T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 139-172
When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said —
To be demobbed, or demobilized, is to be discharged from military service.
I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,
the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, edited
and with an Introduction by Valerie Eliot (1971), this story was related
to the Eliots by their maid.
Hurry up please its time
“Hurry up please its time,” stated five times in this passage, is a common
last call in English pubs. Compare this, and the concurrent advice being
given to Lil, to the urgent “carpe diem” call of Andrew Marvell, To His
Coy Mistress (1681):
Had we but world enough and time,
So the mistress’s lover begins, but he quickly concludes that they don’t.
See Eliot, Andrew Marvel (Times Literary Supplement, 03/31/1921),
finding in Marvel’s Coy Mistress
an alliance of wit and seriousness (by which the seriousness is intensified).
Several more Coy Mistress allusions appear in this poem (see TWL 185 and
196), but none are as prevalent as the counterpoints in Eliot, The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), with its own five repetitions of a less frantic mantra:
There will be time.
For more of this counterpace, compare the similar setting of TWL 260 and
the poet’s unexpected appreciation for the music sometimes heard “beside
a public bar.”
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 herself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
See Jesus ben Sira, Alphabeta (ca.AD 700-900; tr. M. Stein-schneider, 1858):
When the Almighty - may His name be praised - created the first, solitary man,
He said: It is not good for man to be alone. And he fashioned for man a woman from
the earth, like him, and called her Lilith. Soon, they began to quarrel with each other.
She said to him: I will not lie underneath, and he said: I will not lie underneath but
above, for you are meant to lie underneath and I to lie above. She said to him: We are
both equal, because we are both created from the earth. But they didn’t listen to each
other. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced God’s avowed name and flew into the air.
...Immediately, the Almighty - may his name be praised - said to him: If she decides to
return, it is good, but if not, then she must take it upon herself to ensure that a
hundred of her children die each day.
For a biblical reference to Lilith in the wilderness, see Isaiah 34:9-14 (Darby,
1890):
And the torrents thereof shall be turned into pitch, and its dust into brimstone; yea,
the land thereof shall become burning pitch: it shall not be quenched night nor day;
the smoke thereof shall go up for ever: from generation to generation it shall lie waste;
...And he shall stretch out upon it the line of waste, and the plummets of emptiness.
...And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in her fortresses;
and it shall be a dwelling-place of wild dogs, a court for ostriches. And there
shall the beasts of the desert meet with the jackals, and the wild goat shall
cry to his fellow; the lilith also shall settle there, and find for herself a place of rest.
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 for four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.
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 don't like it you can get on with it, I said.
Others can pick and choose if you can't.
But if Albert makes off, it won't be for a 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.
To bring it off is to have an abortion.
(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be all right, but I've never been the same.
The chemist is a pharmacist
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don't want children?
Hurry up please its time
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
Gammon is smoked ham; it also suggests a slang term for sexual
intercourse.
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot —
One of Eliot’s more notorious flaws was a streak of ANTI-SEMITISM, and
the ugly head rears again as the Lil story first alludes to the outspoken Lilith
from Jewish folk literature then concludes with a vulgar pork meal. The
absence of any further recurrence of this flaw in The Waste Land is thanks in
part to Ezra Pound’s editing (see The Wasteland Facsimile, above). A
preliminary draft had contained a reference to a Jewish slur from one of Eliot’s
earlier poems, Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar (1920), in
which Eliot had written
The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs.
Eliot reinserted Bleistein into The Waste Land with yet another reference to
Ariel’s song (see notes at TWL 48):
Full fathom five your Bleistein lies
Under the flatfish and the squids,
but Pound prevailed in having these lines deleted.
Hurry up please its time
Hurry up please its time
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.
See William Shakespeare, Hamlet 4.5.70-73 (1605):
OPHELIA
And so I thank you for your good counsel. Come, my coach!
Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.
These are some of Ophelia’s last words, if not her final words, and thus ends
the air section. Ophelia has a few more lines in the play, but already she has
lost her mind and the air about her is dying. Her words, mourning her father’s
death at the hands of Hamlet, become fragmentary and nonsensical as she
wanders off, and soon it will be reported that she had fallen into shallow
waters and drowned. For the particulars of Ophelia’s demise, see Hamlet
4.7.164-181:
QUEEN
There is a willow grows askant the brook
That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream.
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.
There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up.
...But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
Compare Ophelia’s DEATH BY WATER, further alluded to by TWL
173-174 in the next section (“The river's tent is broken; the last fingers
of leaf / Clutch and sink into the wet bank”), with the hyacinth girl’s
demise at TWL 38 (“Your arms full, and your hair wet”) and the shallow
water death of Bavarian King Ludwig II (alluded to at TWL 8). See also
the collected currants in the merchant’s pocket (see TWL 210) and the
watery deaths of Jean Verdinal (note at TWL 42), the Tempest sailor
(TWL 48), and, in the section entitled “Death by Water,” Phlebas the
Phoenician (TWL 312-321). Finally, note the simile of Cleopatra’s
perfumes that “drowned the sense in odours” (TWL 89).
from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)
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