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69. STETSON, readers once believed, referred to Eliot’s friend Ezra Pound, who was known to wear the occasional Stetson cowboy hat and who, by being Eliot’s “lecteur,” or editor, was given the poem’s opening dedication. Eliot denied the Stetson-Pound connection but never gave a more satisfactory alternative, suggesting only that Stetson was not an actual person but a generic London banker with an arbitrarily common name. See F&T*. But there may be another more plausible explanation. In World War I, Australian troops, who would have been more associated with a naval battle and buried corpses than a London banker, wore felt Stetson hats, and it was among these troops at Gallipoli, where furloughed soldiers sang to Mrs Porter (see line 199), that Eliot’s friend Jean Verdenal died (see note 42).
70. THE BATTLE OF MYLAE (260 BCE) resulted in a Roman naval victory over Carthage, home of Aeneas’s onetime lover Queen Dido (see note 92). In present tense, the battle is over and the surviving sailors are grounded. Compare the return of troops at note 61, and see more references to Carthage at note 307.
71. THE PLANTED CORPSE: See 1 Corinthians* 15: 37, 42-44:
“And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain ...So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.”
In a Moravian tradition begun in Germany and adopted in America, Easter Sunrise Service is held in a churchside graveyard called “God’s Acre,” with hyacinths decorating the graves where the bodies of the dead have been “sown as seed.” See the legend of the hyacinth at note 36. See also Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, God’s Acre (1866):
“With thy rude ploughshare, Death, turn up the sod,
And spread the furrow for the seed we sow;
This is the field and Acre of our God,
This is the place where human harvests grow!”
Compare Longfellow, Hyperion 2.9 (1836):
“...the green terrace or platform on which the church stands, and which, in ancient times, was the churchyard, or as the Germans more devoutly say, God's-acre; where generations are scattered like seeds.”
Thus, this Burial of the Dead section ends where it begins, with the possibility of stirring dull roots in spring. The reader’s brother (mon semblable, mon frère) remains uncertain, though, and still perceives the season’s cruelty; he closes the section with questions (lines 72 and 73) and exclamations (lines 74-76) that are all earth, no air, water or fire.
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*see note 0.1
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