NOTES

Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

Epigraph: Petronius' Satyricon (first century A.D.) recounts the story of the Sibyl of Cumai, given eternal life, but thus doomed to perpetual old age: "For once I myself saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the children said to her, 'Sybyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'I want to die.'" The Sibyl was the priestess presiding over the Apollonian oracle at Cumae. The Cumaean Sibyl prophesied by "singing the fates" and writing on oak leaves. These would be arranged inside the entrance of her cave, but if the wind blew and scattered them she would not help to reassemble the leaves to form the original prophesy again. The Sibyl was a guide to the underworld, its entry being at a nearby crater. Aeneas employed her services before his descent to the lower world to visit his dead father, but she warned him that it was no light undertaking. She warned Aeneas that the descent into Hades was easy, but that it was a great labor to climb back out. Although she was mortal, the Sibyl lived about a thousand years. This came about when Apollo granted her a wish; she took up a handful of sand and asked to live for as many years as the grains of sand she held but she didn't ask for enduring youth, and Apollo allowed her body to wither away because the Sibyl did not consent to have sex with him. Her body grew smaller with age and eventually was kept in a jar. Eventually only her voice was left.

Dedication: "The better maker," Eliot's recognition of Pound for his extensive, sensitive help in shaping the poem. The quotation from Dante's Purgatorio canto 26, line 117, was a tribute to the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel.

The Burial of the Dead: the phrase is from the burial service of the Anglican Church.

Starnbergersee: a lake near Munich. Lines 8-16 echo passages in Countess Marie Larish's My Past (1913). Countess Marie Louise Larisch von Moennich (also known as Countess Marie Louise Larisch-Wallersee) (1858-1940), niece and confidante of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, was born Marie Louise Elizabeth Mendel in Augsburg, Bavaria, the illegitimate daughter of Ludwig Wilhelm, Duke in Bavaria (1831-1920) and actress Henriette Mendel (1833-1891). Her father renounced his rights as firstborn son, and Henriette (or Henrietta) Mendel was created Baroness of Wallersee (Freifrau von Wallersee) in preparation for their morganatic marriage in 1859. From 28 May 1859, Marie was thus a Baroness of Wallersee (Freiin von Wallersee). Marie became the confidante of her aunt, the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, being selected at least partly because of her skills on horseback. Their relationship was shattered by the revelation, after Crown Prince Rudolf's death at Mayerling, that Marie had acted as go-between for him and his lover, Baroness Mary Vetsera. She married Count Georg Larisch of Moennich, Baron of Ellgoth and Karwin (1855-1928). The marriage had been arranged by the Empress. They later divorced. Marie had five children during this marriage, though only the first two were indisputably fathered by her husband. She then married musician Otto Brucks (1854-1914). They had one child, Otto. Marie met and conversed with the poet T. S. Eliot, and part of their conversation found its way into his epochal poem The Waste Land. Marie is said to have been given a great deal of "hush money" not to publish her memoirs, and to have accepted voluntary exile to the United States in exchange for an annual pension of $25,000. She, of course, published her memoirs anyway—a series of ghost-written works which are completely undependable factually.

Bin gar keine: "I am no Russian, I come from Lithuania, a real German."

Line 20 Cf. Ezekiel 2:7. Eliot's note: God addresses Ezekiel as "Son of man," and calls upon him to "stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee."

23. Cf. Ecclesiastes 12:5. The prophet points to old age when "the grasshopper shall be a burden and desire shall fail."

25. Isaiah 32:1-2 prophesies that when the Messiah comes it "shall be [ . . . ] as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."

31. V. Tristan und Isolde, i, verses 5–8. In Wagner's opera, the lines are sung by a sailor aboard Tristan's ship, thinking of his beloved in Ireland: "Fresh blows the wind homeward; my Irish child, where are you waiting?"

36. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, X, Hyacinth is a young boy slain by a rival for Apollo's love. In Greek mythology, Hyacinth or Hyacinthus was a divine hero. He is the tutelary deity of one of the principal Spartan festivals, the Hyacinthia, held every summer. The festival lasted three days, one day of mourning for the death of the divine hero and the last two celebrating his rebirth. In the myth, Hyacinth was a beautiful youth beloved by the god Apollo. According to myth, the two competed at discus. They took turns throwing it, until Apollo, to impress his beloved, threw it with all his might. Hyacinth ran to catch it, to impress Apollo in turn, and was struck by the discus as it fell to the ground and he died. Another myth adds that the wind god Zephyrus was actually responsible for the death of Hyacinth. The lad's beauty caused a feud between Zephyrus and Apollo, which was aggravated by the fact that Hyacinth preferred the radiant archery god Apollo. In jealousy, Zephyrus blew Apollo's discus off course, so as to injure and kill Hyacinth. When he died, Apollo didn't allow Hades to claim the boy; rather, he made a flower, the hyacinth, from his spilled blood. According to Ovid's account, the tears of Apollo stained the newly formed flower's petals with the sign of his grief. The myth is one of the many popular representations of the beautiful spring vegetation slain by the hot sun of summer.

42. Id. iii, verse 24. "Wide and empty the sea," the message given the dying Tristan, waiting for the ship bringing Isolde.

 

43. Sosostris: the name allues to Sesotris, a 12th-dynasy Egyptian king, adapted by Aldous Huxley in Chrome Yellow (1921) to Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ectabana, a woman fortune-teller.

46. I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the 'crowds of people', and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself. (Eliot's note).

 

47 Phoenician Sailor: According to Eliot's note, the Smyrna merchant (I. 129) "melts into the Phoenician Sailor." The Phoenicians were seagoing merchants who spread Egyptian fertility cults throughout the Mediterranean. He is a type of the fertility god annually "drowned" as a symbol of the death of winter.

 

48 From Ariel's song in Shakespeare's The Tempest, I.ii. 398. Ariel sings of the transformation from the supposed death to "something rich and strange." See also "A Game of Chess," 1.125.

 

49-50 Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks. Suggestive of several "situations": literally, beautiful lady, the name ambiguously expands into the names of the poisonous nightshade, of a cosmetic and of the Madonna, or Virgin Mary, painted by Leonardo da Vinci as Madonna of the Rocks.

 

51. Wheel. The wheel on one of the Tarot cards is the Wheel of Fortune.

 

52. One eyed merchant. cf. Mr. Eugenides, 1.209; on the Tarot card he is shown in profile, thus "one-eyed."

60. Cf. Baudelaire:

Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,

Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant.

 

Swarming city, city full of dreams, / Where the specter in full day accosts the passerby." Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil).

63. Cf. Inferno, iii. 55–7:

                      si lunga tratta

di gente, ch'io non avrei mai creduto

  che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta. Translation: "So it ran on, and still behind it pressed / a never-ending rout of souls in pain. / I had not thought death had undone so many / as passed before me in that mourful train." Referring to those living without praise or blame (the Opportunists chose neither good nor evil).

68. A phenomenon which I have often noticed (Eliot's note). This was partly the route Eliot took for many years to his desk at Lloyd's. If he passed under the clock of the "Bankers Church" at nine, he would have been on time at the office, a few steps down the street. The church is also possibly an allusion to the Chapel Perilous in the Grail Legend. See also lines 388-9.

 

 

70 Rome won the naval battle at Mylae (260 B.C.) in a commercial war against Carthage.

 

71-75. These lines constitute a parody of the anticipation of the resurrection of the fertility god. Eliot's note refers to Webster's The White Devil (1612). A Roman woman fears her murdered relatives will be disinterred: "But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men, / For with his nails he'll dig them up again." In welding his "theft,"—Eliot's term for such literary "borrowing"—into something "new" he made two significant changes: "foe" to "friend" and "wolf" to "Dog," thus alluding to the "Dog Star"—the bright star Sirius whose annual positioning coincided with the flooding of the Nile in consonance with the fertility ceremonies. The passage has occasioned a great deal of speculative comment with reference to naturalistic and humanistic suggestions that seem at odds with the rebirth of the god.

76. V. Baudelaire, Preface to Fleurs du Mal. The apposite lines in the introductory poem to the volume may be rendered, "Hypocrite reader!—my likeness—my brother!"

II. A GAME OF CHESS

 

The title "A Game of Chess" refers to Thomas Middleton's A Game of Chess (1627), about a marriage for political purposes, and Women Beware Women (1657), in which a chess game is used as a means of keeping a woman occupied while her daughter-in-law is being seduced, the seduction being described in terms of chess. See also 1.137.

77. Cf. Antony and Cleopatra, II. ii. 190: "The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Burn'd on the water."

92. Laquearia. V. Aeneid, I. 726: dependent lychni laquearibus aureis incensi, et noctem flammis funalia vincunt. An echo of the "paneled ceiling" of the banquet hall in which Queen Dido of Carthage received Aeneas. She commits suicide after Aeneas leaves her to found Rome.

98. Sylvan scene. V. Milton, Paradise Lost, iv. 140. "Sylvan scene" is the phrase used in Satan's first visit to the Garden. The actual scene, however, is that of the "change of Philomel"; and Eliot for line 99 refers to "Ovid Metamorphoses, VI, Philomela." Thus the two failures of love are conjoined—and added to the two previous failures figured in the opulent furnishing of the lady's boudoir. Eve's temptation by Satan will lead to carnal debauchery and expulsion from the Garden. Ovid recounts the rape of Philomela by Tereus, her sister's husband. After he rapes her, Tereus cuts out Philomela's tongue so that she can't tell her sister, Procne. Philomela weaves a tapestry that depicts the rape, thus letting Procne know of her husband's treachery. Eventually, to escape Tereus' wrath, Philomela is transformed into a nightingale. The motif of the transformation of suffering into art continues through line 103 and, pointed to by Eliot's note, in lines 203-6.

103. Jug Jug. The stylized representation of the song of hte nightingale in Elizabethan poetry.

115. Cf. Part III, l. 195.

118. Cf. Webster: 'Is the wind in that door still?"

126. Cf. Part I, l. 37, 48.

138. Cf. the game of chess in Middleton's Women beware Women.

139. demobbed. Slang for "demobilized" form the army after WWI.

 

152. Announcement by the "pub" bartender that it is closing time. Accompanied by rapping on the bar.

 

161. Chemist. Druggist or pharmacist.

 

166. Ham, or the lower end of a side of bacon; suggestively, thigh.

 

172. Alludes both to Ophelia's words before drowning herself, Hamlet Iv.v. 72 and to a popular song "Good night ladies, we're going to leave you now."

III. THE FIRE SERMON

 

The Fire sermon. The title of this section is especially evocative. It serves as a kind of rubric for the various scenes of lust, past and present, which follow, and it anticipates the express references to Buddha's Fire Sermon and St. Augustine's Confessions in the concluding lines and in Eliot's notes on those lines (307-9). Given the accurate London geography of the poem and the fact that The Waste Land began as, and to some extent remains, a poem about London in the Dryden vein, it is worth noting that overlooking the scenes mentioned, especially lines 259-65, is the imposing Monument to the Great Fire of London of 1666. The Buddha's Fire Sermon: The Adittapariyaya Suttra is a discourse from the Pali Canon, popularly known as the Fire Sermon. In it, the Buddha discusses nirvana, using the metaphor of a flame being extinguished to represent the cessation of craving.

176. V. Spenser, Prothalamion. Spenser's refrain, from his poem, a sixteenth century celebration of marriage in the then pastoral setting along the Thames River near London.

 

 

182. In Psalms 137:1 the exiled Jews express their longing for home: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion." Eliot largely finished the poem at Lake Leman, as Lake Geneva is also called, at a sanatorium where he had gone for care.

 

185 and 196. These lines allued to Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," lines 21-24.

192. Cf. The Tempest, I. ii. Ferdinand, believing his father is dead, is "sitting on a bank, / Weeping again the King my father's wreck."

197. 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 [. . . ]

As punishment for thus seeing the goddess of Chastity naked, Actaeon was changed into a stag, hunted, and killed.

199. I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia.

 

201. Eliot here uses some sanitized lines from a bawdy song of World War I, which actually was a parody of the popular ballad, "Little Redwing."

202. V. Verlaine, Parsifal. the last line of which goes, "And O those children singing in the choir." The feet of Parsifal, in Wagner's opera, are washed before he enters the sanctuary. The children are singing at the ceremony. In Verlaine's poem, there are sexual implications.

210. The currants were quoted at a price 'carriage and insurance free to London'; and the Bill of Lading, etc., were to be handed to the buyer upon payment of the sight draft.

 

213. The Cannon Street Hotel is a commercial hotel in that area of the City, the Metropole, a hotel in Brighton popular for assignations.

218. Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character', is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. The whole passage from Ovid is of great anthropological interest:

[. . . ] Cum Iunone iocos et 'maior vestra profecto est

Quam, quae contingit maribus', dixisse, 'voluptas.'

Illa negat; placuit quae sit sententia docti

Quaerere Tiresiae: venus huic erat utraque nota.

Nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva

Corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu

Deque viro factus, mirabile, femina septem

Egerat autumnos; octavo rursus eosdem

Vidit et 'est vestrae si tanta potentia plagae',

Dixit 'ut auctoris sortem in contraria mutet,

Nunc quoque vos feriam!' percussis anguibus isdem

Forma prior rediit genetivaque venit imago.

Arbiter hic igitur sumptus de lite iocosa

Dicta Iovis firmat; gravius Saturnia iusto

Nec pro materia fertur doluisse suique

Iudicis aeterna damnavit lumina nocte,

At pater omnipotens (neque enim licet inrita cuiquam

Facta dei fecisse deo) pro lumine adempto

Scire futura dedit poenamque levavit honore.

Summary of this Latin passage: Tiresias saw two snakes copulating, separatedthem and became a woman; after seven yeras he saw the same sight, again separated them, became a man again. When Jove and Juno disputed whether more pleasure is love was enjoyed by male or female, they referred the question to Tiresias, who said women. Juno in her anger blinded him, but Jove, unable to undo her action, gave him the power of infallible divination.

221. This may not appear as exact as Sappho's lines, but I had in mind the 'longshore' or 'dory' fisherman, who returns at nightfall.

 

234. Bradford. A manufacturing town in Yorkshire, England, noted for the rapid fortunes made during WWI.

 

246. The site of Teresias' prophecies and of his witnessing the fate of Oedipus and Creon.

 

253. V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield. "When lovely woman stoops to folly / And finds too late that men betray / What charm can sooth her melancholy, / What art can wash her guilt away? / The only art her guilt to cover, / To hide her shame from every eye, / To give repentance to her lover / And wring his bosom—is to die."

257. V. The Tempest, as above. An exact quotation of Ariel's song of transformation.

264. The interior of St. Magnus Martyr is to my mind one of the finest among Wren's interiors. See The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches (P. S. King & Son, Ltd.). Nearby the Billingsgate fishmarket and across the street from "the Cock," "where fishmen lounge at noon," it was known as the "Fishmen's Church." The Anglican church is dedicated to St. Magnus, Earl of Orkney, who died in 1117. It is mis-named as St. Magnus was not martyred for his religious beliefs but was executed after being captured during a power struggle with his cousin, a political rival.

266. The Song of the (three) Thames-daughters begins here. From line 292 to 306 inclusive they speak in turn. V. Götterdammerung, III. i: The Rhine-daughters.

279. V. Froude, Elizabeth, vol. I, ch. iv, letter of De Quadra to Philip of Spain:

  In the afternoon we were in a barge, watching the games on the river. (The queen) was alone with Lord Robert and myself on the poop, when they began to talk nonsense, and went so far that Lord Robert at last said, as I was on the spot there was no reason why they should not be married if the queen pleased.

A reference to the fruitless love affair of Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester.

 

293-4. Highbury, Richmond, Kew, and Moorgate are all areas in or around London.

293. Cf. Purgatorio, V. 133:

'Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia;

Siena mi fe', disfecemi Maremma.'

 

 

300. Margate Sands. A resort on the sea where Eliot, suffering from stress, spent a short period before going to the sanatorium on Lake Geneva.

307. V. St. Augustine's Confessions: 'to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears."

308. The complete text of the Buddha's Fire Sermon (which corresponds in importance to the Sermon on the Mount) from which these words are taken, will be found translated in the late Henry Clarke Warren's Buddhism in Translation (Harvard Oriental Series). Mr. Warren was one of the great pioneers of Buddhist studies in the Occident.

309. From St. Augustine's Confessions again. The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident.

 

The last five lines of the "Fire Sermon" Eliot virtually instructs the reader to consider together. Of line 307, he quotes St. Augustine. Of line 308, he points to "the complete text of the Buddha's Fire Sermon. Of line 309, after citing Confessions again.

V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

In the first part of Part V three themes are employed: the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous (see Miss Weston's book), and the present decay of eastern Europe. See lines 360, 388, 369 respectively.

 

 

322-330. Allusion to Christ's travail in the gardens of Gethsemane and Golgotha—but also to that of the other slain gods of anthropology through whom new life is invoked.

 

330. Suggestion that this is the road to Emmaus. The Bible notes that Jesus was seen in Emmaus, the very day of the resurrection, after Jesus’ appearance to Mary Magdalene and after Peter and John ran to the tomb only to find it empty (John:20). While two disciples (including Cleopas) are walking along the Emmaus road, Jesus appears to them and begins interacting with them. When they reach the village of Emmaus, the disciples ask Jesus to stay with them to eat as he seemed willing to walk on. After he prays and breaks the bread, they recognize him, and he disappears. Then they come back to Jerusalem to tell the other disciples about it, and while they share their excitement Jesus appears once again. (Luke:24, John:20). Emmaus is the name of a place which has been proposed to be located in various sites in present-day Israel and the West Bank.

357. This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec County. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds in Eastern North America) 'it is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats [. . . . ] Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.' Its 'water-dripping song' is justly celebrated.

360. The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton's): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.

367–77. Cf. Hermann Hesse, Blick ins Chaos:

Schon ist halb Europa, schon ist zumindest der halbe Osten Europas auf dem Wege zum Chaos, fährt betrunken im heiligen Wahn am Abgrund entlang und singt dazu, singt betrunken und hymnisch wie Dmitri Karamasoff sang. Ueber diese Lieder lacht der Bürger beleidigt, der Heilige und Seher hört sie mit Tränen.

 

393. In folklore, the cock's crow was thought to indicate the departure of ghosts. In Matthew, as Christ predicted, Peter denies him three times before the cock crows.

 

396. The Ganges River in India is sacred to Hindus, a place of purification.

 

398. Himavant. A Himalayan mountain.

401. 'Datta, dayadhvam, damyata' (Give, sympathize, control). The fable of the meaning of the Thunder is found in the Brihadaranyaka—Upanishad, 5, 1. A translation is found in Deussen's Sechzig Upanishads des Veda, p. 489. With this introduction of the onomatopoetic Sanskrit, the density of allusion seems to intensify.

407. Cf. Webster, The White Devil, V, vi:

                                 [ . . . ] they'll remarry

Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, ere the spider

Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.

411. Cf. Inferno, xxxiii. 46:

ed io sentii chiavar l'uscio di sotto

all'orribile torre. Translation: "And from the base of that horrible tower / I heard the sound of hammers nailing up the gates [ . . . ]" (Reference to Ugolino who is starved to death in the locked tower).

  Also F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346:

  My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it [ . . . . ] In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

 

417. Coriolanus. Shakespeare's Coriolanus deals with his tragedy. According to Plutarch, Coriolanus represented the Roman aristocracy and was well respected in the Roman Senate for arguing against the democratic inclinations of the plebeians. He was permanently banished from Rome upon being convicted on charges of misappropriation of public funds. He later turned against Rome and made allegiance with the same Volscians he had once fought against. Plutarch's account of his defection tells that Coriolanus donned a disguise and sneaked into the home of a wealthy Volscian noble, a certain Tullus Aufidius, and appealed to him as a supplicant. Coriolanus and Aufidius then persuaded the Volscians to break their truce with Rome and raise an army to invade. When Coriolanus's Volscian troops threatened the city, Roman matrons, including his wife and mother, were sent to persuade him to call off the attack. At the sight of his mother Veturia, wife Volumnia and children throwing themselves at his feet in supplication, Coriolanus relented, withdrew his troops from the border of Rome, and retired to Aufidius's home city of Antium. Aufidius then raised support to have Coriolanus put on trial by the Volscians, and then formed a conspiracy to assassinate him before the trial had ended.

424. V. Weston, From Ritual to Romance; chapter on the Fisher King. The king in the Grail legends typically lived on a river or seashore. Fish is a fertility or life symbol. This meaning was often forgotten, however, and the title of the Fisher King in medieval romances was accounted for by describing him as fishing.

427. V. Purgatorio, xxvi. 148.

'Ara vos prec per aquella valor

'que vos guida al som de l'escalina,

'sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor.'

 Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina. Translation: "Then he, too, hid himself within the fire / that makes those spirits ready to go higher." Where the poet Arnaut Daniel, remembering his lechery, speaks this line.

428. V. Pervigilium Veneris. Cf. Philomela in Parts II and III. "When shall I be like the swallow?" Eliot's note refers to this Latin poem, with its echo of Philomela, recalling the idea of finding a voice through suffering. In this anonymous poem, the myth is imaged in the swallow. "O Swallow, Swallow" appears in one of the songs in Tennyson's "The Princess."

429. V. Gerard de Nerval, Sonnet El Desdichado. "The Prince of Aquitaine in the ruined tower." Title of sonnet translated: "The Disinherited One." His desolation has been brought on through the death of his wife. In Gerard de Nerval's El Descichado, The Prince of Aquitaine is described as "the dark man, the disconsolate widower, / The prince of Aquitainia whose tower has been torn down; / My sole star is dead,—and my constellated lute / Bears the black sun."

431. V. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. When Hieronymo in Kyd's play is asked to write a court play, he replies, "I'll fit [supply] you." Through the play, despite his madness, he is able to revenge himself on the murderers of his son in a pattern similar to that of Hamlet.

433. Shantih. Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. 'The Peace which passeth understanding' is a feeble translation of the conduct of this word. The Upanishad is a sacred Hindu text.

________________________________

Eliot vocabulary

tuber—A swollen, fleshy, usually underground stem of a plant, such as the potato, bearing buds from which new plant shoots arise.

"[ . . . ] feeding a little life with dried tubers" (1. 6-7).

cupidon—image of a coy Cupid.

"[ . . . ] From which a golden cupidon peeped out [ . . . ]" (80).

unguent—a slave for soothing or healing.

"[ . . . ] Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, / unguent, powered, or liquid [ . . . ]" (88).

neurasthenia—a condition of nervous debility (not in use).

ref. to the Neurasthenic woman in section II: A Game of Chess.

coffer—an ornamental sunken panel in a ceiling or dome (lacuna).

laqueraria—c.f. lacunar, the ceiling or undersurface of any part, especially panels sunken or hollowed.

"[ . . . ] And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air / That freshened from the window, these ascended / In fattenting the prolonged candle-flames / Flung their smoke into the laquearia, / Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling" (89-93).

mince words—moderate or restrain one's language to be polite or avoid giving offense. From the literal sense of cutting meat or vegetables into small pieces.

"[ . . . ] I didn't mince my words [ . . . ]" (140).

demotic—Of or relating to the common people; popular: demotic speech; demotic entertainments.

"[ . . . ] Asked me in demotic French / To luncheon [ . . . ]" (3.213).

garret—room or space under a sloping roof of a house.

"White bones naked on the low damp ground / And bones cast in a little low dry garret [ . . . ]" (193-194).

Smyrna—ancient city on the Aegean coast.

"Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant" (209).

dugs—udder or breasts of a female animal.

"I, Tieresias, old man with wrinkled dugs" (228).

carbuncle—A painful localized bacterial infection of the skin and subcutaneous tissue that usually has several openings through which pus is discharged.

"the young man carbuncular" (231).

propitious—Presenting favorable circumstances; auspicious.

"The time is now propitious [ . . . ]" (235).

leeward—On or toward the side to which the wind is blowing.

spar—Nautical. A wooden or metal pole, such as a boom, yard, or bowsprit, used to support sails and rigging.

"Red sails / Wide / To leeward, swing on the heavy spar" (269-271).

supine—lying on the back or having the face turned upward.

"'[ . . . ] By Richmond I raised my knees / Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe [ . . . ]'" (294-5).

carious—decayed.

"[ . . . ] Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit [ . . . ]" (339).

shore—To support by or as if by a prop: shored up the sagging floors; shored up the peace initiative.

"[ . . . ] These fragments I have shored agaisnst my ruins [ . . . ]" (430).

Fisher king—also called the Wounded King figures in Arthurian legend as the latest in a line charged with keeping the Holy Grail. Versions of his story vary widely, but he is always wounded in the legs or groin, and incapable of moving on his own. When he is injured, his kingdom suffers as he does, his impotence affecting the fertility of the land and reducing it to a barren Wasteland. Little is left for him to do but fish in the river near his castle Corbenic. Knights travel from many lands to heal the Fisher King but only the chosen can accomplish the feat. This is Percival in the earlier stories; in the later versions Percival is joined by Galahad and Bors.

fertility rites—religious rituals that reenact, either actually or symbolically, sexual acts and/or reproductive processes. As with the sacrifices of humans which many scholars think that ancient peoples made to ensure good fortune (be that as to harvests or hunting or warfare or other endeavors), fertility rites are a variety of sympathetic magic in which the forces of nature are to be influenced by the example acted out in the ritual.

Gethsemene—In the New Testament, a garden east of Jerusalem near the foot of the Mount of Olives. It was the scene of Jesus's agony and betrayal.

Gogotha—a hill near Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified.