Sweeney among the Nightingales

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888 - 1965)

Original Text

T. S. Eliot, Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920): 35-36. E546 A753 1920a Fisher Rare Book Library.

omoi peplegmai kairian plegen eso

1Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees

2Letting his arms hang down to laugh,

3The zebra stripes along his jaw

4Swelling to maculate giraffe.

5The circles of the stormy moon

6Slide westward toward the River Plate,

7Death and the Raven drift above

8And Sweeney guards the horned gate.

9Gloomy Orion and the Dog

10Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;

11The person in the Spanish cape

12Tries to sit on Sweeney's knees

13Slips and pulls the table cloth

14Overturns a coffee-cup,

15Reorganized upon the floor

16She yawns and draws a stocking up;

17The silent man in mocha brown

18Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;

19The waiter brings in oranges

20Bananas figs and hothouse grapes;

21The silent vertebrate in brown

22Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;

23Rachel née Rabinovitch

24Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;

25She and the lady in the cape

26Are suspect, thought to be in league;

27Therefore the man with heavy eyes

28Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,

29Leaves the room and reappears

30Outside the window, leaning in,

31Branches of wistaria

32Circumscribe a golden grin;

33The host with someone indistinct

34Converses at the door apart,

35The nightingales are singing near

36The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

37And sang within the bloody wood

38When Agamemnon cried aloud,

39And let their liquid droppings fall

40To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.

Notes

1] The epigraph, from Aeschylus' play Agamemnon, is this king's dying words as his wife Clytemnestra kills him: "Alas, I am struck deeply with a deadly blow." Back to Line

4] maculate: spotted. Back to Line

6] River Plate: Rio de la Plata, between Argentina and Uruguay, an estuary of the Uruguay and Parana rivers on which can be found Buenos Aires, La Plata, and Montevideo. Back to Line

7] the Raven: the constellation Corvus.
horned gate: dreams in classical mythology are sometimes said to emerge from the underworld through this gate. Back to Line

9] Orion, a constellation, includes the dog-star Sirius and is near the constellation of the Dog, Canis Major. Back to Line

31] wistaria: ornamental flowering vine. Back to Line

36] The Roman Catholic Church includes nuns fromthe Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary. Back to Line

37] The bloody wood could be the grove of the classical Furies, in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, a place where there are singing nightingales and where bloody tragedies such as Agamemnon's death would have been spawned. It could also be the wood where Tereus raped and mutilated Philomela, who was later turned into a nightingale (a story Ovid tells in his Metamorphoses). Back to Line

39] droppings: Eliot revises to "siftings" in a later edition. Back to Line

Publication Start Year

1918

Publication Notes

"Four Poems," Little Review 5.5 (Sept. 1918). In England published in an almost identical book, Ara Vos Prec (London: Ovid Press, [1920]); and first in Poems (Richmond: L. and V. Woolf, Hogarth Press, 1919). Donald Gallup, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (London: Faber and Faber, 1969): A3, A4b, C45.

RPO poem Editors

Ian Lancashire

RPO Edition

RPO 1998.

Rhyme

abcb