Notes

1] The Jew of Malta, by Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), supplies the epigraph, which is spoken by Barabas's servant about two friars, a religious type attacked for their parasitic nature from the time of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
The first edition reads "religions" for "religious".
Polyphiloprogenitive: `prolific of offspring' (Eliot's usage here is the first example in the Oxford English Dictionary, but Matthew Arnold uses it in Culture and Anarchy.

2] sapient sutlers: wise suppliers of provisions (`sutler' is originally a term for someone who sells things at a military post).

4] John 1.1, the interpretation that this New Testament gospeler makes on the account of creation in Genesis.

6] Superfetation: conceiving while already pregnant so that the uterus has foetuses of different ages.
Eliot's Greek letters are transliterated and italicized in this edition. The Greek words mean: "the One."

7] mensual: monthly.

8] enervate: exhausted, without vital powers.
Origen (185-254), a major father of the ancient church who castrated himself so that he would not be tempted by the flesh.

9] Umbrian school: 15th-century school of art linked with Umbria in the Italian Apennines. The painting could be "Baptism" by Piero della Francesca, which Eliot could have seen in the National Gallery in London (B. C. Southam, A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot, 6th edn. [San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1994]: 117).

10] gesso ground: plaster surface applied to walls to make them suitable for artistic painting.

11] nimbus: a vaguely circular cloud of light surrounding the head of a saint or a god.

16] Paraclete: the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit, the third member of the Christian Trinity (with God the Father and God the Son).

17] sable: mourning, dressed in black.
presbyters: priests, members of the clergy.

19] pustular: pimply, suffering acme.

20] piaculative: a new word, for which this is the first example in the Oxford English Dictionary: it means "expiatory or appeasing on account of sins or crimes" and refers to those who obtain forgiveness by the Church through offering money in charity to it.

22] Seraphim: one of the order of angels.

27] staminate and pistilate: having stamens (which bear the "male" spores) and having pistils (the "female" ovaries of a seed-bearing plant). Cf. Jules Laforgue's "Ballade":

Une chair bêtement staminifère,
Un cœur illusoirement pistillé,
Sauf certains soirs, sans foi, ni loi, ni clé,
Où c'est précisément tout le contraire.

28] office: job.
epicene: either sexless, or having commerce with both sexes, as the bees do in transferring pollen from stamen to pistils.

29] Hams, found at the back of the knee, are crooked; and the term comes from a root so meaning. Sweeney is celebrated by Eliot in two other poems, "Sweeney Erect" and "Sweeney among the Nightingales."

Other poems by Thomas Stearns Eliot