Olivia's Song

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 249-265 





253  Eliot: V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield. Oliver Goldsmith 24 (1766): “When lovely woman stoops to folly, / And finds too late that men betray, / What charm can soothe 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.”

✭  This is OLIVIA’S SONG, which resonates with several Waste Land images. See Goldsmith’s introductory narrative: “The next morning the sun rose with peculiar warmth for the season; so that we agreed to breakfast together on the honey-suckle bank: where while we sat, my youngest daughter, at my request, joined her voice to the concert of the trees about us. It was in this place my poor Olivia first met her seducer, and every object served to recall her sadness. But that melancholy, which is excited by objects of pleasure, or inspired by sounds of harmony, soothes the heart instead of corroding it. Her mother, too, upon this occasion, felt a pleasing distress, and wept, and loved her daughter as before.” For echoes of Olivia’s song, see line 182 (“By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept”) and note 182 (Rosseau’s “sweetest melancholy”); see also lines 11 (breakfast with Marie on a surprisingly warm day) and99 (the rape of Philomela, her cries  and the nightingale’s forest song resounding through the grove) and notes 0.3 and 63 (the wishes to die of the Sybil and of the undying souls in limbo).

256   Record-playing continues the spirit of this section; see note 172.5.

✭  The gramophone, or phonograph, was a relatively new concept in THE MODERN WORLDof Eliot’s time. See also the typewriter, the two career family and ready-to-eat meals (line 222), horns and motors (line 197) and airplanes (note 374), The term automatic was itself a burgeoning word.

257  Eliot: V. The Tempest, as above. 1.2.392 (see note 48).

258  The Strand is a riverside London street once lined with mansions, almost all of which no longer exist. Eliot alluded to the Strand in an early unnamed poem, commonly known as At Graduation (1905): “Standing upon the shore of all we know / We linger for a moment doubtfully, / Then with a song upon our lips, sail we / Across the harbor bar—  no chart to show / No light to warn of rocks that lie below, / But let us yet put forth courageously. // As colonists embarking from the strand / To seek their fortunes on some foreign shore / Well now they lose what time shall not restore, / And when they leave they fully understand / That though again they see their fatherland / They there shall be as citizens no more.”

259  Eliot vacillated with the Unreal City’s capitalization here; it was capitalized in 1922, lower-cased in 1923 and recapitalized in 1925. Compare line 60 and Baudelaire’s “city, city” at note 60). 

263 It is noon again, after Eugenides’s foggy noon (line 208) and Tiresias’s evening hour (line222); either time has passed or the order of events is nonlinear.

✭  For more on TIME’S PASSAGE, see the limbo states at lines 40, 63, 126 and 329) and the revivals at lines 1-7 and after line 359.

264  Eliot: 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.). London County Council (1920). Public outcry to this proposal spared both Magnus Martyr and Mary Woolnoth (line 67) from being razed. Until 1922, St. Magnus Martyr celebrated an annual Fish Harvest Festival. The church was surrounded by pubs and fish, oil and tar (line 268), and whining, clatter and chatter, yet the scene still exuded pleasant music and an “inexplicabale splendour.”

from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)