The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

In the late 1950s the critic A. Alvarez judged: "The only native English poet of any importance to survive the First World War was D. H. Lawrence." Although there are complex reasons for the posthumous critical triumph of this writer who was so much reviled in his lifetime, there is also a simple and striking reason that must not be forgotten. Lawrence had vision; he responded intensely to life; he had a keen ear and a piercing eye for vitality and color and sound, for landscape�be it of England or Italy or New Mexico�for the individuality and concreteness of things in nature, and for the individuality and concreteness of people. His travel sketches are as impressive

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in their way as his novels and poems; he seizes both on the symbolic incident and on the concrete reality, and each is interpreted in terms of the other. He looked at the world freshly, with his own eyes, avoiding formulas and cliches; and he forged for himself a kind of utterance that, at his best, was able to convey powerfully and vividly what his original vision showed him. A restless pilgrim, he had uncanny perceptions into the depths of physical things and an uncompromising honesty in his view of human beings and the world.

Odour of Chrysanthemums

I

The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full wagons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse,1 which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, out-distanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway line to Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks2 thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black wagons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice3 where the withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney.4 In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass. The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the whimsey,' a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon's stagnant light. Just beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black headstocks of Brinsley Colliery.6 The two wheels were spinning fast up against the sky, and the winding engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners were being turned up.

The engine whistled as it came into the wide bay of railway lines beside the colliery, where rows of trucks stood in harbour.

Miners, single, trailing and in groups, passed like shadows diverging home. At the edge of the ribbed level of sidings squat a low cottage, three steps down from the cinder track. A large bony vine clutched at the house, as if to claw down the tiled roof. Round the bricked yard grew a few wintry primroses. Beyond, the long garden sloped down to a bush-covered brook course. There were some twiggy apple trees, winter-crack trees, and ragged cabbages. Beside the path hung disheveled pink chrysanthemums, like pink cloths hung on bushes. A woman came stooping out of the felt-covered fowl-house, half-way down the garden. She closed and padlocked the door, then drew herself erect, having brushed some bits from her white apron.

She was a tall woman of imperious mien, handsome, with definite black

eyebrows. Her smooth black hair was parted exactly. For a few moments she

stood steadily watching the miners as they passed along the railway: then she

1. Common prickly bush with yellow flowers. 5. Machine for raising ore or water from a mine. 2. Open freight cars. 6. Coal mine. "Headstocks" support revolving 3. A wood of small trees or shrubs. parts of a machine. 4. Thicket.

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224 6 / D. H. LAWRENCE

turned towards the brook course. Her face was calm and set, her mouth was

closed with disillusionment. After a moment she called:

"John!" There was no answer. She waited, and then said distinctly:

"Where are you?"

"Here!" replied a child's sulky voice from among the bushes. The woman looked piercingly through the dusk.

"Are you at that brook?" she asked sternly.

For answer the child showed himself before the raspberry-canes that rose like whips. He was a small, sturdy boy of five. He stood quite still, defiantly.

"Oh!" said the mother, conciliated. "I thought you were down at that wet brook�and you remember what I told you " The boy did not move or answer. "Come, come on in," she said more gently, "it's getting dark. There's your

grandfather's engine coming down the line!"

The lad advanced slowly, with resentful, taciturn movement. He was dressed in trousers and waistcoat of cloth that was too thick and hard for the size of the garments. They were evidently cut down from a man's clothes.

As they went slowly towards the house he tore at the ragged wisps of chrysanthemums and dropped the petals in handfuls along the path.

"Don't do that�it does look nasty," said his mother. He refrained, and she, suddenly pitiful, broke off a twig with three or four wan flowers and held them against her face. When mother and son reached the yard her hand hesitated, and instead of laying the flower aside, she pushed it in her apron-band. The mother and son stood at the foot of the three steps looking across the bay of lines at the passing home of the miners. The trundle of the small train was imminent. Suddenly the engine loomed past the house and came to a stop opposite the gate.

The engine-driver, a short man with round grey beard, leaned out of the cab high above the woman.

"Have you got a cup of tea?" he said in a cheery, hearty fashion.

It was her father. She went in, saying she would mash.7 Directly, she returned. "I didn't come to see you on Sunday," began the little grey-bearded man. "I didn't expect you," said his daughter. The engine-driver winced; then, reassuming his cheery, airy manner, he said:

"Oh, have you heard then? Well, and what do you think ?"

"I think it is soon enough," she replied.

At her brief censure the little man made an impatient gesture, and said coaxingly, yet with dangerous coldness:

"Well, what's a man to do? It's no sort of life for a man of my years, to sit at my own hearth like a stranger. And if I'm going to marry again it may as well be soon as late�what does it matter to anybody?"

The woman did not reply, but turned and went into the house. The man in the engine-cab stood assertive, till she returned with a cup of tea and a piece of bread and butter on a plate. She went up the steps and stood near the footplate of the hissing engine.

"You needn't 'a' brought me bread an' butter," said her father. "But a cup of tea"�he sipped appreciatively�"it's very nice." He sipped for a moment or

7. Steep the tea.

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ODOUR OF CHRYSANTHEMUMS / 224 7

two, then: "I hear as Walter's got another bout8 on," he said.

"When hasn't he?" said the woman bitterly.

"I heerd tell of him in the 'Lord Nelson' braggin' as he was going to spend that b afore he went: half a sovereign9 that was."

"When?" asked the woman.

"A1 Sat'day night�I know that's true."

"Very likely," she laughed bitterly. "He gives me twenty-three shillings."

"Aye, it's a nice thing, when a man can do nothing with his money but make a beast of himself!" said the grey-whiskered man. The woman turned her head away. Her father swallowed the last of his tea and handed her the cup.

"Aye," he sighed, wiping his mouth. "It's a settler,1 it is "

He put his hand on the lever. The little engine strained and groaned, and the train rumbled towards the crossing. The woman again looked across the metals. Darkness was settling over the spaces of the railway and trucks: the miners, in grey somber groups, were still passing home. The winding engine pulsed hurriedly, with brief pauses. Elizabeth Bates looked at the dreary flow of men, then she went indoors. Her husband did not come.

The kitchen was small and full of firelight; red coals piled glowing up the chimney mouth. All the life of the room seemed in the white, warm hearth and the steel fender reflecting the red fire. The cloth was laid for tea; cups glinted in the shadows. At the back, where the lowest stairs protruded into the room, the boy sat struggling with a knife and a piece of white wood. He was almost hidden in the shadow. It was half-past four. They had but to await the father's coming to begin tea. As the mother watched her son's sullen little struggle with the wood, she saw herself in his silence and pertinacity; she saw the father in her child's indifference to all but himself. She seemed to be occupied by her husband. He had probably gone past his home, slunk past his own door, to drink before he came in, while his dinner spoiled and wasted in waiting. She glanced at the clock, then took the potatoes to strain them in the yard. The garden and fields beyond the brook were closed in uncertain darkness. When she rose with the saucepan, leaving the drain steaming into the night behind her, she saw the yellow lamps were lit along the high road that went up the hill away beyond the space of the railway lines and the field.

Then again she watched the men trooping home, fewer now and fewer.

Indoors the fire was sinking and the room was dark red. The woman put

her saucepan on the hob,2 and set a batter-pudding near the mouth of the

oven. Then she stood unmoving. Directly, gratefully, came quick young steps

to the door. Someone hung on the latch a moment, then a little girl entered

and began pulling off her outdoor things, dragging a mass of curls, just rip

ening from gold to brown, over her eyes with her hat.

Her mother chid her for coming late from school, and said she would have

to keep her at home the dark winter days.

"Why, mother, it's hardly a bit dark yet. The lamp's not lighted, and my

father's not home."

"No, he isn't. But it's a quarter to five! Did you see anything of him?"

The child became serious. She looked at her mother with large, wistful blue

eyes.

8. Session; i.e., bout of drinking. public house (pub). 9. Gold coin worth twenty shillings. Half a sover-1. Crushing (or final) blow. eign is worth ten. Lord Nelson is the name of a 2. Part of the fireplace.

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224 8 / D. H. LAWRENCE

"No, mother, I've never seen him. Why? Has he come up an' gone past, to Old Brinsley? He hasn't, mother, 'cos I never saw him."

"He'd watch that," said the mother bitterly, "he'd take care as you didn't see him. But you may depend upon it, he's seated in the 'Prince o' Wales.'3 He wouldn't be this late."

The girl looked at her mother piteously.

"Let's have our teas, mother, should we?" said she.

The mother called John to table. She opened the door once more and looked out across the darkness of the lines. All was deserted: she could not hear the winding-engines.

"Perhaps," she said to herself, "he's stopped to get some ripping4 done."

They sat down to tea. John, at the end of the table near the door, was almost lost in the darkness. Their faces were hidden from each other. The girl crouched against the fender5 slowly moving a thick piece of bread before the fire. The lad, his face a dusky mark on the shadow, sat watching her who was transfigured in the red glow.

"I do think it's beautiful to look in the fire," said the child.

"Do you?" said her mother. "Why?"

"It's so red, and full of little caves�and it feels so nice, and you can fair smell it."

"It'll want mending directly," replied her mother, "and then if your father comes he'll carry on and say there never is a fire when a man comes home sweating from the pit. A public-house is always warm enough."

There was silence till the boy said complainingly: "Make haste, our Annie."

"Well, I am doing! I can't make the fire do it no faster, can I?"

"She keeps wafflin' it about so's to make 'er slow," grumbled the boy.

"Don't have such an evil imagination, child," replied the mother.

Soon the room was busy in the darkness with the crisp sound of crunching. The mother ate very little. She drank her tea determinedly, and sat thinking. When she rose her anger was evident in the stern unbending of her head. She looked at the pudding in the fender, and broke out:

"It is a scandalous thing as a man can't even come home to his dinner! If it's crozzled6 up to a cinder I don't see why I should care. Past his very door he goes to get to a public-house, and here I sit with his dinner waiting for him "

She went out. As she dropped piece after piece of coal on the red fire, the shadows fell on the walls, till the room was almost in total darkness. "I canna see," grumbled the invisible John. In spite of herself, the mother laughed.

"You know the way to your mouth," she said. She set the dust pan outside

the door. When she came again like a shadow on the hearth, the lad repeated,

complaining sulkily:

"I canna see."

"Good gracious!" cried the mother irritably, "you're as bad as your father if

it's a bit dusk!"

Nevertheless, she took a paper spill from a sheaf on the mantelpiece and

proceeded to light the lamp that hung from the ceiling in the middle of the

3. Name of a pub. 5. Frame that keeps coals in the fireplace. 4. Taking out or cutting away coal or stone (a min-6. Curled. ing and quarrying term).

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ODOUR OF CHRYSANTHEMUMS / 224 9

room. As she reached up, her figure displayed itself just rounding with maternity.

"Oh, mother !" exclaimed the girl.

"What?" said the woman, suspended in the act of putting the lamp-glass over the flame. The copper reflector shone handsomely on her, as she stood with uplifted arm, turning to face her daughter. "You've got a flower in your apron!" said the child, in a little rapture at this unusual event.

"Goodness me!" exclaimed the woman, relieved. "One would think the house was afire." She replaced the glass and waited a moment before turning up the wick. A pale shadow was seen floating vaguely on the floor.

"Let me smell!" said the child, still rapturously, coming forward and putting her face to her mother's waist.

"Go along, silly!" said the mother, turning up the lamp. The light revealed their suspense so that the woman felt it almost unbearable. Annie was still bending at her waist. Irritably, the mother took the flowers out from her apron- band.

"Oh, mother�don't take them out!" Annie cried, catching her hand and trying to replace the sprig. "Such nonsense!" said the mother, turning away. The child put the pale chrysanthemums to her lips, murmuring:

"Don't they smell beautiful!"

Her mother gave a short laugh.

"No," she said, "not to me. It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he'd got brown chrysanthemums in his buttonhole." She looked at the children. Their eyes and their parted lips were wondering. The mother sat rocking in silence for some time. Then she looked at the clock.

"Twenty minutes to six!" In a tone of fine bitter carelessness she continued: "Eh, he'll not come now till they bring him. There he'll stick! But he needn't come rolling in here in his pit-dirt, for I won't wash him. He can lie on the floor Eh, what a fool I've been, what a fool! And this is what I came here for, to this dirty hole, rats and all, for him to slink past his very door. Twice last week�he's begun now "

She silenced herself and rose to clear the table.

While for an hour or more the children played, subduedly intent, fertile of

imagination, united in fear of the mother's wrath, and in dread of their father's

home-coming, Mrs Bates sat in her rocking chair making a "singlet" of thick

cream-coloured flannel, which gave a dull wounded sound as she tore off the

grey edge. She worked at her sewing with energy, listening to the children,

and her anger wearied itself, lay down to rest, opening its eyes from time to

time and steadily watching, its ears raised to listen. Sometimes even her anger

quailed and shrank, and the mother suspended her sewing, tracing the foot

steps that thudded along the sleepers7 outside; she would lift her head sharply

to bid the children "hush," but she recovered herself in time, and the footsteps

went past the gate, and the children were not flung out of their play-world.

But at last Annie sighed, and gave in. She glanced at her wagon of slippers,

and loathed the game. She turned plaintively to her mother.

"Mother!"�but she was inarticulate.

7. Railroad ties.

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225 0 / D. H. LAWRENCE

John crept out like a frog from under the sofa. His mother glanced up.

"Yes," she said, "just look at those shirt-sleeves!"

The boy held them out to survey them, saying nothing. Then somebody called in a hoarse voice away down the line, and suspense bristled in the room, till two people had gone by outside, talking.

"It is time for bed," said the mother.

"My father hasn't come," wailed Annie plaintively. But her mother was primed with courage.

"Never mind. They'll bring him when he does come�like a log." She meant there would be no scene. "And he may sleep on the floor till he wakes himself. I know he'll not go to work to-morrow after this!"

The children had their hands and faces wiped with a flannel. They were very quiet. When they had put on their night-dresses, they said their prayers, the boy mumbling. The mother looked down at them, at the brown silken bush of intertwining curls in the nape of the girl's neck, at the little black head of the lad, and her heart burst with anger at their father, who caused all three such distress. The children hid their faces in her skirts for comfort.

When Mrs Bates came down, the room was strangely empty, with a tension of expectancy. She took up her sewing and stitched for some time without raising her head. Meantime her anger was tinged with fear.

II

The clock struck eight and she rose suddenly, dropping her sewing on her chair. She went to the stair-foot door, opened it, listening. Then she went out, locking the door behind her.

Something scuffled in the yard, and she started, though she knew it was only the rats with which the place was over-run. The night was very dark. In the great bay of railway lines, bulked with trucks, there was no trace of light, only away back she could see a few yellow lamps at the pit-top, and the red smear of the burning pit-bank on the night. She hurried along the edge of the track, then, crossing the converging lines, came to the stile by the white gates, whence she emerged on the road. Then the fear which had led her shrank. People were walking up to New Brinsley; she saw the lights in the houses; twenty yards farther on were the broad windows of the "Prince of Wales," very warm and bright, and the loud voices of men could be heard distinctly. What a fool she had been to imagine that anything had happened to him! He was merely drinking over there at the "Prince of Wales." She faltered. She had never yet been to fetch him, and she never would go. So she continued her walk towards the long straggling line of houses, standing back on the highway. She entered a passage between the dwellings.

"Mr Rigley?�Yes! Did you want him? No, he's not in at this minute."

The raw-boned woman leaned forward from her dark scullery8 and peered at the other, upon whom fell a dim light through the blind of the kitchen window.

"Is it Mrs Bates?" she asked in a tone tinged with respect.

"Yes. I wondered if your Master was at home. Mine hasn't come yet."

" 'Asn't 'e! Oh, Jack's been 'ome an' 'ad 'is dinner an' gone out. 'E's just gone for 'alf an hour afore bed-time. Did you call at the 'Prince of Wales'?"

8. Back kitchen.

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ODOUR OF CHRYSANTHEMUMS / 2251

"No "

"No, you didn't like ! It's not very nice." The other woman was indulgent. There was an awkward pause. "Jack never said nothink about�about your Master," she said.

"No!�I expect he's stuck in there!"

Elizabeth Bates said this bitterly, and with recklessness. She knew that the woman across the yard was standing at her door listening, but she did not care. As she turned:

"Stop a minute! I'll just go an' ask Jack if 'e knows anythink," said Mrs Bigley.

"Oh no�I wouldn't like to put !"

"Yes, I will, if you'll just step inside an' see as th' childer doesn't come downstairs and set theirselves afire." Elizabeth Bates, murmuring a remonstrance, stepped inside. The other woman apologised for the state of the room.

The kitchen needed apology. There were little frocks and trousers and childish undergarments on the squab9 and on the floor, and a litter of playthings everywhere. On the black American cloth' of the table were pieces of bread and cake, crusts, slops, and a teapot with cold tea.

"Eh, ours is just as bad," said Elizabeth Bates, looking at the woman, not at the house. Mrs Bigley put a shawl over her head and hurried out, saying:

"I shanna be a minute."

The other sat, noting with faint disapproval the general untidiness of the room. Then she fell to counting the shoes of various sizes scattered over the floor. There were twelve. She sighed and said to herself: "No wonder!"�glancing at the litter. There came the scratching of two pairs of feet on the yard, and the Rigleys entered. Elizabeth Bates rose. Rigley was a big man, with very large bones. His head looked particularly bony. Across his temple was a blue scar, caused by a wound got in the pit, a wound in which the coal dust remained blue like tattooing.

" 'Asna 'e come whoam yit?" asked the man, without any form of greeting, but with deference and sympathy. "I couldna say wheer he is�'e's non ower theer!"�he jerked his head to signify the "Prince of Wales."

" 'E's 'appen gone up to th' Yew,"2 said Mrs Rigley.

There was another pause. Rigley had evidently something to get off his mind:

"Ah left 'im finishin' a stint," he began. "Loose-all3 'ad bin gone about ten minutes when we com'n away, an' I shouted: 'Are ter comin', Walt?' an' 'e said: 'Go on, Ah shanna be but a'ef a minnit,' so we com'n ter th' bottom,

me an' Bowers, thinkin' as 'e wor just behint, an' 'ud come up i' th' next

bantle4 " He stood perplexed, as if answering a charge of deserting his mate. Elizabeth Bates, now again certain of disaster, hastened to reassure him: "I expect 'e's gone up to th' "Yew Tree,' as you say. It's not the first time. I've

fretted myself into a fever before now. He'll come home when they carry him."

"Ay, isn't it too bad!" deplored the other woman.

"I'll just step up to Dick's an' see if 'e is theer," offered the man, afraid of appearing alarmed, afraid of taking liberties.

9. Couch. 3. Signal for end of work. 1. Oilcloth. 4. Group. 2. I.e., the Yew Tree (a pub).

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225 2 / D. H. LAWRENCE

"Oh, I wouldn't think of bothering you that far," said Elizabeth Bates, with emphasis, but he knew she was glad of his offer.

As they stumbled up the entry, Elizabeth Bates heard Rigley's wife run across the yard and open her neighbour's door. At this, suddenly all the blood in her body seemed to switch away from her heart.

"Mind!" warned Rigley. "Ah've said many a time as Ah'd fill up them ruts in this entry, sumb'dy '11 be breakin' their legs yit."

She recovered herself and walked quickly along with the miner.

"I don't like leaving the children in bed, and nobody in the house," she said.

"No, you dunna!" he replied courteously. They were soon at the gate of the cottage. "Well, I shanna be many minnits. Dunna you be frettin' now, 'e'll be all right," said the butty.5

"Thank you very much, Mr Rigley," she replied.

"You're welcome!" he stammered, moving away. "I shanna be many minnits."

The house was quiet. Elizabeth Bates took off her hat and shawl, and rolled back the rug. When she had finished, she sat down. It was a few minutes past nine. She was startled by the rapid chuff of the winding-engine at the pit, and the sharp whirr of the brakes on the rope as it descended. Again she felt the painful sweep of her blood, and she put her hand to her side, saying aloud: "Good gracious!�it's only the nine o'clock deputy6 going down," rebuking herself.

She sat still, listening. Half an hour of this, and she was wearied out.

"What am I working myself up like this for?" she said pitiably to herself, "I s'll only be doing myself some damage." She took out her sewing again. At a quarter to ten there were footsteps. One person! She watched for the

door to open. It was an elderly woman, in a black bonnet and a black woollen shawl�his mother. She was about sixty years old, pale, with blue eyes, and her face all wrinkled and lamentable. She shut the door and turned to her daughter-in-law peevishly.

"Eh, Lizzie, whatever shall we do, whatever shall we do!" she cried.

Elizabeth drew back a little, sharply.

"What is it, mother?" she said.

The elder woman seated herself on the sofa.

"I don't know, child, I can't tell you!"�she shook her head slowly. Elizabeth sat watching her, anxious and vexed.

"I don't know," replied the grandmother, sighing very deeply. "There's no end to my troubles, there isn't. The things I've gone through, I'm sure it's enough !" She wept without wiping her eyes, the tears running.

"But, mother," interrupted Elizabeth, "what do you mean? What is it?" The grandmother slowly wiped her eyes. The fountains of her tears were stopped by Elizabeth's directness. She wiped her eyes slowly. "Poor child! Eh, you poor thing!" she moaned. "I don't know what we're going to do, I don't�and you as you are�it's a thing, it is indeed!"

Elizabeth waited.

"Is he dead?" she asked, and at the words her heart swung violently, though

5. Workmate (cf. "buddy"). Among English coal the employers and the men. miners it means a supervisor intermediary between 6. Minor coal-mine official.

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ODOUR OF CHRYSANTHEMUMS / 2253

she felt a slight flush of shame at the ultimate extravagance of the question. Her words sufficiently frightened the old lady, almost brought her to herself.

"Don't say so, Elizabeth! We'll hope it's not as bad as that; no, may the Lord spare us that, Elizabeth. Jack Rigley came just as I was sittin' down to a glass afore going to bed, an' 'e said: ' 'Appen you'll go down th' line, Mrs. Bates. Walt's had an accident. 'Appen you'll go an' sit wi' 'er till we can get him home.' I hadn't time to ask him a word afore he was gone. An' I put my bonnet on an' come straight down, Lizzie. I thought to myself: 'Eh, that poor blessed child, if anybody should come an' tell her of a sudden, there's no knowin' what'll 'appen to 'er.' You mustn't let it upset you, Lizzie�or you know what to expect. How long is it, six months�or is it five, Lizzie? Ay!"�the old woman shook her head�"time slips on, it slips on! Ay!"

Elizabeth's thoughts were busy elsewhere. If he was killed�would she be able to manage on the little pension and what she could earn?�she counted up rapidly. If he was hurt�they wouldn't take him to the hospital�how tiresome he would be to nurse!�but perhaps she'd be able to get him away from the drink and his hateful ways. She would�while he was ill. The tears offered to come to her eyes at the picture. But what sentimental luxury was this she was beginning? She turned to consider the children. At any rate she was absolutely necessary for them. They were her business.

"Ay!" repeated the old woman, "it seems but a week or two since he brought me his first wages. Ay�he was a good lad, Elizabeth, he was, in his way. I don't know why he got to be such a trouble, I don't. He was a happy lad at home, only full of spirits. But there's no mistake he's been a handful of trouble, he has! I hope the Lord'll spare him to mend his ways. I hope so, I hope so. You've had a sight o' trouble with him, Elizabeth, you have indeed. But he was a jolly enough lad wi' me, he was, I can assure you. I don't know how it is. . . ."

The old woman continued to muse aloud, a monotonous irritating sound, while Elizabeth thought concentratedly, startled once, when she heard the winding-engine chuff quickly, and the brakes skirr with a shriek. Then she heard the engine more slowly, and the brakes made no sound. The old woman did not notice. Elizabeth waited in suspense. The mother-in-law talked, with lapses into silence.

"But he wasn't your son, Lizzie, an' it makes a difference. Whatever he was, I remember him when he was little, an' I learned to understand him and to make allowances. You've got to make allowances for them "

It was half-past ten, and the old woman was saying: "But it's trouble from beginning to end; you're never too old for trouble, never too old for that " when the gate banged back, and there were heavy feet on the steps.

"I'll go, Lizzie, let me go," cried the old woman, rising. But Elizabeth was at the door. It was a man in pit-clothes. "They're bringin' 'im, Missis," he said. Elizabeth's heart halted a moment. Then it surged on again, almost suffocating her.

"Is he�is it bad?" she asked.

The man turned away, looking at the darkness:

"The doctor says 'e'd been dead hours. 'E saw 'im i' th' lamp-cabin."

The old woman, who stood just behind Elizabeth, dropped into a chair, and

folded her hands, crying: "Oh, my boy, my boy!"

"Hush!" said Elizabeth, with a sharp twitch of a frown. "Be still, mother,

don't waken th' children: I wouldn't have them down for anything!"

The old woman moaned softly, rocking herself. The man was drawing away.

Elizabeth took a step forward.

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225 4 / D. H. LAWRENCE

"How was it?" she asked.

"Well, 1 couldn't say for sure," the man replied, very ill at ease. " 'E wor finishin' a stint an' th' butties 'ad gone, an' a lot o' stuff come down atop 'n

lm.

"And crushed him?" cried the widow, with a shudder.

"No," said the man, "it fell at th' back of im. 'E wor under th' face an' it niver touched 'im. It shut 'im in. It seems 'e wor smothered."

Elizabeth shrank back. She heard the old woman behind her cry:

"What?�what did 'e say it was?"

The man replied, more loudly: " 'E wor smothered!"

Then the old woman wailed aloud, and this relieved Elizabeth.

"Oh, mother," she said, putting her hand on the old woman, "don't waken th' children, don't waken th' children."

She wept a little, unknowing, while the old mother rocked herself and moaned. Elizabeth remembered that they were bringing him home, and she must be ready. "They'll lay him in the parlour," she said to herself, standing a moment pale and perplexed.

Then she lighted a candle and went into the tiny room. The air was cold and damp, but she could not make a fire, there was no fireplace. She set down the candle and looked round. The candlelight glittered on the lustre-glasses, on the two vases that held some of the pink chrysanthemums, and on the dark mahogany. There was a cold, deathly smell of chrysanthemums in the room. Elizabeth stood looking at the flowers. She turned away, and calculated whether there would be room to lay him on the floor, between the couch and the chiffonier. She pushed the chairs aside. There would be room to lay him down and to step round him. Then she fetched the old red tablecloth, and another old cloth, spreading them down to save her bit of carpet. She shivered on leaving the parlour; so, from the dresser drawer she took a clean shirt and put it at the fire to air. All the time her mother-in-law was rocking herself in the chair and moaning.

"You'll have to move from there, mother," said Elizabeth. "They'll be bringing him in. Come in the rocker."

The old mother rose mechanically, and seated herself by the fire, continuing to lament. Elizabeth went into the pantry for another candle, and there, in the little pent-house under the naked tiles, she heard them coming. She stood still in the pantry doorway, listening. She heard them pass the end of the house, and come awkwardly down the three steps, a jumble of shuffling footsteps and muttering voices. The old woman was silent. The men were in the yard.

Then Elizabeth heard Matthews, the manager of the pit, say: "You go in first, Jim. Mind!"

The door came open, and the two women saw a collier backing into the room, holding one end of a stretcher, on which they could see the nailed pit- boots of the dead man. The two carriers halted, the man at the head stooping to the lintel of the door.

"Wheer will you have him?" asked the manager, a short, white-bearded man.

Elizabeth roused herself and came from the pantry carrying the unlighted candle. "In the parlour," she said. "In there, Jim!" pointed the manager, and the carriers backed round into

the tiny room. The coat with which they had covered the body fell off as they awkwardly turned through the two doorways, and the women saw their man,

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ODOUR OF CHRYSANTHEMUMS / 2255

naked to the waist, lying stripped for work. The old woman began to moan in a low voice of horror. "Lay th' stretcher at th' side," snapped the manager, "an' put 'im on th' cloths. Mind now, mind! Look you now !"

One of the men had knocked off a vase of chrysanthemums. He stared awkwardly, then they set down the stretcher. Elizabeth did not look at her husband. As soon as she could get in the room, she went and picked up the broken vase and the flowers.

"Wait a minute!" she said. The three men waited in silence while she mopped up the water with a duster.

"Eh, what a job, what a job, to be sure!" the manager was saying, rubbing his brow with trouble and perplexity. "Never knew such a thing in my life, never! He'd no business to ha' been left. I never knew such a thing in my life! Fell over him clean as a whistle, an' shut him in. Not four foot of space, there wasn't�yet it scarce bruised him."

He looked down at the dead man, lying prone, half naked, all grimed with coal-dust.

" ' 'Sphyxiated,' the doctor said. It is the most terrible job I've ever known. Seems as if it was done o' purpose. Clean over him, an' shut 'im in, like a mouse-trap"�he made a sharp, descending gesture with his hand.

The colliers standing by jerked aside their heads in hopeless comment.

The horror of the thing bristled upon them all.

Then they heard the girl's voice upstairs calling shrilly: "Mother, mother� who is it? Mother, who is it?" Elizabeth hurried to the foot of the stairs and opened the door: "Go to sleep!" she commanded sharply. "What are you shouting about? Go

to sleep at once�there's nothing "

Then she began to mount the stairs. They could hear her on the boards, and on the plaster floor of the little bedroom. They could hear her distinctly: "What's the matter now?�what's the matter with you, silly thing?"�her

voice was much agitated, with an unreal gentleness. "I thought it was some men come," said the plaintive voice of the child. "Has he come?" "Yes, they've brought him. There's nothing to make a fuss about. Go to sleep now, like a good child." They could hear her voice in the bedroom, they waited whilst she covered

the children under the bedclothes.

"Is he drunk?" asked the girl, timidly, faintly.

"No! No�he's not! He�he's asleep."

"Is he asleep downstairs?"

"Yes�and don't make a noise."

There was silence for a moment, then the men heard the frightened child again:

"What's that noise?"

"It's nothing, I tell you, what are you bothering for?"

The noise was the grandmother moaning. She was oblivious of everything,

sitting on her chair rocking and moaning. The manager put his hand on her

arm and bade her "Sh�sh! !"

The old woman opened her eyes and looked at him. She was shocked by

this interruption, and seemed to wonder.

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225 6 / D. H. LAWRENCE

"What time is it?" the plaintive thin voice of the child, sinking back unhappily into sleep, asked this last question. "Ten o'clock," answered the mother more softly. Then she must have bent down and kissed the children.

Matthews beckoned to the men to come away. They put on their caps and took up the stretcher. Stepping over the body, they tiptoed out of the house. None of them spoke till they were far from the wakeful children.

When Elizabeth came down she found her mother alone on the parlour floor, leaning over the dead man, the tears dropping on him.

"We must lay him out," the wife said. She put on the kettle, then returning knelt at the feet, and began to unfasten the knotted leather laces. The room was clammy and dim with only one candle, so that she had to bend her face almost to the floor. At last she got off the heavy boots and put them away.

"You must help me now," she whispered to the old woman. Together they stripped the man.

When they arose, saw him lying in the naive dignity of death, the women stood arrested in fear and respect. For a few moments they remained still, looking down, the old mother whimpering. Elizabeth felt countermanded.7 She saw him, how utterly inviolable he lay in himself. She had nothing to do with him. She could not accept it. Stooping, she laid her hand on him, in claim. He was still warm, for the mine was hot where he had died. His mother had his face between her hands, and was murmuring incoherently. The old tears fell in succession as drops from wet leaves; the mother was not weeping, merely her tears flowed. Elizabeth embraced the body of her husband, with cheek and lips. She seemed to be listening, inquiring, trying to get some connection. But she could not. She was driven away. He was impregnable.

She rose, went into the kitchen where she poured warm water into a bowl, brought soap and flannel and a soft towel. "I must wash him," she said.

Then the old mother rose stiffly, and watched Elizabeth as she carefully washed his face, carefully brushing his big blond moustache from his mouth with the flannel. She was afraid with a bottomless fear, so she ministered to him. The old woman, jealous, said:

"Let me wipe him!"�and she kneeled on the other side drying slowly as Elizabeth washed, her big black bonnet sometimes brushing the dark head of her daughter-in-law. They worked thus in silence for a long time. They never forgot it was death, and the touch of the man's dead body gave them strange emotions, different in each of the women; a great dread possessed them both, the mother felt the lie was given to her womb, she was denied; the wife felt the utter isolation of the human soul, the child within her was a weight apart from her.

At last it was finished. He was a man of handsome body, and his face showed no traces of drink. He was blond, full-fleshed, with fine limbs. But he was dead.

"Bless him," whispered his mother, looking always at his face, and speaking out of sheer terror. "Dear lad�bless him!" She spoke in a faint, sibilant ecstasy of fear and mother love.

Elizabeth sank down again to the floor, and put her face against his neck, and trembled and shuddered. But she had to draw away again. He was dead, and her living flesh had no place against his. A great dread and weariness held her: she was so unavailing. Her life was gone like this.

7. Contradicted.

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ODOUR OF CHRYSANTHEMUMS / 2257

"White as milk he is, clear as a twelve-month baby, bless him, the darling!" the old mother murmured to herself. "Not a mark on him, clear and clean and white, beautiful as ever a child was made," she murmured with pride. Elizabeth kept her face hidden.

"He went peaceful, Lizzie�peaceful as sleep. Isn't he beautiful, the lamb? Ay�he must ha' made his peace, Lizzie. 'Appen he made it all right, Lizzie, shut in there. He'd have time. He wouldn't look like this if he hadn't made his peace. The lamb, the dear lamb. Eh, but he had a hearty laugh. I loved to hear it. He had the heartiest laugh, Lizzie, as a lad "

Elizabeth looked up. The man's mouth was fallen back, slightly open under the cover of the moustache. The eyes, half shut, did not show glazed in the obscurity. Life with its smoky burning gone from him, had left him apart and utterly alien to her. And she knew what a stranger he was to her. In her womb was ice of fear, because of this separate stranger with whom she had been living as one flesh. Was this what it all meant�utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of living? In dread she turned her face away. The fact was too deadly. There had been nothing between them, and yet they had come together, exchanging their nakedness repeatedly. Each time he had taken her, they had been two isolated beings, far apart as now. He was no more responsible than she. The child was like ice in her womb. For as she looked at the dead man, her mind, cold and detached, said clearly: "Who am I? What have I been doing? I have been fighting a husband who did not exist. He existed all the time. What wrong have I done? What was that I have been living with? There lies the reality, this man." And her soul died in her for fear: she knew she had never seen him, he had never seen her, they had met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met or whom they fought. And now she saw, and turned silent in seeing. For she had been wrong. She had said he was something he was not; she had felt familiar with him. Whereas he was apart all the while, living as she never lived, feeling as she never felt.

In fear and shame she looked at his naked body, that she had known falsely. And he was the father of her children. Her soul was torn from her body and stood apart. She looked at his naked body and was ashamed, as if she had denied it. After all, it was itself. It seemed awful to her. She looked at his face, and she turned her own face to the wall. For his look was other than hers, his way was not her way. She had denied him what he was�she saw it now. She had refused him as himself. And this had been her life, and his life. She was grateful to death, which restored the truth. And she knew she was not dead.

And all the while her heart was bursting with grief and pity for him. What had he suffered? What stretch of horror for this helpless man! She was rigid with agony. She had not been able to help him. He had been cruelly injured, this naked man, this other being, and she could make no reparation. There were the children�but the children belonged to life. This dead man had nothing to do with them. He and she were only channels through which life had flowed to issue in the children. She was a mother�but how awful she knew it now to have been a wife. And he, dead now, how awful he must have felt it to be a husband. She felt that in the next world he would be a stranger to her. If they met there, in the beyond, they would only be ashamed of what had been before. The children had come, for some mysterious reason, out of both of them. But the children did not unite them. Now he was dead, she knew how eternally he was apart from her, how eternally he had nothing more to do with her. She saw this episode of her life closed. They had denied each other in life. Now he had withdrawn. An anguish came over her. It was finished

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225 8 / D. H. LAWRENCE

then: it had become hopeless between them long before he died. Yet he had

been her husband. But how little!

"Have you got his shirt, 'Lizabeth?"

Elizabeth turned without answering, though she strove to weep and behave as her mother-in-law expected. But she could not, she was silenced. She went into the kitchen and returned with the garment.

"It is aired," she said, grasping the cotton shirt here and there to try. She was almost ashamed to handle him; what right had she or anyone to lay hands on him; but her touch was humble on his body. It was hard work to clothe him. He was so heavy and inert. A terrible dread gripped her all the while: that he could be so heavy and utterly inert, unresponsive, apart. The horror of the distance between them was almost too much for her�it was so infinite a gap she must look across.

At last it was finished. They covered him with a sheet and left him lying, with his face bound. And she fastened the door of the little parlour, lest the children should see what was lying there. Then, with peace sunk heavy on her heart, she went about making tidy the kitchen. She knew she submitted to life, which was her immediate master. But from death, her ultimate master, she winced with fear and shame.

1911, 1914

The Horse Dealer's Daughter

"Well, Mabel, and what are you going to do with yourself?" asked Joe, with foolish flippancy. He felt quite safe himself. Without listening for an answer, he turned aside, worked a grain of tobacco to the tip of his tongue, and spat it out. He did not care about anything, since he felt safe himself.

The three brothers and the sister sat round the desolate breakfast-table, attempting some sort of desultory consultation. The morning's post had given the final tap to the family fortunes, and all was over. The dreary dining-room itself, with its heavy mahogany furniture, looked as if it were waiting to be done away with.

But the consultation amounted to nothing. There was a strange air of ineffectuality about the three men, as they sprawled at table, smoking and reflecting vaguely on their own condition. The girl was alone, a rather short, sullen-looking young woman of twenty-seven. She did not share the same life as her brothers. She would have been good-looking, save for the impressive fixity of her face, "bull-dog," as her brothers called it.

There was a confused tramping of horses' feet outside. The three men all sprawled round in their chairs to watch. Beyond the dark holly bushes that separated the strip of lawn from the high-road, they could see a cavalcade of shire horses swinging out of their own yard, being taken for exercise. This was the last time. These were the last horses that would go through their hands. The young men watched with critical, callous look. They were all frightened at the collapse of their lives, and the sense of disaster in which they were involved left them no inner freedom.

Yet they were three fine, well-set fellows enough. Joe, the eldest, was a man of thirty-three, broad and handsome in a hot, flushed way. His face was red,

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THE HORSE DEALER'S DAUGHTER / 225 9

he twisted his black moustache over a thick finger, his eyes were shallow and restless. He had a sensual way of uncovering his teeth when he laughed, and his bearing was stupid. Now he watched the horses with a glazed look of helplessness in his eyes, a certain stupor of downfall.

The great draught horses swung past. They were tied head to tail, four of them, and they heaved along to where a lane branched off from the high-road, planting their great hoofs floutingly in the fine black mud, swinging their great rounded haunches sumptuously, and trotting a few sudden steps as they were led into the lane, round the corner. Every movement showed a massive, slumbrous strength, and a stupidity which held them in subjection. The groom at the head looked back, jerking the leading rope. And the cavalcade moved out of sight up the lane, the tail of the last horse, bobbed up tight and stiff, held out taut from the swinging great haunches as they rocked behind the hedges in a motion-like sleep.

Joe watched with glazed hopeless eyes. The horses were almost like his own body to him. He felt he was done for now. Luckily he was engaged to a woman as old as himself, and therefore her father, who was steward of a neighbouring estate, would provide him with a job. He would marry and go into harness. His life was over, he would be a subject animal now.

He turned uneasily aside, the retreating steps of the horses echoing in his ears. Then, with foolish restlessness, he reached for the scraps of bacon-rind from the plates, and making a faint whistling sound, flung them to the terrier that lay against the fender. He watched the dog swallow them, and waited till the creature looked into his eyes. Then a faint grin came on his face, and in a high, foolish voice he said:

"You won't get much more bacon, shall you, you little b ?" The dog faintly and dismally wagged its tail, then lowered its haunches, circled round, and lay down again.

There was another helpless silence at the table. Joe sprawled uneasily in his seat, not willing to go till the family conclave was dissolved. Fred Henry, the second brother, was erect, clean-limbed, alert. He had watched the passing of the horses with more sang-froid.' If he was an animal, like Joe, he was an animal which controls, not one which is controlled. He was master of any horse, and he carried himself with a well-tempered air of mastery. But he was not master of the situations of life. He pushed his coarse brown moustache upwards, off his lip, and glanced irritably at his sister, who sat impassive and inscrutable.

"You'll go and stop with Lucy for a bit, shan't you?" he asked. The girl did

not answer.

"I don't see what else you can do," persisted Fred Henry.

"Go as a skivvy,"2 Joe interpolated laconically.

The girl did not move a muscle.

"If I was her, I should go in for training for a nurse," said Malcolm, the youngest of them all. He was the baby of the family, a young man of twenty-

two, with a fresh, jaunty museau.3

But Mabel did not take any notice of him. They had talked at her and round

her for so many years, that she hardly heard them at all.

1. Cold blood (French, literal trans.); here calm 2. Servant girl, detachment. 3. Muzzle (French); here face.

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226 0 / D. H. LAWRENCE

The marble clock on the mantelpiece softly chimed the half-hour, the dog rose uneasily from the hearth-rug and looked at the party at the breakfast- table. But still they sat in an ineffectual conclave.

"Oh, all right," said Joe suddenly, apropos of nothing. "I'll get a move on."

He pushed back his chair, straddled his knees with a downward jerk, to get them free, in horsey fashion, and went to the fire. Still he did not go out of the room; he was curious to know what the others would do or say. He began to charge his pipe, looking down at the dog and saying in a high, affected voice:

"Going wi' me? Going wi' me are ter? Tha'rt goin' further than tha counts on just now, dost hear?"

The dog faintly wagged his tail, the man stuck out his jaw and covered his pipe with his hands, and puffed intently, losing himself in the tobacco, looking down all the while at the dog with an absent brown eye. The dog looked up at him in mournful distrust. Joe stood with his knees stuck out, in real horsey fashion.

"Have you had a letter from Lucy?" Fred Henry asked of his sister.

"Last week," came the neutral reply.

"And what does she say?"

There was no answer.

"Does she ask you to go and stop there?" persisted Fred Henry.

"She says I can if I like."

"Well, then, you'd better. Tell her you'll come on Monday."

This was received in silence.

"That's what you'll do then, is it?" said Fred Henry, in some exasperation.

But she made no answer. There was a silence of futility and irritation in the room. Malcolm grinned fatuously. "You'll have to make up your mind between now and next Wednesday," said Joe loudly, "or else find yourself lodgings on the kerbstone."

The face of the young woman darkened, but she sat on immutable.

"Here's Jack Ferguson!" exclaimed Malcolm, who was looking aimlessly out of the window. "Where?" exclaimed Joe loudly. "Just gone past." "Coming in?" Malcolm craned his neck to see the gate. "Yes," he said. There was a silence. Mabel sat on like one condemned, at the head of the

table. Then a whistle was heard from the kitchen. The dog got up and barked sharply. Joe opened the door and shouted:

"Come on."

After a moment a young man entered. He was muffled up in overcoat and a purple woollen scarf, and his tweed cap, which he did not remove, was pulled down on his head. He was of medium height, his face was rather long and pale, his eyes looked tired.

"Hello, Jack! Well, Jack!" exclaimed Malcolm and Joe. Fred Henry merely

said: "Jack."

"What's doing?" asked the newcomer, evidently addressing Fred Henry.

"Same. We've got to be out by Wednesday. Got a cold?"

"I have�got it bad, too."

"Why don't you stop in?"

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THE HORSE DEALER'S DAUGHTER / 2261

"Me stop in? When I can't stand on my legs, perhaps I shall have a chance." The young man spoke huskily. He had a slight Scotch accent.

"It's a knock-out, isn't it," said Joe, boisterously, "if a doctor goes round croaking with a cold. Looks bad for the patients, doesn't it?"

The young doctor looked at him slowly.

"Anything the matter with you, then?" he asked sarcastically.

"Not as I know of. Damn your eyes, I hope not. Why?"

"I thought you were very concerned about the patients, wondered if you might be one yourself." "Damn it, no, I've never been patient to no flaming doctor, and hope I never shall be," returned Joe.

At this point Mabel rose from the table, and they all seemed to become aware of her existence. She began putting the dishes together. The young doctor looked at her, but did not address her. He had not greeted her. She went out of the room with the tray, her face impassive and unchanged.

"When are you off then, all of you?" asked the doctor.

"I'm catching the eleven-forty," replied Malcolm. "Are you goin' down wi' th' trap, Joe?" "Yes, I've told you I'm going down wi' th' trap, haven't I?" "We'd better be getting her in then. So long Jack, if I don't see you before I go," said Malcolm, shaking hands.

He went out, followed by Joe, who seemed to have his tail between his legs.

"Well, this is the devil's own," exclaimed the doctor, when he was left alone with Fred Henry. "Going before Wednesday, are you?" "That's the orders," replied the other. "Where, to Northampton?" "That's it." "The devil!" exclaimed Ferguson, with quiet chagrin. And there was silence between the two. "All settled up, are you?" asked Ferguson. "About." There was another pause. "Well, I shall miss yer, Freddy, boy," said the young doctor. "And I shall miss thee, Jack," returned the other. "Miss you like hell," mused the doctor. Fred Henry turned aside. There was nothing to say. Mabel came in again,

to finish clearing the table. "What are you going to do, then, Miss Pervin?" asked Ferguson. "Going to your sister's, are you?" Mabel looked at him with her steady, dangerous eyes, that always made him uncomfortable, unsettling his superficial ease.

"No," she said.

"Well, what in the name of fortune are you going to do? Say what you mean to do," cried Fred Henry, with futile intensity. But she only averted her head, and continued her work. She folded the white table-cloth, and put on the chenille cloth.

"The sulkiest bitch that ever trod!" muttered her brother.

But she finished her task with perfectly impassive face, the young doctor watching her interestedly all the while. Then she went out. Fred Henry stared after her, clenching his lips, his blue eyes fixing in sharp antagonism, as he made a grimace of sour exasperation.

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226 2 / D. H. LAWRENCE

"You could bray4 her into bits, and that's all you'd get out of her," he said, in a small, narrowed tone.

The doctor smiled faintly.

"What's she going to do, then?" he asked.

"Strike me if I know!" returned the other.

There was a pause. Then the doctor stirred.

"I'll be seeing you tonight, shall I?" he said to his friend.

"Ay�where's it to be? Are we going over to Jessdale?"

"I don't know. I've got such a cold on me. I'll come round to the 'Moon and Stars,'5 anyway."

"Let Lizzie and May miss their night for once, eh?"

"That's it�if I feel as I do now."

"All's one "

The two young men went through the passage and down to the back door together. The house was large, but it was servantless now, and desolate. At the back was a small bricked house-yard and beyond that a big square, gravelled fine and red, and having stables on two sides. Sloping, dank, winter-dark fields stretched away on the open sides.

But the stables were empty. Joseph Pervin, the father of the family, had been a man of no education, who had become a fairly large horse dealer. The stables had been full of horses, there was a great turmoil and come-and-go of horses and of dealers and grooms. Then the kitchen was full of servants. But of late things had declined. The old man had married a second time, to retrieve his fortunes. Now he was dead and everything was gone to the dogs,6 there was nothing but debt and threatening.

For months, Mabel had been servantless in the big house, keeping the home together in penury for her ineffectual brothers. She had kept house for ten years. But previously it was with unstinted means. Then, however brutal and coarse everything was, the sense of money had kept her proud, confident. The men might be foul-mouthed, the women in the kitchen might have had reputations, her brothers might have illegitimate children. But so long as there was money, the girl felt herself established, and brutally proud, reserved.

No company came to the house, save dealers and coarse men. Mabel had no associates of her own sex, after her sister went away. But she did not mind. She went regularly to church, she attended to her father. And she lived in the memory of her mother, who had died when she was fourteen, and whom she had loved. She had loved her father, too, in a different way, depending upon him, and feeling secure in him, until at the age of fifty-four, he married again. And then she had set hard against him. Now he had died and left them all hopelessly in debt.

She had suffered badly during the period of poverty. Nothing, however, could shake the curious, sullen, animal pride that dominated each member of the family. Now, for Mabel, the end had come. Still she would not cast about her. She would follow her own way just the same. She would always hold the keys of her own situation. Mindless and persistent, she endured from day to day. Why should she think? Why should she answer anybody? It was enough that this was the end, and there was no way out. She need not pass any more darkly along the main street of the small town, avoiding every eye. She need

4. Grind. 6. Gone wrong (slang). 5. Name of a public house (pub).

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THE HORSE DEALER'S DAUGHTER / 2263

not demean herself any more, going into the shops and buying the cheapest food. This was at an end. She thought of nobody, not even of herself. Mindless and persistent, she seemed in a sort of ecstasy to be coming nearer to her fulfilment, her own glorification, approaching her dead mother, who was glorified.

In the afternoon, she took a little bag, with shears and sponge and a small scrubbing-brush, and went out. It was a grey, wintry day, with saddened, dark green fields and an atmosphere blackened by the smoke of foundries not far off. She went quickly, darkly along the causeway, heeding nobody, through the town to the churchyard.

There she always felt secure, as if no one could see her, although as a matter of fact she was exposed to the stare of everyone who passed along under the churchyard wall. Nevertheless, once under the shadow of the great looming church, among the graves, she felt immune from the world, reserved within the thick churchyard wall as in another country.

Carefully she clipped the grass from the grave, and arranged the pinky- white, small chrysanthemums in the tin cross. When this was done, she took an empty jar from a neighbouring grave, brought water, and carefully, most scrupulously sponged the marble headstone and the coping-stone.

It gave her sincere satisfaction to do this. She felt in immediate contact with the world of her mother. She took minute pains, went through the park in a state bordering on pure happiness, as if in performing this task she came into a subtle, intimate connection with her mother. For the life she followed here in the world was far less real than the world of death she inherited from her mother.

The doctor's house was just by the church. Ferguson, being a mere hired assistant, was slave to the country-side. As he hurried now to attend to the out-patients in the surgery, glancing across the graveyard with his quick eye, he saw the girl at her task at the grave. She seemed so intent and remote, it was like looking into another world. Some mystical element was touched in him. He slowed down as he walked, watching her as if spellbound.

She lifted her eyes, feeling him looking. Their eyes met. And each looked away again at once, each feeling, in some way, found out by the other. He lifted his cap and passed on down the road. There remained distinct in his consciousness, like a vision, the memory of her face, lifted from the tombstone in the churchyard, and looking at him with slow, large, portentous eyes. It was portentous, her face. It seemed to mesmerise him. There was a heavy power in her eyes which laid hold of his whole being, as if he had drunk some powerful drug. He had been feeling weak and done before. Now the life came back into him, he felt delivered from his own fretted, daily self.

He finished his duties at the surgery as quickly as might be, hastily filling up the bottles of the waiting people with cheap drugs. Then, in perpetual haste, he set off again to visit several cases in another part of his round, before tea-time. At all times he preferred to walk if he could, but particularly when he was not well. He fancied the motion restored him.

The afternoon was falling. It was grey, deadened, and wintry, with a slow, moist, heavy coldness sinking in and deadening all the faculties. But why should he think or notice? He hastily climbed the hill and turned across the dark green fields, following the black cinder-track. In the distance, across a shallow dip in the country, the small town was clustered like smouldering ash, a tower, a spire, a heap of low, raw, extinct houses. And on the nearest fringe

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226 4 / D. H. LAWRENCE

of the town, sloping into the dip, was Oldmeadow, the Pervins' house. He could see the stables and the outbuildings distinctly, as they lay towards him on the slope. Well, he would not go there many more times! Another resource would be lost to him, another place gone: the only company he cared for in the alien, ugly little town he was losing. Nothing but work, drudgery, constant hastening from dwelling to dwelling among the colliers and the iron-workers. It wore him out, but at the same time he had a craving for it. It was a stimulant to him to be in the homes of the working people, moving, as it were, through the innermost body of their life. His nerves were excited and gratified. He could come so near, into the very lives of the rough, inarticulate, powerfully emotional men and women. He grumbled, he said he hated the hellish hole. But as a matter of fact it excited him, the contact with the rough, strongly- feeling people was a stimultant applied direct to his nerves.

Below Oldmeadow, in the green, shallow, soddened hollow of fields, lay a square, deep pond. Roving across the landscape, the doctor's quick eye detected a figure in black passing through the gate of the field, down towards the pond. He looked again. It would be Mabel Pervin. His mind suddenly became alive and attentive.

Why was she going down there? He pulled up on the path on the slope above, and stood staring. He could just make sure of the small black figure moving in the hollow of the failing day. He seemed to see her in the midst of such obscurity, that he was like a clairvoyant, seeing rather with the mind's eye than with ordinary sight. Yet he could see her positively enough, whilst he kept his eye attentive. He felt, if he looked away from her, in the thick, ugly falling dusk, he would lose her altogether.

He followed her minutely as she moved, direct and intent, like something transmitted rather than stirring in voluntary activity, straight down the field towards the pond. There she stood on the bank for a moment. She never raised her head. Then she waded slowly into the water.

He stood motionless as the small black figure walked slowly and deliberately towards the centre of the pond, very slowly, gradually moving deeper into the motionless water, and still moving forward as the water got up to her breast. Then he could see her no more in the dusk of the dead afternoon.

"There!" he exclaimed. "Would you believe it?"

And he hastened straight down, running over the wet, soddened fields, pushing through the hedges, down into the depression of callous wintry obscurity. It took him several minutes to come to the pond. He stood on the bank, breathing heavily. He could see nothing. His eyes seemed to penetrate the dead water. Yes, perhaps that was the dark shadow of her black clothing beneath the surface of the water.

He slowly ventured into the pond. The bottom was deep, soft clay, he sank in, and the water clasped dead cold round his legs. As he stirred he could smell the cold, rotten clay that fouled up into the water. It was objectionable in his lungs. Still, repelled and yet not heeding, he moved deeper into the pond. The cold water rose over his thighs, over his loins, upon his abdomen. The lower part of his body was all sunk in the hideous cold element. And the bottom was so deeply soft and uncertain, he was afraid of pitching with his mouth underneath. He could not swim, and was afraid.

He crouched a little, spreading his hands under the water and moving them round, trying to feel for her. The dead cold pond swayed upon his chest. He moved again, a little deeper, and again, with his hands underneath, he felt all

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THE HORSE DEALER'S DAUGHTER / 2265

around under the water. And he touched her clothing. But it evaded his fingers. He made a desperate effort to grasp it.

And so doing he lost his balance and went under, horribly, suffocating in the foul earthy water, struggling madly for a few moments. At last, after what seemed an eternity, he got his footing, rose again into the air and looked around. He gasped, and knew he was in the world. Then he looked at the water. She had risen near him. He grasped her clothing, and drawing her nearer, turned to take his way to land again.

He went very slowly, carefully, absorbed in the slow progress. He rose higher, climbing out of the pond. The water was now only about his legs; he was thankful, full of relief to be out of the clutches of the pond. He lifted her and staggered on to the bank, out of the horror of wet, grey clay.

He laid her down on the bank. She was quite unconscious and running with water. He made the water come from her mouth, he worked to restore her. He did not have to work very long before he could feel the breathing begin again in her; she was breathing naturally. He worked a little longer. He could feel her live beneath his hands; she was coming back. He wiped her face, wrapped her in his overcoat, looked round into the dim, dark grey world, then lifted her and staggered down the bank and across the fields.

It seemed an unthinkably long way, and his burden so heavy he felt he would never get to the house. But at last he was in the stable-yard, and then in the house-yard. He opened the door and went into the house. In the kitchen he laid her down on the hearth-rug and called. The house was empty. But the fire was burning in the grate.

Then again he kneeled to attend to her. She was breathing regularly, her eyes were wide open and as if conscious, but there seemed something missing in her look. She was conscious in herself, but unconscious of her surroundings.

He ran upstairs, took blankets from a bed, and put them before the fire to warm. Then he removed her saturated, earthy-smelling clothing, rubbed her dry with a towel, and wrapped her naked in the blankets. Then he went into the dining room, to look for spirits. There was a little whisky. He drank a gulp himself, and put some into her mouth.

The effect was instantaneous. She looked full into his face, as if she had been seeing him for some time, and yet had only just become conscious of him.

"Dr. Ferguson?" she said.

"What?" he answered.

He was divesting himself of his coat, intending to find some dry clothing upstairs. He could not bear the smell of the dead, clayey water, and he was mortally afraid for his own health.

"What did I do?" she asked.

"Walked into the pond," he replied. He had begun to shudder like one sick, and could hardly attend to her. Her eyes remained full on him, he seemed to be going dark in his mind, looking back at her helplessly. The shuddering became quieter in him, his life came back to him, dark and unknowing, but strong again.

"Was I out of my mind?" she asked, while her eyes were fixed on him all the time. "Maybe, for the moment," he replied. He felt quiet, because his strength had come back. The strange fretful strain had left him.

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226 6 / D. H. LAWRENCE

"Am I out of my mind now?" she asked.

"Are you?" he reflected a moment. "No," he answered truthfully. "I don't see that you are." He turned his face aside. He was afraid now, because he felt dazed, and felt dimly that her power was stronger than his, in this issue. And she continued to look at him fixedly all the time. "Can you tell me where I shall find some dry things to put on?" he asked.

"Did you dive into the pond for me?" she asked.

"No," he answered. "I walked in. But I went in overhead as well."

There was silence for a moment. He hesitated. He very much wanted to go

upstairs to get into dry clothing. But there was another desire in him. And she seemed to hold him. His will seemed to have gone to sleep, and left him, standing there slack before her. But he felt warm inside himself. He did not shudder at all, though his clothes were sodden on him.

"Why did you?" she asked.

"Because I didn't want you to do such a foolish thing," he said.

"It wasn't foolish," she said, still gazing at him as she lay on the floor, with a sofa cushion under her head. "It was the right thing to do. I knew best, then."

"I'll go and shift these wet things," he said. But still he had not the power to move out of her presence, until she sent him. It was as if she had the life of his body in her hands, and he could not extricate himself. Or perhaps he did not want to.

Suddenly she sat up. Then she became aware of her own immediate condition. She felt the blankets about her, she knew her own limbs. For a moment it seemed as if her reason were going. She looked round, with wild eye, as if seeking something. He stood still with fear. She saw her clothing lying scattered.

"Who undressed me?" she asked, her eyes resting full and inevitable on his face.

"I did," he replied, "to bring you round."

For some moments she sat and gazed at him awfully, her lips parted.

"Do you love me, then?" she asked.

He only stood and stared at her, fascinated. His soul seemed to melt.

She shuffled forward on her knees, and put her arms round him, round his legs, as he stood there, pressing her breasts against his knees and thighs, clutching him with strange, convulsive certainty, pressing his thighs against her, drawing him to her face, her throat, as she looked up at him with flaring, humble eyes of transfiguration, triumphant in first possession.

"You love me," she murmured, in strange transport, yearning and triumphant and confident. "You love me. I know you love me, I know."

And she was passionately kissing his knees, through the wet clothing, passionately and indiscriminately kissing his knees, his legs, as if unaware of everything.

He looked down at the tangled wet hair, the wild, bare, animal shoulders. He was amazed, bewildered, and afraid. He had never thought of loving her. He had never wanted to love her. When he rescued her and restored her, he was a doctor, and she was a patient. He had had no single personal thought of her. Nay, this introduction of the personal element was very distasteful to him, a violation of his professional honour. It was horrible to have her there embracing his knees. It was horrible. He revolted from it, violently. And yet� and yet�he had not the power to break away.

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THE HORSE DEALER'S DAUGHTER / 2267

She looked at him again, with the same supplication of powerful love, and that same transcendent, frightening light of triumph. In view of the delicate flame which seemed to come from her face like a light, he was powerless. And yet he had never intended to love her. He had never intended. And something stubborn in him could not give way.

"You love me," she repeated, in a murmur of deep, rhapsodic assurance. "You love me."

Her hands were drawing him, drawing him down to her. He was afraid, even a little horrified. For he had, really, no intention of loving her. Yet her hands were drawing him towards her. He put out his hand quickly to steady himself, and grasped her bare shoulder. A flame seemed to burn the hand that grasped her soft shoulder. He had no intention of loving her: his whole will was against his yielding. It was horrible. And yet wonderful was the touch of her shoulders, beautiful the shining of her face. Was she perhaps mad? He had a horror of yielding to her. Yet something in him ached also.

He had been staring away at the door, away from her. But his hand remained on her shoulder. She had gone suddenly very still. He looked down at her. Her eyes were now wide with fear, with doubt, the light was dying from her face, a shadow of terrible greyness was returning. He could not bear the touch of her eyes' question upon him, and the look of death behind the question.

With an inward groan he gave way, and let his heart yield towards her. A sudden gentle smile came on his face. And her eyes, which never left his face, slowly, slowly filled with tears. He watched the strange water rise in her eyes, like some slow fountain coming up. And his heart seemed to burn and melt away in his breast.

He could not bear to look at her any more. He dropped on his knees and caught her head with his arms and pressed her face against his throat. She was very still. His heart, which seemed to have broken, was burning with a kind of agony in his breast. And he felt her slow, hot tears wetting his throat. But he could not move.

He felt the hot tears wet his neck and the hollows of his neck, and he

remained motionless, suspended through one of man's eternities. Only now it

had become indispensable to him to have her face pressed close to him; he

could never let her go again. He could never let her head go away from the

close clutch of his arm. He wanted to remain like that for ever, with his heart

hurting him in a pain that was also life to him. Without knowing, he was

looking down on her damp, soft brown hair.

Then, as it were suddenly, he smelt the horrid stagnant smell of that water.

And at the same moment she drew away from him and looked at him. Her

eyes were wistful and unfathomable. He was afraid of them, and he fell to

kissing her, not knowing what he was doing. He wanted her eyes not to have

that terrible, wistful, unfathomable look.

When she turned her face to him again, a faint delicate flush was glowing,

and there was again dawning that terrible shining of joy in her eyes, which

really terrified him, and yet which he now wanted to see, because he feared

the look of doubt still more.

"You love me?" she said, rather faltering.

"Yes." The word cost him a painful effort. Not because it wasn't true. But

because it was too newly true, the saying seemed to tear open again his newly-

torn heart. And he hardly wanted it to be true, even now.

She lifted her face to him, and he bent forward and kissed her on the mouth,

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226 8 / D. H. LAWRENCE

gently, with the one kiss that is an eternal pledge. And as he kissed her his heart strained again in his breast. He never intended to love her. But now it was over. He had crossed over the gulf to her, and all that he had left behind had shrivelled and become void.

After the kiss, her eyes again slowly filled with tears. She sat still, away from him, with her face drooped aside, and her hands folded in her lap. The tears fell very slowly. There was complete silence. He too sat there motionless and silent on the hearth-rug. The strange pain of his heart that was broken seemed to consume him. That he should love her? That this was love! That he should be ripped open in this way! Him, a doctor! How they would all jeer if they knew! It was agony to him to think they might know.

In the curious naked pain of the thought he looked again to her. She was sitting there drooped into a muse. He saw a tear fall, and his heart flared hot. He saw for the first time that one of her shoulders was quite uncovered, one arm bare, he could see one of her small breasts; dimly, because it had become almost dark in the room.

"Why are you crying?" he asked, in an altered voice.

She looked up at him, and behind her tears the consciousness of her situation for the first time brought a dark look of shame to her eyes. "I'm not crying, really," she said, watching him, half frightened. He reached his hand, and softly closed it on her bare arm. "I love you! I love you!" he said in a soft, low vibrating voice, unlike himself. She shrank, and dropped her head. The soft, penetrating grip of his hand on her arm distressed her. She looked up at him.

"I want to go," she said. "I want to go and get you some dry things."

"Why?" he said. "I'm all right."

"But I want to go," she said. "And I want you to change your things."

He released her arm, and she wrapped herself in the blanket, looking at him, rather frightened. And still she did not rise. "Kiss me," she said wistfully. He kissed her, but briefly, half in anger. Then, after a second, she rose nervously, all mixed up in the blanket. He

watched her in her confusion as she tried to extricate herself and wrap herself up so that she could walk. He watched her relentlessly, as she knew. And as she went, the blanket trailing, and as he saw a glimpse of her feet and her white leg, he tried to remember her as she was when he had wrapped her in the blanket. But then he didn't want to remember, because she had been nothing to him then, and his nature revolted from remembering her as she was when she was nothing to him.

A tumbling muffled noise from within the dark house startled him. Then he heard her voice: "There are clothes." He rose and went to the foot of the stairs, and gathered up the garments she had thrown down. Then he came back to the fire, to rub himself down and dress. He grinned at his own appearance when he had finished.

The fire was sinking, so he put on coal. The house was now quite dark, save for the light of a street-lamp that shone in faintly from beyond the holly trees. He lit the gas with matches he found on the mantelpiece. Then he emptied the pockets of his own clothes, and threw all his wet things in a heap into the scullery. After which he gathered up her sodden clothes, gently, and put them in a separate heap on the copper-top in the scullery.

It was six o'clock on the clock. His own watch had stopped. He ought to go

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WHY THE NOVEL MATTERS / 2269

back to the surgery. He waited, and still she did not come down. So he went

to the foot of the stairs and called:

"1 shall have to go."

Almost immediately he heard her coming down. She had on her best dress of black voile, and her hair was tidy, but still damp. She looked at him�and in spite of herself, smiled.

"I don't like you in those clothes," she said.

"Do I look a sight?" he answered.

They were shy of one another.

"I'll make you some tea," she said.

"No, I must go."

"Must you?" And she looked at him again with the wide, strained, doubtful eyes. And again, from the pain of his breast, he knew how he loved her. He went and bent to kiss her, gently, passionately, with his heart's painful kiss.

"And my hair smells so horrible," she murmured in distraction. "And I'm so awful, I'm so awful! Oh no, I'm too awful." And she broke into bitter, heartbroken sobbing. "You can't want to love me, I'm horrible."

"Don't be silly, don't be silly," he said, trying to comfort her, kissing her, holding her in his arms. "I want you, I want to marry you, we're going to be married, quickly, quickly�to-morrow if I can."

But she only sobbed terribly, and cried:

"I feel awful. I feel awful. I feel I'm horrible to you."

"No, I want you, I want you," was all he answered, blindly, with that terrible intonation which frightened her almost more than her horror lest he should not want her.

1922

Why the Novel Matters

We have curious ideas of ourselves. We think of ourselves as a body with a spirit in it, or a body with a soul in it, or a body with a mind in it. Mens sana in corf ore sano.' The years drink up the wine, and at last throw the bottle away, the body, of course, being the bottle.

It is a funny sort of superstition. Why should I look at my hand, as it so cleverly writes these words, and decide that it is a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it? Is there really any huge difference between my hand and my brain? Or my mind? My hand is alive, it flickers with a life of its own. It meets all the strange universe in touch, and learns a vast number of things, and knows a vast number of things. My hand, as it writes these words, slips gaily along, jumps like a grasshopper to dot an i, feels the table rather cold, gets a little bored if I write too long, has its own rudiments of thought, and is just as much me as is my brain, my mind, or my soul. Why should I imagine that there is a me which is more me than my hand is? Since my hand is absolutely alive, me alive.

Whereas, of course, as far as I am concerned, my pen isn't alive at all. My pen isn't me alive. Me alive ends at my finger tips. Whatever is me alive is me. Every tiny bit of my hands is alive, every little

I. A healthy mind in a healthy body (Latin).

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227 0 / D. H. LAWRENCE

freckle and hair and fold of skin. And whatever is me alive is me. Only my finger-nails, those ten little weapons between me and an inanimate universe, they cross the mysterious Rubicon2 between me alive and things like my pen, which are not alive, in my own sense.

So, seeing my hand is all alive, and me alive, wherein is it just a bottle, or a jug, or a tin can, or a vessel of clay, or any of the rest of that nonsense? True, if I cut it it will bleed, like a can of cherries. But then the skin that is cut, and the veins that bleed, and the bones that should never be seen, they are all just as alive as the blood that flows. So the tin can business, or vessel of clay, is just bunk.

And that's what you learn, when you're a novelist. And that's what you are very liable not to know, if you're a parson, or a philosopher, or a scientist, or a stupid person. If you're a parson, you talk about souls in heaven. If you're a novelist, you know that paradise is in the palm of your hand, and on the end of your nose, because both are alive; and alive, and man alive, which is more than you can say, for certain, of paradise. Paradise is after life, and I for one am not keen on anything that is after life. If you are a philosopher, you talk about infinity, and the pure spirit which knows all things. But if you pick up a novel, you realise immediately that infinity is just a handle to this self-same jug of a body of mine; while as for knowing, if I find my finger in the fire, I know that fire burns, with a knowledge so emphatic and vital, it leaves Nirvana3 merely a conjecture. Oh, yes, my body, me alive, knows, and knows intensely. And as for the sum of all knowledge, it can't be anything more than an accumulation of all the things I know in the body, and you, dear reader, know in the body.

These damned philosophers, they talk as if they suddenly went off in steam, and were then much more important than they are when they're in their shirts. It is nonsense. Every man, philosopher included, ends in his own finger-tips. That's the end of his man alive. As for the words and thoughts and sighs and aspirations that fly from him, they are so many tremulations in the ether, and not alive at all. But if the tremulations reach another man alive, he may receive them into his life, and his life may take on a new colour, like a chameleon creeping from a brown rock on to a green leaf. All very well and good. It still doesn't alter the fact that the so-called spirit, the message or teaching of the philosopher or the saint, isn't alive at all, but just a tremulation upon the ether, like a radio message. All this spirit stuff is just tremulations upon the ether. If you, as man alive, quiver from the tremulation of the ether into new life, that is because you are man alive, and you take sustenance and stimulation into your alive man in a myriad ways. But to say that the message, or the spirit which is communicated to you, is more important than your living body, is nonsense. You might as well say that the potato at dinner was more important.

Nothing is important but life. And for myself, I can absolutely see life nowhere but in the living. Life with a capital L is only man alive. Even a cabbage in the rain is cabbage alive. All things that are alive are amazing. And all things that are dead are subsidiary to the living. Better a live dog than a dead lion. But better a live lion than a live dog. C'est la vie!

2. When Julius Caesar crossed the river Rubicon take an important and irrevocable decision. (near Rimini, Italy) in 49 B.C.E., in defiance of the 3. In Buddhist theology the extinction of the self Senate, he indicated his intention of advancing and its desires and the attainment of perfect beat- against Pompey and thus involving the country in itude. civil war. Hence to "cross the Rubicon" means to

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WHY THE NOVEL MATTERS / 2271

It seems impossible to get a saint, or a philosopher, or a scientist, to stick to this simple truth. They are all, in a sense, renegades. The saint wishes to offer himself up as spiritual food for the multitude. Even Francis of Assisi4 turns himself into a sort of angel-cake, of which anyone may take a slice. But an angel-cake is rather less than man alive. And poor St Francis might well apologise to his body, when he is dying: "Oh, pardon me, my body, the wrong I did you through the years!" It was no wafer,5 for others to eat.

The philosopher, on the other hand, because he can think, decides that nothing but thoughts matter. It is as if a rabbit, because he can make little pills, should decide that nothing but little pills matter. As for the scientist, he has absolutely no use for me so long as I am man alive. To the scientist, I am dead. He puts under the microscope a bit of dead me, and calls it me. He takes me to pieces, and says first one piece, and then another piece, is me. My heart, my liver, my stomach have all been scientifically me, according to the scientist; and nowadays I am either a brain, or nerves, or glands, or something more up-to-date in the tissue line.

Now I absolutely flatly deny that I am a soul, or a body, or a mind, or an intelligence, or a brain, or a nervous system, or a bunch of glands, or any of the rest of these bits of me. The whole is greater than the part. And therefore, I, who am man alive, am greater than my soul, or spirit, or body, or mind, or consciousness, or anything else that is merely a part of me. I am a man, and alive. I am man alive, and as long as I can, I intend to go on being man alive.

For this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.

The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble. Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science, or any other book-tremulation can do.

The novel is the book of life. In this sense, the Bible is a great confused novel. You may say, it is about God. But it is really about man alive. Adam, Eve, Sarai, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Samuel, David, Bath-Sheba, Ruth, Esther, Solomon, Job, Isaiah, Jesus, Mark, Judas, Paul, Peter: what is it but man alive, from start to finish? Man alive, not mere bits. Even the Lord is another man alive, in a burning bush, throwing the tablets of stone at Moses's head.

I do hope you begin to get my idea, why the novel is supremely important,

as a tremulation on the ether. Plato makes the perfect ideal being tremble in

me. But that's only a bit of me. Perfection is only a bit, in the strange make

up of man alive. The Sermon on the Mount6 makes the selfless spirit of me

quiver. But that, too, is only a bit of me. The Ten Commandments set the old

Adam shivering in me, warning me that I am a thief and a murderer, unless I

watch it. But even the old Adam is only a bit of me.

I very much like all these bits of me to be set trembling with life and the

wisdom of life. But I do ask that the whole of me shall tremble in its wholeness,

some time or other.

And this, of course, must happen in me, living.

But as far as it can happen from a communication, it can only happen when

4. Roman Catholic saint (1181 or 1 182�1226). Communion. 5. Consumed as Christ's body in Roman Catholic 6. See Matthew 5.7.

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227 2 / D. H. LAWRENCE

a whole novel communicates itself to me. The Bible�but all the Bible�and Homer, and Shakespeare: these are the supreme old novels. These are all things to all men. Which means that in their wholeness they affect the whole man alive, which is the man himself, beyond any part of him. They set the whole tree trembling with a new access of life, they do not just stimulate growth in one direction.

I don't want to grow in any one direction any more. And, if I can help it, I don't want to stimulate anybody else into some particular direction. A particular direction ends in a cul-de-sac. We're in a cul-de-sac at present.

I don't believe in any dazzling revelation, or in any supreme Word. "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the Word of the Lord shall stand for ever."' That's the kind of stuff we've drugged ourselves with. As a matter of fact, the grass withereth, but comes up all the greener for that reason, after the rains. The flower fadeth, and therefore the bud opens. But the Word of the Lord, being man-uttered and a mere vibration on the ether, becomes staler and staler, more and more boring, till at last we turn a deaf ear and it ceases to exist, far more finally than any withered grass. It is grass that renews its youth like the eagle, not any Word.

We should ask for no absolutes, or absolute. Once and for all and for ever, let us have done with the ugly imperialism of any absolute. There is no absolute good, there is nothing absolutely right. All things flow and change, and even change is not absolute. The whole is a strange assembly of apparently incongruous parts, slipping past one another.

Me, man alive, I am a very curious assembly of incongruous parts. My yea! of today is oddly different from my yea! of yesterday. My tears of to-morrow will have nothing to do with my tears of a year ago. If the one I love remains unchanged and unchanging, I shall cease to love her. It is only because she changes and startles me into change and defies my inertia, and is herself staggered in her inertia by my changing, that I can continue to love her. If she stayed put, I might as well love the pepper pot.

In all this change, I maintain a certain integrity. But woe betide me if I try to put my finger on it. If I say of myself, I am this, I am that!�then, if I stick to it, I turn into a stupid fixed thing like a lamp-post. I shall never know wherein lies my integrity, my individuality, my me. I can never know it. It is useless to talk about my ego. That only means that I have made up an idea of myself, and that I am trying to cut myself out to pattern. Which is no good. You can cut your cloth to fit your coat, but you can't clip bits off your living body, to trim it down to your idea. True, you can put yourself into ideal corsets. But even in ideal corsets, fashions change.

Let us learn from the novel. In the novel, the characters can do nothing but live. If they keep on being good, according to pattern, or bad, according to pattern, or even volatile, according to pattern, they cease to live, and the novel falls dead. A character in a novel has got to live, or it is nothing.

We, likewise, in life have got to live, or we are nothing.

What we mean by living is, of course, just as indescribable as what we mean by being. Men get ideas into their heads, of what they mean by Life, and they proceed to cut life out to pattern. Sometimes they go into the desert to seek God, sometimes they go into the desert to seek cash, sometimes it is wine, woman, and song, and again it is water, political reform, and votes. You never

7. Isaiah 40.8.

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LOVE ON THE FARM / 2273

know what it will he next: from killing your neighbour with hideous bombs and gas that tears the lungs, to supporting a Foundlings' Home8 and preaching infinite Love, and being co-respondent in a divorce.

In all this wild welter, we need some sort of guide. It's no good inventing Thou Shalt Nots!

What then? Turn truly, honourably to the novel, and see wherein you are man alive, and wherein you are dead man in life. You may love a woman as man alive, and you may be making love to a woman as sheer dead man in life. You may eat your dinner as man alive, or as a mere masticating corpse. As man alive you may have shot at your enemy. But as a ghastly simulacrum of life you may be firing bombs into men who are neither your enemies nor your friends, but just things you are dead to. Which is criminal, when the things happen to be alive.

To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you. It can help you not to be dead man in life. So much of a man walks about dead and a carcass in the street and house, to-day: so much of women is merely dead. Like a pianoforte with half the notes mute.

But the novel you can see, plainly, when the man goes dead, the woman goes inert. You can develop an instinct for life, if you will, instead of a theory of right and wrong, good and bad.

In life, there is right and wrong, good and bad, all the time. But what is right in one case is wrong in another. And in the novel you see one man becoming a corpse, because of his so-called goodness, another going dead because of his so-called wickedness. Right and wrong is an instinct: but an instinct of the whole consciousness in a man, bodily, mental, spiritual at once. And only in the novel are all things given full play, or at least, they may be given full play, when we realize that life itself, and not inert safety, is the reason for living. For out of the full play of all things emerges the only thing that is anything, the wholeness of a man, the wholeness of a woman, man live, and live woman.

1936

Love on the Farm1

What large, dark hands are those at the window

Grasping in the golden light

Which weaves its way through the evening wind

At my heart's delight?

5 Ah, only the leaves! But in the west

I see a redness suddenly come

Into the evening's anxious breast�

'Tis the wound of love goes home!

8. Orphanage. in 19] 3 and "Love on the Farm" when it appeared I. Called "Cruelty and Love" w hen first published in Collected Poems (1928).

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227 4 / D. H. LAWRENCE

The woodbine0 creeps abroad honeysuckle

Calling low to her lover: The sunlit flirt who all the day Has poised above her lips in play And stolen kisses, shallow and gay Of pollen, now has gone away�

15

She woos the moth with her sweet, low word; And when above her his moth-wings hover Then her bright breast she will uncover And yield her honey-drop to her lover.

Into the yellow, evening glow

Saunters a man from the farm below; Leans, and looks in at the low-built shed Where the swallow has hung her marriage bed.

The bird lies warm against the wall. She glances quick her startled eyes

25 Towards him, then she turns away Her small head, making warm display Of red upon the throat. Her terrors sway Her out of the nest's warm, busy ball, Whose plaintive cry is heard as she flies

In one blue stoop from out the sties0 pens for animals

Into the twilight's empty hall. Oh, water-hen, beside the rushes Hide your quaintly scarlet blushes, Still your quick tail, lie still as dead,

35 Till the distance folds over his ominous tread!

The rabbit presses back her ears, Turns back her liquid, anguished eyes And crouches low; then with wild spring Spurts from the terror of his oncoming;

To be choked back, the wire ring Her frantic effort throttling:

Piteous brown ball of quivering fears! Ah, soon in his large, hard hands she dies, And swings all loose from the swing of his walk!

45 Yet calm and kindly are his eyes And ready to open in brown surprise Should I not answer to his talk Or should he my tears surmise.

I hear his hand on the latch, and rise from my chair

Watching the door open; he flashes bare His strong teeth in a smile, and flashes his eyes In a smile like triumph upon me; then careless-wise He flings the rabbit soft on the table board And comes towards me: ah! the uplifted sword

55 Of his hand against my bosom! and oh, the broad Blade of his glance that asks me to applaud His coming! With his hand he turns my face to him And caresses me with his fingers that still smell grim

.

TORTOISE SHOUT / 2275

Of the rabbit's fur! God, I am caught in a snare!

60 I know not what fine wire is round my throat; I only know I let him finger there My pulse of life, and let him nose like a stoat0 weasel Who sniffs with joy before he drinks the blood.

And down his mouth comes to my mouth! and down

65 His bright dark eyes come over me, like a hood Upon my mind! his lips meet mine, and a flood Of sweet fire sweeps across me, so I drown Against him, die, and find death good.

1913, 1928

Piano1

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside And hymns in the cozy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour With the great black piano appassionato." The glamour played with passion Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

1918

Tortoise Shout

I thought he was dumb, I said he was dumb, Yet I've heard him cry.

First faint scream, Out of life's unfathomable dawn, Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon's dawning rim, Far, far off, far scream.

Tortoise in extremis.'

I. For an earlier version of this poem, see "Poems 1. At the point of death (Latin), in Process," in the appendices to this volume.

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2276 / D. H. LAWRENCE

Why were we crucified into sex? Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves. As we began, As he certainly began, so perfectly alone?

A far, was-it-audible scream, Or did it sound on the plasm direct?

Worse than the cry of the new-born, A scream, A yell, A shout, A paean, A death-agony, A birth-cry, A submission, All, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn.

War-cry, triumph, acute-delight, death-scream reptilian, Why was the veil torn?2 The silken shriek of the soul's torn membrane? The male soul's membrane Torn with a shriek half music, half horror.

Crucifixion. Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense female, Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, outreaching out of the shell In tortoise-nakedness, Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spread-eagle over her

house-roof, And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath her walls, Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in uttermost tension Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping3 like a jerking leap, and oh! Opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck And giving that fragile yell, that scream, Super-audible, From his pink, cleft, old-man's mouth, Giving up the ghost, Or screaming in Pentecost,4 receiving the ghost.

His scream, and his moment's subsidence, The moment of eternal silence, Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the sudden, startling jerk of coition,

and at once The inexpressible faint yell� And so on, till the last plasm of my body was melted back To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret.

2. Cf. Matthew 27.50�51, describingjesus'death: rocks rent." "Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, 3. Copulating. yielded up the ghost. And, behold, the veil [cur-4. The religious holiday celebrating the descent of tain] of the temple was rent in twain, from the top the Holy Ghost on Jesus' apostles. to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the

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TORTOISE SHOUT / 227 7

So he tups, and screams

Time after time that frail, torn scream

After each jerk, the longish interval,

The tortoise eternity,

Age-long, reptilian persistence,

Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the next spasm.

I remember, when 1 was a boy, 1 heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting snake; I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break into sound in the spring; I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters; I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness, a nightingale's piercing cries and gurgles startled the depths of my soul; 1 remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood at midnight; I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible; I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird, amorous cats; I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the sheet lightning, And running away from the sound of a woman in labour, something like an owl whooing, And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb, The first wail of an infant, And my mother singing to herself, And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a young collier,0 who has long since drunk himself to death, coal miner

The first elements of foreign speech

On wild dark lips.

And more than all these,

And less than all these, This last, Strange, faint coition yell Of the male tortoise at extremity,

Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon of life.

The cross, The wheel on which our silence first is broken, Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence, Tearing a cry from us. Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the complement, Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found. Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost, The cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris5-cry of abandonment, That which is whole, torn asunder, That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe.

5. The Egyptian vegetation god, murdered by his ris, like Christ, was resurrected, and became an brother Set, who cut the corpse into fourteen important ruler in the other world, pieces and scattered them throughout Egypt. Osi

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227 8 / D. H. LAWRENCE

Bavarian Gentians

Not every man has gentians in his house in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.1

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark

darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto's2 gloom, ribbed and torchlike, with their blaze of darkness spread blue down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze, black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue, giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light, lead me then, lead me the way.

Beach me a gentian, give me a torch

let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower

down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness

even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September

to the sightless realm where darkness was awake upon the dark

and Persephone herself is but a voice

or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark

of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,

among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom.

1923

Snake

A snake came to my water-trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,

To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree� Mediterranean evergreen

I came down the steps with my pitcher

And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom

And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough

And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,

And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,

1. September 29, the feast celebrating the Arch-but had to descend again to Hades in the autumn, angel Michael. "the frosted September" (line 14). Demeter and 2. God of the underworld in classical mythology. Persephone were central figures in ancient fertility Also called Dis, he abducted Persephone, daughter myths, where Persephone's annual descent and of the goddess of agriculture, Demeter. Perseph-return were linked with the death and rebirth of one was allowed to return to the earth every spring, vegetation.

.

SNAKE / 2279

He sipped with his straight mouth,

Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,

Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough, And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,

And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,

And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,

And stooped and drank a little more,

Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna0 smoking. the volcano

The voice of my education said to me He must be killed,

For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man

You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him, How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water- trough And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless Into the burning bowels of this earth? Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured? I felt so honoured. And yet those voices:

If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more That he should seek my hospitality From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken, And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black; Seeming to lick his lips, And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air, And slowly turned his head, And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round And climb the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole, And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,

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228 0 / D. H. LAWRENCE

A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid

black hole, Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after, Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher, I picked up a clumsy log

And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him; But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste, Writhed like lightning, and was gone Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination. And immediately I regretted it. I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act! I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross,1 And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king, Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords Of life. And I have something to expiate; A pettiness.

1923

Cypresses1

Tuscan cypresses, What is it?

Folded in like a dark thought, For which the language is lost, Tuscan cypresses, Is there a great secret? Are our words no good?

The undeliverable secret, Dead with a dead race and a dead speech, and yet Darkly monumental in you, Etruscan cypresses.

1. In Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. i. Tall dark coniferous evergreen trees, associated

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CYPRESSES / 2281

Ah, how I admire your fidelity, Dark cypresses!

Is it the secret of the long-nosed Etruscans?2 The long-nosed, sensitive-footed, subtly-smiling Etruscans, Who made so little noise outside the cypress groves?

Among the sinuous, flame-tall cypresses That swayed their length of darkness all around Etruscan-dusky, wavering men of old Etruria: Naked except for fanciful long shoes, Going with insidious, half-smiling quietness And some of Africa's imperturbable sang-froid3 About a forgotten business.

What business, then? Nay, tongues are dead, and words are hollow as hollow seed-pods, Having shed their sound and finished all their echoing Etruscan syllables, That had the telling.

Yet more I see you darkly concentrate, Tuscan cypresses, On one old thought: On one old slim imperishable thought, while you remain Etruscan cypresses; Dusky, slim marrow-thought of slender, flickering men of Etruria, Whom Rome called vicious.

Vicious, dark cypresses: Vicious, you supple, brooding, softly-swaying pillars of dark flame. Monumental to a dead, dead race Embowered in you!

Were they then vicious, the slender, tender-footed Long-nosed men of Etruria? Or was their way only evasive and different, dark, like cypress-trees in a

wind?

They are dead, with all their vices, And all that is left Is the shadowy monomania of some cypresses And tombs.

The smile, the subtle Etruscan smile still lurking Within the tombs, Etruscan cypresses.

He laughs longest who laughs last;0 (proverbial) Nay, Leonardo4 only bungled the pure Etruscan smile.

2. The most important of the pre-Roman inhabi-4. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Italian painter tants of Italy. whose portrait known as the Mona Lisa or La Gio3. Cold blood (French, literal trans.); here calm conda has a famous mysterious smile. detachment.

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228 2 / D. H. LAWRENCE

What would I not give To bring back the rare and orchid-like Evil-yclept� Etruscan? -called (archaic) For as to the evil We have only Roman word for it, Which I, being a little weary of Roman virtue, Don't hang much weight on.

For oh, I know, in the dust where we have buried The silenced races and all their abominations, We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.

There in the deeps That churn the frankincense and ooze the myrrh, Cypress shadowy, Such an aroma of lost human life!

They say the fit survive, But I invoke the spirits of the lost. Those that have not survived, the darkly lost, To bring their meaning back into life again, Which they have taken away And wrap inviolable in soft cypress-trees, Etruscan cypresses.

Evil, what is evil? There is only one evil, to deny life As Rome denied Etruria And mechanical America Montezuma5 still.

Fiesole. 1923

How Beastly the Bourgeois Is

How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species�

Presentable, eminently presentable� shall I make you a present of him?

Isn't he handsome? Isn't he healthy? Isn't he a fine specimen? Doesn't he look the fresh clean englishman, outside? Isn't it god's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day after partridges, or a little rubber ball?

wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing?

Oh, but wait! Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another man's need, let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life face him with a new demand on his understanding

5. A/tec war chief or emperor of ancient Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest early 16th century.

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THE SHIP OF DEATH / 2283

and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue. Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully. 15 Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new demand on his intelligence, a new life-demand.

How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species� Nicely groomed, like a mushroom

20 standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable� and like a fungus, living on the remains of bygone life sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own.

And even so, he's stale, he's been there too long. Touch him, and you'll find he's all gone inside 25 just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.

Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings rather nasty� How beastly the bourgeois is!

30 Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp England what a pity they can't all be kicked over like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly into the soil of England.

1929

The Ship of Death1

I

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit and the long journey towards oblivion.

The apples falling like great drops of dew to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

5 And it is time to go, to bid farewell to one's own self, and find an exit from the fallen self.

II

Have you built your ship of death, O have you? O build your ship of death, for you will need it.

IO The grim frost is at hand, when the apples will fall thick, almost thundrous, on the hardened earth.

1. Lawrence is remembering "the sacred treasures Etruscan tombs and described in his bookEtniscan of the dead, the little bronze ship of death that Places (1932). should bear him over to the other world," found in

.

228 4 / D. H. LAWRENCE

And death is on the air like a smell of ashes! Ah! can't you smell it?

And in the bruised body, the frightened soul 15 finds itself shrinking, wincing from the cold that blows upon it through the orifices.

III

And can a man his own quietus make with a bare bodkin?2

With daggers, bodkins, bullets, man can make 20 a bruise or break of exit for his life; but is that a quietus, O tell me, is it quietus?

Surely not so! for how could murder, even self-murder ever a quietus make?

IV

O let us talk of quiet that we know, 25 that we can know, the deep and lovely quiet of a strong heart at peace!

How can we this, our own quietus, make?

V

Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.

30 And die the death, the long and painful death that lies between the old self and the new.

Already our bodies are fallen, bruised, badly bruised, already our souls are oozing through the exit of the cruel bruise.

35 Already the dark and endless ocean of the end is washing in through the breaches of our wounds, already the flood is upon us.

Oh build your ship of death, your little ark and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine 40 for the dark flight down oblivion.

VI

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.

2. Cf. Shakespeare's Hamlet 3.1.70�76: "For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, / .. . When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin?" "Bodkin": dagger.

.

TH E SHI P O F DEAT H / 228 5 45We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world. We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life. VII 50 We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship of death to carry the soul on the longest journey. 55A little ship, with oars and food and little dishes, and all accoutrements fitting and ready for the departing soul. 60Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith with its store of food and little cooking pans and change of clothes, upon the flood's black waste upon the waters of the end upon the sea of death, where still we sail darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port. 6570 There is no port, there is nowhere to go only the deepening blackness darkening still blacker upon the soundless, ungurgling flood darkness at one with darkness, up and down and sideways utterly dark, so there is no direction any more and the little ship is there; yet she is gone. She is not seen, for there is nothing to see her by. She is gone! gone! and yet somewhere she is there. Nowhere! VIII 75so And everything is gone, the body is gone completely under, gone, entirely gone. The upper darkness is heavy as the lower, between them the little ship is gone she is gone. It is the end, it is oblivion. IX And yet out of eternity a thread separates itself on the blackness,

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2286 / T. S. ELIOT

a horizontal thread 85 that fumes a little with pallor upon the dark.

Is it illusion? or does the pallor fume A little higher? Ah wait, wait, for there's the dawn, the cruel dawn of coming back to life

90 out of oblivion.

Wait, wait, the little ship drifting, beneath the deathly ashy grey of a flood-dawn.

Wait, wait! even so, a flush of yellow 95 and strangely, O chilled wan soul, a flush of rose.

A flush of rose, and the whole thing starts again.

X

The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell emerges strange and lovely. And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing

IOO on the pink flood, and the frail soul steps out, into her house again filling the heart with peace.

Swings the heart renewed with peace even of oblivion.

105 Oh build your ship of death, oh build it! for you will need it. For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.

1929-30 1933

T. S. ELIOT 1888-1965 Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of New England stock. He entered Harvard in 1906 and was influenced there by the anti-Romanticism of Irving Babbitt and the philosophical and critical interests of George Santayana, as well as by the enthusiastic study of Renaissance literature and of South Asian religions. He wrote his Harvard dissertation on the English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley, whose emphasis on the private nature of individual experience, "a circle enclosed on the outside," influenced Eliot's poetry considerably. He also studied literature and philosophy in France and Germany, before going to England shortly after the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He studied Greek philosophy at Oxford, taught school in London, and then obtained a position with Lloyd's Bank. In 1915 he married an English writer, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, but the marriage was not a success. She suf

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T. S. ELIOT / 2287 fered from poor emotional and physical health. The strain told on Eliot, too. By November 1921 distress and worry had brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown, and on medical advice he went to recuperate in a Swiss sanitorium. Two months later he returned, pausing in Paris long enough to give his early supporter and adviser Ezra Pound the manuscript of The Waste Land. Eliot left his wife in 1933, and she was eventually committed to a mental home, where she died in 1947. Ten years later he was happily remarried to his secretary, Valerie Fletcher.

Eliot started writing literary and philosophical reviews soon after settling in London and was assistant editor of The Egoist magazine from 1917 to 1919. In 1922 he founded the influential quarterly The Criterion, which he edited until it ceased publication in 1939. His poetry first appeared in 1915, when, at Pound's urging, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was printed in Poetry magazine (Chicago) and a few other short poems were published in the short-lived periodical Blast. His first published collection of poems was Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917; two other small collections followed in 1919 and 1920; in 1922 The Waste Land appeared, first in The Criterion in October, then in The Dial (in America) in November, and finally in book form. Meanwhile he was also publishing collections of his critical essays. In 1925 he joined the London publishing firm Faber & Gwyer, and he was made a director when the firm was renamed Faber & Faber. He became a British subject and joined the Church of England in 1927.

"Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into bis meaning." This remark, from Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921), gives one clue to his poetic method from "Prufrock" through The Waste Land. When he settled in London he saw poetry in English as exhausted, with no verbal excitement or original craftsmanship. He sought to make poetry more subtle, more suggestive, and at the same time more precise. Like the imagists, he emphasized the necessity of clear and precise images. From the philosopher poet T. E. Hulme and from Pound, he learned to fear what was seen as Romantic self-indulgence and vagueness, and to regard the poetic medium rather than the poet's personality as the important factor. At the same time the "hard, dry" images advocated by Hulme were not enough for him; he wanted wit, allusiveness, irony. He saw in the Metaphysical poets how wit and passion could be combined, and he saw in the French symbolists, such as Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud, how an image could be both absolutely precise in what it referred to physically and endlessly suggestive in its meanings because of its relationship to other images. The combination of precision, symbolic suggestion, and ironic mockery in the poetry of the late-nineteenth-century French poet Jules Laforgue attracted and influenced him, as did Laforgue's verse technique that Eliot described in an interview as "rhyming lines of irregular length, with the rhymes coming in irregular places." He also found in the Jacobean dramatists, such as Thomas Middleton, Cyril Tourneur, and John Webster, a flexible blank verse with overtones of colloquial movement, a way of counterpointing the accent of conversation and the note of terror. Eliot's fluency in French and German, his study of Western and non-Western literary and religious texts in their original languages, his rigorous knowledge of philosophy, his exacting critical intellect, his keen sensitivity to colloquial rhythm and idiom, his ability to fuse anguished emotional states with sharply etched intellectual satire�all of these contributed to his crafting one of the twentieth century's most distinctive and influential bodies of poetry.

Hulme's protests against the Romantic concept of poetry reinforced what Eliot had learned from Babbitt at Harvard; yet for all his severity with poets such as Percy Shelley and Walt Whitman, for all his cultivation of a classical viewpoint and his insistence on order and discipline rather than on mere self-expression in art, one side

.

2288 / T. S. ELIOT

of Eliot's poetic genius is Romantic. The symbolist influence on his imagery, his elegiac lamentation over loss and fragmentation, his interest in the evocative and the suggestive, lines such as "And fiddled whisper music on those strings / And bats with baby faces in the violet light / Whistled, and beat their wings," and recurring images such as the hyacinth girl and the rose garden show what could be called a Romantic element in his poetry. But it is combined with a dry ironic allusiveness, a play of wit and satire, and a colloquial element, which are not normally found in poets of the Romantic tradition.

Eliot's real novelty�and the cause of much bewilderment when his poems first appeared�was his deliberate elimination of all merely connective and transitional passages, his building up of the total pattern of meaning through the immediate juxtaposition of images without overt explanation of what they are doing, together with his use of oblique references to other works of literature (some of them quite obscure to most readers of his time). "Prufrock" presents a symbolic landscape where the meaning emerges from the mutual interaction of the images, and that meaning is enlarged by echoes, often ironic, of Hesiod and Dante and Shakespeare. The Waste Land is a series of scenes and images with no author's voice intervening to tell us where we are but with the implications developed through multiple contrasts and through analogies with older literary works often referred to in a distorted quotation or half-concealed allusion. Furthermore, the works referred to are not necessarily central in the Western literary tradition: besides Dante and Shakespeare there are pre-Socratic philosophers; major and minor seventeenth-century poets and dramatists; works of anthropology, history, and philosophy; texts of Buddhism and Hinduism; even popular songs and vaudeville. Ancient and modern voices, high and low art, Western and non-Western languages clash, coincide, jostle alongside one another. In a culture where the poet's public might lack a common cultural heritage, a shared knowledge of works of the past, Eliot felt it necessary to accumulate his own body of references. In this his use of earlier literature differs from, say, John Milton's. Both poets are difficult for the modern reader, who needs editorial assistance in recognizing and understanding many of the allusions�but Milton was drawing on a body of knowledge common to educated people in his day. Nevertheless, this aspect of Eliot can be exaggerated; his imagery and the movement of his verse set the tone he requires, establish the area of meaning to be developed, so that even a reader ignorant of most of the literary allusions can often get the feel of the poem and achieve some understanding of what it says.

Eliot's early poetry, until at least the middle 1920s, is mostly concerned in one way or another with the Waste Land, with aspects of cultural decay in the modern Western world. After his formal acceptance of Anglican Christianity, a penitential note appears in much of his verse, a note of quiet searching for spiritual peace, with considerable allusion to biblical, liturgical, and mystical religious literature and to Dante. Ash Wednesday (1930), a poem in six parts, much less fiercely concentrated in style than the earlier poetry, explores with gentle insistence a mood both penitential and questioning. The Ariel poems (so called because published in Faber's Ariel pamphlet series) present or explore aspects of religious doubt or discovery or revelation, sometimes, as in "Journey of the Magi," drawing on biblical incident. In Four Quartets (of which the first, "Burnt Norton," appeared in the Collected Poems of 1936, though all four were not completed until 1943, when they were published together), Eliot further explored essentially religious moods, dealing with the relation between time and eternity and the cultivation of that selfless passivity that can yield the moment of timeless revelation in the midst of time. The mocking irony, the savage humor, the collage of quotations, the deliberately startling juxtaposition of the sordid and the romantic give way in these later poems to a quieter poetic idiom that is less jagged and more abstract, less fragmentary and more formally patterned.

As a critic Eliot worked out in his reading of older literature what he needed as a poet to hold and to admire. He lent the growing weight of his authority to a shift in

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THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK / 228 9

literary taste that replaced Milton by John Donne as the great seventeenth-century English poet and replaced Alfred, Lord Tennyson in the nineteenth century by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Rewriting English literary history, he saw the late-seventeenthcentury "dissociation of sensibility"�the segregation of intellect and emotion�as determining the course of English poetry throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This theory also explained what he was aiming at in his own poetry: the reestablishment of that unified sensibility he found in Donne and other early- seventeenth-century poets and dramatists, who were able, he suggests in "The Metaphysical Poets," to "feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose." His view of tradition, his dislike of the poetic exploitation of the author's personality, his advocacy of what he called "orthodoxy," made him suspicious of what he considered eccentric geniuses such as William Blake and D. H. Lawrence. On the other side, his dislike of the grandiloquent and his insistence on complexity and on the mingling of the formal with the conversational made him distrust Milton's influence on English poetry. He considered himself a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo- Catholic in religion" (For Lancelot Andrewes, 1928), in favor of order against chaos, tradition against eccentricity, authority against rampant individualism; yet his own poetry is in many respects untraditional and certainly highly individual in tone. His conservative and even authoritarian habit of mind, his anti-Semitic remarks and missionary zeal, alienated some who admire�and some whose own poetry has been much influenced by�his poetry.

Eliot's plays address, directly or indirectly, religious themes. Murder in the Cathedral (1935) deals in an appropriately ritual manner with the killing of Archbishop Thomas a Becket, using a chorus and presenting its central speech as a sermon by the archbishop. The Family Reunion (1939) deals with the problem of guilt and redemption in a modern upper-class English family; combining choric devices from Greek tragedy with a poetic idiom subdued to the accents of drawing-room conversation. In his three later plays, all written in the 1950s, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman, he achieved popular success by casting a serious religious theme in the form of a sophisticated modern social comedy, using a verse that is so conversational in movement that when spoken in the theater it does not sound like verse at all.

Critics differ on the degree to which Eliot succeeded in his last plays in combining box-office success with dramatic effectiveness. But there is no disagreement on his importance as one of the great renovators of poetry in English, whose influence on a whole generation of poets, critics, and intellectuals was enormous. His range as a poet is limited, and his interest in the great middle ground of human experience (as distinct from the extremes of saint and sinner) deficient; but when in 1948 he was awarded the rare honor of the Order of Merit by King George VI and also gained the Nobel Prize in literature, his positive qualities were widely and fully recognized�his poetic cunning, his fine craftsmanship, his original accent, his historical importance as the poet of the modern symbolist-Metaphysical tradition.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock1

S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piii scosse. Ma per cio cche giammai di questo fondo non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero, senza tenia d'infamia ti rispondo,2

1. The title implies an ironic contrast between the 2. "If I thought that my reply would be to one who romantic suggestions of "love song" and the dully would ever return to the world, this flame would prosaic name "J. Alfred Prufrock." stay without further movement; but since none has

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2290 / T. S. ELIOT

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question . . . Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?' Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time3 For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands4 That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?' Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair� (They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!') My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

ever returned alive from this depth, if what I hear 3. Cf. Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress," is true, I answer you without fear of infamy" line 1: "Had we hut world enough, and time." (Dante, Inferno 27.61�66). Guido da Montefeltro, 4. Works and Days is a poem about the farming shut up in his flame (the punishment given to false year by the Greek poet Hesiod (8th century B.C.E.). counselors), tells the shame of his evil life to Dante Eliot contrasts useful agricultural labor with the because he believes Dante will never return to futile "works and days of hands" engaged in mean- earth to report it. ingless social gesturing.

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THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK / 2291

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin� (They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!')

45 Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all�

50 Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall3 Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

55 And I have known the eyes already, known them all� The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin

60 To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all� Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

65 Is it perfume from a dress That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

And should I then presume? And how should I begin?

70 Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . . I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.6

75 And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! Smoothed by long fingers, Asleep . . . tired .. . or it malingers, Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

so Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a

platter,7

5. Cf. Shakespeare's Twelfth Nig fit 1.1.4: "That Hamlet 2.2.201�02: "for you yourself, sir, should strain again, it had a dying fall." be old as I am�if, like a crab, you could go back6. I.e., he would have been better as a crab on the ward." ocean bed. Perhaps, too, the motion of a crab sug-7. Like that of John the Baptist. See Mark 6.17gests futility and growing old. Cf. Shakespeare's 28 and Matthew 14.3-11.

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2292 / T. S. ELIOT

I am no prophet�and here's no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, 85 And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

90 Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball8 To roll it toward some overwhelming question, To say: 'I am Lazarus,9 come from the dead,

95 Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all'�

If one, settling a pillow by her head, Should say: 'That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.'

And would it have been worth it, after all,

IOO Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor� And this, and so much more?� It is impossible to say just what I mean!

105 But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth while If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say:

'That is not it at all, 110 That is not what I meant, at all.'

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress,1 start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

us Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence,2 but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous� Almost, at times, the Fool.

120 I grow old ... I grow old . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

8. Cf. "To His Coy Mistress," lines 41-44: "Let us made by a royal or noble person. Elizabethan plays roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into sometimes showed such "progresses" crossing the one ball, / And tear our pleasures with rough strife stage. Cf. Chaucer's General Prologue to The Can/ Thorough the iron gates of life." terbury Tales, line 308. 9. Raised by Jesus from the dead (Luke I 6.19�31 2. In its older meanings: "opinions," "sententiousand John 11.1-44). ness." 1. In the Elizabethan sense of a state journey

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SWEENEY AMONG THE NIGHTINGALES / 229 3

125 I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea 130 By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

1910-11 1915,1917

Sweeney among the Nightingales

d'j(j.oL, jisjcXr|Y|.iai Kaipia v 3tX.tiyr)v eaco.1

Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees Letting his arms hang down to laugh, The zebra stripes along his jaw Swelling to maculate0 giraffe. spotted, stained

5 The circles of the stormy moon Slide westward toward the River Plate,2 Death and the Raven1 drift above And Sweeney guards the horned gate.4

Gloomy Orion and the Dog

10 Are veiled;5 and hushed the shrunken seas; The person in the Spanish cape Tries to sit on Sweeney's knees

Slips and pulls the table cloth Overturns a coffee-cup, 15 Reorganized upon the floor She yawns and draws a stocking up;

The silent man in mocha brown Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes; The waiter brings in oranges

20 Bananas figs and hothouse grapes;

The silent vertebrate in brown Contracts and concentrates, withdraws; Bachel nee Rabinovitch Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;

1. "Alas, I am struck with a mortal blow within" 3. The constellation Corvus. (Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 1343); the voice of 4. The gates of horn, in Hades, through which Agamemnon heard crying out from the palace as true dreams come to the upper world. he is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra. 5. For Sweeney and his female friend, the gate of 2. Or Rio de la Plata, an estuary on the South vision is blocked and the great myth-making con- American coast between Argentina and Uruguay, stellations�"Orion and the Dog"�are "veiled." formed by the Uruguay and Parana rivers.

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2294 / T. S. ELIOT

25 She and the lady in the cape

Are suspect, thought to be in league;

Therefore the man with heavy eyes

Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,

Leaves the room and reappears

30 Outside the window, leaning in,

Branches of wistaria

Circumscribe a golden grin;

The host with someone indistinct Converses at the door apart, 35 The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood

When Agamemnon cried aloud6

And let their liquid siftings fall

40 To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.

1918,1919

The Waste Land In the essay "Ulysses, Order, and Myth" (1923), Eliot hinted at the ambitions of The Waste Land when he declared that others would follow James Joyce "in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity. .. . It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. . . . It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible in art." Eliot labeled this new technique "the mythical method."

He gave another clue to the theme and structure of The Waste Land in a general note, in which he stated that "not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance [1920]." He further acknowledged a general indebtedness to Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough (thirteen volumes, 1890�1915), "especially the . . . volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris," in which Frazer deals with ancient vegetation myths and fertility ceremonies. Drawing on material from Frazer and other anthropologists, Weston traces the relationship of these myths and rituals to Christianity and especially to the legend of the Holy Grail. She finds an archetypal fertility myth in the story of the Fisher King, whose death, infirmity, or impotence (there are many forms of the myth) brought drought and desolation to the land and failure of the power to reproduce themselves among both humans and beasts. This symbolic- Waste Land can be revived only if a "questing knight" goes to the Chapel Perilous, situated in the heart of it, and there asks certain ritual questions about the Grail (or Cup) and the Lance�originally fertility symbols, female and male, respectively. The proper asking of these questions revives the king and restores fertility to the land. The relation of this original Grail myth to fertility cults and rituals found in many different civilizations, and represented by stories of a god who dies and is later resurrected (e.g., Tammuz, Adonis, Attis), shows their common origin in a response to

6. Agamemnon is murdered not in a "bloody ingale), and also with the ancient "bloody wood" of wood" but in his bath. Eliot here telescopes Aga-Nemi, where the old priest was slain by his sucmemnon's murder with the wood where, in Greek cessor (as described in the first chapter of Sir myth, Philomela was raped by her sister's husband, James Frazer's Golden Bough). Tereus (she was subsequently turned into a night

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THE WASTE LAND / 2295

the cyclical movement of the seasons, with vegetation dying in winter to be resurrected again in the spring. Christianity, according to Weston, gave its own spiritual meaning to the myth; it "did not hesitate to utilize the already existing medium of instruction, but boldly identified the Deity of Vegetation, regarded as Life Principle, with the God of the Christian Faith." The Fisher King is related to the use of the fish symbol in early Christianity. Weston states "with certainty that the Fish is a Life symbol of immemorial antiquity, and that the title of Fisher has, from the earliest ages, been associated with the Deities who were held to be specially connected with the origin and preservation of Life." Eliot, following Weston, thus uses a great variety of mythological and religious material, both Western and Eastern, to paint a symbolic picture of the modern Waste Land and the need for regeneration. He vividly presents the terror of that desiccated life�its loneliness, emptiness, and irrational apprehensions�as well as its misuse of sexuality, but he paradoxically ends the poem with a benediction. The mass death and social collapse of World War I inform the poem's vision of a Waste Land strewn with corpses, wreckage, and ruin. Another significant general source for the poem is the German composer Richard Wagner's operas Gotterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods), Parsifal, Das Rheingold, and Tristan und Isolde.

The poem as published owes a great deal to the severe pruning of Ezra Pound; the original manuscript, with Pound's excisions and comments, provides fascinating information about the genesis and development of the poem, and was reproduced in facsimile in 1971, edited by Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot. Reprinted below is the text as first published in book form in December 1922, including Eliot's notes, which are supplemented by the present editors' notes.

The Waste Land

"NAM Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: 2L[3uXA.a Tl OE/XLC;; respondebat ilia: curaOciveiv 0eko."'

FOR EZRA POUND

il miglior fabbro2

I. The Burial of the Dead3 April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee4

1. From the Satyricon of Petronius (1st century nally paid to the Provencal poet Arnaut Daniel in C.E.) : "For once I myself saw with my own eyes the Dante's Purgatorio 26.117. Ezra Pound (1885� Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the 1972), American expatriate poet who was a key fig- boys said to her 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she ure in the modern movement in poetry, helped replied, 'I want to die.' " (The Greek may be trans-Eliot massively revise the manuscript. literated, "Sibylla tl theleis?" and "apothanein 3. The title comes from the Anglican burial serthelo.") The Cumaean Sibyl was the most famous vice. of the Sibyls, the prophetic old women of Greek 4. Lake a few miles south of Munich, where the mythology; she guided Aeneas through Hades in "mad" King Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned in 1886 Virgil's Aeneid. She had been granted immortality in mysterious circumstances. This romantic, melby Apollo, but because she forgot to ask for per-ancholy king passionately admired Richard Wagpetual youth, she shrank into withered old age and ner and especially Wagner's opera Tristan und her authority declined. Isolde, which plays a significant part in The Waste 2. The better craftsman (Italian); a tribute origi-Land. Ludwig's suffering of "death by water" in the

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2296 / T. S. ELIOT

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,5 And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.6 And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,7 You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,8 And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock,9 (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zn, Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du?l

"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; "They called me the hyacinth girl." �Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth2 garden, Yours arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Oed' und leer das Meer.3

Starnbergersee thus evokes a cluster of themes central to the poem. Eliot had met King Ludwig's second cousin Countess Marie Larisch and talked with her. Although he had probably not read the countess's book My Past, which discusses King Ludwig at length, he got information about her life and times from her in person, and the remarks made in lines 8�18 are hers.

5. A small public park in Munich. 6. I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, a true German (German). 7. Cf. Ezelael II, i [Eliot's note]. God, addressing Ezekiel, continues: "stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee." 8. Cf. Ecclesiastes XII, v [Eliot's note]. The verse Eliot cites is part of the preacher's picture of the desolation of old age, "when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail."

9. Cf. Isaiah 32.2: the "righteous king" "shall be .. . as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." 1. V. [see] Tristan und Isolde, I, verses 5�8 [Eliot's note]. In Wagner's opera a sailor recalls the girl he has left behind: "Fresh blows the wind to the homeland; my Irish child, where are you waiting?" 2. Name of a young man loved and accidentally killed by Apollo in Greek mythology; from his blood sprang the flower named for him, inscribed with "AI," a cry of grief. 3. Id. [Ibid] III, verse 24 [Eliot's note]. In act 3 of Tristan und Isolde, Tristan lies dying. He is waiting for Isolde to come to him from Cornwall, but a shepherd, appointed to watch for her sail, can report only, "Waste and empty is the sea." Oed' (or Od') was originally misspelled Od'.

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THE WASTE LAND / 2297

Madame Sosostris,4 famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless

45 Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards.5 Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,6 (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna,7 the Lady of the Rocks,

50 The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,8 And here is the one-eyed merchant,9 and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

55 The Hanged Man.1 Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days.

60 Unreal City,2 Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,3 I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,4

4. A mock Egyptian name (suggested to Eliot by nand is associated with Phlebas and Mr. Eugeni" Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana," the name des and, therefore, with the "drowned Phoenician assumed by a character in Aldous Huxley's novel Sailor." Crome Yellow [1921] who dresses up as a gypsy to 7. Beautiful lady (Italian). The word also suggests tell fortunes at a fair). Madonna (the Virgin Mar)') and, therefore, the 5. I.e., the deck of Tarot cards. The four suits of Madonna of the Rocks (as in Leonardo da Vinci's the Tarot pack, discussed by Jessie Weston in From painting); the rocks symbolize the Church. Bella- Ritual to Romance, are the cup, lance, sword, and donna is also an eye cosmetic and a poison�the dish�the life symbols found in the Grail story. deadly nightshade. Weston noted that "today the Tarot has fallen 8. I.e., the wheel of fortune, whose turning rep- somewhat into disrepute, being principally used resents the reversals of human life. for purposes of divination." Some of the cards 9. I.e., Mr. Eugenides, "one-eyed" because the fig- mentioned in lines 46�56 are discussed by Eliot in ure is in profile on the card. Unlike the man with his note to this passage: "I am not familiar with the three staves and the wheel, which are Tarot cards, exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from he is Eliot's creation. which I have obviously departed to suit my own 1. On his card in the Tarot pack he is shown hang- convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the ing by one foot from a T-shaped cross. He symtraditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: bolizes the self-sacrifice of the fertility god who is because he is associated in my mind with the killed so that his resurrection may restore fertility Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate to land and people. him with the hooded figure in the passage of the 2. Cf. Baudelaire: "Fourmillante cite, cite pleine disciples to Emmaus in part V. The Phoenician de reves, / Ou le spectre en plein jour raccroche le Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the passant" [Eliot's note]. The lines are quoted from 'crowds of people,' and Death by Water is executed "Les Sept Vieillards" ("The Seven Old Men") of Les in part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authen-Fletirs du Mai (The Flowers of Evil), by the French tic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite poet Charles Baudelaire (1821�1867): "Swarming arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself." city, city full of dreams, / Where the specter in 6. See part 4. Phlebas the Phoenician and Mr. broad daylight accosts the passerby." The word Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant�both of whom reve was originally misspelled reve. appear later in the poem�are different phases of 3. Cf. Inferno III, 55-57 [Eliot's note]. The note the same symbolic character, here identified as the goes on to quote Dante's lines, which maybe trans" Phoenician Sailor." Mr. Eugenides exports "cur-lated: "So long a train of people, / that I should rants" (line 210); the drowned Phlebas floats in the never have believed / That death had undone so "current" (line 315). Line 48 draws from Ariel's many." Dante, just outside the gate of hell, has song in Shakespeare's The Tempest (1.2.400�08) seen "the wretched souls of those who lived with- to the shipwrecked Ferdinand, who was "sitting on out disgrace and without praise." a bank / Weeping again the King my father's 4. Cf. Inferno IV, 25-27 [Eliot's note]. In Limbo, wrack," when "this music crept by me on the the first circle of hell, Dante has found the virtuous waters." The song is about the supposed drowning heathens, who lived before Christianity and are, of Ferdinand's father, Alonso. The Waste Land therefore, eternally unable to achieve their desire contains many references to The Tempest. Ferdi

.

2298 / T. S. ELIOT

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.5 There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson!6 "You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!7 "That corpse you planted last year in your garden, "Has it begun to sprout?8 Will it bloom this year? "Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? "Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, "Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!9 "You! hypocrite lecteur!�mon semblable�mon frere!"1

II. A Game of Chess2 \ ^

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,3 Glowed on the marble, where the glass Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines From which a golden Cupidon peeped out (Another hid his eyes behind his wing) Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra Reflecting light upon the table as The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it, From satin cases poured in rich profusion; In vials of ivory and coloured glass Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, Unguent, powdered, or liquid�troubled, confused And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air That freshened from the window, these ascended In fattening the prolonged candle-flames, Flung their smoke into the laquearia,4 Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

of seeing God. Dante's lines, cited by Eliot, mean "Hypocrite reader!�my likeness�my brother!" "Here, so far as I could tell by listening, / there was "Au Lecteur" describes humans as sunk in stupid- no lamentation except sighs, / which caused the ity, sin, and evil, but the worst in "each man's foul eternal air to tremble." menagerie of sin" is boredom, the "monstre deli

5. A phenomenon which I have often noticed cat"�"You know him, reader." [Eliot's note]. St. Mary Woolnoth is a church in 2. The title suggests two plays by Thomas Middle- the City of London (the financial district); the ton (1580�1627): A Game at Chess and, more sigcrowd is flowing across London Bridge to work in nificant, Women Beware Women, which has a the City. According to the Bible, Jesus died at the scene in which a mother-in-law is distracted by a ninth hour. game of chess while her daughter-in-law is 6. Presumably representing the "average business-seduced: every move in the chess game represents man." a move in the seduction. 7. The battle of Mylae (260 B.C.E.) in the First 3. Cf. Antony and Cleopatra, II, ii, 1. 190 [Eliot's Punic War, which, in some measure like World note]. In Shakespeare's play, Enobarbus's famous War I, was fought for economic reasons. description of the first meeting of Antony and Cle8. A distortion of the fertility god's ritual death, opatra begins, "The barge she sat in, like a bur- which heralded rebirth. nish'd throne, / Burn'd on the water." Eliot's 9. Cf. the Dirge in Webster's White Devil [Eliot's language in the opening lines of part 2 echoes iron- note]. In the play by John Webster (d. 1625), the ically Enobarbus's speech. dirge, sung by Cornelia, has the lines "But keep 4. Laquearia. V. Aeneid, I, 726 [Eliot's note]. the wolf far thence, that's foe to men, / For with Laquearia means "a paneled ceiling," and Eliot's his nails he'll dig them up again." Eliot makes the note quotes the passage in the Aeneid that was his "wolf" into a "dog," which is not a foe but a friend source for the word. The passage may be trans- to humans. lated: "Blazing torches hang from the gold-paneled 1. V. Baudelaire, Preface to Fleurs du Mai [Eliot's ceiling [laquearibus aureis], and torches conquer note]. The passage is the last line of the introduc-the night with flames." Virgil is describing the ban- tory poem "Au Lecteur" ("To the Reader"), in quet given by Dido, queen of Carthage, for Aeneas, Baudelaire's Fleurs dii Mai; it may be translated: with whom she fell in love.

.

THE WASTE LAND / 2299

Huge sea-wood fed with copper

95 Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone, In which sad light a carved dolphin swam. Above the antique mantel was displayed As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene5 The change of Philomel,6 by the barbarous king

100 So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, "Jug Jug"7 to dirty ears. And other withered stumps of time

105 Were told upon the walls; staring forms Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed. Footsteps shuffled on the stair. Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery points

no Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

"My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. "Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. "What are you thinking of ? What thinking? What? "I never know what you are thinking. Think."

115 I think we are in rats' alley8 Where the dead men lost their bones.

"What is that noise?" The wind under the door.9 "What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?" 120 Nothing again nothing.

"Do "You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember "Nothing?"

I remember 125 Those are pearls that were his eyes.1 "Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?"

But O O O O that Shakespeherian Bag2� It's so elegant

BO So intelligent

"What shall I do now? What shall I do?" "I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

5. Sylvan scene. V. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV. 140 8. Cf. Part 111, I. 195 [Eliot's note]. [Eliot's note]. The phrase is part of the first 9. Cf. Webster: "Is the wind in that door still?" description of Eden, seen through Satan's eyes. [Eliot's note]. In John Webster's The Devil's Law 6. V. Ovid, Metamorphoses, VT, Philomela [Eliot's Case (3.2.162), a physician asks this question on note]. Philomela was raped by "the barbarous king" finding that the victim of a murderous attack is still Tereus, husband of her sister, Procne. Philomela breathing, meaning "Is he still alive?" was then transformed into a nightingale. Eliot's 1. Cf. Part I, 1. 37. 48 [Eliot's note]. note for line 100 refers ahead to his elaboration of 2. American ragtime song, which was a hit of Ziegthe nightingale's song. feld's Follies in 1912. The chorus is "That Shake7. Conventional representation of nightingale's spherean Rag, most intelligent, very elegant." song in Elizabethan poetry.

.

2300 / T. S. ELIOT

"With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow? "What shall we ever do?"

135 The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess,3 Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

When Lil's husband got demobbed,4 I said� 140 I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME5

Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart. He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there,

us You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set, He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you. And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert, He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time, And if you dont give it him, there's others will, I said,

iso Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said. Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

If you dont like it you can get on with it, I said, Others can pick and choose if you can't.

155 But if Albert makes off, it wont be for lack of telling. You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one.) I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face, It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.

160 (She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.) The chemist6 said it would be alright, but I've never been the same. You are a proper fool, I said. Well, if Albert wont leave you alone, there it is, I said, What you get married for if you dont want children?

165 HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,0 ham, bacon And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot�

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

i7o Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight. Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.7

III. The Fire Sermon8 The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind

3. Cf. the game of chess in Middleton's Women tion. Beware Women (Eliot's note]. The significance 7. Cf. the mad Ophelia's departing words (Shakeof this chess game is discussed in the first note to speare, Hamlet 4.5.69�70). Ophelia, too, met part 2. "death by water." Cf. also the popular song lyric 4. British slang for "demobilized" (discharged "Good night ladies, we're going to leave you now." from the army after World War I). 8. The Buddha preached the Fire Sermon, against 5. The traditional call of the British bartender at the fires of lust and other passions that destroy closing time. people and prevent their regeneration. 6. Pharmacist. "To bring it off: to cause an abor

.

TH E WAST E LAN D / 230 1 175 Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.9 The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. 180 And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; Departed, have left no addresses. By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept1 . . . Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, 185Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my back in a cold blast I hear2 The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. A rat crept softly through the vegetation Dragging its slimy belly on the bank While I was fishing in the dull canal 190 On a winter evening round behind the gashouse Musing upon the king my brother s wreck And on the king my father's death before him.3 White bodies naked on the low damp ground And bones cast in a little low dry garret, 195 Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year. But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors,4 which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.5 O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter 200 And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water6 Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupoleI7 Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug 205 So rudely forc'd. Tereus

9. V. Spenser, Prothalamion (Eliot's note]. Eliot's line is the refrain from Edmund Spenser's marriage song, which is also set by the river Thames in London. 1. Cf. Psalms 137.1, in which the exiled Hebrews mourn for their homeland: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion." Lake Leman is another name for Lake Geneva, in Switzerland; Eliot wrote The Waste Land in Lausanne, by that lake. The noun leman is an archaic word meaning lover. 2. An ironic distortion of Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," lines 21�22: "But at my back I always hear/Time's winged chariot hurrvingnear." Cf. lines 196-97. 3. Cf. The Tempest, 1, ii [Eliot's note]. See line 48. 4. Cf. Marvell, To His Coy Mistress [Eliot's note]. 5. Cf. Day, Parliament of Bees: "When of the sudden, listening, you shall hear, / A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring/Actaeon to Diana in the spring, / Where all shall see her naked skin" [Eliot's note]. Actaeon was changed to a stag and hunted to death after he saw Diana, the goddess of chastity, bathing with her nymphs. John Day (1574-ca. 1640), English poet.

6. I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken; it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia [Eliot's note]. One of the less bawdy versions of the song, which was popular among Australian troops in World War I, went as follows: "O the moon shines bright on Mrs. Porter /And on the daughter / Of Mrs. Porter. /They wash their feet in soda water / And so they oughter / To keep them clean." 7. V. Verlaine, Parsifal [Eliot's 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.

.

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 to the place where she was ues, where work and relaxation are both real and seduced: "When lovely woman stoops to folly/And take place in a context of religious meaning. finds too late that men betray / What charm can 1. The Song of the (three) Thames-daughters soothe her melancholy, / What art can wash her begins here. From line 292 to 306 inclusive they guilt away? / The only art her guilt to cover, / To speak in turn. V. Gotterdammerung, III, i: the hide her shame from every eye, / To give repen-Rhinedaughters [Eliot's note]. Eliot parallels the tance to her lover / And wring his bosom�is to Thames-daughters with the Rhinemaidens in Wag- die." ner's opera Gotterdammerung (The Twilight of the 8. V. The Tempest, as above [Eliot's note]. Cf. line Gods), who lament that, with the gold of the Rhine 48. The line is from Ferdinand's speech, continu-stolen, the beauty of the river is gone. The refrain ing after "weeping again the King my father's in lines 277�78 is borrowed from Wagner. wTack."

.

2304 / T. S. ELIOT

270 Red sails Wide To leeward, swing on the heavy spar. The barges wash Drifting logs

275 Down Greenwich reach

Past the Isle of Dogs.2 Weialala leia Wallala leialala

Elizabeth and Leicester'

280 Beating oars The stern was formed A gilded shell Red and gold The brisk swell

285 Rippled both shores Southwest wind Carried down stream The peal of bells White towers

290 Weialala leia Wallala leialala

"Trams and dusty trees. Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew Undid me.4 By Richmond I raised my knees

295 Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe."

"My feet are at Moorgate,'5 and my heart Under my feet. After the event He wept. He promised 'a new start.' I made no comment. What should I resent?"

300 "On Margate6 Sands. I can connect Nothing with nothing. The broken fingernails of dirty hands. My people humble people who expect

305 Nothing." la la

To Carthage then I came7

2. Greenwich is a borough in London on the south Greenwich Hospital now stands. side of the Thames; opposite is the Isle of Dogs (a 4. Cf. Purgatorio, V, 133 [Eliot's note]. The Piirpeninsula). gatorio lines, which Eliot here parodies, may be 3. The fruitless love of Queen Elizabeth and the translated: "Remember me, who am La Pia. / Siena earl of Leicester (Robert Dudley) is recalled in made me, Maremma undid me." "Highbury": a resEliot's note: "V. [J. A.] Froude, Elizabeth, Vol. I, idential London suburb. "Richmond": a pleasant eh. iv, letter of De Quadra to Philip of Spain: 'In part of London westward up the Thames, with the afternoon we were in a barge, watching the boating and riverside hotels. "Kew": adjoining games on the river. (The queen) was alone with Richmond, has the famous Kew Gardens. Lord Robert and myself on the poop, when they 5. Underground (i.e., subway) station Eliot used began to talk nonsense, and went so far that Lord daily while working at Lloyds Bank. Robert at last said, as I was on the spot there was 6. Popular seaside resort on the Thames estuary. no reason why they should not be married if the 7. V. St. Augustine's Confessions: "to Carthage queen pleased.' " Queen Elizabeth 1 was born in then 1 came, where a caldron of unholy loves sang the old Greenwich House, by the river, where all about mine ears" [Eliot's note]. The passage

.

THE WASTE LAND / 2305

Burning burning burning burning8 O Lord Thou pluckest me out9 310 O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

TV. Death by Water]

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss.

315 A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool.

Gentile or Jew 320 O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

V. Wliat the Thunder Said2 After the torchlight red on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places

325 The shouting and the crying Prison and palace and reverberation Of thunder of spring over distant mountains He who was living is now dead3 We who were living are now dying

330 With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water and the sandy road The road winding above among the mountains Which are mountains of rock without water

335 If there were water we should stop and drink Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand If there were only water amongst the rock

from the Confessions quoted here occurs in St. infatuation." For Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, see Augustine's account of his youthful life of lust. Cf. Matthew 5-7. line 92 and its note. 9. From St. Augustine's Confessions again. The

8. The complete text of the Buddha's Fire Sermon collocation of these two representatives of eastern (which corresponds in importance to the Sermon and western asceticism, as the culmination of this on the Mount) from which these words are taken, part of the poem, is not an accident [Eliot's note]. will be found translated in the late Henry Clarke 1. This section has been interpreted as signifying Warren's Buddhism in Translation (Harvard Orien-death by water without resurrection or as symboltal Series). Mr. Warren was one of the great pio-izing the sacrificial death that precedes rebirth. neers of Buddhist studies in the Occident [Eliot's 2. In the first part of Part V three themes are note]. In the sermon, the Buddha instructs his employed: the journey to Emmaus, the approach priests that all things "are on fire. . . . The eye . . . to the Chapel Perilous (see Miss Weston's book), is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is and the present decay of eastern Europe [Eliot's on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire; note]. On the journey to Emmaus, the resurrected and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or Jesus walks alongside and converses with two dis- indifferent, originates in dependence on impres-ciples, who think he is a stranger until he reveals sions received by the eye, that also is on fire. And his identity (Luke 24.13-14). with what are these on fire? With the fire of pas-3. These lines allude to Jesus' agony in the Garden sion, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of of Gethsemane, his trial, and his crucifixion.

.

230 6 / T . S . ELIO T Dead mountain mouth of carious0 teeth that cannot spit decked 340 Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain There is not even solitude in the mountains But red sullen faces sneer and snarl 345 From doors of mudcracked houses If there were water And no rock If there were rock And also water 350 And water A spring A pool among the rock If there were the sound of water only Not the cicada4 355 And dry grass singing But sound of water over a rock Where the hermit-thrush5 sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop But there is no water

360 Who is the third who walks always beside you?6 When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

365 I do not know whether a man or a woman �But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air7 Murmur of maternal lamentation Who are those hooded hordes swarming

370 Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth Ringed by the flat horizon only What is the city over the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers