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13. REMEMBERING YOUTH: Not yet feeling old (see note 219), see Ecclesiastes* 12:1,5:
“Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; ...when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.”
15. MARIE: These lines derive from Marie Larisch, My Past (1913), and from private visits Eliot had with her in Bavaria; see F&T*. In 1889, Austrian Countess Marie was socially cast out after her cousin Crown-Prince Rudolph (the archduke) and his mistress, for whom Marie had acted as a go-between, died in a suicide-murder scandal. Rudolph was succeeded as crown-prince by Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose 1914 assassination triggered World War I (see note 61). Meanwhile, another Prince Ferdinand, from Shakespeare*, The Tempest, will be given repeated attention, beginning with the next passage (see line 26).
17. MOUNTAINS reappear throughout the poem, inspiring freedom but also fear and withdrawal. See the Lenten “thunder of spring over distant mountains” (line 327); the desperate sense of “no water, only rock” (lines 331-359); the unnamed range surrounding Ernest Shackleton’s march (note 361); the inverted mountains beneath a city of decaying earth (line 372), a mountain hole that hides an empty chapel (line 386), and finally the snowy Himavant, a holy mountain in the Himalayas (line 398).
18. GOING SOUTH literally refers to the direction Marie went for winter breaks and Eliot went for recuperation in 1921-22 (see note 300), but it may also refer more figuratively to a decline in value or a departure from responsibility. See, e.g., Elgin (Illinois) Dairy Rep. 11/13/1920: “Meat, grains and provisions generally, are like Douglas Fairbanks, headed south—in other words, going down.” Fairbanks had starred in a 1918 film, no longer available, called “Headin’ South,” about a U.S. ranger who tracks a fugitive to Mexico, joins the fugitive’s gang then falls in love with one of the fugitive’s victims.
MOOD: Right after recalling a feeling of youthful freedom, the tone becomes somber again. The mood of this poem may have been set by the convergence of several key events: the great war and the loss of a friend to that war (see notes 15, 42 and 61), the pain of a dysfunctional marriage and the grappling with sexual identity (notes 92 and 218), recuperation from mental exhaustion (note 300), and, generally, the loss of innocense.
