Notes
1] The epigraph is Aspatia's directions to the tapestry-makers in The Maid's Tragedy by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher: she tells them to depict the tale of Ariadne, like herself someone who has lost a love, with a barrenness that reflects how she feels.
2] unstilled Cyclades: Greek islands in the Aegean Sea that in legend are floating.
3] anfractuous: tortuously broken.
5] Aeolus: god of the winds in Greek mythology.
6] Reviewing: viewing again, perhaps viewing as turning around to one's backside.
7] Ariadne: this daughter of Minos, king of Crete, gave Theseus the thread by which he escaped from the Minotaur's labyrinth. Afterwards, Theseus married and then abandoned her on Naxos, where she hanged herself. On his return to Athens, Theseus forgot to change the colour of his sails from black -- which was supposed to signify his defeat -- as a result of which his father the king, fearing the worst from sails that in effect lied, also committed suicide.
10] Nausicaa: Homer's Odyssey tells how the daughter of the king of King Alcinous brought naked, shipwrecked Odysseus back to the safety of her court on Scheria. Polypheme: chief of the man-eating cyclops, blinded by Odysseus and his ship-mates so that they could escape from his hands.
11] orang-outang: Edgar Allan Poe's short story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," associates its murders with an orang-outang's lathering and shaving by means of his owner's razor.
26] The essay "Self-Reliance," by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), states that "An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man .... and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons" (Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957]: 154-55).
39] Mrs. Turner: the keeper of a bawdy house.
43] sal volatile: smelling salts, used to awaken someone from a faint.
44] neat: served without water or another mixer.
Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
© T.S. Eliot and Faber and Faber Ltd 1974
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.
Original text: T. S. Eliot, Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920): 19-21. E546 A753 1920a Fisher Rare Book Library.
First publication date:
1919
Publication date note: First published in Art and Letters 2.3 (Summer 1919). In England published in an almost identical book, Ara Vos Prec (London: Ovid Press, [1920]). Donald Gallup, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (London: Faber and Faber, 1969): A4b, C81.
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: RPO 1998.
Recent editing: 1:2002/6/1
Composition date:
1917
-
1919
Rhyme: abcb