Three Sonnets

To Geoffrey Cust Faber Esqre., as a reply to a ballad entitled ‘Nobody knows

how I feel about you.’

GEOFFREY! who once did walk the earth like Jove,1

Who on his brow and shoulders once did drape

The Victor’s laurels and the prophet’s Cape,2

Ruling the world below, the sky above;

With monsters of the sea and jungle strove,

Triumphant, as a God in human shape

Sustained by juice of juniper and grape,

Respected by the Trade in Bath and Hove,

Now takes to crooning like a Harlem coon,3

A blackface Ruth amid the alien corn4

Upon the cob; and in degenerate verse

Which still declines from bad to worse and worse

Like Lucifer he falls: from dewy morn

To noon:5 still falling through the afternoon.

CUST! whose loud martial oaths did once proclaim

Thee the most virile of the Brownlow clan,

Captain or Colonel6—but more than man,7

Gallant protector of th’oppressèd dame,8

A spotless knight9 without reproach or blame10

In Cheapside, Lothbury, or Barbican,

How can you do it? Answer now: how can

You be so lost to dignity and shame

As caper to the rhythm known as “swing,”11

And dance to the lubricious saxophone,12

And sway your hips to the barbaric drum?

Can such things be?13 O death where is thy sting,14

When drunken Muses on the banjo strum,

And pipe to negro ditties of no tone?15

FABER! of thy great exploits16 ’twas not least,

That thou ofttimes didst twist the mighty tail

(Alone thou didst it)17 of the basking whale

And tamed with words the elephantine beast,

And (what were minor trophies for thy feast)

Slew the wild albatross, the penguin pale,18

And the white liddell hart19 in coat of mail,

And the sly cat of Bina Gardens fleec’d;20

Great hunter! whose past glories we dissect,

To what decay’d estate21 art thou now come,

Ensiren’d by the Cotton Club22 bassoon,

Enchanted by the Broadway dialect,

And, masticating Wrigley’s pepsin gum,23

Expectoratest in the loud spittoon.

[T. S. Eliot]

Notes
  1. 1.

    Cf. ‘Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour’ (William Wordsworth, ‘London, 1802’).

  2. 2.

    JDH note: ‘Mr. Victor Gollancz & Mr. Jonathan Cape, two famous publishers of London.’

  3. 3.

    The term ‘coon’, now offensive, dates from as far back as the blackface minstrel shows of the 1840s; ‘coon’ denoted a caricature of an African American. Subsequently, ‘coon songs’ were written by many composers, both white and black, including Ernest Hogan, author of ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me’, and even Scott Joplin wrote a coon song entitled ‘I Am Thinking of My Pickaninny Days’.

  4. 4.

    John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ll. 66–7:

    Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

    She stood in tears amid the alien corn

  5. 5.

    John Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk I, ll. 742–5:

    … from morn

    To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,

    A summers day; and with the setting Sun

    Dropped from the zenith like a falling star

    William Morris, ‘A Garden by the Sea’:

    I know a little garden-close,

    Set thick with lily and red rose,

    Where I would wander if I might

    From dewy morn to dewy night,

    And have one with me wandering.

  6. 6.

    Milton, Sonnet 8 (1645):

    Captain or colonel, or knight in arms,

    Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize,

    If ever deed of honour did thee please,

    Guard them, and him within protect from harms

    Geoffrey Cust Faber was descended from the Brownlow and Cust families. Richard Cust (1622–1700), who was created a baronet in 1677, was succeeded by his grandson Richard Cust, who married Anne Brownlow, daughter of Sir William Brownlow, 4th baronet: she was the sister and sole heir of John Brownlow, of the family seat of Belton House, near Grantham in Lincolnshire. In more recent years, Peregrine Cust succeeded in 1927 as 6th Baron Brownlow, and died in 1978.

    Geoffrey Faber served throughout World War I in the 8th Battalion of the London Regiment (Post Office Rifles), in France and Belgium; he was promoted captain in 1916. Another ancestor, Peregrine Cust, MP (1791–1873), son of Brownlow Cust, 1st Baron Brownlow, was a lieutenant-colonel.

  7. 7.

    Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, I, vii, ll. 49–51:

    When you durst do it, then you were a man;

    And, to be more than what you were, you would

    Be so much more the man.

    (cited in Poems II, 227)

  8. 8.

    See Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Marriage of Geraint, Geraint and Enid, with introd. by G. C. Macaulay (1892), for the story of the jealous, unbearably unkind Geraint and the perfectly faithful Enid – with which TSE contrasts the marriage of Geoffrey and Enid Faber.

  9. 9.

    Wolfram von Eschenbach, Lohengrin – trans. Jessie Weston (1894) – Bk VI, ll. 321–4:

    The fame of thy Table Round

    It suffered for the friendship ye with Parzival did swear,

    Tho’ I wot well the outward token of a spotless knight he bear.

  10. 10.

    The heroic, kindly, magnanimous knight Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard (c. 1476–1524): hailed as ‘the knight without fear and beyond reproach’ (cited in Poems II, 227).

  11. 11.

    Swing music, a form of jazz, developed in the USA through the 1920s and 1930s, with big bands playing rhythmical arrangements and contrapuntal improvisations. It inspired vigorous dances – most notably, the Lindy Hop – and was performed by musicians including Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Count Basie and Jimmy Dorsey.

  12. 12.

    Shakespeare, Richard III, I. i, ll. 12–13: ‘He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber,/To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.’

  13. 13.

    Title of a collection of short stories by Ambrose Bierce (1893). Shakespeare, Macbeth, III: iv, ll. 109–10: ‘Can such things be,/ And overcome us like a summer’s cloud’

  14. 14.

    I Corinthians 15: 55: ‘O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’

  15. 15.

    ‘Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone’ – Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, l. 14.

  16. 16.

    ‘great exploits’: Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk XI, l. 790 and Samson Agonistes, l. 32; Samuel Butler, Hudibras III, l. 252.

  17. 17.

    Shakespeare, Coriolanus, V. vi:

    ‘Boy’? False hound!

    If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there

    That like an eagle in a dovecote, I

    Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles,

    Alone I did it. ‘Boy’!

  18. 18.

    JDH note: ‘The “Albatross” & “Penguin” cheapjack books.’

    Founded in 1932 by John Holroyd-Reece, Max Christian Wegner and Kurt Enoch, the German ‘Albatross Books’, based in Hamburg, followed the lead of Tauchnitz in producing mass-market paperbacks. The format was designed by the legendary art director Giovanni Mardersteig, with volumes colour-coded by genre. Allen Lane, founder of the London-based Penguin Books, pursued the same strategy. See Alistair McCleery, ‘Tauchnitz and Albatross: A “Community of Interests” in English-Language Paperback Publishing, 1934–51’, The Library 7: 3 (1 Sept. 2006), 297–316; Michele K. Troy, ‘Behind the Scenes at the Albatross Press: A Modern Press for Modern Times’, in The Culture of the Publisher’s Series, vol. I: Authors, Publishers and Taste, ed. John Spiers (2011); and Lise Jaillant, Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers’ Series and the Avant-Garde (Edinburgh: 2017).

  19. 19.

    JDH note: ‘Capt. Liddell Hart, a military historian.’

    Capt. B. H. Liddell Hart (1895–1970) was a British soldier, historian and influential military strategist. Faber & Faber published his The Defence of Britain (1939).

  20. 20.

    JDH note: ‘Mr. H. then residing in Bina Gardens, S.W.5.’

  21. 21.

    I Maccabees 3: 43: ‘They said one to another, Let us restore the decayed estate of our people, and let us fight for our people and the sanctuary’ (cited in Poems II, 228).

  22. 22.

    JDH note: ‘A famed negro club in New York City.’

    The Cotton Club, at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue, New York, 1923–40, was a whites-only establishment, but many black artists – including Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Fats Waller – were welcome to perform there.

  23. 23.

    Wrigley’s Spearmint Pepsin chewing gum – pepsin aided digestion – was marketed from 1892.