P. The River Thames: A song by the waters
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III. The Fire Sermon 75
The river's tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. -------------175
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.76
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors; ---------------------------180
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept... 77
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
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75 Buddha’s Fire Sermon is explained in Eliot’s note at line 308. The fire section will consider healing by a purging of emotions, but first the dying words of the last "air" section evolve into a series of songs.
76 V. Edmund Spenser, Prothalamion (1596): “Calm was the day, and through the trembling air / Sweet breathing Zephyrus did softly play, ...Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song...” This is a double marriage poem, in which the two brides are attended by river nymphs; compare the songs of the Thames-daughter nymphs beginning at line 266. See also the deadly appearance of Zephyrus, the wind, in the story of the Hyacinth Prince at line 36.
77 Psalm 137: 1,4 (RSV): “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept ...How can we sing the songs of the LORD while in a foreign land?” Lac Leman is an alternative name for Lake Geneva, Switzerland, where Eliot received treatment for mental exhaustion in 1921-22. See also the lament of a monster conceived in Geneva in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818): “I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish, nothing; but, feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept.” See also Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, Book IV (1782), tr. Angela Scholar (2000): “The sight of Lake Geneva and its admirable shores has always held a particular charm for me... During the walk to Vevey, I abandoned myself, as I walked along those lovely shores, to thoughts of the sweetest melancholy. ...I was moved to tenderness, I sighed, I wept like a child. How many times, stopping to weep at my leisure, did I not, perched on a boulder, smile to see my tears mingling with the waters.”” Finally, see Matthew 26:75, in which Peter wept bitterly after betraying Jesus (see note 146). All of this is brought together by the prevailing allusion of this passage, that of Fisher King sitting on a river bank, a motif that is repeated throughout the poem (see lines 182-189, 263, 298 and 425, and notes 2, 32, 35, 94 and 157).
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Q. At the River’s Edge: A rattling sound
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But at my back in a cold blast I hear 78 ---------------------------185
The rattle of the bones, 79 and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse ---------------------------190
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him. 80
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year. ---------------------------195
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78 Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress (1655): “For, Lady, you deserve this state, / Nor would I love at lower rate. / But at my back I always hear / Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near; / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity.” See also line 199.
79 Ezekiel 37:1-14, The Valley of the Dry Bones (NIV): “The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ I said, ‘O Sovereign LORD, you alone know.’ Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to these bones and say to them, “Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.”’ So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, “This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live.”’ So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet--a vast army. Then he said to me: ‘Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, “Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.” Therefore prophesy and say to them: “This is what the Sovereign LORD says: O my people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. Then you, my people, will know that I am the LORD,when I open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land.”’” The rattling bone motif recurs throughout the poem; see lines 22, 116, 186, 198, 316 and 391.
80 Cf. The Tempest, I. ii.552-553, “FERDINAND: ...Sitting on a bank / weeping again the king my father's wreck’” See also note 33.
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R. Voices in the Dome: Nightingale songs
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But at my back from time to time I hear 81
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney 82 to Mrs. Porter in the spring. 83
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter 84
And on her daughter ---------------------------200
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole! 85
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc'd. ---------------------------205
Tereu 86
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81 Cf. Marvell, To His Coy Mistress. See note 78 and line 185. Marvell’s Coy Mistress is also the source of the line “There will be time,” a recurring allusion in Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915).
82 Sweeney is a brutish character Eliot used in three earlier poems, a counterpart to his more sensitive J. Alfred Prufrock. The allusion here is indirect. See Sweeney Among the Nightingales (1918), which opens with Agamemnon’s dying words induced by his wife, from Aeschylus, Agamemnon (458 BC), then concludes: “The nightingales are singing near / The Convent of the Sacred Heart, / And sang within the bloody wood / When Agamemnon cried aloud / And let their liquid droppings fall / To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.” See also Sophocles, Electra (ca. 400 BC), in which Agamemnon incurs the wrath of the wood goddess Artemis, and then compare this to the Ovidian tale of Actaeon and Diana (see note 83).
83 Cf. John Day, Parliament of Bees (1616): “When of the sudden, listening, you shall hear, / A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring / Actaeon to Diana in the spring, / Where all shall see her naked skin...” See Ovid, Metamorphoses iii.131. After Actaeon the hunter saw the goddess Diana naked, she turned him into a stag to be hunted and killed by his own dogs. .
84 I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia. Soldier’s ballad, “O the moon shines bright on Mrs. Porter / And on the daughter / Of Mrs. Porter / And they wash their feet in soda water / And so they oughter / To keep them clean.” See also Thurland Chattaway, Red Wing (1907): “Now the moon shines bright on pretty red-wing / the breeze is sighing / the nightbird’s crying.” Nightbirds, or nightingales, are prostitutes. According to C. M. Bowra, The Creative Experiment (1949), Mrs. Porter was the madame of a wartime brothel in Cairo that was a favorite among Australian troops.
85 V. Paul Verlaine, Parsifal (1886): “And oh, those children’s voices, singing in the dome!” Parcifal, subject of a Wagner opera and the chief knight of the Grail legend, has just “healed the king, is king now in his turn.”
86 Cf. Pt. II, l. 101, 104, Tereus’s rape of Philomela.
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S. The Smyrna Merchant : An invitation
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Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon 87
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant 88
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants ---------------------------210
C.i.f. London: documents at sight, 89
Asked me in demotic French 90
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole. 91
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87 Compare line 61, which presented the brown fog of a winter dawn. Time is not linear in this poem, and memories are fragmented.
88 The name “Eugenides” suggests one who is well-bred, but the image of Mr Eugenides in this scene as an unshaven, demotic London currant seller is unmitigatedly negative. His no-credit sales (see note 89) suggest a lack of trust; he chooses to speak a base version of French (see note 90) instead of the Turkish or Greek of his native Smyrna or the English of his clientele; and he operates within the prevailing brown fog of an unreal city. Even the product he sells, small dried grapes, are far from what one would hope to find in a healing holy grail. Beyond this passage, there is more disparity: he was marked as the “one-eyed” merchant in the Tarot deck (see note 37) and his invitation directly follows a reminder of Philomela’s rape (see note 86), an event about which the victim could only relate through woven tapestry and a memory which, in this fire section, the poet is trying hard to purge. But the merchant is also associated with victims, identified as one who “melts into” the sailor who has drowned and lost his looks and stature (see note 92 and lines 312-322), while the sailor in turn is identified with the drowned hyacinth girl (see note 64). This ambiguity of identity will culminate in the next scene, featuring the androgynous blind observer Tiresius (see note 92).
89 The currants were quoted at a price ‘carriage and insurance free to London’; and the Bill of Lading, etc., were to be handed to the buyer upon payment of the sight draft. In other words, shipping costs were built in to the price, which was expected to be paid on delivery. Currants also appear in Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: These, I, Singing in Spring (1900), among wild plants being “collect[ed] for lovers” as “the token of comrades”: “Collecting, I traverse the garden, the world—but soon I pass the gates, / Now along the pond-side—now wading in a little, fearing not the wet.” Compare this to the "weedy trophies" that Ophelia reached for at her death (see note 74).
90 Demotic means common, of the people. Demotic and demobbed (line 139) were the two specific words Ezra Pound had suggested to improve the poem, but he would also have broader edits that would dramatically cut the length of the poem. For instance, Pound encouraged Eliot to remove a whole section from the beginning of an earlier draft of this poem, which Eliot would ultimately present separately as Gerontion (1920). See also note 73.
91 The Cannon Street Hotel was a hotel frequented by business commuters to and from the Continent, and also known as a homosexual rendezvous; the Metropole was a luxury resort hotel on England’s southern coast.
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T. Tiresius: The blind spectator
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At the violet hour, when the eyes and back ---------------------------215
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, 92
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see 93
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92 Ovid, Metamorphoses (AD 8, translated by A. S. Kline): Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character', is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. The whole passage from Ovid is of great anthropological interest: Cum Iunone iocos et 'maior vestra profecto est / Quam, quae contingit maribus', dixisse, 'voluptas.' / Illa negat; placuit quae sit sententia docti / Quaerere Tiresiae: venus huic erat utraque nota. / Nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva / Corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu / Deque viro factus, mirabile, femina septem / Egerat autumnos; octavo rursus eosdem / Vidit et 'est vestrae si tanta potentia plagae', / Dixit 'ut auctoris sortem in contraria mutet, / Nunc quoque vos feriam!' percussis anguibus isdem / Forma prior rediit genetivaque venit imago. / Arbiter hic igitur sumptus de lite iocosa / Dicta Iovis firmat; gravius Saturnia iusto / Nec pro materia fertur doluisse suique / Iudicis aeterna damnavit lumina nocte, / At pater omnipotens (neque enim licet inrita cuiquam / Facta dei fecisse deo) pro lumine adempto / Scire futura dedit poenamque levavit honore. (The Judgment of Tiresias, Book III, Lines 316 -338: “. . . they say that Jupiter, expansive with wine, set aside his onerous duties, and relaxing, exchanging pleasantries, with Juno, said ‘ You gain more than we do from the pleasures of love.’ She denied it. They agreed to ask learned Tiresias for his opinion. He had known Venus in both ways.---- Once, with a blow of his stick, he had disturbed two large snakes mating in the green forest, and, marvellous to tell, he was changed from a man to a woman, and lived as such for seven years. In the eighth year he saw the same snakes again and said ‘Since there is such power in plaguing you that it changes the giver of a blow to the opposite sex, I will strike you again, now.’ He struck the snakes and regained his former shape, and returned to the sex he was born with.— As the arbiter of the light-hearted dispute he confirmed Jupiter’s words. Saturnia, it is said, was more deeply upset than was justified and than the dispute warranted, and damned the one who had made the judgement to eternal night. But, since no god has the right to void what another god has done, the all-powerful father of the gods gave Tiresias knowledge of the future, in exchange for his lost sight, and lightened the punishment with honour.”)
93 Compare Madame Sosostris, who is one who ostensibly can see (a “clairvoyant”) but is nonetheless blind (see note 38); the one-eyed merchant with a blank card (see notes 37 and 38); and the Phoenician sailor, whose eyes in death become pearls (see note 33).
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U. The Sailor and the Typist : What Tiresius perceived
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At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives ---------------------------220
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, 94
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins. 95
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays, ----------------------225
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. 96
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest —
I too awaited the expected guest. ---------------------------230
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare, 97
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. 98
The time is now propitious, as he guesses, ---------------------------235
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which are still unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; 99
Exploring hands encounter no defence; ---------------------------240
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
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94 Sappho, fragment 95 (ca. 600 BC, tr. Henry Thornton Wharton, 1895): “Evening, thou that bringest all that bright morning scattered; thou bringest the sheep, the goat, the child back to her mother.” This may not appear as exact as Sappho's lines, but I had in mind the 'longshore' or 'dory' fisherman, who returns at nightfall. See also Robert Louis Stevenson, Requiem (1879): “Home is the sailor, home from the sea.”
95 Compare the story of Lil the housewife and Albert the sailor home from sea (note 69). Contrast the drowned Phoenician Sailor (section 4).
96 Combinations are undergarments; stays are corsets. Compare the hyacinth girl with hair and clothes in need of drying (note 25); contrast Cleopatra’s chambers (note 54).
97 Carbuncular: Pimpled. The expected guest is now a house clerk or a typist home at teatime; compare the Smyrna merchant’s lunchguest (note 89).
98 Bradford was an English manufacturing town, reputed for producing the nouveax rich. Compare the socialite chess players (note 68); contrast Marie in Munich (note 15).
99 See Tereus (note 57), and the unresponsive indifference of the “nothing” man (line 61).
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V. Afterwords : Song of the vicar
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(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall ---------------------------245
And walked among the lowest of the dead.) 100
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit... 101
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover; ---------------------------250
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
“Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over.”
When lovely woman stoops to folly and 102
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, ---------------------------255
And puts a record on the gramophone. 103
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100 Besides Metamorphoses (see note 90), Tiresius also appears in Homer, Oddysey, 489-493 (ca. 800 BC), tr. Richmond Lattimore, where Circe speaks to Oddyseus: “You shall no longer stay in my house when none of you wish to; but first there is another journey you must accomplish and reach the house of Hades and revered Persephone, there to consult with the soul of Tiresias the Theban, the blind prophet, whose senses stay unshaken within him...”; in Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (429 BC), tr. Robert Fagles, 468-474, where Tiresius curses Oedipus: “So, you mock my blindness? Let me tell you this. You with your precious eyes, you're blind to the corruption of your life, to the house you live in, those you live with-who are your parents? Do you know? All unknowing you are the scourge of your own flesh and blood, the dead below the earth and the living here above”; in Sophocles, Antigone, 5, 79-83 (441 BC), tr. Dudley Fitz and Robert Fitzgerald, where Tiresius rails against King Creon for threatening to bury his niece Antigone alive: “And curses will be hurled at you from far / Cities grieving for sons unburied, left to rot / Before the walls of Thebes”; and in Inferno, XX, 37-42, where Tiresius, being one who sees the future, is consigned to walk backwards in the eighth circle of hell.
101 Tiresius is an observer, yet he also “enacted” the scene and, being blind, “gropes his way” out of the room.
102 V. Oliver Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield., Ch. 24 (1766): “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.”
103 Compare Mrs. Equitone (note 41).
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W. The “Sometimes” Music : Ariel’s song
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“This music crept by me upon the waters” 104
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street. 105
O City city, 106 I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, 107 ---------------------------260
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: 108 where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold 109
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold. ---------------------------265
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104 V. Shakespeare, The Tempest, as above. I, ii, 462 (1611): “FERDINAND: ‘This music crept by me upon the waters.’” See also note 33.
105 The Strand is a riverside London street once lined with mansions, almost all of which no longer exist. Eliot also alluded to the Strand in one of his earliest poems, untitled but 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.”
106 A tale of two cities: the Unreal City (see line 60) is now simultaneously presented as an ordinary, uncapitalized city.
107 Eliot worked as a clerk at Lloyd’s Bank from 1917 to 1926, initially as a “stopgap” to make ends meet, but then continuing for four years after The Waste Lane was published. Most of the streets referenced here and earlier (see lines 60-68) are in the neighborhood of Lloyd’s Bank, in London’s central financial district.
108 It is noon again (see line 208); but again, time is not linear: this follows Tiresuis’s scene in the violet evening hour (see lines 215, 220) and this may be a different noon.
109 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.). Compare the earlier description of London, with brown fog and the dead sound emanating from Saint Mary Woolnoth Church (see note 46). Even in this later passage, the “inexplicable splendour” of the church is between pubs and fish on one side and oil and tar (line 268) on the other, but now Eliot not only notices the splendor of the church but also sometimes hears the music of the street and the pleasantness of the whining and clatter and chatter.
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X. Wagner’s Twilight : Song of the Thames-daughters
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The river sweats 110
Oil and tar
The barges drift 111
With the turning tide
Red sails ---------------------------270
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach ---------------------------275
Past the Isle of Dogs. 112
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
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110 The Song of the (three) Thames-daughters begins here. From line 292 to 306 inclusive they speak in turn. V. Wagner, Götterdammerung, III. I (Twilight of the Gods, 1876). The name of the Thames-daughters was inspired by Spenser’s Prothalamion (see note 76): “There, in a meadow, by the river's side, / A flock of nymphs I chanced to espy, / All lovely daughters of the flood thereby...,” but their song is derived from that of the Rhinemaidens in Wagner’s Ring Cycle opera. Direct quotes to the opera are limited to the several melody lines, “Weialala leia, Wallala leialala” (lines 277-278) and the more terse “la la”(line 306) but Eliot also references gold forging (lines 282-284) and assimilates Wagner’s dimetric pace and leisurely tone, which stand in contrast to the song’s grimmer content (lines 266 - 289). We can also see some of the curse motif of the Grail legend in the Rhinemaidens’ song: “From the Rhine's gold / the ring was wrought. / He who cunningly fashioned it / and ignominiously lost it / laid on it a curse / into all eternity / to doom to death / whoever wears it. ...if you do not restore the ring to us / to hide it deep in the Rhine. / Only its waters / can wash away the curse!”
111 Conrad, Heart of Darkness: “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.” See also line 41.
112 Greenwich Reach is a straight section of the Thames at the southern banks of the Isle of Dogs, at London’s East End just north of Greenwich. The Isle of Dogs, once an island, is now a peninsula at one of the larger meanders in the Thames River. Queen Elizabeth’s royal dogs were once kenneled here, and it was also the site of Placentia Palace where the Privy Council once met. In 1597, Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe wrote a satirical play called The Isle of Dogs, which allegedly offended Queen Elizabeth I and crossed lines of propriety to the point that Jonson and two other actors were arrested, all copies of the play were destroyed and the matter was referred to the Privy Council. Jonson spent three months in prison and public plays were banned for the rest of the summer.
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Y. Elizabeth and Leicester : A rendezvous
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Elizabeth and Leicester 113
Beating oars 114 ---------------------------280
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold 115
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores ---------------------------285
Southwest wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers 116
Weialala leia ---------------------------290
Wallala leialala
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113 James Anthony Froude, The Reign of Elizabeth, vol. I, ch. iv, 1561 letter of Spanish Ambassador De Quadra to Philip of Spain (1911): “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.” This letter supported rumors that Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, and Lord Robert Dudley, later the Earl of Leicester, were lovers who would rendezvous at the Queen’s home in Greenwich, past the Isle of Dogs. A year before the Ambassador’s letter, Lord Robert’s first wife 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, which because of the scandal could never happen. They remained affectionate, and four years after the accident the Queen even raised his position to Earl of Leicester, but she never did marry Lord Robert or anyone else, and Lord Robert did not remarry for eighteen years.
114 Compare line 422: “the boat responded / Gaily, ...with sail and oar” and, in a calm sea, the “heart would have responded / Gaily ...beating obedient.”
115 Red and gold are the colors of the Spanish flag. In 1588, the Earl of Leicester defended the Thames to keep the Spanish Armada from advancing towards London. See also the “burnished throne” of Cleopatra’s barge (line 77) and “Ionian white and gold” on the walls of Magnus Martyr (lines 263-264).
116 The peal of bells and white towers suggest the festive trappings of a wedding, forever out of reach for Elizabeth and Leicester; bells also characterize the Tower of London and St Paul’s Cathedral, which were white before taking on the dinge of time, pollution and war. See also lines 383-384: “...towers tolling reminiscent bells.”
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Z. Three Sisters : The river song, concluded
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“Trams and dusty trees. 117
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew 118
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.” ---------------------------295
“My feet are at Moorgate 119 and my heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised ‘a new start.’ 120
I made no comment. What should I resent?”
“On Margate Sands. 121 ---------------------------300
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.” 122 ---------------------------305
la la
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117 See Eliot’s introduction to the song of the Thames-daughters at note 110. Each of the three singers relates a loss of virginity, each one having a different perspective.
118 Cf. Dante, Purgatorio, V. 133: 'Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia; / Siena mi fe', disfecemi Maremma.': “...Sienna gave me life; / Maremma took it from me.” Highbury, Richmond and Kew are London neighborhoods along the River Thames.
119 Moorgate is an Underground station in London’s financial district. “He wept” repeats the convalescent’s lament in line 182 (see note 77), though it may also refer to Jesus weeping after the event of Lazarus’s death (see John 11:35).
120 Compare Eliot’s later poems in Four Quartets (1943). From East Coker: “Trying to use words, and every attempt / Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure,” and from Little Gidding: “Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, / Every poem an epitaph.”
121 Margate is the southern England coastal town where Eliot spent time in the fall of 1921 for recuperation after suffering from mental exhaustion. He followed this with more formal treatment in Switzerland (See line 182).
122 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Ch. 3: “They are simple people – and I want nothing.” See also the nothingness of the wind under the door (line 120). Also compare the brokenness of heaped images (line 22), the river’s tent (line 173), the seals of empty rooms (line 409) and Coriolanus (line 417).
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AA. Buddha’s Fire Sermon : A singing cauldron
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To Carthage then I came 123
Burning burning burning burning 124
O Lord Thou pluckest me out 125
Lord Thou pluckest ---------------------------310
burning
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123 V. St. Augustine's Confessions, Book III, Chapter 1 (398 AD) : 'to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears'. See also notes 12, 49 and 55.
124 The complete text of the Buddha's Fire Sermon, Adittapariyaya Sutta, Samyutta Nikaya 35.28 (483 BC) (which corresponds in importance to the Sermon on the Mount (see below)) from which these words are taken, will be found translated in the late Henry Clarke Warren's Buddhism in Translation (Harvard Oriental Series) Ch. 4, Sec. 73 (1896). Mr. Warren was one of the great pioneers of Buddhist studies in the Occident. “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, conceives an aversion for eye-consciousness, conceives 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, for that also he conceives an aversion. ...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.” Compare this to the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:14-16 and 6:22-23 (NIV): “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. ...The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”
125 From St. Augustine's Confessions again, Book X. The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident. “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.”
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