, Metamorphosis, X. 162-219 (AD 8): The hyacinth, a perennial April/May wildflower, was named after a Spartan prince endeared by both Apollo, the sun god, and Zephyrus, the wind god. While playing quoits in the sun the prince was killed by a wind-blown quoit; Apollo raised a purple flower out of his blood, traced a mournful “ai, ai” on its petals and named it Hyacyinth.
25 See Eliot’s note (note 64) at Part 2, line 126, tying the hyacinth garden to the drowned sailor and the recurring allusion from The Tempest. See also note 74, relating this to Hamlet’s Ophelia.
26 Dante, Purgatorio 26. 117: “I was not dead nor living.” See also Bhagavat Gita 2:11: “The wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead.”
27 See Part 2, lines 121-123: “Do / You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember / Nothing?” See also note 77, citing the lament of Frankenstein’s monster.
28 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Ch. 1 (1902), introducing Kurtz, “the only man of us who still followed the sea.”
29 Wagner, Tristan und Isolde Id. iii, verse 24: “(Shepherd:) ‘Old and desolate is the sea.’” This is the shepherd’s report to a mortally wounded Tristan, who waits for Isolde’s ship to arrive.
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F. The Clairvoyante: A wicked pack of cards
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Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, 30
Had a bad cold, 31 nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, ---------------------------45
With a wicked pack of cards. 32 Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. 33 Look!)
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30 Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow (1921), Ch. 21: Sesostris is the Sorceress of Ecbatana, a duplicitous man dressed as a woman; the streetwise fraudulence of Sosostris will stand in contrast with the more mythical androgyny of Tiresius (see note 38).
31 John Webster, White Devil (1612): Flamineo’s dying words, in a play about moral corruption: “I have caught / An everlasting cold. I have lost my voice / Most irrevocably ...Strike, thunder, and strike loud, to my farewell!”
32 Weston (see note 2) saw symbols of the Grail legend in the four Tarot suits and in our modern deck: “Cup (Chalice, or Goblet)--Hearts. Lance (Wand, or Sceptre)--Diamonds. Sword--Spades. Dish (Circles, or Pentangles, the form varies)--Clubs.” Eliot, by his own acknowledgment, took a more arbitrary license with the Tarot cards: I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V (see note 39). The Phoenician Sailor (see notes 33 and 40) and the Merchant (see note 37) appear later; also the “crowds of people,” (see note 38) and Death by Water is executed in Part IV (see note 40). The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself (see notes 2 and 35).
33 Shakespeare, Tempest I. ii. 562: “ARIEL: ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes.” Compare Shakespeare’s lines 537-565 with Eliot’s references at lines 26, 38, 48, 125, 191, 257 and 393: “ARIEL: ‘Come unto these yellow sands, / And then take hands: / Courtsied when you have and kiss'd / The wild waves whist, / Foot it featly here and there; / And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear. / Hark, hark! / ...The watch-dogs bark! / ...Hark, hark! I hear / The strain of strutting chanticleer / Cry, Cock-a- diddle-dow.” FERDINAND: ‘Where should this music be? i' the air or the earth? / It sounds no more: and sure, it waits upon / Some god o' the island. Sitting on a bank, / Weeping again the king my father's wreck, / This music crept by me upon the waters, / Allaying both their fury and my passion / With its sweet air: thence I have follow'd it, / Or it hath drawn me rather. But 'tis gone. / No, it begins again.’ ARIEL sings: ‘Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes: / Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange...’”
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G. Madame Sosostris: The wicked pack, continued
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Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations. 34 ---------------------------50
Here is the man with three staves, 35 and here the Wheel, 36
And here is the one-eyed merchant, 37 and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. 38 I do not find
The Hanged Man. 39 Fear death by water. 40 ---------------------------55
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, 41
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
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34 Tarot: The Queen of Cups, representing the femme fatale; the card shows a Belladonna, or “beautiful lady,” as a Lady of the Rocks, sitting with rocks at her feet, a la Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks (1486). Belladonna is also another name for the poisonous nightshade plant.
35 Tarot: The Three of Staves shows a man at the water’s edge looking out to ships at sea, representing enterprise, commerce and discovery. This is the Fisher King (see note 2).
36 Tarot: The Wheel of Fortune card represents cycles of change, e.g., winter to summer.
37 Tarot: The Six of Coins shows the one-eyed profile of a merchant giving coins to those around him, representing money, gratification and vigilance. See line 209.
38 Tarot: The blank card, often regarded as an extra card, reflects Madame Sosostris, a caricature who tells and cries out “Look!” but is forbidden to see beyond the crowds of people in the unreal city around her (lines 54-56, and 60); thus, here “clairvoyance” is fraudulent; compare Tiresius, “not indeed a ‘character’” (Eliot’s note at line 218) who is blind but can see and even perceives and foretells (lines 218-229).
39 Frazer (see note 2): Eliot’s Hanged God is Artemis, the goddess of fertility who is annually hanged in effigy; alternatively, this is the other who walks beside the disciples (line 360), and whom Madame Sosostris fails to find. In the Tarot deck, the Hanged Man represents self-sacrifice and life after death.
40 Tarot’s King of Cups shows a floating king holding a sceptor and chalise, representing rule by quiet strength. This is the Phoenician Sailor who will meet his death by water.
41 Mrs. Equitone is ostensibly a more even-visioned person than Madame Sosostris; compare Tiresius’s lover, who, after Tiresius leaves, “smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone” (see lines 255-256).
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H. The Reader’s Brother: Seeing the crowd
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Unreal City, 42 ---------------------------60
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge 43, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many. 44
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, 45
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. ---------------------------65
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours 46
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. 47
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42 Cf. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal: Les Sept Vieillards ("The Flowers of Evil: The Seven Old Men") #93 (1867): “Fourmillante cite; cite; pleine de rêves, / Ou le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant. (Swarming city, city full of dreams, / Where the ghost in broad daylight accosts the passerby.)” The City is the popular name of oldest section of London, primarily including the financial district; see also lines 180, 207 and 260.
43 The crowd flows over the bridge, then flows up the hill and down the street, with no mention of any water flowing below the bridge and only a brown fog above them; this reflects the unreal barrenness of the city, but it also suggests there is something beyond the image of lifeless city workers: a metaphor, perhaps, for the flow of dead and injured soldiers coming homeward after the war.
44 Cf. Dante, Inferno, III. 55-7 (ca. 1321): “si lunga tratta di gente, ch’io non avrei mai creduto che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta (...a long train of people, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many).” See also III. 35-36: Dante is standing before the gates of hell, seeing “the melancholy souls of those who lived withouten infamy or praise.”
45 Cf. Dante, Inferno, IV. 25-7: “Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare, non avea pianto, ma’ che di sospiri, che l’aura eterna facevan tremare. (Here was no lamentation, or none that could be heard, but only sighs, sighs that made the timeless air tremble.)” See also Eliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding II.60-61 (1943): “The death of hope and despair, / This is the death of air.” This line derives from Heracleitus, On Nature (ca 475 BC): “Fire lives in the death of air; water lives in the death of earth; and earth lives in the death of water.”
46 St Mary Woolnoth is a London Church at the corners of Lombard and King William Streets. The church was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666, but a religious building has been on the site for over two thousand years.
47 A phenomenon which I have often noticed. Nine is the hour of Jesus’s death, the start of the workday, the final circle of Dante’s Hell.
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I. Stetson: Seen in the crowd
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There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying “Stetson! 48
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! 49 ---------------------------70
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden, 50
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, 51
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! ---------------------------75
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!” 52
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48 Eliot has said that Stetson does not refer to an actual person, but some have considered he nonetheless had in mind his friend Ezra Pound, who helped Eliot out as a reader and editor of this poem and earned Eliot’s opening dedication (see note 4). Pound also had a proclivity for wearing sombreros or Stetson hats.
49 The Battle of Mylae (260 BC) resulted in a Roman naval victory over Carthage. Now that the battle is over, the surviving sailors are grounded.
50 1 Corinthians 15: 37, 42-44 (NIV): “When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed... So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body...” In a Christian tradition said to have begun in the Moravian Church, Easter Sunrise Service is held in a churchside graveyard called “God’s Acre,” where the bodies of the dead are “sown as seed.” Thus, this Burial of the Dead section ends where it begins, with the possibility of stirring dull roots in spring. The reader’s brother remains uncertain, though, and still perceives the season’s cruelty; he closes the section with lines that are all earth, no air or water and only the faintest hint of fire in his final questions and exclamations.
51 Cf. the Dirge in Webster’s White Devil: “Call for the robin-redbreast and the wren, Since o'er shady groves they hover And with leaves and flowers do cover The friendless bodies of unburied men. Call unto his funeral dole The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole, To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm And, when gay tombs are robb'd, sustain no harm; But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men, For with his nails he'll dig them up again.”
52 V. Baudelaire, Preface to Fleurs du Mal: “But among the jackals, panthers and chimerae, ...The monsters yelping, shouti ng, grunting, crawling / In the ill-famed menagerie of all our vices / Is one more ugly, evil, fouler than the rest / ...And it is Boredom! / Eye laden with involuntary tears, / Dreaming of scaffolds, pulls upon its pipe / You know it, reader, this delicate monster - / Hypocrite reader, - my likeness, - my brother!”
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