Shored Against My Ruins

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 427-432 





427  “London bridge is falling down,” a nursery rhyme first referenced in The London Chaunticleres (1657, Anon.), alludes back to lines 22 (a heap of broken images), 62 (crowd flowing over the bridge), 173 (the river’s tent is broken) and 374 (falling towers).

428 Eliot: 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. Dante attributes these words to Provencal poet Arnaut Daniel, at Purgatorio 26.142-148: “I am Arnaut, who weep and singing go; / Contrite I see the folly of the past, / And joyous see the hoped-for day before me. / Therefore do I implore you, by that power /  Which guides you to the summit of the stairs, / Be mindful to assuage my suffering!’ / Then hid him in the fire that purifies them.”) See Appendix D for the extended excerpt. Daniel, whom Dante called the “better craftsman” (see note 0.2), says this as he follows Italian poet Guido Guinizelli, who had “vanished in the fire / As fish in water going to the bottom” (26.134-135).  

429  Eliot: V. Pervigilium Veneris. Cf. Philomela in Parts II and III.  Tiberianus, The Vigil of Venus (400 BC): “Quando ver venit meum? / Quando fiam ceu chelidon, ut tacere desinam? (Ah, loitering Summer! Say when / For me shall be broken the charm, that I chirp with the swallow again?)” See also Algernon Charles Swinburne, Itylus (1864): “Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow.” Swinburne’s poem combines the story of Philomela and Procne, in which two sisters are turned into a nightingale and a swallow (see note 99), with the story of Itylus referred to in Homer, Odyssey 19: 524-534, in which Aedon is turned into a nightingale after accidentally killing her son Itylus. See also Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess; A Melody (1884): “O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying south,” and compare this with Countess Marie going south for the winter (line 18).

430  Eliot: V. Gerard de Nerval, Sonnet El Desdichado.  (1853, tr. J. Vold, 2013, as The Loser): “I’m a man of shadows, widowed, unconsoled, / Once Prince of Aquitaine, my tower undone...” See Appendix H.  Gerard De Nerval was a friend of Charles Baudelaire (see note76). He was also known to have fits of madness: see Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899): “...with Gérard there was no pose; and when, one day, he was found in the Palais-Royal, leading a lobster at the end of a blue ribbon (because, he said, it does not bark, and knows the secrets of the sea), the visionary had simply lost control of his visions, and had to be sent to Dr. Blanche's asylum at Montmartre.”

432  Eliot: V. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy.  Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronymo’s Mad Again (1592), 4.1-5: “HIERONYMO: Why then, I'll fit you; say no more. / When I was young, I gave my mind / And plied myself to fruitless poetry; / Which though it profit the professor naught, / Yet is it passing pleasing to the world.” See Eliot, Hamlet and His Problems (note 417), citing this play as a source for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In trying to interpret and understand the present poem, one might transpose what Eliot wrote about Shakespeare and Hamlet. On interpretation: “Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret... for “interpretation” the chief task is the presentation of relevant historical facts which the reader is not presumed to know.”  And on understanding: “We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. ...We should have to understand things that Shakespeare did not understand himself.” Yet even in a lack of understanding there can be appreciation, and Eliot, in ceding to “the peace that passeth understanding” admits as much (see note 434). Even his final “shantih” comment, he says, is a “feeble translation” of the concept; and yet, incomprehensible as it may be, it is still something for this poet, and every poet and reader, to strive for.

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