Epigraph : To Be or Not To Be
0.5. THE SIBYL of Cumae was an oracle who served as Aeneas’s escort (0.4), but it is her words from another setting that give this poem its epigraph. For a translation, see Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon, 48 (ca. 50 CE, tr. Michael Heseltine 1913):
“Yes, and I myself with my own eyes saw the Sibyl hanging in a cage; and when the boys cried at her: ‘Sibyl, Sibyl, what do you want?’ ‘I would that I were dead,’ she used to answer.’”
Apollo had granted the Sibyl a wish in exchange for her virginity; she asked for eternal life but had forgotten to ask for youth and so in time she shriveled up. From Ovid, Metamorphoses 14:122-133:
“I am no deity, reply'd the dame,
But mortal, and religious rites disclaim.
Yet had avoided death's tyrannick sway,
Had I consented to the God of day.
With promises he sought my love, and said,
Have all you wish, my fair Cumaean maid.
I paus'd; then pointing to a heap of sand,
For ev'ry grain, to live a year, demand.
But ah! unmindful of th' effect of time,
Forgot to covenant for youth, and prime.
The smiling bloom, I boasted once, is gone,
And feeble age with lagging limbs creeps on.”
James Frazer referred to the Sibyl of Cumae in Golden Bough (0.2), and also in his commentary to Description of Greece X.12.8 (0.2):
“...Parallels to the story of the Sibyl’s wish are to be found in German folktales. One of these tales runs as follows:
Once upon a time there was a girl in London, who wished to live forever, so thy say: ‘London, London is a fine town. A maiden prayed to live forever.’
And still she lives and hangs in a basket in a church and every St. John’s Day she eats a roll of bread.”
0.5 ‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis
vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
Σἰβυλλα τἱ θἐλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεν θἑλω.’
ETERNITY, or the thought of never dying, is abhorrent to the Sibyl; her sentiment of a living hell also resonates in an alternative epigraph Eliot had once considered (F&T, and see 298) from Kurtz’s dying words in Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902):
“Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, some vision, - he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath - ‘The horror! The horror!’”
These were the last words of Mr. Kurtz, “chief of the inner station.” Marlow, the narrator, also heard Kurtz utter these words just before: “I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.” And Kurtz’s final words weighed on Marlow:
“He had summed up - he had judged, ‘The horror!’ He was a remarkable man. After all, this was he expression of some sort of belief... Better his cry - much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory, paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory!”
Just as Marlow would call Kurtz’s cry a moral victory, Eliot, even as he relates the Sibyl’s wish to be dead, or Kurtz’s waiting for death, appears to yearn for something beyond the metaphorical grave, and something more than the shriveled continuation of life as the Sibyl would know it: he later mentions a “new start” (298), and more immediately he considers the story of Lazarus (0.7), raised from the dead and given a more positive promise of eternity.
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* see note 0.1
