eliot reads 'the waste land': text and...

Eliot Reads "The Waste Land": Text and RecordingAuthor(s): Stefan HawlinSource: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Jul., 1992), pp. 545-554Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3732918 .

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JULY 1992 VOL. 87 PART 3

ELIOT READS THE WASTE LAND:

TEXT AND RECORDING

The recordings we possess of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Frost, and others reading their own poetry are part of our literary heritage from the first half of the century, yet by and large criticism has not examined the relationship between texts and their oral verbalizations. Eliot gave a reading of The Waste Land at the NBC Studio in New York in I946 and the performance gives us the intonations, paces, nuances, and so on that he felt were appropriate to the poem. Before considering it I want to discuss

briefly the wider issues about the interrelation of texts and voicings. What can

recordings really tell us about poems? Do they provide insight into a poem's composition? Are they helpful for teaching or will they only beguile students away from real engagement with the text?1

On the critical value of recordings, different views will necessarily exist. On the one hand it can be argued that they are a distraction from what should be happening between reader and text: some people do not want to be carrying round with them the timbre and intonation of the poet's voice, and they do not want their immediate, intersubjective response to the poet's personality (as revealed in the voice) coming between them and their own making of the poem. This view presupposes the

sophisticated reader. Arguments for the critical value of recordings will need to be

grounded in the work already done in the field oforality.2 An example would be Eric Griffiths's discussion of 'the printed voice' in Victorian poetry, where he carefully examines texts and our voicings of them, and shows the potentially ambiguous relationship of the two.3 At a simple level we can observe that texts do not supply indications of their performance (pace, intonational contour, juncture, emphasis, and so on). Sensitive readers find these out for themselves: to some degree, through prosody, poems intimate their possible voicings. None the less, even prosodically strict poems are susceptible to different voicings and so to different interpretations. There are two extreme but impossible positions: (a) the printed poem thought of as an abiding entity or event on the page and (b) the poem as an unstable acoustic event existing in our different voicings. These form an unreal opposition and much of the ground between them is shared. It is possible, however, to lean towards one

A text written about a recording is problematic in that it is clearly only complementary to that recording. The reader should verify this essay against the voicing I discuss - in this case, often reproduced and easily available. There are many ramifications to the approach taken in this paper, more than can be dealt with in a small space. In general we have textually-orientated minds, and do not like to think of voiced 'texts' where the examination of the text-acoustic relationship in a particular instance directs attention back to that which is personal in the text. For us the word is a sign rather than a sound. Now that the sound as well as the signs that make up a poem may be permanently recorded, poets' voicings of their works take on a new significance for critical and textual interpretation. The recording is item no. 309, T 6 117-19, side A, in Literary Recordings: A Checklist of the Archive ofRecorded Poetry and Literature in the Library of Congress, comp. by Jennifer Whittington (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, I981), p. 67. For details of the original publication, see Donald Gallup, T.S. Eliot: A Bibliography (London: Faber & Faber, I969), pp. 359-62 (p. 361).

2 For a summary of this field, see Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982).

3 Eric Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 1-96.

19



546 Eliot Reads 'The Waste Land'

side or the other, and what studies in orality suggest is how unwise it is to reify the text mentally; if we have to err slightly towards one side (b) will be preferable to (a).

Recordings reveal the special relationship between personality, physical voice, and poetic voice; between poet, poet's voice, and poem. An example would be Larkin's recording of High Windows, in which he brings out the colloquial quality in his own poems, even at times making them sound offhand.4 He is deliberately the reasonable, ordinary (conservative) man, suddenly, apparently effortlessly, finding his speech falling into poetry. His shy, slightly depressive personality seeks to impose nothing on the hearer. He makes his own poems happen as speech overheard and not declared, letting flattened, down-beat intonations reveal the underlying sadness of his point of view. What recorded or live performances give us, in other words, is a certain kind of intimacy with the poet, based on the connexions we feel between poem and personality. There is a danger that this intimacy can lead to lazy or unresponsive reading. Donald Davie has suggested that the increase in poetry- readings in the I96os and I970s was partly the result of a tendency to this, and of what preconditioned it, an insensitivity to prosody. Audiences were becoming 'recipients' rather than true 'readers' of poetry. They were no longer focused on the prosodic contract between poet and reader: Many observers noticed this [the increase in poetry-readings], though most of them mistakenly welcomed it: people would rather hear a poet read than read his poems for themselves, and performing poets obliged with a rhetoric of buttonholing intimacy. Charles Hartman acknowledged this development, writing of 'directly rhetorical uses of form to establish a special community between the maker of the poem and the reader who "uses" it'. But his quotation-mark around 'uses' did nothing to dispel the squalid probability that at many public readings the audience was being used (exploited) by the performer, even as the audience emotionally exploited him. The poet on the reading circuit was plainly part of showbiz, purveying his art as a service.5

This danger may be real, but it assumes a bad faith that is not inevitable, and it applies only at one remove to recordings. The remark's weakness is that it is textually orientated: it forgets the time, memorialized in the word 'prosody', when poets were more normally singers or performers. It may be that we can more appropriately think of poets' recordings/readings of their own work as being on a par with composers' performance or conducting of their own music. 'Showbiz' is wrong, but then the showbiz relationship at its worst is only a parody of a true intimacy between creator and audience.

Hearing a performance should not lead us to imitate the poet directly; on the other hand the poet's or composer's understanding of his own work is bound up in the shaping of his own performance, something to which we can legitimately attend. However much it is an artifice, a poem is a breath of the poet's life, and the poet's voicing can give a unique insight into this. Seamus Heaney (one of the showbiz poets Davie may have had in mind) takes a more sympathetic view of recordings. In an informal introduction to a recording of some of his own poems he says this: I wish I could hear Wordsworth, or Clare, or Keats reading their poems. I mean [.. .] I think one possesses the poem more intimately. One almost gets the feeling of what it was like to

4 Philip Larkin: High Windows, Four Poets of the 2oth Century, Argo 414 720-24 (London: Decca Records, 1975).

S Donald Davie, Under Briggflatts: A History of Poetry in Great Britain i960-1988 (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1989), pp. 125-26.



STEFAN HAWLIN 547

write this poem. I think particularly of Robert Frost, for example, reading 'After Apple- Picking' or Wallace Stevens reading 'Idea of Order at Key West'. They seem to me to be two magnificent recordings which do more than all the books of criticism. One likes to think that the poem belongs to the poet in a sense, and that he has first right on it.6

Heaney is from an orally more vital culture and it is no accident that he should take

up this position. Those who think the remarks exaggerated should test them against the recordings. The Stevens recording is particularly striking: few readers could take Stevens's very slow pace on the poem and still keep it resonant and distinct; 'The Idea' expresses some of his deepest beliefs and the mode of the reading, meditative to the point of reverie, suggests how his vision formed itself.

Since The Waste Land is now surrounded with a daunting commentary, beginners deserve to hear the recording so as to have some chance of a total response to the

poem, rather than first getting lost in the crossword-puzzle of allusion and

paraphrase. The recording is also valuable because of the prosodically free nature of the verse, which makes it hard to voice well. At points in Eliot's reading there seem to be nuances which even a sensitive reader might not derive from the words on the

page. These points are rare, however, and once the listener is accustomed to the timbre of Eliot's voice, the larger conclusions to be drawn from comparing text and

recording are the finely cadenced nature of the poetry and the quality of musical

sensitivity revealed in the manner of the reading. Compared to Auden's recordings of'In Praise of Limestone' or 'Bucolics', for example, Eliot's reading seems flexible in terms of intonation, dynamics, pitch, and rhythm. Auden reads as though he wants to be sure that we keep his poems separate from any consideration of

personality: his voice is cool, direct, and level-toned, and each line is delivered in a

straightforward manner. His readings match the austerity of such comments as:

'Poetry is not magic. In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.'7 Eliot's reading is flexible and nuanced by comparison. Certain passages are read in a

pressured, steady, slightly intoned manner. (This would be true of the set-pieces, lines I-7, 19-30, 77-I I , and 215-56.)8 At other times there are changes of pressure and attack in the voice within and between fragments, small crescendos and diminuendos, and emphasized contrasts between colloquialness in direct speech and a different voice for the narrator or interlocutor. These are some of the describable ways in which the recording is expressive.

The voicing hints at the instinct of Eliot's poetic to keep poetry close to purely acoustic effect. The interrelation of poetry and music is most obvious in and around the writing of Four Quartets, but it is also present early on, in 'Preludes' (191 I), for

example. In The Waste Land there is a certain amount of recalled musical sound. The music of Wagner, lines of French poetry, the 'Shakespeherian Rag', the 'tone and

exquisite modulation' of the hermit-thrush, and the sing-song of a Cockney accent are all, in a sense, a remembered music: sonorities, intonations, and songs that have

played on the ear and stuck there. Eliot remarked of the Cockney passage (11. I39- 7I) that it was 'pure Ellen Kellond'; Ellen was the Eliots' Cockney maid.9 The

6 'The Poet Speaks' Record 9, Argo 2845-46, PLP Io89 (London: Argo Records, 1967), side 2, track 3. 7 W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand (London: Faber & Faber, I963), p. 27. 8 Quotations are from the reprint of the first edition in The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the

Original Drafts, ed. by Valerie Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, I971), pp. I33-49. 9 The Waste Land: A Facsimile, p. 127, n. 5.



Eliot Reads 'The Waste Land'

intonational contours of that accent, something heard and overheard, proved irresistible in the making of the poem. What precisely (to take another instance) should we make acoustically of the memory of Gitterdimmerung III.i.?1l We need to play a recording of the scene and then to voice carefully lines 266 to 291. Eliot has written his lyric over his memory of the total atmosphere: DIE DREI RHEINTOCHTER Frau Sonne sendet lichne Strahlen;

Nacht liegt in der Tiefe: einst war sie hell, da heil und hehr des Vaters Gold noch in ihr glanzte. Rheingold! Klares Gold! Wie hell du einstens strahltest, hehrer Stern der Tiefe!

(Gbtterdiimmerung, II.i. I.)

The music reinforces the mixed joy and sadness of the words, for on the one hand it enacts the memory of the gold shining beautifully in the sunlight, on the other the sense of its loss. Eliot's lyric is similarly divided, celebratory of the Thames yet also sensing it to be a casualty of the waste land. The expansive song of the Rhine maidens is cut back to something terse. In Gbtterdiimmerung, following the passage above, the flowing motif runs on and on: 'Wei-a-la---la, wei-a la---la lei-a lei-a wal-la-la------la lei---a la la lei---la la la' (bars 97-I02, and continuing), but this reduces to 'Weialala leia | Wallala leialala' (11. 277-78), perhaps because Eliot remembered the libretto and had not seen the score. He performs it quickly and rhythmically in the recording, so shutting down on the lyrical fullness that it might otherwise seem to suggest. Like other allusions it is not, firstly, a piece of knowledge set down to build up the mythos of the poem (as one could believe from paraphrases) but rather a sensuously remembered fragment lodged in the mind through its phonic qualities and only then adapted to its context. The same could be said of'Et, 0 ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!' (1. 20-2) and 'Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie' (1. 429). In the recording Eliot savours these lines in the mouth. He cherishes the '0' sound in the line from Verlaine and gives it a slightly drawn-out emphasis. At line I99 he quickens the pace and brings out the vulgar rhythm and rhyme in the Australian ballad (another musical memory) and against this gives a full, stretched rendering of the French line:

O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water Et, 0 ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

(1. '99)

It may have been the contrast of two rhythms, one syncopated and the other composed, that suggested the formulation of the lines, for a contrast of the rhythms is a part of the meaning. Sarah Wintle has described lines 187 to 206 as 'a kind of Parsifal satire, an absurd amalgam of Stravinsky, music hall and Wagner celebra- ting illicit sex and rape rather than chastity, purity, redemption, and transcendent ritual'.1l Tiresias hears the sounds of cars bringing clients to a brothel and then recalls the song of Mrs Porter and her daughter, the brothel-keeper and the

10 See Eliot's own note to line 266. 11 Sarah Wintle, 'Wagner and "The Waste Land" - Again', English, 38 ( 989), 227-50 (p. 239).

548



STEFAN HAWLIN

prostitute. The sounds are transformed into 'ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la

coupole!' (the spiritual uplift experienced by Parsifal after his ascetic quest). The

pathos of the irony is enacted by the musical contrast between a jingle and a truly sonorous line.

A similar instance is lines 128 to 130, the memory and use of the hit ragtime song from the 1912 Ziegfeld's Follies.12 In the recording Eliot gives an added buoyancy to the line by making a small crescendo through the four separate 'O's, which leads him into a very clear articulation of the five-syllabled 'Shakes-pe-he-ri-an' ('he' takes central stress, and 'pe' a lesser stress):

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag-- It's so elegant So intelligent

(1. i28)

This creates a hysterical effect, as though the husband could no longer bear his wife's neurosis and had suddenly become lighthearted. Eliot teases out the syncopation and then changes the cut of his voice for the lady's speech. He delivers this fast in a direct, panicky manner:

'What shall I do now? What shall I do?' 'I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street 'With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?'

(1. I31)

This is characteristic of the way Eliot reaches beyond formal prosody. In 'The Music of Poetry' (1942) he suggests that the writing of poetry can be inspired by the hearing of a rhythm (from a piece of music or in the inner ear) and that the pure rhythm can

precede and suggest 'idea and image'. He makes other musical-poetic analogies: for instance, that as a melody can be counterpointed, so in poetry there can be a

'contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter'.13 These remarks were originally made in relation to Four Quartets but they could be applied here. We may disagree with them, but at least they show his aspiration to find verbal equivalents for musical effects. Perhaps (to stretch a point) they could also be applied to the musical

highpoint of the poem, the song of the hermit-thrush (11. 346-58). Eliot's note is

deceptive in that it masks a personal and acoustically vivid memory of bird-song under the cover of a work of reference. The note is frankly shy, as though he were

pretending to be objective, when really he is disguising the musical hearing that is one of the roots of his art:

357. This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec County. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds of 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' isjustly celebrated. (p. 148)

To justify these remarks on sensibility I want to reflect on other aspects of the

recording, beginning with a further consideration of lines I I to 138. Here, as elsewhere, Eliot distinguishes very clearly between matter inside and outside

quotation-marks. Through the first long paragraph of'A Game of Chess' he keeps

12 For the identification of the tune that Eliot was remembering, see Bruce R. McElderry, Jr, 'Eliot's "Shakespeherian Rag"', American Quarterly, 9 (1957), 185-86. 13 T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), pp. 26-38 (p. 38).

549




his voice fairly on a level with a slight element of intoning. For the lady's first speech his voice becomes slightly higher and quicker with an abrupt edge on it:

'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.

'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? 'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'

(1. III)

The reading is effective but only partly legislated by the text. Eliot leaves no pause between question and question, question and answer; in particular there is no pause in 'What thinking? What?' or 'thinking. Think', the last 'Think' being delivered quick and loud. The lines might better have been written without punctuation since, as voiced here, the punctuation indicates emphasis but not juncture. After this speech the husband's voice naturally has a quieter, slower effect:

I think we are in rats' alley Where the dead men lost their bones.

(1. 115)

As Eliot reads the whole passage it has a musical quality, not in the sense that there is any kind of sing-song, but rather that he so clearly distinguishes the two voices - the one abrupt, insistent, and nervous, the other slower, flat-toned, and wearier - that a sort of musical interplay is set up between them. After a pressured, virtually pauseless '"What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?"' (1. 119) he reads 'Nothing again nothing' (1. I20) in a limp, empty voice. It might almost be six, pathetic monosyllables: 'no-thing a-gain no-thing'. The lady's voice snaps back:

'Do 'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember 'Nothing?'

(1. 121)

Eliot races through the questions, the organization on the page seeming to count for little. This gives the reply, with its allusion to The Tempest, a lilting, sad effect. The rhythms and intensities of the two voices are not in accord, so that they do not seem to be speaking to each other: the lady's voice is pressured and insistent, while the husband's is an undertone. Out of this moment arises the hysterical lightheadedness of the 'Shakespeherian Rag', and then cutting across this the instant and highly- charged "'What shall I do now? What shall I do?"' (1. 31). The repetition suggests a mind terror-struck within itself, unable to move on. The interplay of voices has a resonant effect at lines 34-35. The lady's speech (11. 31-34) is again pauseless and hysterical but then at line I35, for the voice of the husband, Eliot flattens and empties the tone:

The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess, Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

(1. I35)

Some readings take this to be a bland list of a typical day. Eliot's voicing - and the reader may try the experiment - suggests that the husband is imagining the future, describing all that their lives will amount to. The lady's present life is one of fashion, jazz-balls, and long preparations at her overstocked dressing-table, a life in which neurosis blinds her to any real engagement with her husband. But this present is to



STEFAN HAWLIN

become in old age a sad routine, in which life becomes like an endless game of chess until the couple are released by death knocking on the door. Emotionally the feeling is similar to that in Pope's 'Epistle to a Lady', where the feckless debutantes turn into 'hags', and 'a Youth offrolicks' becomes 'an Old age of cards' (11. 231-48). The passage succeeds by the way in which different pressures and rhythms of voice play against each other.

Another passage worth attention is the second half of 'The Fire Sermon', from line 257 onwards. Eliot moves through different intensities of voice, different pitches, and speeds. He reads the episode of the clerk and the typist in a fairly neutral way, bringing out the weariness. He stresses slightly the rhymes in the last quatrain ('and'/'hand', 'alone'/'phone') as though to emphasize the sad finality of the proceeding. With "'This music crept by me upon the waters"' (1. 257) he makes a new start, but he reads the line in a flat, matter-of-fact vein. After this the fragment receives a heightened reading. Beginning with 'O City city' (1. 259), which is read in a prophetic, chant-like manner, the lines are delivered forte, with the climax in the magnificent 'Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold' (1.266). 'In- explicable' sounds a clear five syllables as Eliot reads it, though the reading is not distorted. At line 261 he pronounces 'mandoline' with a long 'i' (as in 'lean'), giving an added touch of richness to the vowels in the passage. The clatter and chatter of the fishmens' pub is in sympathy with the living splendour ofWren's church: here for a moment is real activity, real spirituality (not the Unreal City of the typist and the clerk).

The voice keeps relatively loud, pressured, and level for the first two stanzas of the Song of the Thames-daughters (11. 266-91). The reading is mezzo forte in a clear, chant-like, slightly wailing manner. The refrain 'Weialala leia' is read quickly and rhythmically with no lingering. When performed like this the stanzas have a sinister effect. A. D. Moody has interpreted them as representing a positive shift away from 'the objective consciousness of Ferdinand and Tiresias': From 'The river sweats' that consciousness is dissolved, and reconstituted in direct visual impressions related musically rather than syntactically. That is, sensation and idea become feeling without the interpreting consciousness intervening. The Thames at London, river, bank and city, both modern and Elizabethan, are recreated with the intense particularity of inward vision. The rhythm is that of a mind following the images without reflecting upon them; its structure is in the beat, and the emphases of rhyme. That the images be felt is all the meaning here.14

Eliot moves through these first two stanzas of the Thames-daughters' song with a certain impetus which is partly sustained by the quick rendering of'Weialala leia'. This movement creates a feeling of tension, one short line following another in unrelieved pulse: Elizabethan London repeats the present, and nothing changes. The syllabled magnificence of'Ionian white and gold' (Rhinegold?) has been lost, and there is only a terse, bitter-sweet atmosphere in its stead.

At 'Trams and dusty trees' (1. 292) there is another small change of attack in the voice. The momentum goes, and Eliot drops to a desolating emptiness of tone. His voice even goes slightly lower in pitch. The speeches of the three girls, the one deflowered, the other attached to a faithless lover, the third numb in the wake of an

14 A. D. Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 93.

55I



Eliot Reads 'The Waste Land'

affair, come at us like the voices of Dantesque shades. Only at one point does Eliot move his voice along. He delivers quite quickly the line '"My people humble people who expect"' (1. 304) so as to undercut it with a limp "'Nothing." [pause] la la [pause]' on the next lines. 'To Carthage then I came' is in a neutral voice (middle pressure). Then the last fragment is intense, fast and loud:

Burning burning burning burning O Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckest

(1.308)

The final, solitary 'burning' (1.311) is not quite so forte, but very abrupt and flat-toned. The passage as a whole has a musical shaping through its different rhythmic and vocal intensities. It moves from one climax to another. The first climax is 'Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold' and the second is 'Burning burning burning burning'. Between these the lowpoint is the pathetic, but not casual, 'la la'.

In the case of another instance of expressiveness, the 'hooded hordes' passage in 'What the Thunder Said', the question is whether the printed page conveys all the dynamics that Eliot intended:

What is that sound high in the air Murmur of maternal lamentation Who are those hooded hordes swarming Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth Ringed by the flat horizon only What is the city over the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Unreal

(1.366)

'What is that sound' receives a straightforward delivery, though the voice rises slightly through 'high in the air', leading into the intoning way in which Eliot reads the next lines. He gives a wonderful quavering emphasis to 'swarming', leaning on it so as to fall into the next line. These are minor points; what is important is what happens after line 372. 'Falling towers' is read less loudly than lines 367 to 372 and through the naming of cities there is a further quietening of the voice and slight lowering of pitch. 'Jerusalem Athens Alexandria' is read flat-toned with distinct pauses between each city. The same applies to 'Vienna London', which is followed by an inert 'Unreal', with a slight lengthening of the sound on the syllable 'real'. After the loudness of 'Murmur of maternal lamentation' through to 'violet air' the close of the passage represents a deliberate falling away and slowing of the voice. These variations of pitch, volume, and pressure convey the feeling of hopelessness. It is as though the prophetic voice that utters 'Murmur of maternal lamentation' had run out of energy, becoming exhausted by the sheer horror of Europe 'aufdem Wege zum Chaos' (p. 148). How much does the arrangement of the lines legislate the expressiveness? In my own view even a sensitive reader might not completely find out the dropping of intensity that so benefits these lines. Perhaps they might better have been arranged:

552



STEFAN HAWLIN

Falling Towers

Jerusalem

Athens

Alexandria

Vienna

London

Unreal

Because Eliot is playing the acoustic intensity of whole lines against each other this difficulty in expressive reading occurs elsewhere. 'Burning burning burning burning' (1. 308) is best read, as Eliot reads it, loud, fast, without pause, as a single sense-unit. 'London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down' (1. 426) is similarly best read faster than the surrounding lines, a complete run-on in its nursery-rhyme rhythm but without any sing-song intonation. (In the first edition it is spaced on its own, away from the surrounding lines.) 'Weialala leia I Wallala leialala' should also be quick and rhythmic, though this is hard to do. By contrast, 'Jerusalem Athens Alexandria | Vienna London' is best read slowly, a tally of cities leading to the terrible emptiness of the solitary 'Unreal'. Some will think that this makes too much of the delivery of individual and unimportant lines, particularly if they are concerned with the intellectual content. Others may want to say (and this is clearly true to a point) that the poem must necessarily bear different nuances in performance. I am taking more exception to the first position than to the second, and trying to show that the rhythmic and phonic structure of The Waste Land is at times quite fragile.

'Weialala leia I Wallala leialala' needs to be well delivered, correct in pronunciation and in terms of its rhythmic accent: 'Wei-a-la-la lei-a I Wal-la-la lei-a-la-la'. It is not a throw-away but an intimate part of the acoustic effect. Its quick, clear pulse is still a contrast, in the mind's ear, to the measured length of'Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold'. So also the undeliberated quickness and loud intensity of 'Burning burning burning burning' functions within the larger shape as a contrast to the halting

'On Margate Sands. I can connect Nothing with nothing.'

(1.300)

'Weialala leia' has a pulse, and these phrases do not. 'Burning burning burning burning' has a simple, drastic pulse (virtually eight equal stresses in Eliot's reading) and an overwhelming urgency after the Thames-daughters' speeches. 'Jerusalem Athens Alexandria' is as important as any of these, and though to some extent it will take different nuances in the way it is read, a quick reading is the least appropriate or evocative.

All this is partly a comment on the performance of the poem. The monoglot student has to get right or be taught the correct pronunciation of, for example, the lines from Nerval and Verlaine, in order to appreciate how their phonic richness adds to their paraphrasable meaning (gleaned from a critical text). Likewise, even

553




the individual lines discussed here must not be swallowed or brushed over. The Waste Landis a collage of original and derived fragments, and each has to be heard properly for the total effect to take place. The emphasis on acoustic effect, drawing the hearer's attention to the interplay of sound, is obvious in the song of the hermit- thrush (1. 357), in the cock's crow in the Perilous Chapel (1. 392), and in the peals of thunder (11.400, 4I0, 417), but these are only instances where an underlying tendency comes to the surface. The mimesis is also present in dialogue, direct speech, effects such as the 'Shakespeherian Rag', and the three beats of'HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME' (1. I4I), and elsewhere. It makes the poem difficult to voice well, requiring a considerable extra-prosodic sensitivity of the reader, and sometimes, as in the case of'co co rico', a mind curious enough to get the delivery right. Someone still learning to read poetry can give quite good performances of, say, Wordsworth's 'Nutting' or Tennyson's 'Ulysses', but The Waste Land demands an added measure of technique and expressiveness.

The hermit-thrush passage can appropriately serve to close this discussion. Through the opening of'What the Thunder Said' Eliot reads in his intoned manner with an intense pressure of voice. After line 345 there is a pause of moderate length, and then the hermit-thrush passage begins in a voice lower and quieter: 'If there were water' (1. 346). From this lowpoint there is a small crescendo through lines 347 to 349 and then again at lines 352 to 355. 'Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees' (1. 356) is a loud and, in terms of pitch, rising line. After it, for the actual song of the thrush, Eliot's voice becomes lower in pitch, quieter, and gentler in pressure. The effect is of a sudden and terrible freshness. The passage leads up to the song short lines going to long lines, gaining in momentum and pressure of voice - and then enacts a release of tension in the limpid gentleness of'Drip drop drip drop dr6p drop dr6p' (1. 357). The last three 'drops' are just fractionally lower in terms of pitch and volume. In the wake of them 'But there is no water', spoken in a monotone, has the effect of a falling back to reality. Sensitive readers naturally find out something of these effects from the repetitions and rhythms of the lines, but perhaps few of them would so boldly shape the passage.

In listening to the I946 recording we do not have to be slaves to Eliot's performance; on the other hand it would be equally short-sighted to ignore its significance. How a poet performs his own work tells us something about the way in which it was composed, something about the poet's ear, and about how he sounds language in his own voice. Not all this insight is capable of being carried over into formal criticism, but at least we can try to take it into account and so close the gap between paraphrase and our finest reactions to the heard poem. In 'The Music of Poetry' Eliot says: 'I shall always remember the impression of W. B. Yeats reading poetry aloud. To hear him read his own works was to be made to recognize how much the Irish way of speech is needed to bring out the beauties of Irish poetry.'15 Attention to the voicing of poems would shift some of the biases within contempo- rary theory. It would lead back through an awareness of the kinds of security and insecurity that exist between printed texts and voicings, to an awareness of some of the deeper implications involved in a more oral-aural centred appreciation of poems.

ST CATHERINE'S COLLEGE, OXFORD STEFAN HAWLIN

15 On Poetry and Poets, pp. 31-32.



eliot reads 'the waste land': text and...

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