131. WHAT SHALL I DO?: More questions, and more Hamlet allusions. See Shakespeare*, Hamlet 1.4.57, for Hamlet’s reaction after his father’s ghost appears:
“Say, why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?”
See also Hamlet 3.4.178, when the Queen fails to see or hear her late husband’s ghost and asks, even after her son challenges her:
“What shall I do?”
Compare the indecisiveness of Hamlet and his mother in the face of a familiar ghost to those whom death has undone at the gates of hell for having “lived withouten infamy or praise.” See note 63 and Dante*, Inferno 3:35-57.
137. DIVERSIONARY GAMES: Eliot*: “Cf. the game of chess in Middleton's Women Beware Women.”
See Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess (1624); and see also Middleton, Women Beware Women (1657), in which a girl is seduced while her mother in law is kept busy in the next room playing chess. See also note 76.5 for other games of chess.
138. LIDLESS EYES: See Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Inclusiveness (1881):
“The changing guests, each in a different mood,
Sit at the roadside table and arise:
And every life among them in likewise
Is a soul’s board set daily with new food.
What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?—
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
May not this ancient room thou sit’st in dwell
In separate living souls for joy or pain?
Nay, all its corners may be painted plain
Where Heaven shows pictures of some life spent well;
And may be stamped, a memory all in vain,
Upon the sight of lidless eyes in Hell.”
In an earlier manuscript, in a section edited after Vivienne’s objection, Eliot had referred to the statuary chess pieces in an extra line between “a game of chess” and “pressing lidless eyes”: “The ivory men make company between us.” See F&T*.
Compare the “vials of ivory and coloured glass” at line 86, and also compare the pearly eyes of the hyacinth prince and the drowned sailors (note 125). See also Oscar Wilde, The Sphinx (1894), speaking of the statue that “strains his lidless eyes Across the empty land.”
For an alternative and perhaps more disparate image, see W.B. Yeats, Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation (1916), referring to the eagle’s ability to stare at the sun without blinking, with “the lidless eye that loves the sun.” By way of reconciling this with the chess pieces, compare the image of line 22: “a heap of broken images, where the sun beats,” and see also the white skeletons of soldiers at note 186.
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* see note 0.1
