An Answer to the Foregoing Poem1

Arboreal though the natural habitat

Of Possums may have been in far-off times,

And apt though Possums are to play with rhymes

Recalling feats a human acrobat

Might envy, what a Possum is best at

Is not the swinging creepers Tarzan climbs2

Nor yet the chimney-pot that poor old Grimes3

Got stuck in—No Sir! certainly not that.

Ancestral memory reaches farther back,

When water was the stuff he wallowed in,

Reminding Possum when and how to tack,

To jibe the boom and wag the tiller-fin.4

That is what Possum’s godson5 hopes to see,

In Regent’s Park, next Sunday, before tea.

[Geoffrey Faber]

Notes
  1. 1.

    King’s HB/H/2a: GCF’s sonnet – typescript copy sent to JDH by TSE.

    ‘Addressed to the Rev. Uncle Possum by his unworthy coadjutor, Father Faber, who, alas, will be unable to be present. September the 15th. 1937.’

    GCF’s great-uncle was the Catholic hymn-writer and theologian Father Frederick William Faber, CO (1814–63), founder of the Brompton Oratory in Knightsbridge, London.

  2. 2.

    Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) – author of the twenty-five adventure novels in the Tarzan series (beginning with Tarzan of the Apes [1912]) – did not depict Tarzan as swinging from ‘creepers’ (vines or lianas). Only in the movie Tarzan the Mighty (1928) did the stuntman-gymnast Frank Merrill start to swing from artificial vines.

  3. 3.

    Thomas Grimes – the master chimney sweep in The Water Babies (1863), by Charles Kingsley – tyrannizes the young orphan Tom, who is obliged to remain in ignorance and never to wash the soot from his body. But at the culmination of Tom’s dizzying whirligig of travels and experiences – beginning with his transmogrification into a water baby – he finds Mr Grimes trapped in a chimney, supervised by policemen’s truncheons which have no legs or arms. Grimes is, says one truncheon, ‘the most unremorseful, hard-hearted foulmouthed fellow I have in charge’. Tom’s efforts to release his nasty old master are unavailing. ‘So you go along, you kind little chap … I’m beat now, and beat I must be.’ Only when the begrimed Grimes weeps for his dead mother is he freed from the chimney; even so, he is bound henceforth to sweep out the crater of Etna, and is marched off ‘looking as meek as a drowned worm’.

  4. 4.

    To jibe the boom is to swing the sail from one side of the craft to the other, to ensure a decisive change of direction from port to starboard or vice-versa. The tiller controls the rudder: pushing left turns the vessel to the right, and vice-versa. Wagging the tiller is something of a beginner’s way of getting the feel of the course of the boat.

    W. G. Tinckom-Fernandez, ‘T. S. Eliot, ’10, an Advocate Friendship’, Harvard Advocate 125: 3 (Dec. 1938), 5–10, 47–8; repr. in The Harvard Advocate Anthology, ed. Donald Hall (1950), 317–27. ‘I used to descend on him at his summer home in East Gloucester … He used to take me sailing in his catboat, and he could handle a sheet with the best in Gloucester.’ For Alison Tandy (2 Jan. 1939), TSE recalled his ‘young days as a sailor’: ‘I sailed in sloops and schooners not in ketches.’

  5. 5.

    JDH note: ‘Master Richard Tom Faber a promising youth.’

    Thomas Erle Faber (1927–2004), physicist and publisher – TSE’s first godchild – was to take a double first in physics at Trinity College, Cambridge; thereafter he became a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 1953–2004; Lecturer in Physics, 1959–93 – specializing in superconductivity, liquid metals and liquid crystals; he wrote Introduction to the Theory of Liquid Metals (1972) and Fluid Dynamics for Physicists (1995). From 1969 he was a Director of Faber & Faber Ltd, and he served as Chairman of Geoffrey Faber Holdings Ltd, 1977–2004. TSE was present at his christening, which took place on 27 July 1927. GCF noted in his diary: ‘Eliot came up afterwards, & Thomas Erle was duly baptized by the Vicar Carnegie, in the Parish Church, present Godfather T. S. Eliot & godmother Frances Duke, the other godfather Eric Beckett being in Geneva.’