221. HOME FROM THE SEA: Eliot*: “This may not appear as exact as Sappho's lines, but I had in mind the longshore' or 'dory' fisherman, who returns at nightfall.”
See Sappho, fragment 95 (ca. 600 BCE, tr. Henry Thornton Wharton, 1895):
“Evening, thou that bringest all that bright morning scattered;
thou bringest the sheep, the goat, the child back to her mother.”
Compare Albert returning to Lil at lines 139 and following, and see also Robert Louis Stevenson, Requiem (1879):
“Home is the sailor, home from the sea.”
See also Dante*, Purgatorio 8:1-2:
“Twas now the hour that turneth back desire
In those who sail the sea...”
223. CHANGING TIMES: Typists, the two-career household and ready-to-serve meals, were part of the war and post-war trend. See also note 256.
Compare the typist’s teatime with Countess Marie’s coffee break (line 11), the bar talk at last call (line 139), or lunch with the Smyrna merchant (line 213). See also note 263, and observe how time moves here from evening to breakfast to teatime.
227. COMBINATIONS are undergarments; stays are corsets. Contrast the piled up bed and the hyacinth girl's hair and clothes in need of drying (line 38) with Cleopatra’s chambers (line 77).
231. CARBUNCULAR: Pimpled. A carbuncle can also describe a burning charcoal or a red garnet stone. Compare these to the sailor’s pearly eyes (line 48). See also Shakespeare*, Hamlet 2.2.401, where Hamlet recites a play passage in which a vengeful Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, has “eyes like carbuncles,” i.e red and bent on killing. The unsourced play is a dramatization of the fall of Troy from Virgil*, Aeneid 2.506-558, and in this passage Aeneas is telling Queen Dido how Pyrrhus has covered himself in blood to avenge the death of his father. Compare Dryden’s translation at Aeneid 2:539: “And all his father sparkles in his eyes.” Compare this to the “one bold stare” of the young man (line 232).
234. BRADFORD MILLIONAIRE: Bradford was an English manufacturing town and home to the nouveaux riche. Compare the socialite chess players at line 137.
The expected guest, a young house clerk, is "one of the low" (line 233) and of an even station with the typist home at teatime, but his stature is raised by his self-assurance.
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* see note 0.1
