note]: 'And O those children's voices singing in the dome!' The sonnet by the French poet Paul Verlaine (1844- 1896) describes Parsifal, the questing knight, resisting all sensual temptations to keep himself pure for the Grail and heal the Fisher King; Wagner's Parsifal had his feet washed before entering the castle of the Grail. 8. A reference to Tereus, who 'rudely forc'd' Philomela; it was also one of the conventional words for a nightingale's song in Elizabethan poetry. Cf. the song from John Lyly's Alexander and Campaspe (1564): 'Oh, 'tis the ravished nightingale. / Jug, jug, jug, pig, tereu! she cries.' Cf. also lines lOOff.
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2302 / T. S. ELIOT
Unreal City Under the brown fog of a winter noon Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna9 merchant
210 Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f.1 London: documents at sight, Asked me in demotic0 French colloquial To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.2 215 At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, I Tiresias,3 though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
220 At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,4 The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Out of the window perilously spread
225 Her drying combinations0 touched by the sun's last rays, undergarments On the divan are piled (at night her bed) Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.0 corset I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest?
230 I too awaited the expected guest. He, the young man carbuncular,0 arrives, pimply A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a Bradford5 millionaire.
9. Now Izmir, a seaport in western Turkey; here aspects of love. For once, with a blow of his staff, associated with Carthage and the ancient Phoe-he had committed violence on two huge snakes as nician and Syrian merchants, who spread the old they copulated in the green forest; and?wondermystery cults. ful to tell?was turned from a man into a woman 1. The currants were quoted at a price 'carriage and thus spent seven years. In the eighth year he and insurance free to London'; and the Bill of Lad-saw the same snakes again and said: 'If a blow ing etc. were to be handed to the buyer upon pay-struck at you is so powerful that it changes the sex ment of the sight draft [Eliot's note]. Another gloss of the giver, I will now strike at you again.' With of C.i.f. is 'cost, insurance and freight.' these words she struck the snakes, and again
2. Luxury hotel in the seaside resort of Brighton. became a man. So he was appointed arbitrator in Cannon Street Hotel, near the station that was the playful quarrel, and supported Jove's state- then chief terminus for travelers to the Continent, ment. It is said that Saturnia [i.e., Juno] was quite was a favorite meeting place for businesspeople disproportionately upset, and condemned the arbigoing or coming from abroad; it was also a locale trator to perpetual blindness. But the almighty for homosexual liaisons. father (for no god may undo what has been done
3. Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not by another god), in return for the sight that was indeed a 'character,' is yet the most important per-taken away, gave him the power to know the future sonage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the and so lightened the penalty paid by the honor.' one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into 4. This may not appear as exact as Sappho's lines, the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly but I had in mind the 'longshore' or 'dory' fish- distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the erman, who returns at nightfall [Eliot's note]. Sap- women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in pho's poem addressed Hesperus, the evening star, Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the sub-as the star that brings everyone home from work stance of the poem. The whole passage from Ovid to evening rest; her poem is here distorted by Eliot. is of great anthropological interest [Eliot's note]. There is also an echo of the 19th-century Scottish The note then quotes, from the Latin text of Ovid's writer Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Requiem,' line Metamorphoses, the story of Tiresias's change of 221: 'Home is the sailor, home from sea.' sex: '[The story goes that once Jove, having drunk 5. Either the Yorkshire woolen manufacturing a great deal,] jested with Juno. He said, 'Your plea-town, where many fortunes were made in World sure in love is really greater than that enjoyed by War I, or the pioneer oil town of Bradford, Pennmen.' She denied it; so they decided to seek the sylvania, the home of one of Eliot's wealthy Haropinion of the wise Tiresias, for he knew both vard contemporaries, T. E. Hanley.
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THE WASTE LAND / 2303
235 The time is now propitious, as he guesses, The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Endeavours to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired. Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
240 Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed;
245 I who have sat by Thebes6 below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead.) Bestows one final patronising kiss, And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
250 Hardly aware of her departed lover; Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: 'Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over.' When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone,
255 She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.7
'This music crept by me upon the waters'8 And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street. O City, City, I can sometimes hear
260 Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, The pleasant whining of a mandoline And a clatter and a chatter from within Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls Of Magnus Martyr hold
265 Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.9
The river sweats' Oil and tar The barges drift With the turning tide
6. For many generations, Tiresias lived in Thebes, 9. The interior of St. Magnus Martyr is to my where he witnessed the tragic fates of Oedipus and mind one of the finest among [Sir Christopher] Creon; he prophesied in the marketplace by the Wren's interiors. See The Proposed Demolition of wall of Thebes. Nineteen City Churches: (P. S. King & Son, Ltd.) 7. V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wake-[Eliot's note]. In these lines the 'pleasant' music, field [Eliot's note]. Olivia, a character in Oliver the 'fishmen' resting after labor, and the splendor Goldsmith's 1766 novel, sings the following song of the church interior suggest a world of true valwhen she returns
