297. THE MOORGATE NYMPH: Moorgate is an Underground stop in London’s financial district. This is the second of three Thames-daughters nymphs speaking, suggesting either three separate events or three perspectives of the same event. See note 18 for the general events that set the mood of this poem (the war, the loss of a friend, a troubled marriage), and see note 263 for the possibility of events being out of order. More immediately, and perhaps allegorically, consider the carnality of the event that “undid” the first of the Thames-daughters (line 294), with her knees supine (line 295), and compare this to the second position of one with “heart under my feet,” i.e., on her back. See also the event perceived in the violet hour (line 220), an enactment both foresuffered by Tiresias (lines 243-244) and foresworn by the lovely woman’s half-formed thought: “Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over” (line 252). In the present telling, note that however much thoughts are formed they are left unspoken; likewise, even the nymph’s emotion is reserved, with resentment only half-formed, this as her counterpart weeps and speaks.
298. HE WEPT, HE PROMISED: “He wept” repeats the convalescent’s lament (see line 182: “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept...”) but also recalls the two word verse after the event of Lazarus’s death: “Jesus wept.” See John* 11:35. Jesus had seen Lazarus’s sister Mary weeping and those with her weeping, and this had troubled him (John* 11:33). Note that the “he” of line 298 is not necessarily the perpetrator but could be, like Tiresias or Jesus, an observer of the event, or, as in line 360, the one “who walks always beside.”
EPIGRAPHS: By recalling the story of Lazarus, “he wept” returns us to this poem’s opening allusion from the Order of the Burial of the Dead (see note 0.5), and it also conjures the earlier allusion of the Sibyl wishing to die in the poem’s epigraph (note 0.3). This might be considered the poem’s “old start,” and it is comparable to what Eliot had considered as an alternative epigraph (see F&T*), from Conrad***, Heart of Darkness 3:
“The horror! The horror!”
But whether one weeps over death, curses life or is horrified over humanity, there is now the hope of a “new start.” Consider the epigraph that starts the Order of the Burial of the Dead, a passage at the heart of the Lazarus event from John* 11:26:
“...whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.”
And in response to both the weeping and the horror, see Heart of Darkness 3 for Marlow’s comment on Kurtz’s last words:
“Better his cry—much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats ...But it was a victory!”
Compare Herman Hesse, A Glimpse of Chaos: The Brothers Karamazov, or The Downfall of Europe (1920; tr. Sydney Schiff):
“Those who cling definitely to the past, those who venerate time-honoured cultural forms, the Knights of a treasured morality, must seek to delay this Downfall and will mourn it inconsolably when it passes. For them the Downfall is the End; for the others, it is the Beginning.”
Eliot met Hesse in Switzerland in 1922 and published this translation of Hesse’s essay in the first issue of his magazine The Criterion (October 1922), the same issue in which he offered his debut of The Waste Land.
EPITAPHS: See note 306 for more of this turnaround from beginning to end and end to beginning.
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* see note 0.1
