a n o t e o n t h e t e x t
5 1
Hogarth editions mistakenly reports that Jessie Weston’s book was pub-
lished by Macmillan. In a presentation copy of the Hogarth which Eliot
gave “to Mother from Tom. 14.ix.23,” he corrected “Macmillan” to “Cam-
bridge Univ. Press.”9 A briefer version of this change, simply to “Cam-
bridge,” was made in the Faber Poems, 1909–1925, remained in all subse-
quent editions, and is followed here. Also, in both the Boni and Liveright
and Hogarth editions, the notes to lines 196 and 197 were reversed. They
are silently corrected here.
Apart from these two obvious corrections to Eliot’s notes, there are
numerous matters of consistency in citing titles and punctuation which
were left uncorrected not only in B and H but also in F and many subsequent editions. Eliot was plainly diªdent about the notes and never devoted
his attention to proofreading them. To cite one example, although the
titles of books and other major works are routinely rendered in italics
throughout the notes, the titles of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Dante’s Inferno (notes to lines 31, 63, and 64) were left in roman in B, H, F, and many later editions, including The Complete Poems and Plays. But to leave
the notes in this state merely creates or perpetuates pointless distractions.
Moreover, it can be argued, whereas the text of the poem proper shows
signs of Eliot’s active editorial intervention in B, H, and F, the text of the notes does not, and is therefore devoid of his or any other authority. Errors
of this kind, therefore, have been corrected, and the corrections have been
duly noted in the Historical Collation that follows.
This edition, then, follows Eliot in adopting B as setting text; it admits
the six corrections which he made to the text proper in 1923 (H) and 1925
(F) and the one alteration (“aethereal”) he made in 1925 (F); it admits the other alteration that he also made in 1925, the addition of the dedication
to Ezra Pound; it also admits the alteration to the first note which he made
in 1925 (F); and it admits three further emendations (lines 42, 131, 428) on the authority of the Waste Land manuscripts which Eliot wrote or typed and
showed to Ezra Pound in early 1922. It rejects the (generally dubious) au-
thority of all editions from 1936 on, including that of the autograph manu-
script which Eliot prepared in 1960, which, after line 137, contained a line
(“The ivory men make company between us”) that had been in early type-
scripts of the poem but which never appeared in any printing prepared
during Eliot’s lifetime, including the 1962 Mardersteig, which Eliot himself
on one occasion referred to as “the standard text.”10 In short, it presents
5 2
a n o t e o n t h e t e x t
the text that most closely conforms to Eliot’s intentions during the period
when he was actively concerned with and intervening in the text’s shape
and evolution.
A final point must be added concerning the poem’s lineation. In the
Boni and Liveright edition, what are lines 346 and 347 in Collected Poems,
1909–1962 and many other editions were counted as a single line. Though
the Hogarth edition did not include line numbers, it evidently presupposed
the same lineation as Boni and Liveright, since the notes to all lines after
these two used the same numerical references as did Boni and Liveright.
The lineation also remained the same in Poems, 1909–1925, and it is there-
fore this earlier lineation which is followed here. To enhance ease of refer-
ence, however, the line number is given at every fifth line, rather than every
tenth line as was done in all numbered editions during Eliot’s lifetime.
Notes
1. True, the Dial could have saved eight days in requesting a setting copy from Eliot by telegraphing him, cutting down the minimum time to produce the
poem from thirty-six to twenty-eight days. But since James Sibley Watson
was presiding over the poem’s publication in the Dial, having so actively intervened to secure it for the journal, he may also have recalled his experience
with Eliot earlier in the summer. Though Eliot had promised Ezra Pound on
28 July that he would make a new copy of The Waste Land for Watson to read
while still in Paris ( LOTSE, 552), it was not till 16 August that the copy had finally arrived. If a similar delay of nineteen days were to occur now, Watson
may have calculated, even a production process reduced to twenty-eight days
would not have suªced for the Dial to meet its schedule.
2. Four prepublication typescripts of the poem are known to exist. One is found
among the Dial papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
of Yale University. Another is housed in the James Sibley Watson, Jr., papers
at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. A third is found
among the papers of Jeanne Robert Foster at the Houghton Library of Har-
vard University. A fourth is housed in the John Hayward Collection at the
library of King’s College, Cambridge University. None of these served as
setting copies, and all of them have a great many nonauthorial variants that
are devoid of any authority.
3. The printers of the Criterion were Hazel, Watson & Viney, Ltd., located in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. See unpublished letter from T. S. Eliot to F. S.
Flint, 22 September 1922, University of Texas, Harry Ransom Center for the
Humanities.
4. Consider one other portion of the text, the poem’s first part, in which Eliot
had detected an alarming number of “undesired alterations made by the
a n o t e o n t h e t e x t
5 3
printers” of the Criterion. Despite his e¤orts to remove these, the Criterion still has eleven variants when collated against the Boni and Liveright text.
Two of these are substantives ( B’s “And went on in sunlight” at line 10 be-
comes C’s “And went on in the sunlight,” while B’s “One must be so careful these days” at line 58 becomes C’s “One must be so careful in these days”).
Five are the result of quotation marks or inverted commas having been
added to speeches (ll. 15, 16, 46, 47, 59), and two more are minor alterations
of punctuation (the em dash is removed from line 37, the first exclamation
point in line 76 is changed to a comma). One is a change of font (lines 31–34
are changed from italics to roman), and one is the addition of a blank line
of space between lines 41 and 42. The Dial, instead, makes nine changes to
the Boni and Liveright text. Three result from attempting to rationalize the
treatment of quotations in a foreign language. Whereas the Boni and Live-
right text had given lines 31–34 in italics but also used roman for lines 11, 42,
and 76, the Dial text aimed for consistency and placed them all in italics
(the Criterion text had tried to achieve consistency by the reverse procedure, putting lines 31–34 in roman). Another variant results from a similar attempt to rationalize capitalization. Since “hyacinth” was lowercase in lines
35 and 36, the Dial made “hyacinth” in lines 37 lowercase as well. Two more were spelling changes, altering the British usage “cruellest” to the American
“cruelest” and correcting Liveright’s erroneous German “Od’” to “Öd’.”
Yet another two were alterations of punct
uation, eliminating the apparently
superfluous comma at the end of line 26 and (in conformity with house
style) dropping the period after “Mrs.” One was a more serious error, the
dropping of the blank line between lines 42 and 43. Minute variants in
the spelling of three other words in the notes are recorded in the historical
collation.
5. Unpublished letters from T. S. Eliot to Hermann Hesse, 24 and 31 May 1922,
Schweizerisches Literaturarchiv; unpublished letter from T. S. Eliot to Ernst
Curtius, 9 July 1922, Universitätsbibliothek, Bonn.
6. See A. D. Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1979), 303.
7. “More widely accepted scholarly reading” understates the case. I know of no
edition of the poem which reads “ceu.” But the problem is more complicated
than a simple opposition between “ceu” and “uti.” Briefly, there are three
manuscripts which contain the Pervigilium Veneris. One is the Codex Pitho-
eanus, named after Pierre Pithou (1539–1595), a French humanist who
published the first edition of the poem in 1577. Another is the Codex Salma-
sianus, so called from the Latin form ( Salmasius) of the name of Claude de
Saumaise (1588–1653), a French scholar who owned it. In 1871 a third manu-
script was discovered, now in Vienna and hence known as the Codex Vindo-
bonensis, which is a copy of a lost manuscript, one made by the humanist
Jacopo Sannazaro (1457–1530) sometime between 1503 and 1505. The three
have di¤erent readings of the opening words to this line:
5 4
a n o t e o n t h e t e x t
Pithoeanus:
quando faciam ut celidon
Salmasianus:
quando fiam ut caelidon
Vindobonensis:
quando faciam ut chelidon
Since the Codex Salmasianus is older than Pithoeanus by two centuries,
scholars have generally preferred its reading of fiam over faciam. Since chelidon (or “swallow”) is the more correct and attested way of rendering this
Greek word in ancient or late antique Latin, they have overwhelmingly cho-
sen it over celidon and caelidon, a decision supported after 1871 by the testimony of Vindobonensis. The critical problem is the line’s third word, ut,
which makes no sense metrically. Another syllable is needed. In 1644 An-
dreas Rivinus (or Andreas Bachmann, 1601–1656) suggested uti as a specu-
lative emendation. A slender majority of scholars have since adopted this
reading, which makes good sense; yet ceu would also be a plausible emenda-
tion, though it would depart more sharply from the testimony of the manu-
scripts. I have examined some thirty editions of the poem and not found
one which reads ceu. But ceu is clearly the reading, or even misreading, that Eliot had stored in his memory when he wrote The Waste Land, and throughout the period 1922–1925, when he was still actively involved with the text’s
evolution.
8. Moody, Eliot, 307.
9. Daniel Woodward, “Notes on the Publishing History and Text of The Waste
Land, ” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 58 (1964): 262.
10. Letter from T. S. Eliot to Daniel Woodward, 26 June 1963, cited in Wood-
ward, “Notes,” 264.
t h e w a s t e l a n d
The Waste Land
“Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla
pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Sivbulla tiv qevlei"; respondebat
illa: ajpoqanei'n qevlw.”
For Ezra Pound
il miglior fabbro
i . t h e b u r i a l o f t h e d e a d
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
5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
10
And drank co¤ee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
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,
15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
5 7
5 8
t h e w a s t e l a n d
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,
20
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,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
25
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something di¤erent 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.
30
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
35
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Öd’ und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
45
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
50
t h e w a s t e l a n d
5 9
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
55
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.
Unreal City,
60
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
65
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.
There I saw one I knew, and s
topped him, crying: “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
70
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? 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!
75
“You! hypocrite lecteur! —mon semblable, —mon frère!”
i i . a g a m e o f c h e s s
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
80
(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,
6 0
t h e w a s t e l a n d
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;
85
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
90
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the co¤ered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
95
In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
100
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
105
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuºed on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.
110
“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?