As Wallace Stevens once confided to Donald Hall regarding poets’ juvenilia, “Some of one’s early things give one the creeps.” T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) was similarly skittish about the contents of a leather-bound notebook of poems dating from 1909. Eliot sold the notebook to his patron John Quinn on the condition that the “unpublished and unpublishable” verses never find their way into print. Against the unwanted airing of a poet’s apprentice work, however, the fireplace seems the only summary defense, for now, nearly thirty years after the manuscript was unearthed in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, an edition of the early poems, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, has been commissioned by Valerie Eliot and painstakingly prepared by Christopher Ricks.
In their weaker moments, Eliot’s fledgling verses provide highly revealing insights into the formation of his poetic sensibility; in their stronger, they contain the nascent strains of an inimitable, thoroughly familiar music—the music of the mature voice, among the finest in this century. What Eliot wrote of John Webster rings true for his own work in the Berg Notebook: his “mind was of the reservoir type. He needed to accumulate for a long time before he could transmute into real poetry.” The ingredients which Eliot gathered for his early poems (and which are sprinkled throughout the Notebook) have been much remarked on: the sources of inspiration, he wrote, for young poets after 1910 “are to be found in the earlier symbolist poets of France … in Baudelaire and his immediate followers, Laforgue, Corbière, Rimbaud and Mallarmé,” as well as in the poets and playwrights of the Tudor-Stuart period, among others.
As Eric Sigg notes in The American T. S. Eliot (Cambridge, 1989), the Symbolist movement, which Eliot came to through the writings of Arthur Symons,
grasps at extremes, adopting the extraordinary as its norm… . Eliot borrowed something of Laforgue’s method, which Symons described as a kind of travesty, incorporating odd and unusual, “nonpoetic words” and subtly allusive, factitious, and reflected meanings. Laforgue combined these meanings in a kind of serious play by lampooning sentimentalism, treating trivial matters seriously, and juxtaposing colloquial and high diction.
While the two products of Eliot’s literary gleanings printed below, “Mandarins” (1910) and “Paysage Triste” (1914?), hark back to the Symbolists, they forecast in their repetitions, echoes, cadences, lexicon, and mixed diction Eliot’s more accomplished work. If on the whole the juvenilia lack the polish of the contemporaneous verse later published in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), it is nevertheless thrilling to hear in these formative poems the initial notes of that Eliotic rag.
-David Yezzi
Mandarins
by T.S. Eliot
1
Stands there, complete,
Stiffly addressed with sword and fan:
What of the crowds that ran,
Pushed, stared, and huddled, at his feet,
Keen to appropriate the man?
Indifferent to all these baits
Of popular benignity
He merely stands and waits
Upon his own intrepid dignity;
With fixed regardless eyes—
Looking neither out nor in—
The centre of formalities.
A hero! and how much it means;
How much—
The rest is merely shifting scenes.
2
Two ladies of uncertain age
Sit by a window drinking tea
(No persiflage!)
With assured tranquillity
Regard
A distant prospect of the sea.
The outlines delicate and hard
Of gowns that fall from neck and knee;
Grey and yellow patterns move
From the shoulder to the floor.
By attitude
It would seem that they approve
The abstract sunset (rich, not crude).
And while one lifts her hand to pour
You have the other raise
A thin translucent porcelain,
Murmurs a word of praise.
3
The eldest of the mandarins,
A stoic in obese repose,
With intellectual double chins,
Regards the corner of his nose;
The cranes that fly across a screen
Pert, alert,
Observe him with a frivolous mien—
Indifferent idealist,
World in fist,
Screen and cranes.
And what of all that one has missed!
And how life goes on different planes!
4
Still one more thought for pen and ink!
(Though not indicative of spleen):
How very few there are, I think
Who see their outlines on the screen.
And so, I say, I find it good
(Even if misunderstood)
That demoiselles and gentlemen
Walk out beneath the cherry trees,
The goldwire dragons on their gowns
Expanded by the breeze.
The conversation dignified
Nor intellectual nor mean,
And graceful, not too gay …
And so I say
How life goes well in pink and green!
Paysage triste
by T.S. Eliot
The girl who mounted in the omnibus
The rainy day, and paid a penny fare
Who answered my appreciative stare
With that averted look without surprise
Which only the experienced can wear
A girl with reddish hair and faint blue eyes
An almost denizen of Leicester Square.
We could not have had her in the box with us
She would not have known how to sit, or what to wear
Yet if I close my eyes I see her moving
With loosened hair about her chamber
With naked feet passing across the skies
She would have been most crudely ill at ease
She would not have known how to sit, or what to wear
Nor, when the lights went out and the horn began
Have leaned as you did, your elbow on my knees
To prod impetuously with your fan
The smiling stripling with the pink soaped face
Who had your opera-glasses in his care.
