300. RECUPERATION: Margate is the southern England coastal town along a seaside cliff where Eliot, suffering from mental exhaustion, began a course of recuperation in the fall of 1921. He followed this with more formal treatment in Switzerland (see note 182), where he met Herman Hesse (see note 298).
303. BROKENNESS: See note 123 for recurrent images of nothingness, emptiness and brokenness. In this case, broken nails and dirty hands suggest a continuation of the carnality of the nymphs’ event-telling (see note 297). For more broken and dirty nails, see the nails of the corpse-digging dog at line 75.
THE MARGATE NYMPH, third of the three Thames-daughters, has not yet reached the resolution of a new start (see note 298). None of the nymphs have made this connection, and with the Margate nymph’s lines their disconnection and lack of expectation is made even more apparent (see lines 299, 301-302 and 304-305), but their songs, sung at the end of this fire section of songs, are all part of the purgation.
306. FINAL NOTES: The three Thames-daughters’ songs end with a brief “la la” epitaph, a feeble echo of their opening choruses at lines 277-79 and 290-291, uttered with a tone of defeat. The curtain appears to be drawn, even as it is done by the “beneficent spider” (line 408, and see Webster, note 408), who would “make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.” Yet quietly tucked into their songs was that promise of a new start (line 298).
ELIOT’S EPITAPH: Eliot’s hope for a new beginning and his appreciation for Hesse’s end to beginning turnaround (see note 298) would be developed further in his Four Quartets† collection (see note 64). First, from East Coker (1940):
“In my beginning is my end...
...Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure...
...In my end is my beginning.”
Eliot would take the East Coker bookends,“In my beginning is my end... In my end is my beginning,” as his own epitaph.
See also Little Gidding, the final part of Eliot‘s Four Quartets†:
“Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.”
Thus, while the conclusion is not yet drawn, even in the nymphs’ songs as they reserve comment and fail to connect or expect, there is hope.
Finally, or not so finally, compare Eliot’s epitaph, along with his lines “He wept. He promised...” (Line 298) and Herman Hesse’s “For them the Downfall is the End; for the others, it is the Beginning” (note 298) to the epigraph Dostoevsky chose for his Brother’s Karamazov (note 248), from John* 12:24:
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
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* see note 0.1 †see note 0.5
