402. THUNDER’S FIRST DISCIPLINE: Eliot*: “'Datta, dayadhvam, damyata' (Give, sympathize, control). The fable of the meaning of the Thunder is found in the Brihadaranyaka– Upanishad, 5, 1. A translation is found in Deussen's Sechzig Upanishads des Veda, p. 489.” See Paul Deussen’s German translation (1897), and see note 400 for an English translation.
The first discipline of datta, or “Give,” is what humans can hear in the syllable “Da.” Compare Eliot, Portrait of a Lady (1920):
“But what have I, but what have I, my friend,
To give you, what can you receive from me?”
403. PERSONAL POETRY: This line once read, “My friend. My friend, beating in my heart” (see Eliot, F&T*). Eliot struggled to keep his poetry impersonal (see note 172.5), and even called the more personal Walt Whitman “pathetic” (see Eliot, American Literature, Athenaeum, 4/25/1919), yet he could not resist occasional turns to friendship and, in this poem and elsewhere, allusions to Whitman. See Eliot, Portrait of a Lady:
“Now that lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in her fingers while she talks.
‘Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you should hold it in your hands’;
(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
‘You let it flow from you, you let it flow...’”
and compare this to the opening lines of Whitman†, Memories:
“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,
And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,
I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.”
408. THE BENEFICENT SPIDER: Eliot*: “Cf. Webster, The White Devil, V, vi: ‘...they'll remarry / Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, ere the spider / Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.’” This is Flamineo from John Webster’s White Devil (note 44) 5.6.182-190, leading up to his own dying words:
“O men,
That lie upon your death-beds, and are haunted
With howling wives! ne'er trust them; they'll re-marry
Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, ere the spider
Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.
...Trust a woman? never, never; Brachiano
be my precedent. We lay our souls to pawn to the devil for
a little pleasure, and a woman makes the bill of sale. That
ever man should marry!”
410. A MOMENT’S SURRENDER: Lines 403-410 answer line 402: That which we have given, that which the thunder would have us give, is ever more than what will be stated in what we leave behind: not in our public obituaries or preserved epitaphs or private wills, beyond the bills of sale, but it is only by this “awful daring” (line 404) of ephemoral surrender that we have existed (line 406).
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* see note 0.1 †see note 2
