<---BACK TO THE POEM
112. SPEAK: See Shakespeare*, Hamlet 1.1.127-138 (Hamlet addressing the ghost of his father): “Speak to me.”
113. QUESTIONS keep coming up, don’t they? One is left unmarked, at line 112 (Why do you never speak), but questions are regularly punctuated at lines 20, 34, 72ff, 113ff, 131ff, 164, 299, 360ff, 402 and 426. Questions are also alluded to by the epigraph and by lines 26, 30, 48, 118,182, 186, 309, and 400.
115. RAT’S ALLEY was a World War I slang term for battlefield trenches; it may also refer to the rodent infested alleyways in the City of London (see note 60). See also the recurrence of bones “rattled by the rat’s foot” at lines 194-195, and see note 186.
118. THE WIND UNDER THE DOOR: Eliot*: “Cf. Webster: ‘Is the wind in that door still?’”
See John Webster, The Devil’s Lawcase 3.2.164 (1623), and see all of scene 2 for the context. Two surgeons come upon a man being stabbed, ostensibly to death; the surgeons consider how they might make money off of the perpetrator by promising to keep quiet, when the victim groans. They first pretend it is only the wind they hear, but they know better and quickly realize that by healing the victim they can profit from both sides.
123. NOTHING: See Shakespeare*, Hamlet 3.4.128-131:
“HAMLET: Do you see nothing there?
QUEEN: Nothing at all, yet all that is I see.
HAMLET: Nor did you nothing hear?
QUEEN: No, nothing but ourselves.”
Nothingness, emptiness and brokenness pervade this poem. See lines 22, 40, 119-126, 173, 177, 303-305, 385, 389, 409, 410, 417 and 427. Compare these lines with the humble thoughts of Kurtz’s “last disciple” in Conrad***, Heart of Darkness 3:
“I am a simple man. I have no great thoughts. I want nothing from anybody.”
125: PEARLY EYES: Eliot*: “Cf. Part I, l. 37, 48.” This is Eliot’s quiet hint tying the hyacinth prince of line 37 (“...your arms full and your hair wet”) to the drowned sailor of line 48 (“Those are pearls that were his eyes”). See also Shakespeare*, The Tempest 1.2.402.
126. ALIVE, OR NOT: Wondering about being “alive, or not” follows lines 39-40: “I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing...” which alludes to Dante*, Inferno 34:25:
“I did not die, and I alive remained not.”
_________________________________________
*see note 0.1 ***see note 0.3
NEXT NOTE--->
