331. THIRTY GOOD LINES: T.S. Eliot wrote to Ford Madox Ford in 1923 that there were “about thirty good lines in The Waste Land, can you find them?” Ford declined to take the bait, so Eliot answered himself in a subsequent letter: “As for the lines I mention, you need not scratch your head over them. They are the 29 lines of the water-dripping song in the last part.” See Letters II*. A few years earlier, in Reflections on Contemporary Poetry, Egoist (November 1917), Eliot had called Ford’s poem Antwerp (1917) “the only good poem I have met with on the subject of the war.” Ford’s poem graphically describes “the trench of gray mud ...turned to a brown purple drain...” See note 61 for references to the war within The Waste Land.
343. LIMBO: Compare the absence of silence, of solitude and the presence of a dry thunder to the suspended state of limbo in Inferno 4.41-42 (see note 64). See also Brooks (note 330), comparing these descriptions to the different sounds and presences to come, when a third will begin to walk beside the travelers (lines 360-366) and the thunder will bring rain and words with meaning (lines 400-423).
357. THE HERMIT-THRUSH: Eliot*: “This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec County. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds in Eastern North America) ‘it is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats.... Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.’ Its ‘water-dripping song’ is justly celebrated.” See Frank M. Chapman, Handbook (1896).
Lines 331-359 present the longest stretch of the poem in Eliot’s own voice without apparent allusions or the need for translation, but the hermit thrush's call at the end of this passage represents the hint of, or the longing for, a third voice. This itself alludes to the hermit thrush in Whitman†, Memories; see especially Memories 13, and see note 2 for other Memories allusions.
“Sing on, sing on, you gray-brown bird
...Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines
...O liquid and free and tender!”
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* see note 0.1 †see note 2
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MEMORIES OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN, by Walt Whitman
(Hermit Thrush excerpts)
4
In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat,
Death's outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou would'st surely die.)
...
13
Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird,
Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the
bushes,
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.
Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song,
Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.
O liquid and free and tender!
O wild and loose to my soul—O wondrous singer!
You only I hear—yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart,)
Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me.
...
16
Passing the visions, passing the night,
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades' hands,
Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my
soul,
Victorious song, death's outlet song, yet varying ever-altering
song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling,
flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet
again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,
Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with
spring.
I cease from my song for thee,
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing
with thee,
O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.
Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo arous'd in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full
of woe,
With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to
keep, for the dead I loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this
for his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.
