257. UNDERTONE: Eliot*: “V. The Tempest, as above.” See Shakespeare*, The Tempest 1.2.392, and see note 26.
258. THE STRAND, about a mile west of where Eliot worked (see note 66), is a riverside London street once lined with mansions, almost all of which no longer exist. Eliot alluded to the Strand in an early unnamed poem, commonly known as At Graduation (1905):
“Standing upon the shore of all we know
We linger for a moment doubtfully,
Then with a song upon our lips, sail we
Across the harbor bar— no chart to show
No light to warn of rocks that lie below,
But let us yet put forth courageously.
As colonists embarking from the strand
To seek their fortunes on some foreign shore
Well now they lose what time shall not restore,
And when they leave they fully understand
That though again they see their fatherland
They there shall be as citizens no more.”
CITIZENSHIP and its renouncement would be part of Eliot’s own story, although not until several years after The Waste Land and from an opposite direction than the British immigration his 1905 graduation poem spoke of. He was at Harvard when that poem was written, but by 1910 he moved to Paris for a year of undergraduate studies. He eventually ended up at Oxford (1914) and the working world of London (1917), and in 1927 he renounced his American citizenship to become a naturalized Briton.
259. CITY CITY: Eliot vacillated with the Unreal City’s capitalization here; it was capitalized in 1922, lower-cased in 1923 and recapitalized in 1925. Compare line 60, and see Baudelaire’s “city, city” at note 60. For this moment, however, the city is less unreal and more appreciated.
263. TIME’S PASSAGE is unclear here. It is noon again, after Eugenides’s foggy noon (line 208) and Tiresias’s evening hour (line 222); either time has passed or the order of events is not what it appears. See also the limbo states at lines 40, 63, 126, 329 and 344 and the revivals at lines 1-7 and after line 359. See also note 322.
265. ST. MAGNUS MARY: Eliot*: “The interior of St. Magnus Martyr is to my mind one of the finest among Wren's interiors. See The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches (P. S. King & Son, Ltd.).”
Public outcry to this 1920 proposal from the London County Council spared both Magnus Martyr (line 264) and Mary Woolnoth (line 67) from being razed. Until 1922, St. Magnus Martyr celebrated an annual Fish Harvest Festival. The church was surrounded by pubs and fish, oil and tar (line 268), and whining, clatter and chatter, yet the scene still exuded pleasant music and an “inexplicable splendour.”
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* see note 0.1
