The library
The works the poem quotes or draws on, in ten languages, from the Upanishads to a rag of 1912. Most are given in their own language, with a translation where one is needed. Each has a note on what Eliot did with it and the lines where it appears in the poem, and most have a link to a free text of the whole work. Click a line number to go to it in the poem.
Jessie L. Weston · Sir James George Frazer · Petronius · Dante Alighieri · Dante Alighieri · Dante Alighieri · Dante Alighieri · Dante Alighieri · Geoffrey Chaucer · Walt Whitman · The Bible (King James Version) · The Bible (King James Version) · The Bible (King James Version) · The Bible (King James Version) · Richard Wagner · Richard Wagner · Charles Baudelaire · Charles Baudelaire · John Webster · John Webster · William Shakespeare · William Shakespeare · William Shakespeare · Virgil · John Milton · Ovid · Ovid · Thomas Middleton · Edmund Spenser · The Book of Common Prayer (Coverdale’s psalter) · Andrew Marvell · John Day · Paul Verlaine · John Lyly · Sappho · Oliver Goldsmith · James Anthony Froude · Augustine of Hippo · The Buddha · Anonymous (Vedic) · F. H. Bradley · Hermann Hesse · Sir Ernest Shackleton · Frank M. Chapman · Anonymous · Gérard de Nerval · Thomas Kyd · Traditional · Gene Buck and Herman Ruby (words) · T. S. Eliot · T. S. Eliot · Charles Dickens · Joseph Conrad · Alfred Tennyson · Aldous Huxley · T. S. Eliot · Works cited
Poems
Purgatorio, canto XXVI
Dante Alighieri · c. 1315 · Italian and Provençal
The dedication calls Ezra Pound, who cut the poem, “il miglior fabbro,” the better craftsman, Dante’s phrase for the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel; line 428 is Arnaut stepping back into the refining fire.
«Tan m’abellis vostre cortes deman,
qu’ieu no me puesc ni voill a vos cobrire.
Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan;
consiros vei la passada folor,
e vei jausen lo joi qu’esper, denan.
Ara vos prec, per aquella valor
que vos guida al som de l’escalina,
sovenha vos a temps de ma dolor!».
Poi s’ascose nel foco che li affina.
“So much does your courteous question please me that I cannot and will not hide myself from you. I am Arnaut, who weep and go singing; in thought I see my past folly, and I see with joy, ahead, the joy I hope for. Now I pray you, by that power which guides you to the top of the stair, be mindful in time of my pain.” Then he hid himself in the fire that refines them.
On the seventh terrace of Purgatory, where the lustful walk in flame, Dante meets the poet Guido Guinizelli, who points out the troubadour Arnaut Daniel as “miglior fabbro del parlar materno,” the better craftsman of the mother tongue (line 117). Arnaut answers in his own Provençal, the only passage in the Comedy in a vernacular other than Italian, and steps back into the fire. Eliot took the title of his 1920 collection Ara Vos Prec from line 145 (the Ovid Press title page misprinted it “Ara Vus Prec,” a form Eliot later blamed on his Italian edition of Dante), and line 428 of the poem from line 148, which his note quotes with the three lines before it. The dedication “For Ezra Pound / il miglior fabbro” was not printed in 1922: Eliot wrote it in January 1923 into the copy of the edition published by Boni & Liveright that belonged to Pound, who had cut the poem, and it first appeared in print in Poems 1909–1925. The phrase was already Pound’s own: “Il Miglior Fabbro” is the title of his chapter on Arnaut Daniel in The Spirit of Romance (1910). Modern texts read “li affina”; Eliot’s “gli” follows the older text he used.
References Dante, Purgatorio XXVI 115–117 and 140–148; Temple Classics Purgatorio, XXVI 148; Eliot, Dante (1929), preface; Poems 1909–1925, the dedication; Gallup, A3; Pound, The Spirit of Romance, ch. II; Southam, Guide, note on the title Ara Vos Prec; Southam, Guide, note on the dedication of The Waste Land.
In the poem: title page, line 428
Read it whole: Purgatorio XXVI (Arnaut Daniel: ‘Ara vos prec’; ‘Poi s’ascose nel foco che li affina’; l. 117 ‘fu miglior fabbro del parlar materno’) at it.wikisource.org
Inferno, canto III
Dante Alighieri · c. 1308 · Italian
The crowd on London Bridge: “I had not thought death had undone so many.”
E io, che riguardai, vidi una ’nsegna
che girando correva tanto ratta,
che d’ogne posa mi parea indegna;
e dietro le venìa sì lunga tratta
di gente, ch’i’ non averei creduto
che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta.
And I, who looked, saw a banner which, whirling, ran so fast that it seemed to scorn all pause; and behind it came so long a train of people that I would never have believed death had undone so many.
Inside the gate (“Abandon all hope”) but before the river Acheron, Dante finds the souls who were neither good nor bad, “who lived without infamy and without praise.” Heaven has cast them out and Hell will not receive them; they run for ever after a banner, stung by wasps. Eliot’s note on line 63 quotes lines 55–57 as the source of the crowd flowing over London Bridge, and his note on line 46 says that the “crowds of people” in Madame Sosostris’s cards “appear later,” which has generally been taken to mean this crowd. Eliot said in “What Dante Means to Me” (1950) that Dante’s poetry was still, “after forty years,” “the most persistent and deepest influence” on his own verse.
References Dante, Inferno III 34–69; Eliot, “What Dante Means to Me” (1950).
In the poem: line 62, line 63, line 56
Read it whole: Inferno III 55-57 (‘si lunga tratta / di gente’) at it.wikisource.org
Inferno, canto IV
Dante Alighieri · c. 1308 · Italian
Limbo’s sighs, behind “Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled.”
Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare,
non avea pianto mai che di sospiri
che l’aura etterna facevan tremare.
Here, as far as I could tell by listening, there was no weeping but only sighs, which made the eternal air tremble.
Limbo, the first circle of Hell, holds the virtuous who died unbaptised, Homer, Virgil and Aristotle among them; Dante calls them the “great spirits” (spiriti magni), and they are not tormented but live in desire without hope. Eliot’s note on line 64 cites these lines. The comparison likens the sighs of the crowd on London Bridge to those of Limbo, where there is grief but no torment.
References Dante, Inferno IV 25–45 and 118–120.
In the poem: line 64
Read it whole: Inferno IV 25-27 (the sighs, ‘sospiri’) at it.wikisource.org
Purgatorio, canto V
Dante Alighieri · c. 1315 · Italian
La Pia’s “Siena made me, Maremma unmade me,” the model for “Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew / Undid me.”
«Deh, quando tu sarai tornato al mondo,
e riposato de la lunga via»,
seguitò ’l terzo spirito al secondo,
«ricorditi di me, che son la Pia;
Siena mi fé, disfecemi Maremma:
salsi colui che ’nnanellata pria
disposando m’avea con la sua gemma».
“Ah, when you have returned to the world and rested from the long way,” the third spirit followed the second, “remember me, who am La Pia; Siena made me, Maremma unmade me: he knows it who, having first put a ring on me, wedded me with his gem.”
On the lower slopes of Purgatory, among those who repented only at a violent death, a woman speaks seven lines and gives her name, her birthplace, the place of her death and, without quite saying it, that her husband had her killed. The Maremma is the marsh country on the Tuscan coast. Early commentators named her Pia de’ Tolomei of Siena and her husband Nello dei Pannocchieschi; nothing certain is known of her. Eliot’s note on line 293 cites the passage for the first Thames-daughter, whose “Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew / Undid me” follows the shape of “Siena mi fé, disfecemi Maremma”; unlike La Pia, she gives no name.
References Dante, Purgatorio V 130–136; Temple Classics Purgatorio, note on V 130–136.
In the poem: line 293
Read it whole: Purgatorio V 130-136 (La Pia: ‘Siena mi fe’, disfecemi Maremma’) at it.wikisource.org
e io senti’ chiavar l’uscio di sotto
a l’orribile torre; ond’io guardai
nel viso a’ mie’ figliuoi sanza far motto.
and I heard them nailing up the door below of the horrible tower; at which I looked into the faces of my sons without a word.
Count Ugolino della Gherardesca of Pisa, imprisoned in 1288 with two sons and two grandsons and left to starve, gnaws in Hell on the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri, who betrayed him, and tells Dante the story. The verb in the passage, chiavar, has been read both as locking and as nailing up the door; the translation above has “nailing up,” and Eliot’s “key” takes it as locking. His note on line 412 quotes the first of these lines and the start of the second, and then a passage from Appearance and Reality (1893) by F. H. Bradley, the philosopher on whom Eliot wrote his doctoral thesis; in it Bradley says that each person’s experience “falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside.”
References Dante, Inferno XXXIII 46–48; Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346; Eliot, Knowledge and Experience (1964).
In the poem: line 412, line 413
Read it whole: Inferno XXXIII 46 (Ugolino: ‘e io senti’ chiavar l’uscio di sotto’) at it.wikisource.org
The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue
Geoffrey Chaucer · c. 1387 · Middle English
Chaucer’s April of sweet showers and pilgrimages, behind Eliot’s “cruellest month.”
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root and bathed every vein in the liquid whose power engenders the flower; when Zephyrus with his sweet breath has quickened the tender shoots in every wood and heath, and the young sun has run half his course in the Ram, and small birds make melody that sleep all night with open eye (so Nature pricks them in their hearts), then people long to go on pilgrimages.
The Prologue opens with April rain ending the drought of March, sap rising, birds singing and people longing to go on pilgrimage. Eliot’s notes say nothing of Chaucer; readers have long set “April is the cruellest month” against these lines, in which the same month and the same rain are welcome. In Eliot’s poem it is winter that “kept us warm” (lines 5–6).
References Chaucer, General Prologue, lines 1–12; Southam, Guide, note on line 1.
In the poem: line 1
Read it whole: The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, opening (‘Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote’) at en.wikisource.org
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
Walt Whitman · 1865 · English
The American poet Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, shot in April 1865: lilacs, spring, and the hermit thrush.
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. . . .
In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat,
Death’s outlet song of life . . .
Whitman’s elegy for President Abraham Lincoln, who was shot in April 1865, brings together the lilac, the evening star and the hermit thrush singing in a swamp. Eliot’s poem opens with lilacs bred out of the dead land (line 2) and the hermit-thrush’s “water-dripping song” is at line 357; Eliot’s note on that line describes the bird and quotes the Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America by the ornithologist Frank M. Chapman, and says nothing of Whitman. In 1928, introducing the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, who had cut the poem, Eliot wrote that he “did not read Whitman until much later in life, and had to conquer an aversion to his form, as well as to much of his matter, in order to do so.” Two years earlier, reviewing a life of Whitman, he had written that “when Whitman speaks of the lilacs or of the mocking-bird, his theories and beliefs drop away like a needless pretext” (“Whitman and Tennyson,” Nation and Athenaeum, 18 December 1926). The Auckland scholar S. Musgrove argued at length in 1952 that the poem drew on Whitman all the same, and set the lilacs bred out of the dead land and the hermit-thrush of line 357 beside the lilac and the thrush of this elegy.
References Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, sections 1 and 4; Eliot, introduction to Pound’s Selected Poems (1928); Eliot, “Whitman and Tennyson” (1926); Musgrove (1952).
In the poem: line 2, line 357
Read it whole: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d at en.wikisource.org
Les Sept Vieillards (from Les Fleurs du mal)
Charles Baudelaire · 1859; in the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du mal · French
“Unreal City”: the swarming Paris of “The Seven Old Men.”
Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!
Les mystères partout coulent comme des sèves
Dans les canaux étroits du colosse puissant.
Swarming city, city full of dreams, where the ghost in broad daylight accosts the passer-by! Mysteries everywhere flow like sap in the narrow channels of the mighty giant.
The poet, walking through a dirty yellow fog on a Paris morning, meets a hideous old man, then another exactly like him, and another, seven in all, and flees home half mad. Eliot’s note on line 60 quotes the first two lines. Stetson, hailed on King William Street at nine in the morning as a shipmate from the battle of Mylae, a sea battle of 260 BC (lines 69–70), has been read as Eliot’s version of Baudelaire’s daylight ghost.
References Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, “Les Sept Vieillards”, lines 1–4.
In the poem: line 60
Read it whole: Les Fleurs du mal: ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ (‘Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves’) and ‘Au Lecteur’ (‘Hypocrite lecteur, - mon semblable, - mon frère!’) at fr.wikisource.org
Au Lecteur (the preface poem of Les Fleurs du mal)
Charles Baudelaire · 1855; the preface poem of the 1857 volume · French
“hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
C’est l’Ennui! — l’œil chargé d’un pleur involontaire,
Il rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!
It is Boredom! Its eye charged with an involuntary tear, it dreams of scaffolds while smoking its hookah. You know it, reader, this delicate monster, hypocrite reader, my double, my brother!
Baudelaire opens his book by listing the sins of mankind, keeping the worst, boredom, for last, and then turning on whoever is reading. Eliot closes his first section the same way. In his essay “Baudelaire” (1930) he called him “the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language,” and in “What Dante Means to Me” (1950) he said he had learned from him “the possibility of fusion between the sordidly realistic and the phantasmagoric.”
References Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, “Au Lecteur”, lines 37–40; Eliot, “Baudelaire” (1930); Eliot, “What Dante Means to Me” (1950).
In the poem: line 76
Aeneid, Book I
Virgil · 19 BC · Latin
“laquearia,” the coffered ceiling of the hall where Dido, queen of Carthage, feasts Aeneas.
dependent lychni laquearibus aureis
incensi et noctem flammis funalia vincunt.
Lit lamps hang from the golden coffered ceiling, and torches conquer the night with their flames.
Eliot’s note on line 92 quotes lines 726–727, from the banquet at which Dido, queen of Carthage, falls in love with Aeneas; he will sail away, and she will kill herself on a pyre. In the poem the word names the ceiling of the room in Part II. Carthage returns at line 307, this time from Augustine’s Confessions.
References Virgil, Aeneid I 726–727.
In the poem: line 92
Read it whole: Aeneid I 726-727 (‘dependent lychni laquearibus aureis’) at perseus.tufts.edu
. . . and overhead up grew
Insuperable height of loftiest shade,
Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm,
A silvan scene, and as the ranks ascend
Shade above shade, a woody theatre
Of stateliest view.
Eliot’s note on line 98 cites Book IV, line 140. Satan, arriving at Eden, looks in at Paradise from outside, the trees rising rank above rank into “a woody theatre”; “silvan scene” (the poem spells it “sylvan”) and “theatre” are Milton’s words for the view. In the poem the phrase describes the painting over the mantel, which shows the change of Philomel.
References Milton, Paradise Lost IV 137–142.
In the poem: line 98
Read it whole: Paradise Lost IV 140 (‘A Silvan Scene’) at en.wikisource.org
corpora Cecropidum pennis pendere putares:
pendebant pennis. quarum petit altera silvas,
altera tecta subit, neque adhuc de pectore caedis
excessere notae, signataque sanguine pluma est.
ille dolore suo poenaeque cupidine velox
vertitur in volucrem, cui stant in vertice cristae.
prominet inmodicum pro longa cuspide rostrum;
nomen epops volucri, facies armata videtur.
As they fly from him you would think that the bodies of the two Athenians were poised on wings: they were poised on wings! One flies to the woods, the other rises to the roof. And even now their breasts have not lost the marks of their murderous deed, their feathers are stained with blood. Tereus, swift in pursuit because of his grief and eager desire for vengeance, is himself changed into a bird. Upon his head a stiff crest appears, and a huge beak stands forth instead of his long sword. He is the hoopoe, with the look of one armed for war. (Frank Justus Miller, 1916; Metamorphoses VI, 667–674)
Tereus, king of Thrace, is bringing his wife Procne’s sister Philomela to visit her when he rapes Philomela in a hut deep in the woods and cuts out her tongue; she weaves the crime into a cloth and sends it to her sister; the sisters kill Procne’s son Itys and serve him to his father; Tereus, pursuing the sisters with a sword, and the sisters, fleeing, are all turned into birds. Ovid names only Tereus’s bird, the hoopoe, and does not say which sister became the nightingale and which the swallow; the later tradition that Eliot follows makes Philomela the nightingale. Eliot’s note on line 99 cites the story for the picture over the mantel in Part II; the “Jug Jug” of lines 103 and 204 is the nightingale’s song as Elizabethan poets wrote it; and his note on line 429 refers the swallow back to “Philomela in Parts II and III.” Arthur Golding’s translation of 1567, the one Shakespeare knew, gives the story in Book VI.
References Ovid, Metamorphoses VI 424–674; Golding, Metamorphoses (1567), bk. VI.
In the poem: line 99, line 205, line 429
Read it whole: Metamorphoses VI 424-674 (Tereus, Procne and Philomela) at perseus.tufts.edu
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.
For once, in a green wood, he had struck with his staff the bodies of two great serpents as they coupled, and, from a man made a woman, wonderful to tell, had lived seven autumns; in the eighth he saw the same snakes again and said, “If a blow to you has such power that it changes its author’s condition into its opposite, I will strike you now as well!” He struck the snakes, and his former shape returned, the form he was born with.
The passage is Book III, lines 324–331; Eliot’s note on line 218 quotes the whole episode (lines 320–338) in Latin, calling it “of great anthropological interest.” Jupiter and Juno, disputing in jest which sex takes more pleasure in love, put the question to Tiresias, who has been both; he sides with Jupiter, Juno strikes him blind, and Jupiter gives him foresight in return. Eliot’s note calls Tiresias “the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest,” and says that “what Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.”
References Ovid, Metamorphoses III 316–338.
In the poem: line 218
Read it whole: Metamorphoses III 316-338 (Tiresias) at perseus.tufts.edu
Prothalamion
Edmund Spenser · 1596 · English
“Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.”
Calme was the day, and through the trembling ayre
Sweete breathing Zephyrus did softly play
A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay
Hot Titans beames, which then did glyster fayre:
When I whom sullein care,
Through discontent of my long fruitlesse stay
In Princes Court, and expectation vayne
Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away,
Like empty shaddowes, did aflict my brayne,
Walkt forth to ease my payne
Along the shoare of silver streaming Themmes,
Whose rutty Bancke, the which his River hemmes,
Was paynted all with variable flowers,
And all the meades adornd with daintie gemmes,
Fit to decke maydens bowres,
And crowne their Paramours,
Against the Brydale day, which is not long:
Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song.
A “Spousall Verse,” as its title page calls it, for the double wedding of the Earl of Worcester’s daughters, Elizabeth and Katherine Somerset. The poet, out of favour at court, walks by the Thames and sees nymphs gathering flowers for two swans, who stand for the brides. Eliot’s note to line 176 cites the poem. He keeps Spenser’s refrain; his nymphs are twice said to have departed (lines 175 and 179), and where Spenser’s river carries the swans, his bears no litter of summer nights. Spenser’s poet is himself unhappy, walking by the river to ease the “sullein care” of a fruitless wait at court.
References Spenser, Prothalamion, lines 1–18 and the title page.
In the poem: line 176, line 183, line 184
Read it whole: Prothalamion (‘Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song’) at en.wikisource.org
To His Coy Mistress
Andrew Marvell · written c. 1650; published 1681 · English
“But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.”
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Marvell’s speaker urges his mistress not to wait, because time is short, and in the grave there is no embracing. Eliot’s note cites the poem. Twice he begins a line with Marvell’s “But at my back,” and each time puts another sound where the chariot was: at lines 185–186 “The rattle of the bones,” at lines 196–198 “The sound of horns and motors,” which brings Sweeney to Mrs Porter. Eliot’s essay “Andrew Marvell,” in the Times Literary Supplement of 31 March 1921, while he was at work on the poem, praised in Marvell “a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace.”
References Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”, lines 21–32; Eliot, “Andrew Marvell” (1921).
In the poem: line 185, line 196
Read it whole: To His Coy Mistress at en.wikisource.org
Parsifal
Paul Verlaine · 1886 · French
“And, oh, those children’s voices singing in the dome!”: the last line of a sonnet on Wagner’s Parsifal.
Parsifal a vaincu les Filles, leur gentil
Babil et la luxure amusante — et sa pente
Vers la Chair de garçon vierge que cela tente
D’aimer les seins légers et ce gentil babil;
Il a vaincu la Femme belle, au cœur subtil,
Étalant ses bras frais et sa gorge excitante;
Il a vaincu l’Enfer et rentre sous la tente
Avec un lourd trophée à son bras puéril,
Avec la lance qui perça le Flanc suprême!
Il a guéri le roi, le voici roi lui-même,
Et prêtre du très saint Trésor essentiel.
En robe d’or il adore, gloire et symbole,
Le vase pur où resplendit le Sang réel.
— Et, ô ces voix d’enfants chantant dans la coupole!
Parsifal has overcome the Maidens, their pretty chatter and amusing lust, and his own leaning toward the Flesh, the leaning of a virgin boy whom all that tempts to love light breasts and that pretty chatter; he has overcome the beautiful Woman with the subtle heart, spreading her cool arms and her exciting bosom; he has overcome Hell and returns to the tent with a heavy trophy on his boyish arm, with the lance that pierced the supreme Side! He has healed the king, and here he is king himself, and priest of the most holy essential Treasure. In a robe of gold he adores, glory and symbol, the pure vessel where the real Blood shines. And, oh, those children’s voices singing in the dome!
Verlaine’s sonnet on Wagner’s last opera, written for the Revue wagnérienne, a Paris journal devoted to Wagner, and printed there in January 1886, gives the plot in thirteen lines: the flower-maidens, the temptress Kundry, the recovered spear, the healed king. The fourteenth line is the boys’ choir in the dome of the Grail temple. Eliot’s note cites the sonnet. In the poem the line comes straight after the ballad about Mrs Porter, which Eliot’s note says was “reported to me from Sydney, Australia.” In Wagner, as in the romances Jessie Weston discusses in From Ritual to Romance, the book Eliot names in the note at the head of his notes, the knight heals the wounded king; the poem’s Fisher King is still fishing at line 425, “with the arid plain behind me.”
References Verlaine, “Parsifal”; Weston, From Ritual to Romance, ch. II.
In the poem: line 202
Read it whole: ‘Parsifal’ (from Amour, 1888: ‘Et, ô ces voix d’enfants chantant dans la coupole!’) at fr.wikisource.org
Fragment 104a (Hesperus)
Sappho · c. 600 BC · Greek
Two lines to the evening star, which brings the sheep, the goat and the child home.
Ἔσπερε πάντα φέρων ὄσα φαίνολις ἐσκέδασ’ Αὔως,
φέρεις ὄιν, φέρεις αἶγα, φέρεις ἄπυ μάτερι παῖδα.
Evening star, bringing back everything that shining dawn scattered: you bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring the child back to its mother.
Two lines that survive in quotation: Demetrius, an ancient Greek critic, gives them in his treatise On Style (section 141) for the charm of their repeated “you bring,” all but the second half of the first line, which is preserved in the Etymologicum Magnum, a Byzantine dictionary. Eliot’s note says his lines “may not appear as exact as Sappho’s,” and that he had in mind the “longshore” or “dory” fisherman “who returns at nightfall.” Byron imitated the lines in Don Juan (Canto III, stanza 107), and Stevenson’s “Requiem” has “Home is the sailor, home from sea”; both have been cited as English links between Sappho and Eliot’s lines 220–221.
References Sappho, fr. 104; Demetrius, On Style, § 141; Wharton, Sappho (1887), fr. 95; Byron, Don Juan III.107; Stevenson, “Requiem”.
In the poem: line 221
Read it whole: Sappho fr. 104a (Hesperus, ‘bringing back all that bright dawn scattered’) at en.wikisource.org
Pervigilium Veneris (The Vigil of Venus)
Anonymous · 2nd–5th century AD · Latin
“Quando fiam ceu chelidon”: when shall I be like the swallow? The poem’s “ceu” (like) is Eliot’s; the Latin text, quoted above, has “uti,” and later editions of the poem were changed to it.
iam loquaces ore rauco stagna cycni perstrepunt;
adsonat Terei puella subter umbram populi,
ut putes motus amoris ore dici musico,
et neges queri sororem de marito barbaro.
illa cantat, nos tacemus. quando ver venit meum?
quando fiam uti chelidon, ut tacere desinam?
perdidi Musam tacendo, nec me Phoebus respicit.
sic Amyclas, cum tacerent, perdidit silentium.
cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet.
Now the chattering swans with hoarse voices make the pools ring; Tereus’s girl sings under the poplar’s shade, so that you would think the stirrings of love were spoken by her musical mouth, and not that a sister complained of a barbarous husband. She sings; we are silent. When does my spring come? When shall I become like the swallow, so that I may stop being silent? By silence I have lost the Muse, and Phoebus does not regard me. So Amyclae, when its people kept silent, was destroyed by silence. Tomorrow let him love who has never loved, and let him who has loved love tomorrow.
A Latin poem of ninety-three lines, written some time between the second and fifth centuries AD, for the eve of the spring festival of Venus; its refrain is “cras amet qui numquam amavit,” tomorrow let him love who has never loved. After the flowers and the nymphs, the last stanza turns to the poet’s own silence and envies the swallow, who is Procne, sister of the raped Philomela. Eliot’s note cites the poem and adds “Cf. Philomela in Parts II and III.” His 1922 text reads “ceu” where the poem has “uti,” and so do his manuscripts; the line was changed to “uti” in Collected Poems 1909–1935 (1936).
References Pervigilium Veneris, lines 85–93; Mackail, Pervigilium Veneris (1913), introduction; Facsimile (1971), pp. 80–81; Rainey, Annotated Waste Land, note on line 428.
In the poem: line 429
Read it whole: Pervigilium Veneris (‘Quando fiam uti chelidon’; refrain ‘Cras amet qui numquam amavit’) at la.wikisource.org
El Desdichado (from Les Chimères)
Gérard de Nerval · 1854 · French
“Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie”: the Prince of Aquitaine with the ruined tower.
Je suis le Ténébreux, — le Veuf, — l’Inconsolé,
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la Tour abolie:
Ma seule Étoile est morte, — et mon luth constellé
Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.
Dans la nuit du Tombeau, Toi qui m’as consolé,
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie,
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon cœur désolé,
Et la treille où le Pampre à la Rose s’allie.
Suis-je Amour ou Phébus? . . . Lusignan ou Biron?
Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la Reine;
J’ai rêvé dans la Grotte où nage la Sirène . . .
Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron:
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée
Les soupirs de la Sainte et les cris de la Fée.
I am the dark one, the widower, the unconsoled, the Prince of Aquitaine with the ruined tower: my only star is dead, and my starred lute bears the black sun of Melancholy. In the night of the tomb, you who consoled me, give me back Posillipo and the Italian sea, the flower that so pleased my desolate heart, and the arbour where the vine and the rose are joined. Am I Love or Phoebus? Lusignan or Biron? My brow is still red from the queen’s kiss; I have dreamed in the grotto where the siren swims. And twice, victorious, I have crossed the Acheron, modulating in turn on Orpheus’s lyre the sighs of the saint and the cries of the fairy.
The opening sonnet of Nerval’s Chimères, first printed in December 1853, in the last years of his illness; he hanged himself in a Paris street on 26 January 1855. The title, a Spanish word, is usually traced to the shield of the Disinherited Knight in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe; in Spanish it means “unfortunate” rather than “disinherited.” The “tour abolie” is often read as the Tower card of the Tarot. In the last lines the poet says he has twice crossed Acheron, the river of the dead, and come back, and still plays Orpheus’s lyre. Eliot’s note cites the sonnet; he quotes its second line only.
References Nerval, “El Desdichado”; BnF, “El Desdichado”; Scott, Ivanhoe, ch. 8.
In the poem: line 430
Read it whole: ‘El Desdichado’ (‘Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie’) at fr.wikisource.org
Phlébas, le Phénicien, pendant quinze jours noyé,
Oubliait les cris des mouettes et la houle de Cornouaille,
Et les profits et les pertes, et la cargaison d’étain:
Un courant de sous-mer l’emporta très loin,
Le repassant aux étapes de sa vie antérieure.
Figurez-vous donc, c’était un sort pénible;
Cependant, ce fut jadis un bel homme, de haute taille.
Phlebas the Phoenician, drowned a fortnight, forgot the cries of the gulls and the swell off Cornwall, and the profits and the losses, and the cargo of tin: an undersea current carried him very far away, taking him back through the stages of his former life. Just imagine, it was a hard fate; and yet he was once a handsome man, and tall.
Eliot published four poems in French; this is one of them, written in 1917, printed in the Little Review in September 1918 and then in his two collections of 1920, Ara Vos Prec and Poems. A shabby waiter tells a customer about sheltering from a shower with a small girl when he was seven; the customer, disgusted, gives him ten sous to go and wash. Then, without transition, come seven lines on the drowned Phoenician Phlebas. Eliot turned those seven lines into the ten of Part IV, dropping the tin and Cornwall and adding “Gentile or Jew” and the address to the man at the wheel. His “Cornouaille”, without an s, is strictly the district of Brittany; the cargo of tin points to Cornwall, and that is how the line is read. In the draft these lines closed a long narrative of a shipwreck; Pound cut the narrative and insisted that Phlebas stay.
References Poems (1920), “Dans le Restaurant”; The Little Review, September 1918; Ara Vos Prec (1920), p. 27; Schuchard, “Eliot in the Wartime Classroom”; Facsimile (1971), the typescript of Part IV; Pound, Letters, ed. Paige, no. 183.
In the poem: line 312
The Death of Saint Narcissus
T. S. Eliot · 1915 (withdrawn from publication) · English
“Come in under the shadow of this red rock.”
Come under the shadow of this gray rock—
Come in under the shadow of this gray rock,
The poem was set in type for Poetry (Chicago) in 1915 and withdrawn in proof; it was first published in 1950. It is about a saint who believes he has been a tree, a fish and a young girl, and who dies pierced with arrows. Two manuscripts, a rough draft and a fair copy, survived among the papers Eliot sent in 1922 to John Quinn, the New York lawyer and collector, with the Waste Land drafts; they are now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library and are reproduced in the 1971 facsimile. After these two lines the speaker promises to show the listener something other than the listener’s own shadow, sprawling on the sand at daybreak or leaping behind the fire against a red rock. The Waste Land keeps the second line, with “gray” changed to “red,” and reshapes the first. The poem is still in copyright, so only its first two lines are given here.
References Poems Written in Early Youth (1950); Gallup, entry for Poems Written in Early Youth; Facsimile (1971), pp. 90–97 and introduction; Southam, Guide, note on line 26.
In the poem: line 26
Dead, long dead,
Long dead!
And my heart is a handful of dust,
And the wheels go over my head,
And my bones are shaken with pain,
For into a shallow grave they are thrust,
Only a yard beneath the street . . . (Maud, II.v)
O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South,
Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves,
And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee. (The Princess)
Eliot’s notes cite neither poem. The mad speaker of Maud, who imagines himself buried under a city street with the traffic going over him, is the source usually given for “a handful of dust” (line 30), and the passage has been compared with the “rats’ alley” of Part II. The Prince’s song in The Princess, with Swinburne’s “Itylus” (“Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow”) beside it, is the source usually given for “O swallow swallow” at line 429, the English half of a line whose Latin half is from the Pervigilium Veneris. In his essay “In Memoriam” (1936) Eliot wrote that Tennyson “had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton.”
References Tennyson, Maud, Part II, section V; Tennyson, The Princess, the song “O Swallow, Swallow”; Swinburne, “Itylus”; Eliot, “In Memoriam” (1936).
In the poem: line 30, line 429
Plays
The White Devil
John Webster · 1612 · English
Cornelia’s dirge (“keep the wolf far thence”) and Flamineo on the spider and the winding-sheet.
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. (V.iv)
O men,
That lie upon your death-beds, and are haunted
With howling wives! ne’er trust them; they’ll re-marry
Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, ere the spider
Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs. (V.vi)
Webster’s tragedy is about Vittoria Corombona, the “white devil” of the title, and her lover Brachiano, who has her husband and his own wife murdered. Vittoria’s mother Cornelia sings the dirge over her son Marcello, killed by his brother Flamineo; Flamineo makes the speech about widows in the last scene, rising from a feigned death after Vittoria and her maid Zanche have fired at him pistols they took to be loaded. Eliot’s notes cite the dirge at line 74 and Flamineo’s speech at line 408. At line 74 the poem turns Webster’s wolf, “foe to men,” into a Dog, “friend to men.” Eliot’s “Whispers of Immortality” (1918) begins “Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin.”
References Webster, The White Devil, V.iv and V.vi; Poems (1920), “Whispers of Immortality”.
In the poem: line 74, line 408
Read it whole: The White Devil V.iv, Cornelia’s dirge (‘Call for the robin-redbreast and the wren’); and The Devil’s Law-Case III.ii (‘Is the wind in that door still?’) at gutenberg.org
Is the wind in that door still?
Act III scene ii. Romelio, disguised as a physician, bribes the two surgeons attending the wounded Contarino to leave him alone with the patient, and stabs him; the surgeons, who have kept near, come back. When Contarino groans, one of them asks the other “Is the wind in that door still?”, an idiom for “so that is how things stand?”: the man is alive. The stab has drained the old wound, and Contarino recovers. Eliot’s note quotes the line with “Webster” for its source and does not name the play.
References Webster, The Devil’s Law-Case, III.ii.
In the poem: line 118
The Tempest, Act I scene ii
William Shakespeare · c. 1611 · English
Ariel’s song (“Those are pearls that were his eyes”) and Ferdinand, weeping on the bank for his father’s wreck, hearing “This music crept by me upon the waters.”
FERDINAND: Where should this music be? i’ th’ air or th’ earth?
It sounds no more: and sure, it waits upon
Some god o’ th’ 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 . . .
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.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,—Ding-dong, bell.
Ferdinand, washed ashore after the shipwreck, believes his father Alonso drowned; the song Ariel sings to him, unseen, describes a drowned man turned to coral and pearl. The song is not true. Alonso is alive, and the play ends with father and son reunited; in the poem the Phoenician Sailor of line 47 and Phlebas in Part IV stay drowned. Eliot’s notes cite the scene at lines 192 and 257, and his note on the pearls of line 125 refers them back to lines 37 and 48. His note on Tiresias says the Phoenician Sailor “is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples.” Ferdinand’s “the king my father’s wreck” becomes “the king my brother’s wreck” and “the king my father’s death” for the fisherman on the canal bank behind the gashouse (lines 191–192).
References Shakespeare, The Tempest I.ii and V.i.
In the poem: line 48, line 125, line 191, line 257
Read it whole: The Tempest I.ii (‘Full fathom five thy father lies’; ‘Sitting on a bank, / Weeping again the king my father’s wreck’; ‘This music crept by me upon the waters’) at shakespeare.mit.edu
Antony and Cleopatra, Act II scene ii
William Shakespeare · c. 1607 · English
“The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne.”
The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar’d all description.
Antony’s officer Enobarbus describes Cleopatra’s first appearance to Antony, in her barge on the river Cydnus; Eliot’s note on line 77 cites the speech. The opening of Part II keeps the speech’s manner, its blank verse and its inventory of gold, perfume and light, but moves the scene indoors, to a woman at her dressing table. The barge of Elizabeth and Leicester at line 279, for which Eliot’s note cites the historian J. A. Froude, has been compared with this one.
References Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra II.ii; Coote (1985).
In the poem: line 77
Read it whole: Antony and Cleopatra II.ii (‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne’) at shakespeare.mit.edu
Hamlet, Act IV scene v
William Shakespeare · c. 1600 · English
Ophelia’s exit: “Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.”
I hope all will be well. We must be patient: but I cannot choose but weep, to think they should lay him i’ the cold ground. My brother shall know of it: and so I thank you for your good counsel. Come, my coach! Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.
Ophelia, mad after her father’s death, leaves the stage with these words; she comes back once more in the same scene, with flowers, and her drowning is reported by Gertrude in scene vii. Eliot’s notes say nothing of the line, which follows the pub’s goodnights of lines 170–171 (“Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. / Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.”) without a break and ends Part II.
References Shakespeare, Hamlet IV.v and IV.vii.
In the poem: line 172
Read it whole: Hamlet IV.v (Ophelia: ‘Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies’) at shakespeare.mit.edu
Women Beware Women, Act II scene ii
Thomas Middleton · c. 1621 · English
The game of chess played downstairs while a woman is forced upstairs.
LIVIA: Alas, poor widow, I shall be too hard for thee.
MOTHER: Y’are cunning at the game, I’ll be sworn, madam.
LIVIA: It will be found so, ere I give you over. . . . Did not I say my duke would fetch you o’er, widow? . . . I’ve given thee blind mate twice.
Livia, a rich widow acting as the Duke of Florence’s go-between, keeps Bianca’s mother-in-law at chess while the Duke forces himself on Bianca in the gallery above; her remarks on the game double as commentary on what is happening upstairs. Eliot’s note on line 137 cites “the game of chess in Middleton’s Women beware Women”; the title of Part II has also been connected with Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624), a satire on Spain that ran for nine days at the Globe before the Privy Council stopped it.
References Middleton, Women Beware Women, II.ii; O’Callaghan (2009), ch. 8.
In the poem: line 137
Read it whole: Women Beware Women II.ii (the chess game) at archive.org
The Parliament of Bees
John Day · printed 1641; date of writing unknown · English
“A noise of horns and hunting” that brings Actaeon to Diana.
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 . . .
Twelve “characters,” sketches of good and bad men, who appear as bees. The lines Eliot’s note quotes are spoken by Polypragmus, “a mere vainglorious reveller,” describing the shows he means to stage in his hall. A noise of horns and hunting is to bring Actaeon to Diana “in the spring,” where all shall see her naked, and Actaeon’s hounds are then to tear their master. The story is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the hunter Actaeon comes upon the goddess Diana bathing, is turned into a stag and is killed by his own dogs. In Day “the spring” is the water Diana bathes in; in Eliot’s line it is the season. Eliot keeps the shape of Day’s sentence and puts “horns and motors” for the hunt, and Sweeney and Mrs Porter for Actaeon and Diana.
References Day, The Parliament of Bees, Character 3; Ovid, Metamorphoses III 138–252.
In the poem: line 197
Read it whole: The Parliament of Bees (Character III, Polypragmus the Plush Bee: ‘A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring / Actaeon to Diana in the spring’) at archive.org
What bird so sings, yet so does wail?
O ’tis the ravish’d nightingale.
Jug, jug, jug, jug, tereu! she cries,
And still her woes at midnight rise.
The Elizabethan convention that the nightingale sings “jug jug” and cries “tereu,” calling on Tereus, the king who raped Philomela, is at its plainest in this song from Lyly’s court comedy. The songs in Lyly’s plays were first printed in the collected edition of 1632, and whether he wrote them is disputed. Eliot does not cite Lyly. “Jug Jug” at line 103 and the birdsong at lines 203–206 use the convention, and at line 205, between the bird’s “Jug jug” and its “Tereu,” stands “So rudely forc’d.”
References Lyly, Campaspe, V.i (Bond, vol. II, p. 351); Greg (1905).
In the poem: line 103, line 204, line 206
The Spanish Tragedy, Act IV
Thomas Kyd · c. 1587 · English
Hieronimo, whose son Horatio has been murdered, agrees to provide the court entertainment, a tragedy he wrote as a student, in which he will take his revenge; “I’ll fit you” means both “I’ll oblige you” and “I’ll pay you out.” “Hieronimo is mad againe” is the subtitle on the title page of the 1615 quarto.
HIERONIMO: Why then, I’ll fit you; say no more.
When I was young, I gave my mind
And plied myself to fruitless poetry;
Which though it profit the professor naught,
Yet is it passing pleasing to the world.
Hieronimo, Knight Marshal of Spain, whose son Horatio has been murdered and hanged in an arbour, is asked by the murderers to write a play for the court. “I’ll fit you” means two things at once: I’ll give you what you want, and I’ll pay you back. The play he supplies is written, as the early quartos’ note to the reader says, “in sundry languages,” and in performing it the murderers are stabbed for real. “Hieronimo is mad againe” is from the title page of the 1615 quarto and of the reprints that followed it. Eliot’s note cites the play.
References Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, IV.i and IV.iv, and the 1615 quarto’s title page.
In the poem: line 432
Read it whole: The Spanish Tragedy IV.i (Hieronimo: ‘Why then, I’ll fit you’) at gutenberg.org
Operas
Tristan und Isolde
Richard Wagner · 1865 (first performed Munich) · German
The sailor’s song (lines 31–34) and the shepherd’s “Öd und leer das Meer,” desolate and empty the sea (line 42).
Westwärts
schweift der Blick;
ostwärts
streicht das Schiff.
Frisch weht der Wind
der Heimat zu:
mein irisch Kind,
wo weilest du?
Sind’s deiner Seufzer Wehen,
die mir die Segel blähen?
Wehe, wehe, du Wind!
Weh, ach wehe, mein Kind!
Irische Maid,
du wilde, minnige Maid!
. . .
HIRT: Öd und leer das Meer!
Westward the gaze wanders; eastward the ship runs. Fresh blows the wind toward home: my Irish child, where do you linger? Is it the breath of your sighs that fills my sails? Woe, woe, you wind! Woe, ah woe, my child! Irish maid, you wild, lovely maid! . . . SHEPHERD: Desolate and empty the sea!
Eliot’s notes cite the libretto by act and verse: I, verses 5–8, and III, verse 24. The young sailor’s song is the first thing sung in the opera; the sailor sings it unseen, from the masthead, above the deck where Isolde lies. The shepherd’s “Öd und leer das Meer!” comes in Act III, answering Tristan’s servant Kurwenal, who has asked whether any ship is in sight while Tristan lies wounded and waiting for Isolde. In the poem the hyacinth garden (lines 35–41) falls between the two quotations. Eliot heard Tristan, or its music in concert, in Boston in the autumn of 1909, at the start of his graduate year at Harvard, and wrote a poem about it, “Opera,” dated November 1909. Stravinsky, who met him in December 1956, wrote in “Memories of T. S. Eliot” (Esquire, August 1965) that Tristan “must have been one of the most passionate experiences of his life.” Ludwig II of Bavaria, whose money paid for the first performance, was found dead in 1886 in the Starnberger See, the lake of line 8.
References Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, I.i and III.i; Inventions of the March Hare, “Opera”; Crawford, Young Eliot; Brooker (2020); Stravinsky (1965), as quoted in Brooker (2020); Southam, Guide, note on line 8.
In the poem: line 31, line 42
Read it whole: Tristan und Isolde, libretto: Act I sailor’s song (‘Frisch weht der Wind der Heimat zu, mein irisch Kind’) and Act III ‘Öd und leer das Meer!’ at projekt-gutenberg.org
Götterdämmerung, Act III scene 1
Richard Wagner · 1876 (first performed Bayreuth) · German
“Weialala leia / Wallala leialala”: the Rhine-daughters’ refrain.
Frau Sonne
sendet lichte Strahlen;
Nacht liegt in der Tiefe:
einst war sie hell,
da heil und hehr
des Vaters Gold noch in ihr glänzte.
Rheingold!
Klares Gold!
Wie hell du einstens strahltest,
hehrer Stern der Tiefe!
Weialala leia,
wallala leialala.
Lady Sun sends bright rays; night lies in the depths: once they were bright, when whole and noble the father’s gold still shone in them. Rhinegold! Clear gold! How brightly you once shone, noble star of the deep! Weialala leia, wallala leialala.
Götterdämmerung is the last of the four operas of Wagner’s Ring. Its third act opens with the three Rhine-daughters swimming and singing for the gold that the dwarf Alberich stole from them at the start of the first opera, and asking the hero Siegfried, when he appears, to give back the ring made from it. Their refrain is sung syllables without meaning, which Wagner’s printed poem leaves out and the scores supply at length; Eliot’s Thames-daughters sing two lines of it at 277–278 and 290–291. Eliot’s note on line 266 reads: “The Song of the (three) Thames-daughters begins here. . . . V. Götterdämmerung, III, i: the Rhine-daughters.”
References Wagner, Götterdämmerung, III.i; Götterdämmerung, Schott libretto; Götterdämmerung, vocal score (Klindworth).
In the poem: line 277, line 290
Read it whole: Götterdämmerung, Act III scene 1, the Rhinemaidens (‘Weialala leia, wallala leialala’) at projekt-gutenberg.org
Scripture
Ezekiel 2 and 37
The Bible (King James Version) · 6th century BC; translation 1611 · English
Ezekiel 2:1 is the address “Son of man” (line 20); chapter 37, the valley of dry bones, is behind “Dry bones can harm no one” (line 391).
And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee. (2:1)
The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest. (37:1–3)
Ezekiel, prophet of the Babylonian exile, is addressed by God some ninety times as “son of man,” that is, mortal man. Eliot’s note on line 20 cites 2:1, where God first speaks to him. The “heap of broken images” of line 22 has been traced to chapter 6, where the idols of Israel are to be destroyed (“your images shall be broken”), and the dry bones of line 391 to chapter 37, where the bones are joined, clothed with flesh and made to live.
References King James Bible, Ezekiel 2:1, 6:4–6 and 37:1–10; Southam, Guide, note on line 22; Rainey, Annotated Waste Land, note on line 22.
In the poem: line 20, line 22, line 391
Ecclesiastes 12
The Bible (King James Version) · 3rd century BC; translation 1611 · English
“the cricket no relief”: the chapter on old age and death.
Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets: or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.
Eliot’s note on line 23 cites verse 5, where “the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail”; the poem has a cricket in the grasshopper’s place. The chapter is an allegory of old age and death, and its pitcher broken at the fountain and wheel broken at the cistern have been heard again in the “empty cisterns and exhausted wells” of line 385.
References King James Bible, Ecclesiastes 12:1–8.
In the poem: line 23
Isaiah 32 and 38
The Bible (King James Version) · 8th century BC; translation 1611 · English
Isaiah’s “shadow of a great rock in a weary land” beside line 25, “There is shadow under this red rock”; his message to the dying king Hezekiah, “Set thine house in order,” beside line 426, “Shall I at least set my lands in order?”
And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. (32:2)
In those days was Hezekiah sick unto death. And Isaiah the prophet the son of Amoz came unto him, and said unto him, Thus saith the LORD, Set thine house in order: for thou shalt die, and not live. (38:1)
Eliot’s notes do not cite Isaiah. The “shadow of a great rock in a weary land” of chapter 32 has long been recognised behind the “shadow under this red rock” of line 25; in Isaiah the shadow is promised together with “rivers of water in a dry place,” and the red rock of the poem gives shade but no water. In chapter 38 King Hezekiah, told to set his house in order because he will die, turns his face to the wall and weeps, and is granted fifteen more years. At line 426 the speaker, fishing on the shore, asks “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” and gets no answer; Eliot’s note on the line before cites Weston’s chapter on the Fisher King.
References King James Bible, Isaiah 32:2 and 38:1–5; Southam, Guide, note on line 25.
In the poem: line 25, line 426
Read it whole: Isaiah 32:2 (‘the shadow of a great rock in a weary land’) and 38:1 (‘Set thine house in order’) at en.wikisource.org
Luke 24: the road to Emmaus
The Bible (King James Version) · 1st century AD; translation 1611 · English
“Who is the third who walks always beside you?”
And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs. And they talked together of all these things which had happened. And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them. But their eyes were holden that they should not know him. . . . And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.
Eliot’s note at the head of his notes to Part V names “the journey to Emmaus” as the first of its three themes. On the day of the resurrection two disciples walk from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus, and a stranger joins them on the road; they know him as Jesus only when he breaks bread at supper, and at that moment he vanishes. Eliot’s lines take the moment on the road, before the recognition. His note on line 360 adds a second source for the figure who walks beside the travellers: an account of an Antarctic expedition, “I think one of Shackleton’s,” in which the exhausted party “had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.”
References King James Bible, Luke 24:13–31.
In the poem: line 360
Read it whole: Luke 24:13-35 (the road to Emmaus) at en.wikisource.org
Psalm 137
The Book of Common Prayer (Coverdale’s psalter) · 6th century BC; Coverdale’s translation, 1530s, as in the Book of Common Prayer · English
“By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.”
By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered thee, O Sion. As for our harps, we hanged them up upon the trees that are therein. For they that led us away captive required of us then a song, and melody in our heaviness: Sing us one of the songs of Sion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
The psalm of the Jewish exiles in Babylon, whose captors ask them for a song, and who ask in return how they can sing the Lord’s song in a strange land. Eliot’s line follows the Prayer Book’s wording, “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,” not the King James Version’s “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept.” Leman is Lac Léman, Lake Geneva: Eliot finished the poem at Lausanne, on the lake, in November and December 1921, on three months’ leave from Lloyds Bank, and puts the lake in place of Babylon’s waters. “Leman” is also an old English word for a lover, and the double sense has often been noticed.
References Book of Common Prayer, Psalm 137:1–4; King James Bible, Psalm 137:1; Southam, Guide, note on line 182; Crawford, Young Eliot.
In the poem: line 182
Read it whole: Psalm 137 (‘By the rivers of Babylon’) at en.wikisource.org
The Fire Sermon (Ādittapariyāya Sutta)
The Buddha, translated by Henry Clarke Warren · 5th century BC; translation 1896 · Pali; English
The title of Part III and “Burning burning burning burning.”
All things, O priests, are on fire. And what, O priests, are all these things which are on fire? 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 passion, 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.
In the account Warren translates from the Mahāvagga, a book of the Pali scriptures, the Buddha preached the sermon to a thousand former fire-worshipping ascetics on Gayā Head, a hill near the town of Gaya in Bihar, India, soon after his enlightenment. Eliot studied Sanskrit and Indian philosophy at Harvard in 1911–13 and knew Warren’s Buddhism in Translations (1896). His note says the sermon “corresponds in importance to the Sermon on the Mount,” sends the reader to Warren for the complete text, and calls Warren “one of the great pioneers of Buddhist studies in the occident.” Part III takes its title from the sermon, and line 308 its word, “Burning.”
References Warren, Buddhism in Translations, § 73, pp. 351–53; Kearns (1987).
In the poem: line 308
Read it whole: Buddhism in Translations, section 73, ‘The Fire-Sermon’ (‘All things, O priests, are on fire’) at en.wikisource.org
Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 5.2: what the thunder says
Anonymous (Vedic) · c. 700 BC · Sanskrit
“DA,” the thunder’s one syllable, at lines 401, 411 and 418; “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.” at line 433; and “Shantih shantih shantih” at line 434.
The threefold offspring of Prajāpati, gods, men and demons, lived with their father as students. When they had finished, the gods said: Teach us. He spoke one syllable, “Da,” and asked: Did you understand? They said: We understood; you told us, dāmyata, restrain yourselves. Then the men: Teach us. “Da.” We understood; you told us, datta, give. Then the demons: Teach us. “Da.” We understood; you told us, dayadhvam, be compassionate. This is what the divine voice, the thunder, repeats: da, da, da: restrain yourselves, give, be compassionate. (Paraphrased from the Sanskrit.)
Eliot read the Upanishads in Sanskrit at Harvard under Charles Lanman in 1911–13. His note gives the reference as Brihadaranyaka 5, 1 (the passage is 5.2 in the standard numbering) and sends the reader to Paul Deussen’s German translation of 1897. In the fable each group hears in the one syllable the command it needs. Eliot puts the three commands in a different order, glosses them in his note as “Give, sympathise, control,” and follows each with a passage in which the speaker answers it. “Shantih,” his last note says, is “a formal ending to an Upanishad,” and “The Peace which passeth understanding” is “a feeble translation of the content of this word”; later editions soften this to “our equivalent to this word.”
References Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad V.2; Poems 1909–1925, the last note (on “Shantih”); Kearns (1987).
In the poem: line 400, line 402, line 411, line 418, line 433, line 434
Read it whole: Brihadaranyaka Upanishad V.2 (the thunder’s ‘Da, da, da’: datta, dayadhvam, damyata) at archive.org
Novels
When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can sooth 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.
Olivia, the Vicar’s daughter, seduced and abandoned by Squire Thornhill, sings this at her mother’s request, the family sitting on the bank where she first met him. Goldsmith’s song says the only thing left to a betrayed woman is to die. Eliot’s note cites the song. He takes its first line and adds “and” to fill out his pentameter (Goldsmith’s is a four-beat line); the typist then “smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone.” The scene has been read as contempt for her, and also as the reverse: she does not die, as the song says a fallen woman must.
References Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, ch. 24.
In the poem: line 253
Read it whole: The Vicar of Wakefield, ch. 24 (‘When lovely woman stoops to folly’) at gutenberg.org
“And I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.”
Betty Higden, a poor old woman who minds children for a living, is praising Sloppy, a foundling brought up in the workhouse who lives with her and turns her mangle, and who reads her the newspaper and does all the voices in the police-court reports. “He Do the Police in Different Voices” is typed as a title at the head of the typescripts of Parts I and II in the drafts; it did not survive to publication. The novel opens on the Thames, with Gaffer Hexam and his daughter in a boat searching the water for drowned bodies.
References Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, bk. I, chs. 1 and 16; Facsimile (1971), pp. 4 and 10.
In the poem: title page
Read it whole: Our Mutual Friend, Book I ch. 16 (‘He do the Police in different voices’) at gutenberg.org
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad · 1899 · English
The epigraph on the typescript, replaced before publication by the passage from Petronius.
Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—
“The horror! The horror!”
Kurtz’s last words stood on the title page of the typescript, as the poem’s epigraph. Kurtz is the trader whom the narrator, Marlow, has gone up the river to find. Pound, returning the poem in January 1922, wrote that he doubted whether Conrad was “weighty enough to stand the citation.” Eliot answered that it was “much the most appropriate I can find, and somewhat elucidative,” and Pound withdrew the objection (the exchange is printed in the 1971 facsimile and in the Letters, volume 1); Eliot nevertheless replaced it with the passage from Petronius that stands there now. “The heart of light” at line 41 has been read as an inversion of Conrad’s title. The story is told on a yawl at anchor in the Thames estuary at dusk, with London upriver.
References Conrad, Heart of Darkness, part III; Facsimile (1971), the title page of the typescript and the editor’s notes; Pound, Letters, ed. Paige, nos. 181–183; Letters, vol. 1, Pound to Eliot, 24 January 1922, and Eliot to Pound, January 1922.
In the poem: title page
Read it whole: Heart of Darkness, part III (‘The horror! The horror!’) at gutenberg.org
Crome Yellow, chapter 27
Aldous Huxley · 1921 · English
“Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana”: the name behind Madame Sosostris.
Mr. Scogan had been accommodated in a little canvas hut. Dressed in a black skirt and a red bodice, with a yellow-and-red bandana handkerchief tied round his black wig, he looked—sharp-nosed, brown, and wrinkled—like the Bohemian Hag of Frith’s Derby Day. A placard pinned to the curtain of the doorway announced the presence within the tent of “Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana.”
Huxley’s country-house satire was published in November 1921. Its Mr. Scogan, a cynical guest who dresses up as an old gypsy woman to tell fortunes at the charity fair in the park under the name “Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana,” is the source usually given for Madame Sosostris. Asked about it by the critic Grover Smith, Eliot wrote to him on 10 March 1952 that he was “almost certain” he had taken the name from Crome Yellow without being conscious of doing so. Lawrence Rainey (Revisiting The Waste Land, 2005) has doubted it: he dates the typescript of Parts I and II to May 1921 from its paper and typewriter, before Huxley had finished the novel, and suggests the name was Eliot’s own. Huxley and Eliot had known each other since the war years through Lady Ottoline Morrell’s circle at Garsington, her house near Oxford.
References Huxley, Crome Yellow, ch. 27; Rainey, Annotated Waste Land, note on line 43; Grover Smith (1996); Rainey, Revisiting The Waste Land, ch. 1; Crawford, Young Eliot.
In the poem: line 43
Prose
Satyricon, chapter 48
Petronius · 1st century AD · Latin, with Greek
The epigraph: the Sibyl who wanted to die.
Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω.
For I myself, with my own eyes, saw the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said to her, “Sibyl, what do you want?” she answered, “I want to die.”
The speaker is Trimalchio, a freed slave grown enormously rich, boasting to his guests between courses; his dinner party is the longest continuous episode in what survives of the Satyricon. The Sibyl of Cumae, as the Roman poet Ovid tells it (Metamorphoses XIV), asked Apollo for as many years as there were grains in a heap of dust she had scooped up, and forgot to ask for youth to go with them; she foresees that she will shrink until only her voice is left. The typescript of the poem carried a different epigraph, from the novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, ending “The horror! the horror!”; Ezra Pound, who cut the poem, doubted that Conrad was weighty enough for the place, and Eliot put Petronius in its place before publication.
References Petronius, Satyricon 48; Ovid, Metamorphoses XIV 130–153; Facsimile (1971), the title page of the typescript; Pound, Letters, ed. Paige, nos. 181–182.
In the poem: title page
Read it whole: Satyricon, ch. 48 (Trimalchio on the Sibyl at Cumae; the epigraph) at thelatinlibrary.com
Confessions, Books III and X
Augustine of Hippo, translated by E. B. Pusey · c. 400; translation 1838 · Latin; English
“To Carthage then I came”; “O Lord Thou pluckest me out.”
To Carthage I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. (III.1)
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. (X.34)
Augustine’s account, in Book III, of his student years at Carthage, “a cauldron of unholy loves,” and, in Book X, of the pull that beautiful things still have on a man trying to keep his eyes on God. In the Latin, sartago, a cauldron or frying pan, plays on Carthago. Eliot’s words are Pusey’s translation of 1838, with the first sentence rearranged in his note as “to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears.” His second Augustine note says that setting “these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism,” Augustine and the Buddha, side by side at the end of Part III “is not an accident.”
References Augustine, Confessions III.1 and X.34; Rainey, Annotated Waste Land, note on line 307.
In the poem: line 307, line 309
Read it whole: Confessions III.1 (‘To Carthage then I came’) and X.34 (‘Thou pluckest me out’) at gutenberg.org
Essays
Blick ins Chaos (In Sight of Chaos)
Hermann Hesse · 1920 · German
The essay behind the “hooded hordes” and what Eliot’s note on Part V calls “the present decay of eastern Europe.”
Schon ist halb Europa, schon ist zumindest der halbe Osten Europas auf dem Wege zum Chaos, fährt betrunken in heiligem Wahn am Abgrund entlang und singt dazu, singt betrunken und hymnisch wie Dmitri Karamasoff sang. Über diese Lieder lacht der Bürger beleidigt, der Heilige und Seher hört sie mit Tränen.
Already half of Europe, already at least half of eastern Europe, is on the way to chaos, driving drunk in holy delusion along the edge of the abyss and singing as it goes, singing drunken hymns as Dmitri Karamazov sang. The bourgeois laughs at these songs, offended; the saint and the seer hear them with tears.
Three essays written in the aftermath of the First World War, two of them on Dostoevsky, in which Hesse saw the “Russian man” of The Brothers Karamazov as the coming type of a Europe that had lost faith in its own order. Eliot’s note quotes the essay “The Brothers Karamazov, or the Downfall of Europe,” misprinting “in heiligem Wahn” as “im heiligem Wahn.” Stephen Hudson’s English version, In Sight of Chaos (1923), has the two Dostoevsky essays. Eliot visited Hesse at Montagnola in Switzerland in May 1922 and printed him in the first number of the Criterion, the magazine Eliot founded that year.
References Hesse, Blick ins Chaos, “Die Brüder Karamasoff oder Der Untergang Europas”; Hesse, “Recent German Poetry” (1922); Crawford, Young Eliot; Michels (1975).
In the poem: line 367
Read it whole: Blick ins Chaos (1920; ‘Die Brüder Karamasoff oder der Untergang Europas’) / In Sight of Chaos (1923, tr. Stephen Hudson) at archive.org
“bogus scholarship” … “a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail”
Eliot gave the lecture at the University of Minnesota on 30 April 1956, to an audience of about fourteen thousand; it was printed in On Poetry and Poets (1957). Thirty-four years on, Eliot said he had meant only to list his references, “spiking the guns” of critics who had accused his earlier poems of plagiarism. The poem’s first printings, in two magazines, the Criterion and the Dial, had no notes; when Boni & Liveright were to make it a book, it was found too short, and he expanded the notes to fill the pages, with the result he called “bogus scholarship.” He regretted sending readers on “a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail,” and said the notes could not now be removed, since anyone who bought his poems and found them missing would ask for his money back.
References Eliot, “The Frontiers of Criticism” (1956); The Criterion, October 1922; The Dial, November 1922; Southam, Guide, introductory note to The Waste Land; Rainey, Annotated Waste Land, introduction.
In the poem: title page
Anthropology
From Ritual to Romance
Jessie L. Weston · 1920 · English
The book Eliot names in the note at the head of his notes as the source of the title and the plan: the Fisher King, the waste land, the Chapel Perilous.
Weston (1850–1928) was a scholar of Arthurian romance. Following the anthropologist J. G. Frazer’s book The Golden Bough, she argued that the Grail stories preserved the remains of an ancient fertility cult: a king whose wound lays his land waste, a cup and a lance that were sexual symbols before they were Christian relics, and a rite of initiation descended from the mystery cults of Attis and Mithra. Those cults, she says, were carried across the Roman Empire by Syrian merchants, slaves and soldiers (chapter XII). Medievalists have not accepted the argument. Eliot’s note at the head of his notes says the book suggested “not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem,” and recommends it “to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble”; in a lecture of 1956 he said he regretted “having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail.” The chapters the poem draws on most are II (The Task of the Hero), VI (The Symbols, where the Grail hallows become the four suits of the Tarot), IX (The Fisher King) and XIII (The Perilous Chapel).
References Weston, From Ritual to Romance, chs. II, VI, IX, XII and XIII; Eliot, “The Frontiers of Criticism” (1956).
In the poem: title page, line 46, line 386, line 424
Read it whole: From Ritual to Romance (1920) at gutenberg.org
The Golden Bough (Adonis, Attis, Osiris)
Sir James George Frazer · 1906–15 (third edition); one-volume abridgement 1922 · English
The god who dies with the harvest and returns in spring: the Hanged God, the buried effigy, the image thrown into the sea.
Frazer’s twelve-volume study of magic and religion, which Eliot, in the note at the head of his notes, says “has influenced our generation profoundly,” argued that the myths of Adonis, Attis and Osiris tell one story, that of a god who dies with the harvest and returns with the spring, helped by rites in which a king is sacrificed or an effigy is buried or drowned, and that the Church’s Easter was adapted from the spring festivals of Adonis and Attis. The two volumes Eliot names describe the “gardens of Adonis,” pots of quick-sprouting seed carried out with images of the dead god and “flung with them into the sea,” and the effigies of Osiris “made of earth and corn” that the priests buried so that grain would sprout from the god’s body. Eliot’s note on the Tarot says the Hanged Man “is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer”; the corpse planted in Stetson’s garden (line 71) and Phlebas in the current (line 312) have been connected with the same rites. Frazer put a reproduction of The Golden Bough (1834), a painting by the English landscape painter J. M. W. Turner, at the front of his first edition and opened his first page with it, describing it as a view of Lake Nemi. It in fact shows Lake Avernus, with the Sibyl of Cumae, the prophetess of the poem’s epigraph, holding the bough that admits the Trojan hero Aeneas to the underworld.
References Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, bk. I ch. IX, bk. II chs. V and VI, bk. III ch. IV; Frazer, The Golden Bough (1922), chs. XXXIII, XXXVII and XXXIX; Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890), vol. I, frontispiece and p. 1; Victorian Web, Turner’s The Golden Bough; Coote (1985).
In the poem: line 46, line 71, line 312
Read it whole: The Golden Bough (1922 abridgement), chs. 29-33 (Adonis) and 34-37 (Attis); and Adonis, Attis, Osiris at gutenberg.org
Philosophy
Appearance and Reality
F. H. Bradley · 1893 · English
The closed circle of private experience, in Eliot’s note to line 412.
My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it. . . . In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.
The Oxford philosopher on whom Eliot wrote his Harvard doctoral dissertation (finished 1916, never defended, published in 1964). Eliot’s note on “I have heard the key” first quotes Dante’s Ugolino, who hears the door of the tower locked below him (Inferno XXXIII), and then adds this passage from page 346 of Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. The two together gloss “each in his prison,” the lines that follow the thunder’s “Dayadhvam,” sympathise.
References Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346; Dante, Inferno XXXIII 46–48; Eliot, Knowledge and Experience (1964).
In the poem: line 412
Read it whole: Appearance and Reality, ch. XXIII, p. 346 (‘My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings’) at archive.org
History
In the afternoon we were in a barge, watching the games on the river. She was alone with the 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.
Froude quotes a dispatch of 30 June 1561 from the Spanish ambassador, Álvaro de la Quadra, to King Philip II, describing an afternoon on the Thames that June. “Lord Robert” is Robert Dudley, not yet Earl of Leicester; his wife, Amy Robsart, had died the previous September in a fall at Cumnor Place, and the talk of marriage came to nothing. Eliot’s note cites Froude for lines 279–289, quoting the passage with “(The queen)” for Froude’s “She”; his “Vol. I, ch. iv” is the Everyman’s Library edition. The dispatch says nothing of what the barge looked like; its “gilded shell / Red and gold” (lines 282–283) is the poem’s own.
References Froude, Reign of Elizabeth, vol. I, ch. iv; Calendar of State Papers, Simancas, vol. 1, no. 134, Quadra to the King, 30 June 1561.
In the poem: line 279
Read it whole: History of England, reign of Elizabeth, vol. I ch. IV (De Quadra to Philip II: ‘In the afternoon we were in a barge, watching the games on the river’) at archive.org
Memoirs
South: The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition
Sir Ernest Shackleton · 1919 · English
The crossing of South Georgia, when three exhausted men felt “that we were four, not three.”
I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, “Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.” Crean confessed to the same idea.
In May 1916, after the Endurance had been crushed in the ice and the party had come through the open-boat voyage across the Southern Ocean, Shackleton and two of his men, Worsley and Crean, crossed the mountains of South Georgia on foot to reach the whaling station at Stromness. Eliot’s note says he had forgotten which expedition it was, “but I think one of Shackleton’s,” and remembers the party’s “constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted”; Shackleton’s own words are that “it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.” Eliot’s note at the head of his notes to Part V names the journey to Emmaus as one of the section’s three themes. In that story two disciples walking from Jerusalem after the crucifixion are joined by a third whom they do not recognise as the risen Christ; the lines beginning at 360 ask who the third is.
References Shackleton, South, ch. X; King James Bible, Luke 24:13–31.
In the poem: line 360
Read it whole: South (1919), ch. X (‘it seemed to me often that we were four, not three’) at gutenberg.org
A field guide
Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America
Frank M. Chapman · 1895 · English
From the hermit-thrush entry in the ornithologist Frank M. Chapman’s Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America (1895), the words Eliot’s note on this line quotes; the note’s “water-dripping song” is not in Chapman, and no source for the phrase is agreed.
It is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats. . . . Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequaled.
The field guide Eliot had as a boy, a fourteenth-birthday present from his mother in 1902; his copy survives, with his later inscription calling it “a much coveted birthday present.” Eliot’s note quotes the Handbook’s entry (its descriptive paragraphs are signed by Eugene P. Bicknell, one of Chapman’s contributors), gives the bird the scientific name of the day, Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii (now Catharus guttatus), and says he had heard it “in Quebec County.” The phrase “water-dripping song,” which the note puts in quotation marks, is not in Chapman’s entry.
References Chapman, Handbook (1895), p. 400; T. S. Eliot Foundation, “T. S. Eliot’s Gloucester”.
In the poem: line 357
Read it whole: Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America (1895), Hermit Thrush entry at archive.org
Songs
London Bridge Is Falling Down
Traditional · first printed c. 1744 · English
“London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down.”
London Bridge is falling down,
Falling down, falling down,
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair lady.
Build it up with wood and clay . . .
Build it up with iron and steel . . .
Build it up with silver and gold . . .
Set a man to watch all night . . .
The rhyme runs through building materials that fail until a watchman is set. Folklorists of James Frazer’s generation, Alice Gomme among them, connected it with the belief that a bridge was once made to stand by burying a victim in its foundations; Iona and Peter Opie, in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, treat the connection with caution. Eliot’s crowd crossed the real London Bridge at line 62. Here the rhyme opens the run of quotations at lines 427–430, the “fragments” of line 431; the others are in Italian, Latin and French, with three English words, “O swallow swallow,” set in the Latin line.
References Gomme, Traditional Games, vol. I, pp. 333–50.
In the poem: line 427
Read it whole: ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’ (nursery rhyme) at en.wikisource.org
That Shakespearian Rag
Gene Buck and Herman Ruby (words), Dave Stamper (music) · 1912 · English
“O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— / It’s so elegant / So intelligent.”
That Shakespearian rag,
Most intelligent, very elegant,
That old classical drag,
Has the proper stuff, the line “Lay on Macduff” . . .
Published in 1912, and usually said to have been sung in that year’s Ziegfeld Follies, the Broadway revue, on the strength of a trade advertisement that B. R. McElderry cited when he identified the song as Eliot’s source in 1957. In 2017 the music critic Matthew Guerrieri searched the files of Variety, the show-business trade paper, and found no sign that it was sung in the show; the first performance he could find was in vaudeville, at the Columbia Theatre, New York, on 5 January 1913. The lyric has Shakespeare’s characters dancing the ragtime steps of the day. Eliot’s “Shakespeherian,” with its extra syllable, is generally read as deliberate, giving the word the rag’s syncopation; the poem also reverses the song’s “intelligent … elegant.” The cover spells the title “Shakesperian”, the chorus inside “Shakespearian”. No recording from the period is known.
References Buck, Ruby and Stamper, “That Shakespearian Rag” (1912); McElderry (1957); Guerrieri (2017); Southam, Guide, note on line 128.
In the poem: line 128
Read it whole: ‘That Shakespearian Rag’ (1912), words by Gene Buck and Herman Ruby, music by Dave Stamper at yorkspace.library.yorku.ca
Works cited
The editions and studies the notes refer to, each under the short form the notes use, with a link to the copy consulted where the text is free to read. Works published after 1930 are still in copyright in the United States, and the line moves forward a year each January; this site keeps to 1929, and describes, or quotes in a phrase, anything later.
- The Waste Land (1922)T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), the first edition in book form and the first printing with Eliot’s notes; the text the site prints. Read it at archive.org
- The Criterion, October 1922T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” The Criterion 1, no. 1 (October 1922), 50–64; the poem’s first printing, without notes.
- The Dial, November 1922T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” The Dial 73, no. 5 (November 1922), 473–85; the first American printing, without notes. Read it at archive.org
- Poems 1909–1925T. S. Eliot, Poems 1909–1925 (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1925), the first printing of the dedication to Pound and of the revised notes. Read it at archive.org
- Poems (1920)T. S. Eliot, Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920), which prints “Dans le Restaurant.” Read it at en.wikisource.org
- The Little Review, September 1918T. S. Eliot, “Dans le Restaurant,” The Little Review 5, no. 5 (September 1918), 12–13, the poem’s first printing. Read it at modjourn.org
- The Sacred WoodT. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920); “Philip Massinger” is quoted from it. Read it at gutenberg.org
- Eliot, “Whitman and Tennyson” (1926)T. S. Eliot, “Whitman and Tennyson,” The Nation and Athenaeum 40 (18 December 1926), 426, a review of Emory Holloway’s Whitman: An Interpretation in Narrative.
- Eliot, “Thomas Middleton” (1927)T. S. Eliot, “Thomas Middleton,” Times Literary Supplement, no. 1326, 30 June 1927, 445–46 (unsigned); collected in Selected Essays (1932).
- Eliot, “The Pensées of Pascal” (1931)T. S. Eliot, introduction to Pascal’s Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter, Everyman’s Library 874 (London: Dent, 1931); collected as “The ‘Pensées’ of Pascal” in Selected Essays (1932). Described, not quoted at length.
- Eliot, After Strange Gods (1934)T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber, 1934), the Page-Barbour lectures of 1933. Quoted in a phrase only.
- Eliot, “A Commentary,” Criterion, April 1934T. S. Eliot, “A Commentary,” The Criterion 13, no. 52 (April 1934), 451–54, the passage recalling a friend in the Luxembourg Gardens. Described, not quoted at length.
- Eliot, “Ezra Pound,” Poetry (1946)T. S. Eliot, “Ezra Pound,” Poetry 68, no. 6 (September 1946), 326–38. Quoted in a phrase only.
- Eliot, “What Dante Means to Me” (1950)T. S. Eliot, “What Dante Means to Me,” a talk given at the Italian Institute, London, 4 July 1950; collected in To Criticize the Critic (London: Faber, 1965). Described, not quoted at length.
- Eliot, “The Frontiers of Criticism” (1956)T. S. Eliot, “The Frontiers of Criticism,” a lecture given at the University of Minnesota, 30 April 1956; collected in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957). Quoted in a phrase only.
- Paris Review interview (1959)“T. S. Eliot: The Art of Poetry No. 1,” interview by Donald Hall, The Paris Review 21 (Spring–Summer 1959). Described, not quoted at length. Read it at theparisreview.org
- The Eliot–Hale lettersThe letters of T. S. Eliot to Emily Hale, 1930–1956, Princeton University Library, opened 2 January 2020; the T. S. Eliot Foundation’s online edition (tseliot.com). Read it at tseliot.com
- Letters, vol. 1The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1: 1898–1922, rev. ed., ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Faber, 2009). Letters after 1929 are described, not quoted at length; this volume’s are of 1922 and before.
- Facsimile (1971)The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971). Page numbers are the same in the reprints. The drafts are described, or quoted in a phrase.
- Ricks and McCueThe Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. I: Collected and Uncollected Poems, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber, 2015). Cited by the line its commentary on The Waste Land is keyed to, or by the headnote.
- Rainey, Annotated Waste LandThe Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, ed. Lawrence Rainey, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006; first ed. 2005). Cited by the line its annotation is keyed to.
- Rainey, Revisiting The Waste LandLawrence Rainey, Revisiting The Waste Land (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), chapter 1 on the dating of the manuscripts.
- Southam, GuideB. C. Southam, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot, 6th ed. (London: Faber, 1994); the American edition is titled A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1996). Cited by the line its note is keyed to.
- Pound, Letters, ed. PaigeThe Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950; London: Faber, 1951); the exchange with Eliot on the poem is letters 181–183. Read it at archive.org
- Pound, The Spirit of RomanceEzra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (London: J. M. Dent, 1910), chapter II, “Il Miglior Fabbro.” Read it at archive.org
- Woolf, Diary, vol. 2The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2: 1920–1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), entry for 23 June 1922.
- Valerie Eliot, TLS, 11 May 1973Valerie Eliot, “T. S. Eliot and The Waste Land,” letter to the editor, Times Literary Supplement, no. 3714, 11 May 1973, 529, on Stetson.
- Brooks (1939)Cleanth Brooks, “The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth,” in Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939), 136–72; first printed as “The Waste Land: An Analysis,” Southern Review 3, no. 1 (Summer 1937), 106–36.
- Matthiessen (1935)F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935).
- Grover Smith (1956)Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956; 2nd ed. 1974).
- Kenner (1959)Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959).
- Gardner (1949)Helen Gardner, The Art of T. S. Eliot (London: Cresset Press, 1949).
- Gordon, Eliot’s Early YearsLyndall Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
- Gordon, The Hyacinth GirlLyndall Gordon, The Hyacinth Girl: T. S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse (London: Virago, 2022).
- Crawford, The Savage and the CityRobert Crawford, The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
- Crawford, Young EliotRobert Crawford, Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015).
- Childs (1988)Donald J. Childs, “Stetson in The Waste Land,” Essays in Criticism 38, no. 2 (April 1988), 131–48.
- Morris (1954)G. L. K. Morris, “Marie, Marie, Hold On Tight,” Partisan Review 21, no. 2 (March–April 1954), 231–33. Read it at bu.edu
- Peter (1952; 1969)John Peter, “A New Interpretation of The Waste Land,” Essays in Criticism 2, no. 3 (July 1952), 242–66; reprinted with a postscript, Essays in Criticism 19, no. 2 (April 1969), 140–75.
- Miller (1977)James E. Miller, Jr., T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977).
- Unger (1981)Leonard Unger, Eliot’s Compound Ghost: Influence and Confluence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981), where the “withered stumps of time” are set beside the mutilated Lavinia of Titus Andronicus.
- McElderry (1957)B. R. McElderry, Jr., “Eliot’s ‘Shakespeherian Rag,’” American Quarterly 9, no. 2 (Summer 1957), 185–86.
- Guerrieri (2017)Matthew Guerrieri, “That old classical drag,” Soho the Dog (his blog), 10 March 2017, on “That Shakespearian Rag” and the poem. Read it at sohothedog.com
- Ellmann (1971)Richard Ellmann, “The First Waste Land—I,” The New York Review of Books, 18 November 1971. Read it at nybooks.com
- Edmund Wilson (1971)Edmund Wilson, “The First Waste Land—II,” The New York Review of Books, 18 November 1971. Read it at nybooks.com
- The Spectator, 1 January 1972Gabriel Pearson, “Eliot and Pound,” review of the facsimile, The Spectator, 1 January 1972, 26. Read it at archive.spectator.co.uk
- Perloff (1981)Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), in its account of the drafts of The Waste Land and Pound’s cuts.
- Martz (1993)Louis L. Martz, “Origins of Form in Four Quartets,” in Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot’s Four Quartets, ed. Edward Lobb (London: Athlone Press; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).
- Schuchard, “Eliot in the Wartime Classroom”Ronald Schuchard, “Eliot in the Wartime Classroom, 1916–1919,” T. S. Eliot Foundation website; the essay is drawn from his Eliot’s Dark Angel (Oxford University Press, 1999). Read it at tseliot.com
- T. S. Eliot Foundation, “T. S. Eliot’s Gloucester”“T. S. Eliot’s Gloucester,” T. S. Eliot Foundation website. Read it at tseliot.com
- Musurillo (1956)Herbert Musurillo, “A Note on The Waste Land (Part IV),” Classical Philology 51, no. 3 (July 1956), 174–75.
- Seymour-Jones (2001)Carole Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot (London: Constable, 2001).
- Menand (1997)Louis Menand, “How Eliot Became Eliot,” The New York Review of Books, 15 May 1997. Read it at nybooks.com
- Keane (2011)Patrick J. Keane, “Convergences: Memories Involving The Waste Land Manuscript,” Numéro Cinq, 22 February 2011. Read it at numerocinqmagazine.com
- Gold (2000)Matthew K. Gold, “The Expert Hand and the Obedient Heart: Dr. Vittoz, T. S. Eliot, and the Therapeutic Possibilities of The Waste Land,” Journal of Modern Literature 23, nos. 3–4 (Summer 2000), 519–33. Read it at mkgold.net
- Leithauser and Dyer (1982)Gladys Garner Leithauser and Nadine Cowan Dyer, “Bertrand Russell and T. S. Eliot: Their Dialogue,” Russell: The Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives, n.s. 2, no. 1 (1982), 7–28. Read it at scispace.com
- Kearns (1987)Cleo McNelly Kearns, T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
- Chasseaud (2006)Peter Chasseaud, Rats Alley: Trench Names of the Western Front, 1914–1918 (Stroud: Spellmount, 2006).
- GallupDonald Gallup, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography, rev. ed. (London: Faber, 1969), entry A6 for the Boni and Liveright edition.
- Historic England, list entry 1393490Historic England, “Nayland Rock Promenade Shelter,” National Heritage List for England, entry 1393490 (listed 2009). Read it at historicengland.org.uk
- The Observer, 12 July 2009Vanessa Thorpe, “Margate’s shrine to Eliot’s muse,” The Observer, 12 July 2009 (published online by The Guardian), on the listing of the Nayland Rock shelter. Read it at theguardian.com
- LCC, Nineteen City Churches (1920)London County Council, Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches: Report by the Clerk of the Council and the Architect of the Council (London: London County Council, 1920; printed by Odhams Press; sold by P. S. King and Son), the pamphlet Eliot’s note on line 264 cites. Read it at archive.org
- Chapman, Handbook (1895)Frank M. Chapman, Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America (New York: D. Appleton, 1895), the book Eliot’s note on line 357 quotes; the passage on the hermit thrush’s song, in the account signed by Eugene P. Bicknell that Chapman prints, is on p. 400. Read it at archive.org
- Weston, From Ritual to RomanceJessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920). Cited by chapter. Read it at gutenberg.org
- Frazer, The Golden Bough (1922)Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, abridged edition (London: Macmillan, 1922). Cited by chapter. Read it at gutenberg.org
- Frazer, Adonis, Attis, OsirisSir James George Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris: Studies in the History of Oriental Religion (London: Macmillan, 1906); the third edition of The Golden Bough, part IV, in two volumes (1914), is the one Eliot’s headnote names. Cited by chapter. Read it at archive.org
- Chaucer, General PrologueGeoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, lines 1–12, in the text on Wikisource (The Canterbury Tales, unsourced), which the site prints (“perced to the roote”); W. W. Skeat’s edition, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford, 1894–97), on Project Gutenberg, reads “perced to the rote”. Read it at en.wikisource.org
- Petronius, SatyriconPetronius, Satyricon, chapter 48 (the Cena Trimalchionis). Read it at thelatinlibrary.com
- Ovid, MetamorphosesOvid, Metamorphoses, cited by book and line; the Latin from the Latin Library, the English from Frank Justus Miller’s Loeb translation (1916). Read it at thelatinlibrary.com
- DanteDante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, cited by cantica, canto and line; the Italian from the Italian Wikisource text. Read it at it.wikisource.org
- Wagner, Tristan und IsoldeRichard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde (1865), libretto, cited by act. Read it at librettoarchive.com
- Wagner, GötterdämmerungRichard Wagner, Götterdämmerung (1876), libretto, Act III scene 1. Read it at librettoarchive.com
- King James BibleThe Holy Bible, Authorised (King James) Version (1611), cited by book, chapter and verse. Read it at en.wikisource.org
- Book of Common PrayerThe Book of Common Prayer (1662), the Psalter (Coverdale’s psalms) and the Order for the Burial of the Dead. Read it at churchofengland.org
- Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du malCharles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal (Paris, 1857; 2nd ed. 1861): “Au Lecteur” and “Les Sept Vieillards.” Read it at fr.wikisource.org
- Webster, The White DevilJohn Webster, The White Devil (1612), cited by act and scene. Read it at gutenberg.org
- Webster, The Devil’s Law-CaseJohn Webster, The Devil’s Law-Case (1623), Act III scene ii, in The Dramatic Works of John Webster, ed. William Hazlitt, vol. III (London: Reeves and Turner, 1897). Read it at archive.org
- Middleton, Women Beware WomenThomas Middleton, Women Beware Women (written c. 1621; printed 1657), Act II scene ii, in The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. Alexander Dyce, vol. IV (London, 1840). Read it at gutenberg.org
- ShakespeareWilliam Shakespeare, cited by play, act and scene: The Tempest, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus; the text of the Moby Shakespeare (the Globe edition) at MIT. Read it at shakespeare.mit.edu
- Milton, Paradise LostJohn Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), Book IV, line 140. Read it at gutenberg.org
- Virgil, AeneidVirgil, Aeneid, Book I, line 726. Read it at thelatinlibrary.com
- Spenser, ProthalamionEdmund Spenser, Prothalamion (1596). Read it at en.wikisource.org
- Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” in Miscellaneous Poems (1681). Read it at en.wikisource.org
- Day, The Parliament of BeesJohn Day, The Parliament of Bees (printed 1641), in The Works of John Day, ed. A. H. Bullen (1881). Read it at archive.org
- Verlaine, “Parsifal”Paul Verlaine, “Parsifal,” Revue wagnérienne, 8 January 1886; collected in Amour (1888). Read it at fr.wikisource.org
- Lyly, CampaspeJohn Lyly, Campaspe (1584), the songs first printed in Sixe Court Comedies (1632); in The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902). Read it at archive.org
- Sappho, fr. 104Sappho, fragment 104 (Lobel–Page), the evening-star lines.
- Goldsmith, The Vicar of WakefieldOliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), chapter 24. Read it at gutenberg.org
- Froude, Reign of ElizabethJames Anthony Froude, History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth, vol. VII: The Reign of Elizabeth, vol. I (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1863), ch. IV; the copy consulted is the Everyman’s Library edition, The Reign of Elizabeth, vol. I (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1911), ch. IV, p. 244, where de Quadra’s letter is quoted. Read it at archive.org
- Augustine, ConfessionsAugustine, Confessions, trans. E. B. Pusey (1838), Books III and X. Read it at gutenberg.org
- Warren, Buddhism in TranslationsHenry Clarke Warren, Buddhism in Translations, Harvard Oriental Series 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1896), § 73, “The Fire-Sermon,” pp. 351–53. Read it at en.wikisource.org
- Hesse, Blick ins ChaosHermann Hesse, Blick ins Chaos: Drei Aufsätze (Bern: Seldwyla, 1920); English as In Sight of Chaos, trans. Stephen Hudson (Zurich: Seldwyla, 1923). Read it at archive.org
- Shackleton, SouthSir Ernest Shackleton, South: The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914–1917 (London: Heinemann, 1919), chapter X. Read it at gutenberg.org
- Bṛhadāraṇyaka UpaniṣadBṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad V.2, in The Upanishads, part II, trans. F. Max Müller, Sacred Books of the East 15 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884). Read it at archive.org
- Bradley, Appearance and RealityF. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay, 2nd ed. (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1897; first ed. 1893), p. 346, the page Eliot’s note quotes; the copy consulted is the sixth impression of the second edition (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1916), in which the passage is on p. 346. Read it at archive.org
- Pervigilium VenerisPervigilium Veneris, an anonymous Latin poem of late antiquity; the passage on the Library page is lines 85–93, and Eliot’s line 429 quotes line 90. Read it at la.wikisource.org
- Nerval, “El Desdichado”Gérard de Nerval, “El Desdichado,” in Les Chimères (1854). Read it at fr.wikisource.org
- Kyd, The Spanish TragedyThomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587), Act IV scene i; the 1615 quarto’s title page. Read it at gutenberg.org
- TennysonAlfred Tennyson, The Princess (1847), the song “O Swallow, Swallow”; Maud (1855), Part II, section V. Read it at gutenberg.org
- Swinburne, “Itylus”Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Itylus,” in Poems and Ballads (1866). Read it at en.wikisource.org
- Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” in Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865); Leaves of Grass (1881–82). Read it at en.wikisource.org
- Brooke, “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”Rupert Brooke, “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester,” dated Café des Westens, Berlin, May 1912, in 1914 and Other Poems (1915). Read it at gutenberg.org
- Dickens, Our Mutual FriendCharles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), Book I, chapter 16. Read it at gutenberg.org
- Conrad, Heart of DarknessJoseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899; 1902). Read it at gutenberg.org
- Huxley, Crome YellowAldous Huxley, Crome Yellow (London: Chatto and Windus, 1921), chapter 27. Read it at gutenberg.org
- Larisch, My PastCountess Marie Larisch, My Past (London: Eveleigh Nash; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913); the copy consulted is the Putnam printing. Read it at archive.org
- Gomme, Traditional GamesAlice Bertha Gomme, The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland, vol. I (London: David Nutt, 1894), “London Bridge,” pp. 333–49. Read it at archive.org
- Kipling, “The Finest Story in the World”Rudyard Kipling, “The Finest Story in the World,” in Many Inventions (1893). Read it at gutenberg.org
- Stevenson, “Requiem”Robert Louis Stevenson, “Requiem,” in Underwoods (1887). Read it at gutenberg.org
- Vagrancy Act 1824Vagrancy Act 1824 (5 Geo. 4, c. 83), section 4. Read it at legislation.gov.uk
- Licensing Act 1921Licensing Act 1921 (11 & 12 Geo. 5, c. 42). Read it at legislation.gov.uk
- Calendar of State Papers, SimancasCalendar of Letters and State Papers relating to English Affairs, preserved principally in the Archives of Simancas, vol. 1: Elizabeth, 1558–1567, ed. Martin A. S. Hume (London: HMSO, 1892), the despatch of 30 June 1561. Read it at british-history.ac.uk
- The Rider pack (1909)The tarot pack designed by Pamela Colman Smith under A. E. Waite’s direction, published by William Rider and Son, London, December 1909; Waite’s The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: Rider, 1911; his unillustrated Key to the Tarot appeared in 1910) describes the cards. Read it at en.wikisource.org
- Hamlet, first quarto (1603)The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet (London, 1603), the first quarto, whose stage direction reads “Enter Ofelia playing on a Lute, and her haire downe singing.” Read it at en.wikisource.org
- The Poetry ArchiveThe Poetry Archive, “T. S. Eliot,” the note on its recording of The Waste Land, dated 1933 (once thought to be 1935). Read it at poetryarchive.org
- PennSoundPennSound, University of Pennsylvania, “T. S. Eliot,” the Columbia recordings. Read it at writing.upenn.edu
- Library of Congress, recording of 23 May 1947Library of Congress, Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, T. S. Eliot reading at the National Gallery of Art, 23 May 1947. Read it at loc.gov
- Buck, Ruby and Stamper, “That Shakespearian Rag” (1912)Gene Buck and Herman Ruby (words) and Dave Stamper (music), That Shakesperian Rag (New York: Jos. W. Stern & Co., 1912), sheet music; the copy in the Clara Thomas Archives, York University Libraries. Read it at yorkspace.library.yorku.ca
- Internet Shakespeare EditionsInternet Shakespeare Editions (University of Victoria), old-spelling transcriptions of the First Folio (1623) and the quartos, with through line numbers (TLN). Read it at internetshakespeare.uvic.ca
- Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land (2015)The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land, ed. Gabrielle McIntire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); ch. 7, Jewel Spears Brooker, “Dialectical Collaboration: Editing The Waste Land”.
- Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War (2013)The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War, ed. Santanu Das (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
- HansardParliamentary Debates (Hansard), House of Lords, fifth series, read in the Historic Hansard transcripts; each debate is cited by date, volume and column. Read it at api.parliament.uk
- Fuld (1966)James J. Fuld, The Book of World-Famous Music: Classical, Popular and Folk (New York: Crown, 1966; revised editions, New York: Dover, 1971, 1985, 1995), the entries “Goodnight Ladies” and “Merrily We Roll Along”.
- Waltz and Engle, Traditional Ballad IndexRobert B. Waltz and David G. Engle, The Traditional Ballad Index (online), the entry “Goodnight Ladies”. Read it at balladindex.org
- Williams (1968)Helen Williams, T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land (London: Edward Arnold, 1968).
- Wilks (1971)A. John Wilks, A Critical Commentary on T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (London: Macmillan, 1971).
- Unger (1966)Leonard Unger, T. S. Eliot: Moments and Patterns (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966).
- Litz (1973)Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Waste Land, ed. A. Walton Litz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).
- Montgomery (1979)Marion Montgomery, Eliot’s Reflective Journey to the Garden (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1979).
- Gish (1988)Nancy K. Gish, The Waste Land: A Poem of Memory and Desire (Boston: Twayne, 1988).
- Thormählen (1978)Marianne Thormählen, The Waste Land: A Fragmentary Wholeness (Lund: Gleerup, 1978).
- Cox and Hinchliffe (1968)T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land: A Casebook, ed. C. B. Cox and Arnold P. Hinchliffe (London: Macmillan, 1968).
- O’Callaghan (2009)Michelle O’Callaghan, Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), ch. 8, “Politics and Theatre: A Game at Chess”.
- Charney (1988)Maurice Charney, Hamlet’s Fictions (New York and London: Routledge, 1988).
- Women Beware Women, ed. Gill (1968)Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women, ed. Roma Gill, New Mermaids (London: Ernest Benn, 1968).
- Greek AnthologyThe Greek Anthology, with an English translation by W. R. Paton, vol. II, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917); the sepulchral epigrams for the drowned are in book VII. Read it at archive.org
- Eliot, The Dry Salvages (1941)T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), the headnote placing the rocks, with their beacon, off the north-east coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Described, not quoted.
- Deutsch (1952)Babette Deutsch, Poetry in Our Time (New York: Henry Holt, 1952).
- Eliot, introduction to Pound’s Selected Poems (1928)T. S. Eliot, introduction to Ezra Pound, Selected Poems, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928). Quoted in a phrase only.
- Chandran (2005)K. Narayana Chandran, “T. S. Eliot and W. E. Henley: A Source for the ‘Water-dripping Song’ in The Waste Land,” English Language Notes 43, no. 1 (September 2005), 59–62.
- McCue (2014)Jim McCue, “Did Eliot Mis-ascribe the ‘Water-dripping Song’ in The Waste Land?,” Notes and Queries 61, no. 1 (March 2014), 118–19.
- Irmscher (2014)Christoph Irmscher, “Listening to Eliot’s Thrush,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 12, no. 2 (June 2014), 231–49.
- All About Birds, “Hermit Thrush”Cornell Lab of Ornithology, All About Birds, “Hermit Thrush: Sounds.” Read it at allaboutbirds.org
- Hesse, “Recent German Poetry” (1922)Hermann Hesse, “Recent German Poetry,” The Criterion 1, no. 1 (October 1922), 89–93. Read it at theworld.com
- RamayanaVālmīki, The Rámáyan of Válmíki, translated into English verse by Ralph T. H. Griffith, 5 vols (London: Trübner; Benares: E. J. Lazarus, 1870–1874); bk. I, canto XXXVI, “The Birth of Gangá.” Read it at gutenberg.org
- Deussen, Sechzig Upanishad’sPaul Deussen, Sechzig Upanishad’s des Veda, aus dem Sanskrit übersetzt (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1897; 3rd ed. 1921), the translation Eliot’s note on line 401 names; in the 1921 edition, the one linked, the Bṛhadāraṇyaka passage is on pp. 489–490, the page Eliot’s note cites. Read it at archive.org
- Eliot, Knowledge and Experience (1964)T. S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (London: Faber and Faber; New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1964), the Harvard dissertation of 1916.
- Opie (1951)Iona and Peter Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), the entry “London Bridge is broken down.”
- Ara Vos Prec (1920)T. S. Eliot, Ara Vos Prec (London: The Ovid Press, 1920); the title page misprints the title “Ara Vus Prec.”
- Swigg (2012)Richard Swigg, Quick, Said the Bird: Williams, Eliot, Moore, and the Spoken Word (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012).
- Camlot (2019)Jason Camlot, Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).
- Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England, the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures for 1932–1933 (London: Faber and Faber; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933).
- Brooker and Bentley (1990)Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley, Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990).
- Faber (SoundCloud)Faber and Faber’s SoundCloud account (“FaberBooks”): “T.S. Eliot reads The Waste Land (The Burial of the Dead, extract)”, “Ted Hughes reads The Waste Land (A Game of Chess, extract)” and “Viggo Mortensen reads The Waste Land (The Fire Sermon, extract)”, posted 21 April 2011, and “The Waste Land audio extract read by Edoardo Ballerini” (2022). Read it at soundcloud.com
- Harper Audio (1994)T. S. Eliot reads The Waste Land, HarperAudio!, Harper Audio (HarperCollins), distributed by the Internet Multicasting Service on its Internet Town Hall channel, 18 January 1994; Internet Archive item RTFM-Harp-940218, collection Internet Talk Radio. Read it at archive.org
- Mitgang, New York Times, 27 August 1987Herbert Mitgang, “Recorded Books Help Make the Ear Faster Than the Eye,” The New York Times, 27 August 1987. Read it at nytimes.com
- Guinness, Argo album (1975)British Poets of Our Time: T. S. Eliot – The Waste Land, Four Quartets, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Journey of the Magi, read by Alec Guinness, produced by Hallam Tennyson, 2 LPs, Argo PLP 1206/7 (1975), “recorded in association with The Arts Council of Great Britain and the British Broadcasting Corporation” (front cover). Read it at discogs.com
- BBC Radio 4, 1 January 2017BBC Radio 4, Jeremy Irons Reads TS Eliot: The Waste Land, presented by Martha Kearney with Jeanette Winterson, Rowan Williams and Jackie Kay, broadcast 1 January 2017, 14:00–14:45 (programme b086l8m2). Read it at bbc.co.uk
- BBC Radio 4, 30 March 2012BBC Radio 4, Drama on 4: TS Eliot – The Waste Land, read by Eileen Atkins and Jeremy Irons, introduced by Rowan Williams, Jackie Kay, Matthew Hollis and Sean O’Brien, broadcast 30 March 2012, 14:15 (programme b01dvzg7). Read it at bbc.co.uk
- jeremyirons.net, 20 January 2017“Jeremy Irons Reads TS Eliot,” jeremyirons.net (a fan site), 20 January 2017: the five parts of the Radio 4 series of 1 January 2017, with Part Three, The Waste Land, and its guests. Read it at jeremyirons.net
- Festival of Writing and Ideas, June 2022“Jeremy Irons & Sinéad Cusack: The Waste Land (introduced by James Lever),” Festival of Writing and Ideas, Borris House, County Carlow, June 2022; the festival’s recording on its YouTube channel The Borris Broadcasts, and as episode S01E012 of its podcast, 21 February 2023, 51:54. Read it at youtube.com
- Newsnight, 19 January 2015“Fiona Shaw performs The Wasteland – Newsnight,” BBC Newsnight, clip on the BBC Politics YouTube channel, uploaded 19 January 2015. Read it at youtube.com
- Playbill, 28 October 1996David Lefkowitz, “Fiona Shaw, in US Debut, to Turn Liberty into Waste Land,” Playbill, 28 October 1996. Read it at playbill.com
- Festival de Cannes, The Waste Land (1996)Festival de Cannes, film archive: The Waste Land, directed by Deborah Warner, with Fiona Shaw, United Kingdom, 1996, Un Certain Regard. Read it at festival-cannes.com
- Playbill, 8 December 1997Terri Paddock, “T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land Opens Dec. 14 in World’s Oldest Music Hall,” Playbill, 8 December 1997. Read it at playbill.com
- Wilton’s Music Hall, The Waste Land (1997)Wilton’s Music Hall, heritage archive, “The Waste Land”: the 1997 production with Fiona Shaw, which “put live performance back at the centre of Wilton’s”. Read it at wiltons.org.uk
- The Waste Land app (2011)The Waste Land, app for iPad by Faber and Faber and Touch Press, first released 3 June 2011; updated 27 January and 2 February 2022, when it was released for iPhone (“For the first time, the app is available on iPhones alongside iPads”); App Store id 427434046. Read it at apps.apple.com
- Touch Press, A walk through The Waste LandTouch Press, “A walk through The Waste Land,” demonstration film of the app, on Touch Press’s YouTube channel. Read it at youtube.com
- Ted Hughes reads The Waste Land (1996)The Waste Land and Other Poems, read by Ted Hughes, Penguin Audiobooks in association with Faber and Faber (1996), ISBN 0140863982.
- Ballerini, The Waste Land audiobook (2022)The Waste Land and Other Poems, read by Edoardo Ballerini, Centenary Edition, Faber and Faber in association with the T. S. Eliot Foundation, published 4 January 2022, ISBN 9780571370498. Read it at faber.co.uk
- Queens Public Library, Ballerini reading (2022)“A Centennial Celebration of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ with Edoardo Ballerini,” Queens Public Library, on its YouTube channel (2022). Read it at youtube.com
- LibriVox, The Waste Land (2011)The Waste Land (version 3), read by Elizabeth Klett, LibriVox, 14 April 2011, 25:40, released into the public domain; Internet Archive item wasteland_etk_librivox. Read it at archive.org
- Tristan (Bayreuth, 1928), first actWagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act I, Bayreuth Festival chorus and orchestra conducted by Karl Elmendorff, with Gustav Rödin (young sailor), Nanny Larsen-Todsen (Isolde), Anny Helm, Rudolf Bockelmann; recorded at Bayreuth, July 1928, Columbia GOX 10532–10551 (L 2187–2206); Internet Archive item tristan1928-1. Read it at archive.org
- Tristan (Bayreuth, 1928), third actWagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act III, the same recording, with Hans Beer (shepherd) and Rudolf Bockelmann (Kurwenal); Internet Archive item Tristan1928-3. Read it at archive.org
- Götterdämmerung (Solti, London Records, 1965)Wagner, Götterdämmerung, Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Georg Solti, with Birgit Nilsson, Wolfgang Windgassen, and Lucia Popp, Gwyneth Jones and Maureen Guy as the Rhinemaidens, 6 LPs, London Records, 1965; Boston Public Library’s copy, digitised by the Internet Archive. Read it at archive.org
- Macaulay Library (2017)Macaulay Library Team, “Hermit Thrush Song Differs Across North America,” Macaulay Library, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 21 July 2017. Read it at macaulaylibrary.org
- The Waste Land, fourth printing (1930)T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Horace Liveright; “Fourth Printing, April, 1930”), from the 1922 setting of type; Brigham Young University’s copy. Read it at archive.org
- The Dial, December 1922The Dial 73, no. 6 (December 1922): “Comment,” 685–687, the announcement that “for the year 1922 The Dial’s award goes to Mr T. S. Eliot,” and Edmund Wilson’s review “The Poetry of Drouth,” 611–616; Internet Archive item sim_dial_1922-12_73. Read it at archive.org
- HathiTrust, The Criterion, vol. 1HathiTrust catalogue record 007155909, The Criterion: A Quarterly Review, vol. 1 (1922–1923), the Ohio State University copy (osu.32435059862219), full view in the United States. Read it at catalog.hathitrust.org
- NYPL, The Waste Land typescriptNew York Public Library, Digital Collections: “The Waste land: Typescript with the author’s ms. corrections,” Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature (Berg Coll MSS Eliot). Read it at digitalcollections.nypl.org
- Facsimile, Faber colour edition (2022)T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot, with the pages in colour and an afterword by Matthew Hollis (London: Faber and Faber, 28 April 2022), ISBN 9780571370856. Read it at faber.co.uk
- Frazer, The Golden Bough, part IV (1914)J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd ed., Part IV: Adonis, Attis, Osiris: Studies in the History of Oriental Religion, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1914), the “two volumes” Eliot’s headnote names. Read it at archive.org
- Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890)Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, first edition, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1890), vol. I, which carries Turner’s Golden Bough as its frontispiece and opens with it on p. 1. Read it at archive.org
- Victorian Web, Turner’s The Golden Bough“The Golden Bough (exhibited 1834) by Joseph Mallord William Turner,” The Victorian Web, reproducing the Tate Britain display text (2010): the Sibyl with sickle and bough in front of Lake Avernus. Read it at victorianweb.org
- Temple Classics PurgatorioThe Purgatorio of Dante Alighieri, Italian text with English translation by Thomas Okey and notes, Temple Classics (London: J. M. Dent, 1901; 3rd ed. 1903), the edition Eliot used; it reads “gli affina” at XXVI 148 and gives the Pia de’ Tolomei story in its note on V 130–136. Read it at archive.org
- Eliot, Dante (1929)T. S. Eliot, Dante, The Poets on the Poets, no. 2 (London: Faber and Faber, 1929), whose preface says he read Dante in Dent’s Temple Classics edition; collected in Selected Essays (1932). Quoted in a phrase where the site quotes it, as a text of 1929. Read it at archive.org
- Musgrove (1952)S. Musgrove, T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman (Wellington: New Zealand University Press, 1952); reprinted New York: Haskell House, 1966.
- Brooker (2020)Jewel Spears Brooker, “Eliot’s Ghost Story: Reflections on his Letters to Emily Hale,” Time Present (the newsletter of the International T. S. Eliot Society) 101 (Summer 2020), 1 and 10. Read it at sites.lsa.umich.edu
- Stravinsky (1965)Igor Stravinsky, “Memories of T. S. Eliot,” Esquire, August 1965; the sentence on Tristan as quoted in Brooker (2020). Quoted in a phrase only.
- Inventions of the March HareT. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), the notebook poems with Ricks’s notes; “Opera” is dated November 1909 there.
- Götterdämmerung, Schott librettoRichard Wagner, Götterdämmerung: dritter Tag aus der Trilogie Der Ring des Nibelungen, the printed poem (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1874; reprinted 1882), which gives the Rhine-daughters no vocalise. Read it at archive.org
- Götterdämmerung, vocal score (Klindworth)Richard Wagner, Götterdämmerung, vocal score arranged by Karl Klindworth, with Frederick Jameson’s English translation (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1900); the Schirmer reprint (New York, 1904) has the same text. Read it at archive.org
- Eliot, “Baudelaire” (1930)T. S. Eliot, “Baudelaire,” introduction to Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, trans. Christopher Isherwood (London: Blackamore Press, 1930); collected in Selected Essays (1932). Quoted in a phrase only.
- Coote (1985)Stephen Coote, T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land, Penguin Critical Studies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
- Golding, Metamorphoses (1567)Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1567), in Shakespeare’s Ovid, being Arthur Golding’s Translation of the Metamorphoses, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (London: De La More Press, 1904), “The Sixt Booke.” Read it at archive.org
- Eliot, “Andrew Marvell” (1921)T. S. Eliot, “Andrew Marvell,” Times Literary Supplement, 31 March 1921 (unsigned); collected in Selected Essays (1932). Quoted in a phrase only.
- Greg (1905)W. W. Greg, “The Authorship of the Songs in Lyly’s Plays,” Modern Language Review 1, no. 1 (October 1905), 43–52. Read it at archive.org
- Demetrius, On StyleDemetrius, On Style (De elocutione), § 141, in Demetrius on Style, ed. and trans. W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902). Read it at archive.org
- Wharton, Sappho (1887)Henry Thornton Wharton, Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation, 2nd ed. (London: David Stott, 1887), fragment 95 (the evening-star lines), with its sources and Byron’s imitation. Read it at archive.org
- Byron, Don JuanLord Byron, Don Juan (1819–24), Canto III, stanza 107, “O, Hesperus! thou bringest all good things.” Read it at gutenberg.org
- Michels (1975)Volker Michels, Hermann Hesse: A Pictorial Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), the caption recording Eliot’s visit to Montagnola in May 1922.
- BnF, “El Desdichado”Bibliothèque nationale de France, Les Essentiels, “El Desdichado,” on the sonnet’s first printing in Le Mousquetaire, 10 December 1853. Read it at essentiels.bnf.fr
- Scott, IvanhoeSir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1819), ch. 8, the Disinherited Knight’s shield with the word “Desdichado.” Read it at gutenberg.org
- Poems Written in Early Youth (1950)T. S. Eliot, Poems Written in Early Youth, compiled by John Hayward (Stockholm: privately printed, 1950, twelve copies; London: Faber and Faber, 1967), the first publication of “The Death of Saint Narcissus.”
- Eliot, “In Memoriam” (1936)T. S. Eliot, “In Memoriam,” in Essays Ancient and Modern (London: Faber and Faber, 1936). Quoted in a phrase only.
- Grover Smith (1996)Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot and the Use of Memory (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1996), which quotes Eliot’s letter of 10 March 1952 on Crome Yellow.
- Mackail, Pervigilium Veneris (1913)Pervigilium Veneris, ed. and trans. J. W. Mackail, in Catullus, Tibullus, and Pervigilium Veneris, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1913), with Mackail’s introduction on the poem’s date. Read it at archive.org
- Eliot, “Burnt Norton” (1936)T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in Collected Poems 1909–1935 (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), section I. Quoted in a phrase only (“the heart of light”).
- Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations (London: The Egoist Ltd, 1917), the dedication “To Jean Verdenal, 1889–1915”. Read it at gutenberg.org
- Grover Smith (1954)Grover Smith, “The Fortuneteller in Eliot’s Waste Land,” American Literature 25 (January 1954), 490–92.
- Herodotus, HistoriesHerodotus, Histories, cited by book and chapter; the English from G. C. Macaulay’s translation, The History of Herodotus (London: Macmillan, 1890). Sesostris is at II 102–110. Read it at gutenberg.org
- Drew (1949)Elizabeth Drew, T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949; London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1950).
- Historic England, list entry 1064620Historic England, “Church of St Mary Woolnoth,” National Heritage List for England, entry 1064620. Read it at historicengland.org.uk
- Representative Poetry OnlineT. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ed. Ian Lancashire, Representative Poetry Online (University of Toronto Libraries), with notes keyed to the lines. Read it at rpo.library.utoronto.ca
- T. S. Eliot Foundation, “T. S. Eliot at Lloyds Bank”“T. S. Eliot at Lloyds Bank,” T. S. Eliot Foundation website (30 March 2017). Read it at tseliot.com
- Wagner, ParsifalRichard Wagner, Parsifal (1882), libretto, Act III: the stage directions in which Kundry washes Parsifal’s feet and dries them with her hair. Read it at opera-arias.com
- Homer, OdysseyHomer, The Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1919), cited by book and line; bk. XI, lines 90–151, is the ghost of Tiresias. Samuel Butler’s prose translation (1900) is Project Gutenberg no. 1727. Read it at perseus.tufts.edu
- Sophocles, Oedipus TyrannusSophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, ed. and trans. Sir Richard Jebb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1887), lines 300–462, the scene with Tiresias; F. Storr’s Loeb translation (1912) is Project Gutenberg no. 31. Read it at perseus.tufts.edu
- Toynbee, Dante DictionaryPaget Toynbee, A Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), the entry “Pia, La”. Read it at archive.org
- St Magnus the Martyr, “Between the Wars”“Between the Wars,” in “The History of the Church,” St Magnus the Martyr, London Bridge (parish website), on Martin Travers’s restoration of the interior in 1924. Read it at stmagnusmartyr.org.uk
- Shipping Wonders of the World, “Thames Sailing Barges”“Thames Sailing Barges,” Shipping Wonders of the World (London: Amalgamated Press, 1936–37), part and page numbers not verified; on the sprit, the heavy spar from the foot of the mast to the peak of the mainsail, and on sails “tanned a rich, warm red”. Read it at shippingwondersoftheworld.com
- Moody (ed.), The Waste Land in Different VoicesThe Waste Land in Different Voices: The Revised Versions of Lectures Given at the University of York in the Fiftieth Year of The Waste Land, ed. A. D. Moody (London: Edward Arnold, 1974; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1975), xi + 237 pp.
- King’s College, Cambridge, “The Waste Land at 100”“The Waste Land at 100,” King’s Treasures, the blog of King’s College Library and Archives, Cambridge, 15 October 2022; on the College’s Hayward copies of the first editions, the copy Eliot inscribed to Pound, and the first printing of the dedication in Poems 1909–1925. Read it at kcctreasures.com
- Eliot, To Criticize the Critic (1965)T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), “The Aims of Education” (1950), where Eliot recalls his hours at the bank (“9.15 to 5.30”). Quoted in a phrase only.
- Moody (1979)A. David Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
- Charity (1974)A. C. Charity, “T. S. Eliot: The Dantean Recognitions,” in The Waste Land in Different Voices, ed. A. D. Moody (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), 117–62. Read it at archive.org
- Stephenson (1946)Ethel M. Stephenson, T. S. Eliot and the Lay Reader, 2nd ed., extended (London: Fortune Press, 1946; first ed. 1944); the copy consulted is the Haskell House reprint (New York, 1966). Read it at archive.org
- Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911), “Wagner, Wilhelm Richard”Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. 28, Vetch to Zymotic Diseases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), “Wagner, Wilhelm Richard,” by W. S. Rockstro and D. F. Tovey, beginning on p. 236. Read it at en.wikisource.org
- Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923)T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” The Dial 75, no. 5 (November 1923), 480–483. Read it at en.wikisource.org
- Kaṭha UpaniṣadKaṭha Upaniṣad, in The Upanishads, part II, trans. F. Max Müller, Sacred Books of the East 15 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884); its closing formula, “Om! Peace! peace! peace!” Read it at archive.org
- Eliot, “London Letter,” Dial, June 1921T. S. Eliot, “London Letter,” The Dial 70, no. 6 (June 1921), 686–691, dated May 1921; the section “The True Church and the Nineteen Churches” on pp. 690–691. Read it at archive.org
- Gardner (1972)Helen Gardner, The Waste Land 1972: The Adamson Lecture, 3rd May 1972, University of Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972). Read it at archive.org
- Dickey (2020)Frances Dickey, “May the Record Speak: The Correspondence of T. S. Eliot and Emily Hale,” Twentieth-Century Literature 66, no. 4 (December 2020), 431–62. Read it at english.missouri.edu
- Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951 (14 & 15 Geo. 6, c. 33), section 2, which repealed the Witchcraft Act 1735 and section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824 so far as it extended to spiritualistic mediums and to persons purporting to exercise telepathy, clairvoyance or similar powers. Read it at legislation.gov.uk
- Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921)T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Times Literary Supplement, no. 1031, 20 October 1921, 669–70 (unsigned); reprinted in Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays on Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (London: Hogarth Press, 1924), the sentence quoted on p. 31. Read it at archive.org
- Eliot, “Thoughts after Lambeth” (1931)T. S. Eliot, Thoughts after Lambeth (London: Faber and Faber, 1931; Criterion Miscellany 30); collected in Selected Essays 1917–1932 (London: Faber and Faber, 1932). Quoted in a phrase only.
- Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1926)I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 2nd ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1926), Appendix B, “On Mr. Eliot’s Poetry”, added to that edition; verified in the 1928 printing, pp. 289–295. Read it at archive.org
- Time, 3 March 1923“Shantih, Shantih, Shantih: Has the Reader Any Rights Before the Bar of Literature?”, Time 1, no. 1 (3 March 1923), the report of a rumour that the poem was written as a hoax; reprinted in Critical Essays on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, ed. Lois A. Cuddy and David H. Hirsch (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991). Read it at content.time.com
- Joyce, Ulysses (1922)James Joyce, Ulysses (Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922).