Notes
1] The poem's title alludes to William Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood."
Another homage to Théophile Gautier, this time his "Bûchers et tombeaux" (Émaux et Camées [1858]):
Le squelette éait invisible(Poésies Complètes, ed. René Jasinki [Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1970], III, 72).
Au temps heureux de l'Art païen;
L'homme, sous la forme sensible,
Content du beau, ne cherchait rien.[You could not see the skeleton
in the happy days of pagan art!
Man, viewed from the perspective of the five senses,
content with beauty, searched for nothing.]
Eliot wrote an essay on the plays of John Webster, a Renaissance playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare, and included it in his The Sacred Wood in 1920.
9] John Donne (1572-1631), English poet and (at his death) Bishop of London. In his essay on "The Metaphysical Poets," published in 1921, Eliot wrote that "A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility."
17] B. C. Southam, following Ezra Pound, identifies Grishkin as "Serafima Astafieva (1876-1934), a Russian dancer with the Diaghilev company who opened her own ballet school in London. Pound introduced her to Eliot, `with the firm intuito that a poem wd result & intention that it should'; and elsewhere Pound recollected that once `I took Parson Elyot to see the Prima Ballerina and it evoked "Grushkin"'" (A Guide to The Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot, 6th edn. [San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1994]: 110).
Cf. Gautier's "Carmen":
Carmen est maigre, -- un trait de bistre(Poésies Complètes, ed. René Jasinki [Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1970], III, 91).
Cerne son œil de gitana.[Carmen is unsubstantial, some shading
outlines her gipsy's eye.]
21] couched: lying as if on a couch or sofa.
22] marmoset: a type of arborial monkey.
24] maisonette: `little house,' a term describing a flat in a house with its entrance and, hence, with privacy.
27] rank: coarse, offensive, ruttish.
feline: catlike.
31] our lot: our sort of people, i.e., the type Eliot consorts with, those who have a philosophical bent of mind and who, even when they appreciate the senses (as Webster and Donne do), tend to see it in the context of skeletons and death (that is, the world of "dry ribs").
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): 31-32. E546 A753 1920a Fisher Rare Book Library.
First publication date:
September
1918
Publication date note: "Four Poems," Little Review 5.5 (Sept. 1918). 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, C45.
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: RPO 1998.
Recent editing: 2:2002/4/26
Composition date:
1917
-
1918
Rhyme: abcb