197. HEARING HORNS: Eliot*: “Cf. Marvell, To His Coy Mistress.” For the allusion here and at line 185, see Marvell’s impatient plea (see note 141):
“For, Lady, you deserve this state
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.”
See also John Day, Parliament of Bees (1641). Eliot*: “Cf. Day, Parliament of Bees:
‘When of the sudden, listening, you shall hear,
‘A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring
‘Actaeon to Diana in the spring,
‘Where all shall see her naked skin...’”
Day’s Parliament of Bees features a "vainglorious reveler" named Polypragmus the Plush Bee who speaks of a mechanical panorama he wants to build on the ceiling of his hive, depicting the tale of Actaeon and Diana. See Ovid*, Metamorphoses 3:206-312. After Actaeon the hunter saw the goddess Diana naked, she turned him into a stag to be hunted and killed by his own dogs. See also Sophocles, Electra (ca. 400 BCE) for the Greek counterpart with Agamemnon and Artemis. Compare Shakespeare, Cymbeline (note 77), in which Iachimo takes
pleasure in seeing an image of Diana bathing on Imogene’s bedchamber walls.
198. SWEENEY is Eliot’s revival of a brutish character he used in three earlier poems, a counterpart to his more sensitive Prufrock (see note 0.4). Here Sweeney takes the place of Actaeon / Agamemnon (note 197), and Diana/Artemis becomes Mrs. Porter, a brothel madame (see note 200). Compare Eliot, Sweeney Among the Nightingales (1918), which opens with a Greek epigraph of the dying words of Agamemnon, suffering at the hands of his wife and her lover, as told in Aeschylus, Agamemnon 116 (458 BCE, tr. William Watson Goodwin (1906):
“Oh, woe is me! I am struck to the heart with a fatal blow.”
Sweeney Among the Nightingales then concludes:
“The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,
And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud
And let their liquid droppings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.”
NIGHTBIRDS: The nightingale is the bird Philomela turns into after her rape (see note 99), but it has also come to symbolize the prostitute. See the nightbird of note 200, and see Franceschina’s song in John Marston, The Dutch Courtezan (1605) 1.2.220-227:
“The dark is my delight,
So ‘tis the nightingale’s;
My music’s is the night;
So is the nightingale’s;
My body is but little,
So is the nightingale’s;
I love to sleep ‘gainst prickle,
So doth the nightingale.”
See also Anthony’s affection to his queen, in Shakespeare*, Anthony and Cleopatra 4.8.25-26: “My nightingale, we have beat them to their beds. What, girl!”
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* see note 0.1
