Z-siteA Companion to the Works of Louis Zukofsky

Commentary

LZ offers some retrospective remarks on his intentions in Bottom in Prep+ 167 and 242-243.

Bernstein, Charles. “Words and Pictures.” Sagetrieb 2.1 (1983): 9-34. Rpt. Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Sun & Moon, 1986): 114-161.

Comens, Bruce. Apocalypse and After: Modern Strategy and Postmodern Tactics in Pound, Williams, and Zukofsky (1995): 158-174.

Cordes, Jocelyn. “Love’s Labor: Reading Zukofsky’s Bottom: on Shakespeare.” Sagetrieb 14.3 ( 1995): 77-88.

Corman, Cid. “At: Bottom.” Word for Word: Essays on the Arts of Language, vol. 1 (Black Sparrow Press, 1977): 128-169.

Hatlen, Burton. “Zukofsky, Wittgenstein, and the Poetics of Absence.” Sagetrieb 1.1 (1982): 74-82.

Hunt, Erica. “Beginning at ‘Bottom.’” Poetics Journal 3 (1983): 63-66.

Kalck, Xavier. Pluralism, Poetry, and Literacy: A Test of Reading and Interpretive Techniques. Routledge, 2021. 101-124.

Malanga, Gerald. “Some Thoughts on Bottom and After I’s.” Poetry 107.1 (1965): 60-64.

Melnick, David. “The ‘Ought’ Of Seeing: Zukofsky’s Bottom.” MAPS 5 (1973): 55-65. Online.

Perelman, Bob. “Foreword” to Bottom: on Shakespeare. Wesleyan University Press, 2002. vii-xiii.

Rifkin, Libbie. Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avant-Garde. University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. 92-96.

Salvato, Nick. Uncloseted Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance. Yale University Press, 2010. 64-73.

Scroggins, Mark. Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge. University of Alabama Press, 1998. 68-94.

___. The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky. Shoeman Hoard, 2007. 300-311.

___. “Zukofsky’s Bottom: on Shakespeare: Objectivist Poetics and Critical Prosody.” West Coast Line 27.3 (1993): 17-36.

Twitchell-Waas, Jeffrey. “Keep Your Eyes on the Page: Zukofsky’s Bottom: on Shakespeare.” Paideuma 39 (2012): 209-247.

 

Notes to Bottom

Publishing History

According to Scroggins, the origins of Bottom go back to courses LZ taught during the summer of 1947 at Colgate University on Renaissance Literature and Shakespeare. At that time he began what he originally conceived of as an essay on Shakespeare, but in the end he worked more or less continually on the project until 1960. Retrospectively, LZ suggested that the genesis of the work goes back even further, spanning 19 or 20 year in all, which may refer to initial conception and/or include Celia’s part in the project which preceded his (Prep+ 167, 230).

The chronology of composition indicated by the dates on manuscripts is as follows (from Booth 190-191):

Preface – Summer 1947 (Colgate Univ.) / Sept. 8/47

Part One – 15 Feb. 48

Part Two, Section 1 – 1 Jan. 54

Complete work finished 8 May 1960 (LZ notes that the “Pericles” section was written last)

However, at the page proofs stage, dated 1 April 1963, LZ added to the selection of quotations from his own poetry that concludes “Continents” some excerpts from the Catullus translations he worked on with CZ during the period 1961-1963; the inserted Catullus quotations are those that follow “My nose feels better in the air” on page 265-266 of Bottom (Booth 191-192).

CZ’s musical setting of Pericles began as a prior and separate project as early as 1943 (see WCW/LZ 339; LZ mentions it in “A”-12.197.34 & 12.257.23), and by 1949 she had completed a full setting for piano and voice for the play, which she subsequently rescored for a sparse ensemble of strings, woodwinds and brass in 1961, once LZ decided it should appear as a companion work with his (Scroggins Bio 224, 304, 310-311).

The Preface and Part One of Bottom were published in New Directions 14 in 1953, Part Two in four installments in Black Mountain Review and Origin (1956-1961) and two sections of Part Three in Poetry (1960). Various short selections or snippets appeared in other small publications, sometimes selected by editors (see below for further details). The complete text was published after various delays by Ark Press for the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in February 1964, although dated 1963, as a deluxe boxed edition in two volumes (on the confusion of publication dating, see Scroggins Bio 311).

The two reprints of Bottom exactly reproduce Volume 1 of the original Ark Press edition from the table of contents through the index, except that the 1987 University of California Press edition notes that it “incorporates corrections that Louis Zukofsky noted in his own handwriting on the flyleaf and first pages of his personal copy of this book [the Ark Press edition]” (6). However, for some reason the 2002 Wesleyan University Press edition of both volumes reproduces the Ark Press edition without these corrections (for a list of the corrections go here). The front apparatus of all three editions are somewhat different from each other, and in the case of the Wesleyan UP edition involves some repagination. Strangely a significant note of thanks on the copyright page of the Ark Press edition disappeared from both reprints:

The author takes this occasion to thank

Longview Foundation for its award to “Ember Eyes”

which appeared in Poetry, December 1960,

and

Mark Van Doren for his gift of

a facsimile volume of the original First Quartos of Shakespeare’s Poems and Pericles,

inscribed 10/7/47.

This refers to a 1905 edition by Sidney Lee, who is mentioned several times, and the facsimile volume figures prominently in some of LZ’s discussions of textual issues in Bottom. Van Doren (1894-1972) was one of LZ’s professors at Columbia and closely involved with student literary publications; he also published Shakespeare (1939), a standard work on the subject.

1953 Preface and Part I. New Directions 14: 288-307.

1955 “Shakespeare’s Theme.” The Pound Newsletter 8 (Oct.): 18 [from “Shakespeare’s theme” to “Nine, XVII, XVIII, XXX” (84)].

1956 from Bottom: on Shakespeare Part Two. Black Mountain Review 6 (Spring): 119-155 [Section 1 (“Music’s master”) and Section 2 to “…dead love birds, ‘Love hath reason’” (33-49); plus CZ’s “Gower Chorus” from Act 1 of Pericles, volume 2 of Bottom (10-12)].

1957 Bottom: on Shakespeare Part Two. Black Mountain Review 7 (Autumn): 95-133 [from “The object is simple (Tractatus)” to “…wonder of looking” (49-67)].

1960 “All eyes!” (from Bottom: on Shakespeare). Folio 25.2 (Spring): 7-13 [Part Three, “Continents”: from “From the head of a later sculptor” to “have likewise to spend much energy. ca. 1914” (178-181); from “That art is ‘good’ which does not presume” to “…with small colored stones,” from “…against this, excesses of wish insist” to “nurse the self-contained simple,” from “All art after Shakespeare may be read” to “eyes reassures the reasonable” (182-183); from “The risks his text takes” to “except it shows and moves less” (183-185)].
From Bottom: on Shakespeare. Poetry 97.3 (Dec.): 141-152 [Part Three: “Ember eves” and “Z”].

1961 from Bottom: on Shakespeare. Origin 1, second series (April): 48-62 [Part Two: from “Magnanimity is by nature difficult” to “a flower that might come to think and like it” (67-77)].
from Bottom: on Shakespeare. Origin 2, second series (July): 34-62 [Part Two: from “As for the anticipatory Freudian flight of divided soul” to “…trusting to see an alphabet of subjects” (77-94)].
“Old Testament’s Odyssey” (from Bottom: on Shakespeare). Damascus Road 1: 23-24 [from Part Three (428-429)].

1964 “Bottom: on Shakespeare and A Mosaic.” Agenda 3.6 (Dec.): 29-35 [for this special LZ issue of Agenda, the editor, Charles Tomlinson, collaged brief quotations from Bottom with those from other writers such as Robert Duncan and Marshall McLuhan].

1965 “On Basil Bunting: from Bottom: On Shakespeare page 163.” King Ida’s Watch Chain: A Moving Anthology: Link One: Basil Bunting issue [from “‘I shall end up by hating the Western World’” to “…the quantity of rhymeless ‘classic’ feet” (163-164)].

1968 from Bottom: on Shakespeare. Origin 8, third series (Jan.): 18 [brief snippets for an issue on Josef Albers, probably selected by Corman rather than LZ: “St. Thomas: ‘No power … color’” (133); “(speaking of Crashaw … in its place …” (175); “Art is to see” (185); “Seeing cannot be … moves less” (185); “Plato (Symposium): ‘The mind … eye fails’” (74)].
“Julia’s Wild.” Artes Hispanicas 1.3 & 4 (Winter-Spring): 219-220 [a large issue on concrete poetry from around the world edited by Augusto de Campos, includes LZ’s poem from “Julia’s Wild” in Part Three with de Campos’ facing translation into Portuguese].

1970 from Bottom: on Shakespeare. Workshop No. Nine (April): 9-10 [Part Three, “Iliad”: from “A concise Iliad of history” to “so poetry was a guide for prose” (391-392); “Qu’ai-je” and “Rites” (436); “U (V),” “Videsne” and “Wonder” (440-441)].
from Bottom: on Shakespeare. Tree 1 (Winter): 25 [Part Three, “Continents”: from “On vicissitude Shakespeare’s text offers” to “invests their minutes and shores” (155)].

1975 “A Translator’s Florilegium: from Bottom: on Shakespeare.” Modern Language Notes 90.6 (Dec.): 923-924 [introduced by Hugh Kenner, so quite possibly selected by him as well; from Part Three, “Iliad”: from “Pericles, an Odyssean song” to “…had been in The Iliad” (378) and from “XIX, 408: Achilles’ horse Xanthus” to “…and meant to kill” (388)].

Notes to Bottom

Although LZ gives references for the numerous quotations in Bottom, it should not be assumed that he read the original works, as he was perfectly willing to pick up quotations wherever he ran across them. To give a couple of examples, all the various quotations from Jewish mysticism or the Kabbalah come from a single source, Ernst Müller’s History of Jewish Mysticism, or the interplay of Medieval philosophers and Persian poets (117-136) is almost entirely culled from two anthologies: The Age of Belief, ed. Anne Fremantle and Persian Poems, ed. A.J. Arberry.

Dedication: Lew David Feldman (1906-1976) was an important, if eccentric, dealer in rare books and manuscripts, who was a primary buyer for the Research Humanities Center at the University of Texas at Austin during the period when it was established by Harry Ransom in 1957 until the latter’s death in 1976. Feldman was largely responsible for arranging a complicated deal for the purchase of the LZ papers for the HRC, which included the publication of Bottom and his insistence that the book be dedicated to him (Scroggins Bio 309-311).

Preface

9 ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste…: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, qtd. 15, 35.

9 ‘. . . and yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days…: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, qtd. 23, 371 and “A”-12.133.14-19. LZ’s reference should be to scene i rather than ii.

9 ‘Things base and vile, holding no quantity, / Love can transpose…: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, qtd. 16, 18, 19, 20, “A”-12.132.6-8 and TP 75.

10 ‘I have no way, and therefore want no eyes; / I stumbled when I saw’: from King Lear, qtd. 91, 312 and TP 71.

Part One – “O, that record could with a backward look,”

13 Title: from Shakespeare, Sonnet 59, which is quoted complete at 14 and discussed at 17; also partially qtd. 177.

13 from “itself never turning”: from the concluding line of the 16th century ballad, “As ye came from the holy land / Of Walsinghame,” often attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, although LZ does not; entire poem included in TP 68-69, qtd. CF 147 (see also “A”-12.131.8):
But true love is a durable fire,
In the mind ever burning,
Never sick, never dead, never cold,
From itself never turning.

15 The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen…: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, qtd. 9 and 35.

15 ‘damnable iteration’: from King Henry IV, Part I I.ii; qtd. 310 and “A”-8.57.22.

15 ‘. . . love is of such a nature…: Spinoza’s so-called Short Treatise was only discovered and first published in the mid-19th century and is generally believed to have been his first, pre-geometric effort to systematize his thought. There were several English translations of this work in the first decade of the 20th century; LZ quotes from that of Lydia Gillingham Robinson, Spinoza’s Short Treatise on God, Man and Human Welfare (Open Court, 1909), which he owned. This is the only Spinoza quotation or reference in Bottom (or elsewhere in LZ’s work prior to the 1960s) that is not taken from LZ’s standard text, the Everyman’s Library edition of the Ethics and Treatise on the Correction of the Understanding (tractatus de intellectus emendatione) translated by Andrew Boyd. The First Folio came out in 1623 and 35 years later is roughly when Spinoza (1632-1677) is believed to have been working on the Short Treatise.

16 ‘Things base and vile holding no quality…: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, qtd. 9, 19, 20 and “A”-12.132.6-8.

16 ‘Desire which arises from reason can have no excess’: from Spinoza, see “Prop. LXI” (CSP 42).

16 ‘For no one is anxious or cares about anything that he does not love…: from Spinoza, see “A”-12.174.21.

18 ‘When icicles hang by the wall’: from the concluding song of Love’s Labour’s Lost, qtd. 282, 406, 407 and referred to at Prep+ 5.

18 ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind’: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, see quotation at 9.

19 ‘. . . the lady shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt for ’t’: from Hamlet, qtd. 145, 327, 333, “A”-12.163.4-5 and Prep+ 224.

19 ‘Things base and vile holding no quantity…: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, qtd. 9, 16, 20 and “A”-12.132.6-8.

20 ‘Nor hath Love’s mind of any judgment taste’: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, qtd. 9 and 16.

20 Homer said of his minstrel: ‘the Muse’s darling, but she had given him evil mixed with good…: from Odyssey Bk. VIII as translated by W.H.D. Rouse.

20 Cocteau’s film ‘Beauty and the Beast’…: 1945 film directed by Jean Cocteau, mentioned “A”-12.186.30-187.1, where the “American child” is explicitly identified as PZ.

21 For we do not admire the architect who planned a chapel so much as the architect who planned some great temple: from Spinoza, qtd. Prep+ 54.

22 For every man has business and desire, / Such as it is: from Hamlet, qtd. 326.

22 Stephen Dedalus ‘works in all he knows,’ grasps the purgatorial setting of Hamlet…: the reference here is to Stephen’s discourse on Hamlet in the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter of James Joyce, Ulysses, from which the following quotations are taken.

23 Bottom has said, ‘reason and love keep little company together now-a-days’: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, qtd. 9, 371 and “A”-12.133.14-16.

25 The Phoenix and the Turtle: qtd. “A”-12.170.31-171.3 and TP 22; LZ also alludes to this poem in “A Keystone Comedy” (CF 186).

26 nest from which the lapwing cries away: alludes to The Comedy of Errors IV.2: “Adriana: Ah, but I think him better than I say, / And yet would herein others’ eyes were worse. / Far from her nest the lapwing cries away: / My heart prays for him, though my tongue do curse.”

26 For the eyes of the mind by which it sees things and observes them are proofs’: from Spinoza, qtd. 94, 297, 325 and “A”-12.130.19, 177.19; see also Bottom 325.

27 Spinoza had occasion to refer to Ovid: ‘For a man who is submissive to his emotions…: from Spinoza, Ethics IV, Preface; Part IV is entitled: “On Human Servitude, or the Strength of the Emotions.” In this case LZ is quoting from his copy of Spinoza translated by Andrew Boyle. The importance of Ovid to both Shakespeare and Spinoza is mentioned at “A”-12.246.16-17.

29 ‘The more an image is associated with many other things, the more often it flourishes…: from Spinoza, qtd. 89; see “A”-11.124.21-22 and “A”-12.174.22-24.

29 ‘For the idea of quantity, if the understanding perceives it by means of a cause…: from Spinoza, qtd. “A”-12.174.25-175.3.

Part Two – Music’s master: notes for Her music to Pericles and for a graph of culture

Title “Music’s master” is from Shakespeare, Pericles, where this designates Pericles himself (see qtd. passage at 36), while “Her” most obviously refers to CZ and her music to Pericles that was published as volume 2 of Bottom. However, the opening paragraphs of this section play off of the above title in a manner that greatly complicates such questions of specific reference.

33 I had a wound here that was like a T, / But now ’tis made an H: from Antony and Cleopatra, qtd. 339 and 442.

33 affined […] bound by obligation: the word is used in this sense in Othello I.i.33; spoken by Iago: “Now sir be judge yourself / Whether I in any just term am affined / To love the Moor.”

33 scar…: see definition in CD: <L. eschara, a scar, esp. from a burn, < Gr. ἐσχάρα, a scab, scar, scar caused by burning, a hearth, means of producing fire, etc.

34 ‘BOTTOM. Some man or other must present Wall…: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, qtd. “A”-12.132.17.

35 ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen’: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, qtd. 9 and 15.

35 unwithering Cleopatra struggling to sleep…: LZ echoes and conflates two famous lines from Antony and Cleopatra II.ii: “Enobarbus [speaking of Cleopatra]: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety”; and I.v: “Cleopatra [asks for mandragora]: That I might sleep out this great gap of time / My Antony is away” (qtd. 317).

35 modern Kiss Me Kates: Kiss Me Kate was a hugely successful musical by Cole Porter that ran from 1948-1951 and revolved around a production of a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew. A film version came out in 1953.

36 ‘I see it in / My motion, have it not in my tongue’: from Antony and Cleopatra, qtd. 181.

36 musique concrète: an early form of electronic music pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer beginning in the late 1940s.

36 The music the skillful singer does not filch…: LZ is reworking lines spoken by Falstaff: “His thefts were too open. His filching was like an unskillful singer: he kept not time.”

37 cure addled brains in the skull (T.,V,ii,128): referring to lines spoken by Prospero when he charms all the plotting characters: “A solemn air, and the best comforter / To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains, / Now useless, boiled within thy skull”; also referred to at 57.

38 ‘No tongue! All eyes! Be silent’: from The Tempest, qtd. entire or in part at 39, 77, 81, 85, 86, 91, 99, 155, 232, 341, 362; also Prep+ 170.

38 Malone: Edmond Malone (1741-1812), Irish scholar who produced what is generally considered the best 18th century edition of Shakespeare in 1790; a pioneer in establishing authentic texts and the chronology of Shakespeare’s works.

39 a pale cast of thought: alluding to Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy, Hamlet III.i (qtd. 363; echoed 89, 299):
Thus Conscience does make cowards of us all,
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

39 The rest is silence: Hamlet’s final words before dying, from Hamlet V.2. This remark is echoed in a quotation from Henry James, A Small Boy and Others at 260.

39 negative resistance of the electronic physicist…: negative resistance or negative differential resistance is a property of electrical circuit elements composed of certain materials in which, over certain voltage ranges, current is a decreasing function of voltage. This range of voltages is known as a negative resistance region. LZ worked on technical manuals for an electronics firm in the early 1940s.

39 ‘All men by nature desire to know…: from Aristotle, qtd. “A”-12.169.10-17. All quotations from Aristotle in Part Two of Bottom, as well as “A”-12 can be found in the selection edited by Richard McKeon, Introduction to Aristotle (1947), not to be confused with the more compendious selection by the same editor, The Basic Works of Aristotle (1941). The translations are those of the Oxford edition under the general editorship of W.D. Ross, the standard English version throughout most of the last century.

40 To Aristotle the soul meant life: cf. De Anima 412a: “But since it is also a body of such and such a kind, viz. having life, the body cannot be soul; the body is the subject or matter, not what is attributed to it. Hence the soul must be a substance in the sense of the form of a natural body having life potentially within it. But substance is actuality, and thus soul is the actuality of a body as above characterized. Now the word actuality has two senses corresponding respectively to the possession of knowledge and the actual exercise of knowledge. It is obvious that the soul is actuality in the first sense, viz. that of knowledge as possessed, for both sleeping and waking presuppose the existence of soul, and of these waking corresponds to actual knowing, sleeping to knowledge possessed but not employed, and, in the history of the individual, knowledge comes before its employment or exercise. That is why the soul is the first grade of actuality of a natural body having life potentially in it.” See also 60, 71, 77.

40 the Philosopher with eyes fixed on biological specimens on Lesbos…: prior to establishing a school in Athens as a rival to Plato’s, Aristotle spent several years on the island of Lesbos where with Theophrastus he conducted intense observations of flora and fauna, which are presumed to be the basis of his biological writings. Also mentioned 334.

40 ‘A man whose white bones lie on the ground and rot in the rain…: from Homer, Odyssey I.161-163; see 354 where LZ references this passage in comparison with Shakespeare’s “Full fathom five” lyric from The Tempest. As is often the case with quotations from Homer, LZ appears to be making his own adaptation, probably here from the version of W.H.D. Rouse (Mentor Classics): “a man whose white bones are lying on the ground and rotting in the rain, no doubt, or rolling about in the salt sea.” For the Loeb Classical Library version by A.T. Murray, which LZ seems to have acquired sometime in the mid-1950s, see note at 354.

45 Ludwig Wittgenstein […] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. (1918): LZ used the translation by C.K. Odgen with the assistance of F.P. Ramsey (1922), which included the original German text en face.

46 lines in the second quarto of Hamlet said […] omitted from the Folio: most modern texts of Hamlet correlate the Second Quarto (1604) version with the Folio (1623) edited by Heminge and Condell (see next) since each includes significant passages missing from the other.

46 Heminge and Condell: John Heminge and Henry Condell were actors with Shakespeare in the King’s Men, and apparently were primarily responsible for collecting his works for the First Folio (1623), to which they also contributed a dedication and a preface—the latter is quoted almost entire by LZ at 101-102.

46 If it be now, / ’tis not to come…: from Hamlet, qtd. 106, 302, 358, “A”-18.406.20-22 and Prep+ 46.

46 A point in space is a place for an argument: from Wittgenstein, qtd. 47, “A”-13.287.38-39; see also “A”-12.255.27.

47 ‘Sense sure you have…: from Hamlet, qtd. 172 and “A”-12.127.6; the following quotation, ‘Eyes without feeling…,’ also qtd. 279.

49 only a glossary questions…: the glossary that LZ refers to here and intermittently elsewhere in Bottom (see 60, 85, 99, 441) is C.T. Onions, A Shakespeare Glossary (Oxford UP, 1911, 1919).

50 4.002 […] The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated: from Wittgenstein, qtd. 65, see also 73.

51 LAUNCE. Why, stand-under and under-stance is all one: from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, qtd. 55, 66, 178, 190 and “A”-13.313.13-17; see also “A”-22.519.5 and 23.544.18.

52 ‘And from nothing in the field of sight can it be concluded that it is seen from an eye: from Wittgenstein, qtd. 89.

52 ‘between water and what it is to be water…: from Aristotle, De Anima III.4, qtd. 43; see “A”-22.520.9-10.

52 ‘(for it produces movement through infinite time…: from Aristotle, Metaphysics XII.7; qtd 44.

53 The final cause, then, produces motion as being loved…: from Aristotle, see “A”-12.237.8.

53 Similarly, Aristotle proposes to complete his biological interest…: this sentence is working from Metaphysics I.2: “Yet the acquisition of [wisdom or the highest science] must in a sense end in something which is the opposite of our original inquiries. For all men begin, as we said, by wondering that things are as they are, as they do about self-moving marionettes, or about the solstices of the incommensurability of the diagonal of a square with the side; for it seems wonderful to all who have not yet seen the reason, that there is a thing which cannot be measured even by the smallest unit. But we must end in the contrary and, according to the proverb, the better state, as is the case in these instances too when men learn the cause; for there is nothing which would surprise a geometer so much as if the diagonal turned out to be commensurable.”

54 but “simple” means that the thing itself has a certain nature…: from Aristotle, qtd. Prep+ 51, see “A”-12.237.7.

54 ‘. . . as for those who posit the Ideas as causes…: from Aristotle, cf. “A”-12.170.6-11.

55 But the zeal of Aristotle’s metaphysics is clearly for ‘things’ and nature’…: this echoes a remark in Metaphysics I.9 that LZ does not include in the preceding quotations; see “A”-12.170.8-16.

55 Launce asserting ‘stand-under and under-stand is all one’: from The Two Gentlemen of Verona II.5, qtd. 51, 66, 178, 190, “A”-13.313.13-17 and Prep+ 51.

57 (cf. T.,V,I,58-60): see note at 37.

58 the flowers of odious savours sweet…: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, qtd. 326 and “A”-12.163.7.

59 ‘The excellence of the eye makes both the eye and its work good…: from Aristotle, qtd. 308 (using Rackham translation). LZ notes that both Plato and Aristotle remark on the “excellence of the eye,” see 101, 105 and “A”-12.169.30.

60 ‘Tell me where is fancy bred…: from The Merchant of Venice, qtd. 286, mentioned 429; also qtd. “Poem beginning ‘The’” (CSP 18) and “A”-12.127.2.

60 follow the gloss: see note at 49.

61 William Rowan Hamilton’s quaternions…: (1805-1865) an Irish mathematician and scientist, best known for his discovery of quaterrnions, which would prove significant in the development of quantum mechanics and which LZ succinctly describes as “numbers of a non-commutative algebra in which i x j does not equal j x i.” The source for the information and quotations in this paragraph is an article on Hamilton by Sir Edmund Whittaker in Scientific American vol. 190, no. 5 (May 1954): 82-87.

61 the music of Bach’s Matthew Passion to Leipzig ladies in 1729: the original performance of St. Matthew Passion by J.S. Bach is of course mentioned on the opening page of “A”-1, although the disconcerted reaction of Leipzig ladies is mentioned at “A”-8.44.2-9.

61 it will not be good any the more for being eternal, since that which lasts long is no whiter than that which perishes in a day: from Aristotle, see “A”-12.237.24-25 and “4 Other Countries” (CSP 177).

62 ‘Seeing seems at any moment complete, for it does not lack anything…: from Aristotle, qtd. “A”-12.169.19-22.

64 (T.,II,I,153, out of Ovid’s Golden Age rather than Montaigne?): LZ is here referring to the famous utopian speech of Gonzalo, which Shakespeare cribbed from Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals” via John Florio’s translation. However, LZ suggests it may actually have been taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who gives a classic account of the Golden Age and who is an identifiable source in The Tempest via Arthur Golding’s translation.

64 a this (Aristotle): see note at 133.

64 inadvertently Aristotle uses nature in two sense, as Plato had used one!: alluding to Aristotle, Metaphysics I.9, qtd. 55.

64 a wish for the impossible, for immortality…: from Aristotle, see “A”-12.237.22.

64 as Aristotle has said here before (De Anima,II,8): qtd. 59.

65 ‘The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language…: from Wittgenstein, qtd. 50, see also 73.

66 If Launce sums up Aristotle…: from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, qtd. 51, 55, 178, 190 and “A”-13.313.13-17.

66 Aristotle […] Ethics…: the two longish quotations from the Nicomachean Ethics here and on the following page are somewhat reworked by LZ, apparently using the Loeb Classical Library translation by H. Rackham, but probably also consulting the W.D. Ross version in McKeon’s Introduction to Aristotle (see note at 39).

67 entalphic: = enthalpy, a thermodynamic function of a system, equivalent to the sum of the internal energy of the system plus the product of its volume multiplied by the pressure exerted on it by its surroundings (AHD). The adjectival form is rare and LZ appears to use it to mean that humans necessarily change like systems according to a complex of internal and external pressures or demands.

67 which begins as body, finds a voice that involves or generates intellect…: cf. opening of “A”-12, especially 12.126.21-23.

69 Aristotle’s suggestive metaphysical humor as to the profligacy of the male impregnating many females…: from Aristotle, Metaphysics, qtd. 42.

70 the shadowed and hieroglyphical image of the world: from Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643) II.9: “For there is a musick wherever there is a harmony, order, or proportion; and thus far we may maintain ‘the musick of the spheres’: for those well-ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony. Whatsoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony, which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all church-musick. For myself, not only from my obedience but my particular genius I do embrace it: for even that vulgar and tavern-musick which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first composer. There is something in it of divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world, and creatures of God, —such a melody to the ear, as the whole world, well understood, would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God.”

71 That horse that I so carefully have dress’d!…: from Richard II’s soliloquy in Richard II V.v, see “A”-14.351.10-15 where various phrases quoted on this page are spliced together.

73 Aristotle, Ethics,IX,12: referring to the following sentence from the Nicomachean Ethics: “Does it not follow, then, that, as for lovers the sight of the beloved is the thing they love most, and they prefer this sense to the others because on it love depends most for its being and for its origin, so for friends the most desirable thing is living together?” (trans. W.D. Ross).

73 But the colloquial sense of Dogberry’s thought is ‘enormously complicated’: quoted phrase from Wittgenstein, qtd. 50 and 65.

73 liquid crystal: A liquid having certain physical properties, esp. optical, shown by crystalline solids but not by ordinary liquids (WD); in other words, a state of matter that shows both liquid and solid properties. See also 75, 429.

74 Plato, whom Aristotle charged with making mathematics identical with philosophy…: see Aristotle, Metaphysics I.9, qtd. 42.

74 The mind becomes critical when the bodily eye fails (The Symposium): from Plato, qtd. 372.

74 Pericles suggested by (?) periclitate = attended with risk…: see 428 and “Claims” (CSP 155). Where LZ found this definition and examples is uncertain; the CD gives the following definitions: “pericle [< L. periculum, periclum, risk, danger: see peril.] A danger; danger; peril; risk; hazard”; and for “periclitate [< L. periclitatus, pp. of periclitari (> It. periclitare = F. péricliter), try, prove, test, put to the test, endanger, imperil, < periculum, periclum, trial experiment, test, danger, peril: see peril.] To endanger.”

75 mathematics—the Greek of which meant a disposition to learn: cf. “A”-14.349.11-13.

76 Man is begotten by man and the sun as well: from Aristotle, qtd. 86 and see “A”-12.236.11-13, “A”-13.290.24 and 13.300.10.

76 ‘. . . when we say that anyone suspends his judgment…: from Spinoza, see “A”-12.189.9-19, 12.234.32-235.6 and Prep+ 54.

77the readiness is all: from Hamlet V.ii, qtd. 152, 302, 358 and “A”-23.554.6.

78 Wittgenstein who often hits the nail on the head…: alluding to Wittgenstein’s preface to the Tractatus, qtd. 56.

78 ‘There cannot be too much merriment…: from Spinoza, qtd. 192, “A”-12.184.15-16 and Prep+ 54; see also “A”-9.109.18.

79 ‘To make use of things and take delight in them…: from Spinoza, qtd. 192 and “A”-12.184.17-34.

79 Wittgenstein’s warning in Philosophical Investigations that ‘A smiling mouth…: from Philosophical Investigations (1953) I.583.

80 But . . . men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues…: from Spinoza, see “A”-12.233.8-9.

81 dream with their eyes open’: from Spinoza, see “A”-9.109.25.

81 second best bed that Shakespeare left to Ann Hathaway and the bed that Benedict Spinoza…: there has been considerable discussion over the significance of the fact that Shakespeare’s will left to his wife the “second best bed,” while the best went to their daughter. On the death of his father, Spinoza’s sisters apparently attempted to appropriate his share of the inheritance, but having successfully asserted his rights in court, he then gave up his share except for one bed.

83 Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through: from Wittgenstein, qtd. 98 and “A”-18.391.9.

83 Agassiz…: Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), great Swiss-American scientist and anti-Darwinist; this letter dated June 1845.

83 whorl of the spindle of Necessity…: see “Pamphylian” (CSP 133) and Prep+ 55.

84 Analects…: Confucius, Analects in EP’s translation, as LZ indicates, which was first published in 1950.

85 7: ‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen’: this is the only time LZ quotes Wittgenstein’s original German, which C.K. Odgen translates: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Wittgenstein quotes this conclusion in his preface, qtd. 56.

85 as the glossary profanes: see note at 49.

86 a fruit called forerunner: mentioned in Arise, Arise 44.

86 Aristotle […] Man is begotten by man and by the sun as well: qtd. 76 and see “A”-12.236.11-13, “A”-13.290.24 and 13.300.10.

86 Lucretius […] ‘it Ver et Venus et Veneris praenuntius ante’: from De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) V.737 (the reference in the text to Book IV is an error). Although elsewhere in Bottom and “A”-12, LZ generally uses the translation of Cyril Bailey, here he appears to slightly adapt from the Loeb Classical Library version of W.H.D. Rouse, which also would have the Latin text—he owned both versions: “On come spring and Venus and Venus’ winged harbinger marching before with Zephyr and mother Flora a pace behind him, strewingthe whole path for them with brilliant colours and filling it with scent.” On “forerunner” see above. See “A”-12.165.1-19 for LZ’s version of the entire passage that this line opens; also qtd. Prep+ 50.

86 ‘her unselfish ways . . . the neat body . . . habit alone can win love’: from Lucretius, De Rerum Natura IV.1281-1283: “For at times a woman may bring it about by her own doing, by her unselfish ways, and the neat adornment of her body, that she accustoms you easily to live your life with her. Nay more, habit alone can win love; for that which is struck ever and again by a blow, however light, is yet mastered in long lapse of time and gives way. Do you not see too how drops of water falling upon rocks in long lapse of time drill through the rocks?” (trans. Cyril Bailey). This last quoted sentence is referred to at 401.

87 Hamlet’s ‘resolve into a dew’: from famous soliloquy in Hamlet I.2: “O that this too too solid flesh would melt / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew, […].” Referred to at 299.

87 Wittgenstein’s What is thinkable is also possible: this statement is actually cut out of the immediately preceding quotation from Wittgenstein: “3.02: The thought contains the possibility of the state of affairs which it thinks. What is thinkable is also possible.”

88 Pericles listening to ‘the music of the spheres’ before seeing his wife and daughter…: referring to Pericles V.i; for other mentions of Pericles and the music of the spheres, see 328, 423 and 428.

88 Lucretius, who generates a world of atoms […] proving his reason by dedicating it to the visible goodness of generative, bodily Venus…: referring to the opening invocation of De Rerum Natura addressed to Venus (see 112).

88 nor can the eyes know, i.e. conceived, the nature of things…: from Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (LZ’s reference should be lines IV.379-386); LZ is for the most part quoting from the translation of Cyril Bailey, which he adapts in “A”-12.166.27-30 and this latter version is quoted at 138.

89 Conception, as Hamlet says, is not always a blessing…: the phrase “pale cast” alludes to Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy in Hamlet III.i (see 39, 299, 363), and the rest Hamlet’s dialogue with Polonius about Ophelia in Hamlet II.ii:
Hamlet: For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion—have you a daughter?
Polonius: I have, my lord.
Hamlet: Let her not walk I’ th’ sun. Conception is a blessing, but not as your daughter may conceive. Friend, look to’t.

89 As for true conceptions they are, as Spinoza said, ‘of thought,’ until words disguise and imperil or feign them: see Spinoza quotations at 80.

89 we cannot think that we cannot think…: from Wittgenstein, qtd. 82.

89 ‘From nothing in the field of sight…: from Wittgenstein, qtd. 52.

89 ‘the more an image is associated with many other things…: from Spinoza, qtd. 29; see “A”-11.124.21-22 and “A”-12.174.22-24.

90 ‘new to thee’ […] the world ‘that has such people in ’t’ is for Miranda: from The Tempest V.1, qtd. 161, 428.

91 ‘look, don’t think’: from Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I.66, qtd. 50.

91 how it is with that world is: from Wittgenstein, qtd. 84: “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”

91 where thought is free and music is for nothing: this refers back to the opening discussion of this section at 37.

91 All eyes! or I want no eyes; I stumbled when I saw: respectively from The Tempest IV.1, qtd. 38, 39, 77, 81, 85, 86, 99, 155, 232, 341, 362; also Prep+ 170; and King Lear IV.2, qtd. 10. 312, TP 71.

92 friendship removed at a great distance ceases, as Aristotle says: from Nicomachean Ethics VIII.7, qtd. 65.

92 being bodily, that which comes to be must be visible: from Plato, Timaeus, qtd. 75; the following quotation, “understanding cannot arise anywhere without life,” is from the same quotation on 74.

92 how the world is: from Wittgenstein, qtd. 84, see note at 91.

92 Juliet’s ‘mask of night’: from Romeo and Juliet, qtd. 49.

92 but the blind, said the Philosopher…: see Aristotle quotation at 58 from Physics II.1.

92 Graphs are always compounding events…: this sentence echoes key phrases from George Boole’s definition of “simple” and “compound” qtd. 48-49.

92 ‘the image of a voice’: from II Esdras V, qtd. 36.

92 Achilles’ ‘speculation turns not to itself…: from Troilus and Cressida, qtd. 72.

93 Homer’s use of ἲδεν and ἔγνω—he saw cities and knew minds…: referring to the third line of the Odyssey: “he saw many cities of men, and learnt their mind” (trans. W.H.D. Rouse).

93 Golding (1565) translated Ovid…: Arthur Golding (1536-1606) made an influential verse translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which Shakespeare knew and which LZ quotes in “A”-12.242-250. The passage from which the following is excerpted, “. . . (the crooked banks much wondering…,” appears in TP 112.

93 He, though the gods were far away…: unlike the previous translation from Ovid by Golding, this is from the Loeb Classical Library edition by Frank Miller. This passage on Pythagoras is referred to at 104.

93 what for: alluding to Aristotle’s final cause, see 48, 75, 98, 112.

93 Mozart, ‘in opera poetry must be the obedient daughter of music’: from a 1781 letter of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to his father, which LZ used as epigraph to “Non Ti Fidar” (see quotation at CSP 123); also qtd. Bottom 427.

94 55 years after the Folio: the First Folio collecting Shakespeare’s plays was published in 1623, while Spinoza’s Ethics was published in 1677, immediately after his death.

94 ‘the eyes of the mind by which it sees things…: from Spinoza, qtd. 26, 297, 325 and “A”-12.130.19.

94 ‘The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body…: from Spinoza, cf. “A”-12.232.9.12.

94 ‘a certain mode’—Olearius to Bach…: from Charles Stanford Terry, Bach: A Biography (1928), concerning a reprimand given to the young Bach at his first job as organist at Arnstadt by his superior, Johann Christoph Olearius: “‘Complaints have been made to the Consistorium that you now accompany the hymns with surprising variations and irrelevant ornaments, which obliterate the melody and confuse the congregation. If you desire to introduce a theme against the melody, you must go on with it and not immediately fly off to another. And in no circumstances must you introduce a tonus contrarius [Terry notes: “i.e. conflicting with the melody”]’” (70). Terry gives the original German for the underlined phrase above that LZ quotes. See “A”-8.104.21-22.

94 Fowre Hymnes: the preceding quotations are taken, as LZ indicates, from two of the four hymns (1596) by Edmund Spenser.

Part Three: An Alphabet of Subjects

A-Bomb and H-

97 Title: while the H- of the title most obviously refers to the hydrogen bomb, which was first exploded by the U.S. in 1952, we might also keep in mind the significance of the letter H in the opening paragraphs of Part Two.

97 residual perceptive stand in the rout…: see Aristotle, Posterior Analytics II.19, qtd. 40.

97 rarefaction: Act or process of rarefying; state of being rarefied (WD).

98 ‘skill of the craftsman and the knowledge of the man of science…: from Aristotle, Posterior Analytics II.19.3; qtd. 39-40.

98 Memory is a stage or stand in the senses of the process, said the Philosopher, and death is not of it, said the Tractatus: from Aristotle, Posterior Analytics II.19, see quotation 40; and from Wittgenstein, Tractatus, qtd. 83.

98 A man throng’d up with cold. My veins are chill: from Pericles, qtd.396 and “A”-21.457.9-10.

99 ‘Die, de-tha; now Gogs forbid’t…: from Pericles, this is the commonsense response of the Fishermen, who have saved Pericles from shipwreck, to his complaint quoted on the previous page. The later part of sentence is qtd. 397.

99 Malone: see note at 38.

99 says the glossary: see note at 49.

99 Feyerabend’s pocket dictionary: A Pocket-Dictionary of the Greek and English Languages compiled by Karl Feyerabend, which uses the Toussaint-Langenscheidt Method. Philadelphia: David McKay, Publisher, 1918; also mentioned at 388.

After All Eyes & The Birthplace

Title All Eyes: alludes to line from The Tempest IV.i.59, spoken by Prospero: “No tongue! All eyes! Be silent,” qtd. 39, 77, 81, 85, 86, 91, 99, 155, 232, 341, 362 and frequently echoed; also qtd, Prep+ 170.

99 The Birthplace: a long story by Henry James, which, although it characteristically never explicitly names Shakespeare or Stratford-on-Avon, concerns a couple who take over management of Shakespeare’s birthplace house. The story is both a satire on the commercialization of Shakespeare and an inquiry into the question of where or in what sense does “Shakespeare” continue to exist. Through to the bottom of 100 are scattered quotations from James’ story. James’ story was apparently pointed out to LZ by Lorine Niedecker (HRC 20.1), who was working on a play about the James family in the early 1950s. The quotation on 100-101 found in Simon Nowell-Smith is from Niedecker’s typed notes sent to LZ. 

Continents

101 ‘It’s absurd . . . to talk of our not knowing…: from Henry James, see quotation at 99.

101 Eden’s History of Travaile (1577) Setebos, a Patagonian god…: Richard Eden’s volume is a compilation of travel descriptions of the New World, including a translation of an account of Patagonia during the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães), from which it is believed Shakespeare found the name Setebos, who is mentioned in The Tempest as the god of Sycorax, the mother of Caliban.

101 Anthony Jenkinson…: (1530-1609), one of the first Europeans to travel widely in Russia and central Asia, including Bokhara in what is now Uzbekistan, and wrote detailed accounts of his journeys. See 143.

101 excellence of the eyes: from both Plato and Aristotle, see 59, 105, 308 and “A”-12.169.30.

101 ‘To the great Variety of Readers…: from the preface to the first Folio of Shakespeare’s works; on John Heminge and Henrie Condell see note at 46.

102 what his beloued avthor hath left vs: the full title of Ben Jonson’s well-known tribute to Shakespeare published in the First Folio (1523) is “To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us.” The following quoted lines are from Jonson’s poem.

102 ‘Rare’ Ben, who compiled The English Grammar…: Ben Jonson left this work unpublished at his death, in which he attempts to systematize English grammar according to Latin categories.

103 Thales’ equation of all to the moist: Thales the 6th century BC Greek philosopher who argued that the primary principal of nature was water. Aristotle, the main source for Thales’ ideas, states in Metaphysics I.3 (983b): “Thales, the founder of [natural] philosophy, says the principle is water (for which reason he declared that the earth rests on water), getting the notion perhaps from seeing that the nutriment of all things is moist, and that heat itself is generated from the moist and kept alive by it (and that from which they come to be is a principle of all things). He got his notion from this fact, and from the fact that the seeds of all things have a moist nature, and that water is the origin of the nature of moist things” (trans. W.D. Ross).

103 declared Pericles a moldy tale: see note and quotation at 322.

103 Chinnereth: Biblical name for Sea of Galilee.

103 Son of Japheth, Javan (Ionians): in Genesis 10:2, Javan is the son of Japheth, and in Biblical Heb. considered to be the ancestor of and to designate the Greeks, thus Ionians (e.g. Zechariah 9:13). See “A”-12.142.14.

103 Pythagoras…: pre-Socratic philosopher. In the following two sentences, LZ is conflating a number of surviving accounts of Pythagorean beliefs:
From Aristotle, Metaphysics I.5 (985b-986a): “Contemporaneously with these philosophers and before them, the so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this study, but also having been brought up in it they thought its principles were the principles of all things. Since of these principles numbers are by nature the first, and in numbers they seemed to see many resemblances to the things that exist and come into being—more than in fire and earth and water (such and such a modification of numbers being justice, another being soul and reason, another being opportunity—and similarly almost all other things being numerically expressible); since, again, they saw that the modifications and the ratios of the musical scales were expressible in numbers; since, then, all other things seemed in their whole nature to be modelled on numbers, and numbers seemed to be the first things in the whole of nature, they supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number. And all the properties of numbers and scales which they could show to agree with the attributes and parts and the whole arrangement of the heavens, they collected and fitted into their scheme; and if there was a gap anywhere, they readily made additions so as to make their whole theory coherent. E.g. as the number 10 is thought to be perfect and to comprise the whole nature of numbers, they say that the bodies which move through the heavens are ten, but as the visible bodies are only nine, to meet this they invent a tenth—the ‘counter-earth’” (trans. W.D. Ross).
From Hippolytus: “[Pythagoras] said that the soul is immortal, and that it changes from one body to another; so he was wont to say that he himself had been born before the Trojan war as Aethalides, and at the time of the Trojan war as Euphorbos, and after that as Hermotimos of Samos, then as Pyrrhos of Delos, fifth as Pythagoras. And Diodoros of Eretria and Aristoxenos the musician say that Pythagoras had come into Zaratas of Chaldaea and he set forth that in his view there were from the beginning two causes of things, father and mother and the father is light and the mother darkness; and the parts of light are warm, dry, light, swift; and of darkness are cold, moist, heavy, slow; and of these the universe is composed, of male and female. And he says that the universe exists in accordance with musical harmony, so the sun also makes an harmonious period” (trans. Arthur Fairbanks).

103 Xenophanes…: early pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and poet (c.400 BC). In the following two sentences, LZ fuses together details from various surviving fragments from Xenophanes; for the sources see notes to “Xenophanes” (CSP 123); see also 178, 356-357. The speaker defending the dog is Pythagoras, from an anecdote as told by Xenophanes; see also “A”-12.210.3-4.

103 herdsman of Tekoa’s, sold the poor for a pair of shoes…: the herdsman is Amos, and the quotations are from Amos 2:6: “Thus saith the Lord; For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they sold the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes”; and Amos 9:13-15: “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed; and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt. And I will bring again the captivity of my people of Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the Lord thy God.”

103 Ocellus Lucanus: Pythagorean philosopher of the 2nd century BC. Ocellus is mentioned a number of times in the later Cantos of EP, particularly in Rock-Drill and Thrones (see next note), where he is placed in the tradition of light philosophy; EP particularly associates Ocellus with the phrase, “to build light” (94/642, 98/684). LZ points out that Ocellus’ name is a diminutive Latin form of oculus, meaning eye.

103 changes called Los Cantares, 90: two volumes of EP’s Cantos use the designation “Los Cantares”: Section: Rock-Drill De Los Cantares LXXXV-XCV (1955) and Thrones de los Cantares XCVI-CIX (1959). Canto 90 is a highly mytho-poetic section, concerned with the tradition of light philosophy and the correlation between love and seeing, with a refrain from Richard of St. Victor: “Ubi amor, ibi oculus” (Where there is love, there is the eye).

103 ‘Whole earth . . . of one speech’: from Genesis 11:1, the opening of the account of the tower of Babel: “And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.”

103 Kung: = Confucius.

103 `Pythagoras (whom Ovid in the recaptured Changes of love praised curiously for the intellect…: see quotation at 93 from Ovid, Metamorphoses XV.62-64.

104 exiled Jews came back with Zerubbabel to live for the second Temple at Jerusalem under Cyrus (526 B.C.): as described in the Book of Ezra, with the permission of King Cyrus of Persia, Zerubbabel led the Jews back from their Babylonian exile and helped lay the foundation for the Second Temple. Further details of this narrative appear below and are alluded to in “’Nor did the prophet’” (CSP 147).

104 ‘Beréshīt bara Elohīm ēt hāshāmayim v’ēt hāāretz’: transliteration from the Hebrew of the opening verse of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” In the Hebrew the untranslatable ēt lies precisely between the two main halves of this sentence, joining or separating God and his creations. See “A”-12.142.18f.

104 Being and Non-being before the Void—Rig Veda X: from the so-called Creation Hymn of the Rig Veda X.19; qtd. “A”-12.126.24-25 and Prep+ 55 and 242.

104 Philo’s saying that Jeremiah taught Plato…: Philo (20 BC-40 AD) Jewish philosopher of Alexandra who synthesized Greek and Jewish thought through allegory; see “A”-12.142.14f and 22.523.10-13. Philo is mentioned in “Poem beginning ‘The’” (CSP 15). In his synthesis, Philo argues that Greek philosophy had its roots in Jewish thought: that Socrates was a disciple of the prophet Ahitophel, that Plato (429-347 BC) learned directly from Jeremiah (6th century BC) and that Aristotle (384-322 BC) studied with Simon the Just (3rd century BC), High Priest of Israel during the time of the Second Temple.

104 Shem […] Ham: sons of Noah and brothers of Japheth, and so uncles of Javan. From Shem’s sons descended the peoples who generally occupied the Middle East nations, including the Jews, and from Ham the African peoples.

104 Er’s Pamphylia was Asia…: refers to the mythological fable that concludes Plato’s Republic; see 83 and “Pamphylian” (CSP 133). The following quotation is from Socrates’ introduction to this myth: “Well, I said, I will tell you a tale; not one of the tales which Odysseus tells to the hero Alcinous, yet this too is a tale of a hero, Er the son of Armenius, a Pamphylian by birth” (trans. Benjamin Jowett).

104 Homeric redaction of Pisistratus: Pisistratus or Peisistratus (c.607-528 BC) tyrant of Athens who is traditionally credited with commissioning to have Homer’s works written down.

104 journey of Ezra to Jerusalem under Darius and Artaxerxes…: see end notes to “‘Nor did the prophet’” (CSP 147).

104 thread of Cephalus…: Cephalus is one of the discussants in Plato’s Republic, and the following quotations are from Book I, beginning with a question from Socrates to which Cephalus responds.

105 topics and analytics: referring to works on logic by Aristotle, grouped together as the Organon, of which three have the titles: Topics, Prior Analytics and Posterior Analytics.

105 excellence of the eyes: from both Plato and Aristotle, see 59, 101, 308 and “A”-12.169.30.

106 ‘glory’ enlarges by ‘broad spreading’…: from Shakespeare, Henry VI Part I, I.ii.133-135; qtd. 105 and more fully at 374.

106 ‘A book weighed in the scales…: LZ’s information on and quotations from the Zohar, Book of Enoch and other texts in the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition that appear in the following and elsewhere in Bottom are taken from Ernst Müller, History of Jewish Mysticism, trans. Maurice Simon (1946).

106 Cabalist Isaac ben Abraham ben David of Posquières…: otherwise known as Isaac the Blind (c.1160-1235), major writer on Kabbalah, possibly the author of the Book of Bahir (see 421) and son of the famous talmudist, Abraham ben David of Posquières.

106 If it be now, ‘tis not to come…: from Hamlet, qtd. 46, 302, 358, “A”-18.406.20-22 and Prep+ 46.

106 . . . Let be’; from Hamlet, qtd. 152, 302; “A”-18.397.27 and “A”-23.554.5.

106 Sanhedrin…: from the Talmud, qtd. from Müller.

107 Hebrew Book of Enoch: also known as 3 Enoch, an ancient Hebrew text usually considered pseudepigraphal, that is, non-canonical; qtd. 14.351.16-21. The quotation continues at the bottom of the page. LZ quotes from Müller but adds the parenthetical “(presence).”

108 Talmud Babli, Yoma…: qtd. from Müller.

110 Sanhedrin…: see 106; qtd. from Müller.

110 Zohar (Daniel, XII,3 and Ezekiel, VIII,2) that is brightness…: from Müller: “The Zohar derives its name from the verse in The Book of Daniel XIII, 3: ‘And thou that be wise’ (more exactly, ‘that affect reason’) shall shine as the brightness (zohar) of the firmament.’ The noun Zohar is found only once more in the Bible, in one of the visions of the prophet Ezekiel (VIII, 2).”Part of the following quotation, “extension after extension…,” is quoted at 155. For Zohar see also 106, 155, 338, 342. Jonathan Ivry points out (219) that the reference for the immediately following quotation from the Zohar should be I,20a (rather than 19b).

111 thought like Aristotle’s that there are some things better not to see than to see: see quotation from Aristotle, Metaphysics XII.9 at 59.

111 passer, deliciae meae puellae / quem plus illa oculis suis amabat: from Catullus II.3-4, L. “the sparrow my lady’s pet, whom she loved more than her very eyes” (trans. Francis Cornish). LZ’s Catullus version of this poem is included in “A”-17.387.1f

111 cui videberis bella?: from Catullus VIII.16, L. “to whom will you seem fair?” LZ translated Catullus VIII in 1939, see Anew #22 (CSP 88-89).

111 Sirmio…: peninsula extending into Lake Garda where Catullus had a villa. This was one of EP’s sacred places frequently referred to in the Cantos and was visited by the Zukofskys during their 1957 European trip; see “4 Other Countries” (CSP 195). The rest of this sentence is a paraphrased version of lines from Catullus XXXI; see next.

111 Paene insularum, Sirmio, insularumque / ocelle . . . / vix mi ipse credens Thyniam atque Bithynos / liquisse campos et videre te in tuto: from Catullus XXXI.1-2, 5-6, L. “Sirmio, bright eye of peninsulas and islands […] scarcely trusting myself that I have left Thynia and the Bithynian plains, and that I see you in safety.”

111 Of Song XIV Landor wrote…: from a long review-essay, “The Poems of Catullus,” by Walter Savage Landor (1842); LZ quotes from the same essay at “A”-18.402.12-17.

111 nam castum esse decet pium poetam / ipsum, versiculos nihil necessest: from Catullus XVI. 5-6, L. “For the sacred poet ought to be chaste himself, his verses need not be so” (trans. Francis Cornish).

111 translate Integer vitae…: as LZ indicates this refers to Horace, Odes I.22, whose opening phrase means: he who is upright in life (see note at 405 for translation of first two lines of this ode). Ode I.22 is primarily a pastoral expression of love for Lalage, while the following Ode I.23 is a more aggressive description of love for Chloë using hunting imagery. Ode I.13, addressed to Lydia, is an expression of jealousy and the inconstancy of love, while in Ode IV.1 the elderly poet pleads with Venus to leave him alone since love is for the young.

111 Propertius…: the following translations appear to be LZ’s adaptations, probably from those of H.E. Butler in the Loeb Classical Library.

112 one swallow does not make a summer: proverbial but found in Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.7: “For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed or happy” (trans. W.D. Ross). See 12.138.30 and 13.295.9.

112 Aeneadum genetrix . . . voluptas: L. “Mother of Aeneas . . . delight”; the first and last words of the opening line of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura addressed to Venus. Qtd. TP 108-109 as translated by both John Dryden and Basil Bunting; see also 88.

113 Boethius (480-524) ‘And whan she say thise poetical Muses…: LZ uses Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy.

113 antiquary Aubrey’s butcher’s son…: John Aubrey (1626-1697) wrote one of the earliest accounts of Shakespeare’s life in Brief Lives, in which says he was the son of a butcher.

113 W. S. Melsome’s The Bacon-Shakespeare Anatomy: this work argues for Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare’s works based on showing that the two bodies of texts express the same mind. See 146.

115 Consider had meant to observe the stars—together. Contemplate had in past times a meaning…: apparently from entries in CD:
consider. < L. considerare, look at closely, observe, consider, meditate; orig., it is supposed, an augurial term, observe the stars, < com– + sidus (sider-), a star, a constellation: see sidereal, and cf. desiderate, desire. For the sense, cf. contemplate.
contemplate. < L. contemplatus, pp. of contemplaii, look at, view attentively, observe, consider, orig. an augurial term, mark out a templum, a space for observation, < com– + templum, a temple: see temple, and cf. contemple. I may at rest contemple / The starry arches of thy spacious temple. Sylvester, tr. of Du Bart’s Weeks, ii., The Columnes.
temple. < L. templum, an open space, the circuit of the heavens, a consecrated place, a temple, prob. for temulum, akin to Gr. τέμενος, a piece of ground cut or marked off, a sacred enclosure, < τέμνειν, ταμεīν, cut.

116 O verrey light of eyen that ben blinde…: from Geoffrey Chaucer, “An A.B.C.,” also known as “La priere de Nostre Dame” (The prayer of Our Lady), in which each stanza begins with a letter of the Latin alphabet; the Latin line, “Incipit carmen secundum, ordinem literarum Alphabeti,” introduces the poem: “Here begins a poem following the letters of the alphabet.” LZ quotes the opening line of the O stanza, then those of the first four stanzas and most of the following with various additional lines, including most of the final stanza to the end. See 441. LZ would use Chaucer’s “An A.B.C.” as a template to conclude “A”-23; see 23.563.8 where LZ quotes the phrase “Kalenderes enlumined.”

117 ‘Well could he in eschaunges sheeldes selle’: from Chaucer, the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (l. 280), describing the merchant; sheeldes = shields, that is, French crowns.

117 Mu’allaquat…: this is an immensely influential pre-Islamic collection of Arabic poems, and the poet of these specific lines is Antara or Antar (6th century), a heroic figure also famous for his love for Abla. Basil Bunting mentioned the Mu’allaquat to LZ in explaining a couple of brief quotations incorporated into The Spoils (letter dated 13 March 1951; HRC 21.6). A possible source for LZ’s quotation is An Anthology of World Poetry, ed. Mark Van Doren (1928). 

117 John Scotus Erigena…: for Erigena and most of the following passages from medieval philosophy LZ’s source is The Age of Belief, selected with introduction and interpretive commentary by Anne Fremantle (1954), part of the series The Great Ages of Western Philosophy (Houghton Mifflin/New American Library), which offers a survey of Western philosophy from the Middle Ages to the present through brief selections with commentary of major philosophers. There were six volumes in all, also available in a two volume version, of which LZ owned at least the two on The Age of Belief (Medieval philosophy) and The Age of Analysis (20th century philosophy), ed. Morton White (1955).

119 Hebrew emet (truth) is the root of emunah (faith): from Müller (see note at 106): “This relation of man—especially of the religious man—to truth is indicated by the Hebrew language itself which makes emeth, truth, the root of emunah, faith” (106).

119 Moreh Nebuchim: the Hebrew title of A Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides (1135-1204).

119 Avicebron (Ibn Gabirol)—his M’Kor Chayyim as Fons Vitae: Avicebron is the Latin name for Solomon ibn Gabirol (c.1201-c.1058) Andalucian Hebrew poet and transmitter of Greco-Arabic Neoplatonism to Europe. His major philosophical work was Fountain of Life (H. Meqor Hayyim or M’Kor Chayyim; L. Fons Vitae; see 23.557.37-558.1). As LZ suggests, Ibn Gabirol’s philosophy was especially advocated by Duns Scotus in opposition to the Aristotlians, Albertus Magnus and Aquinas—although the latter too was familiar with Ibn Solomon’s work.

120 Emerson vaguely orated of Shakespeare…: in “Shakespeare, or, The Poet” from Representative Men (1850): “He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of England and Europe; the father of the man in America….” LZ also quotes from Emerson’s essay at 183.

120 Emerson’s little bouquet of Persians…: refers to Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Persian Poetry” (1876), which includes a liberal sampling of his renditions from Persian, especially Hafiz, as well as the quotation by Cyrus from Xenophon. LZ found this essay in his Centennial edition of Letters and Social Aims (1903-1904), which includes copious notes; all the Emerson versions from Persian poets at 125-126 and 141-142 are from the essay or in one instance from the notes. LZ also drew on the notes for passages on Hafiz and Saadi in “A”-13.279.40-280.2, 13.280.12-16.

120 Jami…: in the following pages through 142, all the translations from Persian poets, aside from a couple by Basil Bunting (see note at 121) and others by Emerson (see previous note), are found in the Everyman’s Library volume Persian Poems, ed. A.J. Arberry (1954), which LZ owned. LZ’s interest in these poets was undoubtedly spurred by Bunting, who often discussed Persian poetry and included translations in his correspondence with LZ during his period in Tehran during the 1940s and early 50s. The tale of Laila and Majnun is often referred to as the Middle Eastern Romeo and Juliet; see 126 and Little (CF 66, 169).

121 Basil Bunting translations: both of these translations from Rudaki and Firdosi were included in the volume Poems: 1950 (Galveston, Texas: The Cleaner’s Press, 1950), which is LZ’s source. Bunting subsequently made a revision in the third line of the first translation (see Bunting, Complete Poems 154-156). LZ and Bunting corresponded regularly throughout the 1940s, when Bunting was in Teheran and worked extensively on translations from the Persian, which he often sent to LZ.

121 Shah-nama: the great Persian “Epic of the Kings” (Shahnameh) by Firdosi (Ferdowsi); qtd. or mentioned “A”-12.227.17-28, “A”-18.394.6, Arise 22 and Ferdinand (CF 222). Bunting intended to translate at least a substantial selection of this huge poem, but in the end only published a couple short excerpts (“When the sword of sixty comes nigh his head” and “from ‘Faridun’s Sons'”); however, among LZ’s papers are further excerpts by Bunting (HRC 30.13), which are now available available in the Uncollected Overdrafts of The Poems (2016): “The beginning of the stories” and an extended version of “from ‘Faridun’s Sons.'”

124 Jaufre Rudel […] ‘Wrathful and joyous…: LZ slightly adapts the prose translation from the Provençal that EP gives in The Spirit of Romance (1910): “I depart wrathful and joyous when I see this love afar; for I see her not in the body, for our lands are set apart too far. Many’s the step and the road between us, though for all that I am not divided from her; but all shall be as it pleaseth God. I have true faith in God, whereby I shall see this love afar” (43).

124 trobar clus: Provençal, closed verse; troubadour poetry of the 12th century that was hermetic and obscure, emphasizing technical virtuosity.

124 ‘. . . it is as like as not Arnaut Daniel (writing 1180-1200) knew Arabic music…: this remark is quoted from EP, “Arnaut Daniel” (1920) in Literary Essays (109); for the following translations from Arnaut’s canzone, LZ prefers the version from The Spirit of Romance for the first stanza (27), but uses the later rendition from the essay for the snippet from the second stanza (139).

124 al prim vezer, as Marlowe wrote and Shakespeare repeated, at first sight: the Provençal phrase is from the Arnaut excerpt quoted above. For Shakespeare’s echoing of Marlowe, see note at 162.

129 Roger Bacon […] ‘Sed Aristoteles vult in fine secundi Coeli et Mundi…: as LZ indicates, this Latin quotation from Bacon is taken from John Fiske, The Discovery of America, but the page reference should be 53:
“But Aristotle maintains at the end of the second book of the Heavens and the World that more than a fourth is inhabited. And Averroës confirms this. Aristotle says that the sea is small between the end of Spain on the west and the beginning of India on the east. Seneca in the fifth book on Natural History says that this sea is navigable in a very few days if the wind is favorable. And Pliny teaches in his Natural History that it was navigated from the Arabic Gulf to Cadiz:…For Esdras states in the fourth book that six parts of the earth are habitable and the seventh is covered by water” (trans. Robert Belle Burke).

130 ‘El Aristotel dice que…: from Columbus: “Aristotle says that the world is small, and the water very limited in extent, and that it is easy to pass from Spain to the Indies; and this is confirmed by Avenryz, and by the Cardinal Pedro de Aliaco, who, in supporting this opinion, shows that it agrees with that of Seneca….he finds a passage in the third book of Esdras, where that sacred writer says, that of seven parts of the world six are discovered, and the other is covered with water. The authority of the third and fourth books of Esdras is also confirmed by holy persons, such as St. Augustin, and St. Ambrose in his Exameron….” (trans. R.H. Major).

131 after translation by A. J. Arberry: LZ does not actually rework Arberry’s translation except to put together lines from the first and last of four quatrains.

133 ipsum esse, actus purus: L. being itself, pure act.

133 “quod quid erat esse”: Aquinas glosses this in LZ’s source as “that by virtue of which a thing (anything) has to be what it is (something)” (Fremantle 136).

133 a this somewhat: this is found in Aristotle, De Anima I.1: “First, no doubt, it is necessary to determine in which of the summa genera soul lies, what it is; is it ‘a this-somewhat,’ a substance, or is it a quale or a quantum, or some other of the remaining kinds of predicates which we have distinguished? Further, does soul belong to the class of potential existents, or is it not rather an actuality? Our answer to this question is of the greatest importance” (trans. J.A. Smith). See also 64, 128, “A”-12.163.22, “A”-17.138.33 and Prep+ 51.

134 Guido Cavalcanti […] Donna mi priegha…: Cavalcanti’s difficult philosophical canzone on love, “A Lady asked me,” was of major interest to EP, who translated it twice, as well as attempting a detailed exegesis in his introduction to his edition of Guido Cavalcanti Rime (1932), all of which came to bear on LZ’s own “translation” of the canzone in “A”-9. LZ also included most of the canzone, both in the original Italian and EP’s Rime translation, in The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire 76-83.

134 ‘Vien da veduta forma ches s’intende…: from Cavalcanti, “Donna mi priegha”; following translations by EP:
From form seen doth he start, that, understood,
Taketh in latent intellect—
As in a subject ready—
place and abode,
Yet in that place it ever is unstill,
Spreading its rays, it tendeth never down
By quality, but is its own effect unendingly . . .

134 ‘E non si mova perch’ a llui si tirj…: from Cavalcanti, “Donna mi priegha”:
Does not move but draweth all to him

Nor doth he turn for a whim to find delight
Nor to seek out, surely, great knowledge or slight . . .

134 ‘Non razionale ma che si sente dicho’: from Cavalcanti, “Donna mi priegha”:
Not by reason but is felt I say.

134 Guido’s Madrigale: despite a blind world, unerring love lights and stays green— / ‘Amor luce e sta verde—’: LZ translates this phrase from Cavalcanti in the preceding sentence, “love lights and stays green,” and the phrase “despite a blind world” translates the opening of the poem, “O cieco mondo.” See notes LZ appended to Anew 29, “Glad they were there” (CSP 104).

135 ‘Green, like tender leaves just born’: from Dante, Purgatorio. Here and in the following translations from Dante, LZ is almost certainly using the Temple Classics editions with original texts and facing translations, which here LZ appears to be adapting; Purgatorio translated by Thomas Okey and Paradiso translated by P.H. Wicksteed.

135 ‘Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei…: from Dante, Paradiso. LZ only translates the second quoted stanza; both as translated by P.H. Wicksteed:
“Gazing on her such I became within, as was Glaucus, tasting of the grass that made him the sea-fellow of the other gods. / To pass beyond humanity may not be told in words wherefore let the example satisfy him for whom grace reserveth the experience.”

135 ‘Ne creator nè creatura mai…: from Dante, Purgatorio (the lines from XVIII.25-27 are used in “A”-12.136.15-16):
“‘Nor Creator, nor creature,… was ever without love, either natural or rational, and this thou knowest. / The natural is always without error; but the other may err through an evil object, or through too little or too much vigour. . . .”
And if, being turned, it inclines towards it, that inclination is love; that is nature which through pleasure is bound anew within you.
[Every substantial form] which is distinct from matter and is in union with it, has a specific virtue contained within itself, / which is not perceived save in operation; nor is manifested except by its effects, just as life in a plant by the green leaves’” (trans. Thomas Okey).

136 hast seen these signs / black verspers pageants. . . .That which is now a horse, even with a thought / The rack dislimns…: from Antony and Cleopatra, qtd. 318 and latter phrases at “A”-14.351.21-23.

136 The nine men’s morris: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, qtd. “A”-21.445.20-22.

138 Carus: i.e. Titus Lucretius Carus (c.94-49 BC), Roman philosophical poet; see next.

138 Just as if what each of them fights for may not be the truth: from Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) V.729-30, translated by Cyril Bailey; qtd. “A”-12.164.17-18.

138 ‘. . . nor do eyes / Know the nature of things…: the rest of this quotation is LZ’s adaptation of Lucretius taken from “A”-12.166.27-167.12; see notes to latter for quotations from Lucretius. 

138 Spinoza who […] slurs the infinite range of modes—in a single substance…: from Spinoza, Ethics I. Defs.3: “I understand Substance (substantia) to be that which is in itself and is conceived through itself: I mean that, the conception of which does not depend on the conception of another thing from which it must be formed” (trans. Andrew Boyle).

141 Arnaut Daniel ‘had in mind some sort of Arabic singing’: qtd. 124.

141 Emerson…: see note at 120.

143 Anthony Jenkinson, at Bokhara; John Erdred at Basrah. Ralph Fitch…: early English explorers and traders. On Jenkinson see note at 101. John Erdred, error for Eldred, was part of an expedition including Ralph Fitch (c.1550-1611) who in 1583 set out for the Middle East on a trip to Mesopotamia to establish commercial contacts, sailing on the Tyger and disembarking at Aleppo, which is alluded to in Macbeth I.3. Eldred eventually stopped at Basra, the port city in present-day southern Iraq, and then made his way back to England. Fitch continued to the Indian subcontinent and into Southeast Asia; his travels, as well as Jenkinson’s, were recounted in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (2nd ed. 1599), which Shakespeare is known to have read. Eldred and Fitch were both consultants in the establishment of the East India Company.

145 ‘and the lady shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt for’t’: from Hamlet, qtd. 19, 327, 333, “A”-12.163.4-5 and Prep+ 224.

145 “Quod tempore antiquum videtur, id incongruitate est maxime novum”: from Bacon, L. “there is nothing more new than an old thing that has ceased to fit.”

145 Et bonum quo antiquius, eo melius: L. “and the more ancient a good thing, the better”; from Shakespeare, Pericles, the opening prologue spoken by Gower, qtd. 330 and “A”-13.288.32.

145 ‘video meliora, proboque, / deteriora sequor’: from Ovid, Metamorphoses Vii.20, qtd. in Bacon, L. “see the better, approve of it, yet follow the worse.” Spinoza quotes the same remark in Ethics III, Prop. 2, Note.

146 Northumberland Manuscript…: LZ quotes this manuscript from W.S. Melsome, The Bacon-Shakespeare Anatomy mentioned at 113.

149 Lucretius’ ‘rerum simulacrum in rebus apertis / corpora res multae partim diffusa, solute…: from De Rerum Natura IV.30, 54-55, the following translation appears to be LZ’s adaptation.

149 Parolles: a cowardly braggart soldier in All’s Well That Ends Well.

150 ‘the thing itself…: from King Lear III.iv (storm scene).

150 Monteverdi’s Orfeo, 1607: See note at 369.

152 Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams: see “Wallace Stevens,” where LZ quotes this more concisely (Prep+ 27) and 23.545.3.

152 ‘The readiness is all . . . Let be’: from Hamlet, qtd. 77, 106, 152, 302, 358 and “A”-23.554.5-6.

153 Like Gonzalo…: from The Tempest, see quote at 134.

153 Falstaff—‘a Table of greene fields’; by all mean a Table…: from Henry V, see 290 where LZ explains his textual disagreement with Lewis Theobald’s emendation.

153 Theobald: Lewis Theobald (1688-1744) produced a major edition of Shakespeare in 1733. He had previously savaged Alexander Pope’s edition of 1725 in Shakespeare Restor’d (1726), which earned him the honor of being designated Dulness in Pope’s first Dunciad (1728); see 278. In fact, Theobald was a good scholar, Pope was not, and many of the former’s emendations are still accepted as standard readings of Shakespeare’s texts, although LZ frequently dissents in Bottom.

155 Zohar—‘extension after extension, each one forming a vestment to the other…: qtd. 110. See also 106, 338, 342. LZ’s source is Ernst Müller, History of Jewish Mysticism, trans. Maurice Simon (Phaidon Press, 1946).

155 Οὐ Τόπος: Gk. Utopos.

161‘Without eyen I see…: from Sir Thomas Wyatt, the sonnet “I find no peace, and all my war is done.” The next quotation is from another Wyatt sonnet.

162 ‘The reason no man knows…: from Marlowe’s Hero and Leander; the next line not quoted is: “Whoever loved, that loved not…”; see next note.

162 Marlowe’s saw of might…: in As You Like It III.v (dated 1599-1600; see 295), Shakespeare paid tribute to Marlowe by quoting from the latter’s Hero and Leander: “Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might, / Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?” In his famous tribute to Shakespeare in the first Folio, Ben Jonson famously referred to Marlowe’s “mighty line.”

163 ‘When Nashe “Martin” wrote…: this quotation from Michael Roberts, Elizabethan Prose (Jonathan Cape, 1933).

163 ‘This simple location of instantaneous material configurations…: from Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925). LZ quotes from the same volume in the appendix of quotations originally attached to “A Statement for Poetry 1950” (Prep+ 224).

163 where before, if all things were emptied from the world…: from Albert Einstein, qtd. “A”-12.231.24-232.4. Source is probably a review in the New York Times for 20 Feb. 1947; see note at 12.231.24.

163 ‘I shall end up by hating the Western World, said—: the speaker is Basil Bunting in a letter to LZ dated 27 Oct. 1953 (HRC 21.6). The immediate context is that after having to return from Iran to the U.K. the previous year, Bunting found himself unable to find work and in desperate financial straits, but finally, he announces in this letter, is about to start on a poor paying job proof-reading railway timetables. LZ included this and the following paragraphs in his contribution to a special Bunting issue of King Ida’s Watch Chain (1965). In a letter dated 10 May 1953, Bunting remarks: “Reverting to the West has made me more convinced than before that we’ve got to learn almost everything from the East (which, to the measure of my limited experience, is the lands of Islam) before there’s a chance of any peace of mind or dignity for most of us. And that’s a way of saying to hell with material welfare, and, logically, all the laws and references and adages designed to procure it” (HRC 21.6; Letters of Basil Bunting 228). This perspective is the burden of “The Spoils” (simply entitled “The Fifth Sonata” in draft), drafts with comments of which Bunting sent to LZ in the years before its publication in 1951. LZ responses to the poem had a significant impact on its final form. 

163 Kepler’s Three Laws: Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) proposed three mathematical laws concerning the orbits of planets.

165 Ben Jonson […] Ode: To Himself…: this poem and its circumstance are also mentioned at 322; the reference to Pericles as a “moldy tale” also mentioned at 103 and 165.

166 To Celia: ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’: this poem is alluded to in both “One lutenist played look; your thought was drink” (CSP 77) and “A”-18.390.31-36.

166 Donne […]A Valediction Forbidding Mourning: qtd. entire TP 127-128, also mentioned Prep+ 18.

167 En-gedi: town on the western shore of the Dead Sea; the name means “fountain of the kid” after the spring that flows from the limestone cliffs in the area. In the caves located here David took refuge from Saul’s wrath mentioned in I Samuel, which explains the connection with the preceding quotation (see “Thanks to the Dictionary” CF 287):
24:1-3: “And it came to pass, when Saul was returned from following the Philistines, that it was told him, saying, Behold, David is in the wilderness of Engedi. Then Saul took three thousand chosen men out of all Israel, and went to seek David and his men upon the rocks of the wild goats. And he came to the sheepcotes by the way, where was a cave; and Saul went in to cover his feet: and David and his men remained in the sides of the cave.”
24:9-10: “And David said to Saul, Wherefore hearest thou men’s words, saying, Behold, David seeketh thy hurt? Behold, this day thine eyes have seen how that the Lord had delivered thee to day into mine hand in the cave: and some bade me kill thee: but mine eye spared thee; and I said, I will not put forth mine hand against my lord; for he is the Lord’s anointed.”

169 Paul later might have meant…: referring to 1 Corinthians 15:35-49: “But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body. All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual. The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven. As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy: and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.”

172 Time qualifies the spark and fire of it…: from Hamlet, qtd. 299 and “A”-12.138.21.

172 ‘Sense sure’: from Hamlet, qtd. 47 and “A”-12.127.6.

172 the Stagirite: Aristotle, who was born in Stagira in Thrace, Greece.

177 Sonnet 59: qtd. complete at 14.

178 ‘to stand-under and under-stand is all one’: spoken by Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona II.5, qtd. 51, 55, 66, 190 and “A”-13.313.13-17.

178 From the head of a later sculptor…: i.e. the French sculptor, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915). The quotation dated 1914 at 178 and continuing at 179-181 gives most of “Vortex” published in Blast 1 (June 1914), which LZ probably found in EP, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916), collecting his and Gaudier-Brzeska’s main Vorticist writings (20-24). The two long paragraphs in-between are from a Gaudier-Brzeska letter to his companion, Sophia Brzeska, mostly likely found in a biography that centers on their relationship, Savage Messiah (1931) by H.S. Ede, whose translation LZ is clearly using. The distinction Gaudier-Brzeska uses between solid, liquid and gas, famously appears in LZ’s 1969 talk “About the Gas Age” (Prep+ 169), although LZ could have found this in numerous sources.

181 Ben Jonson saw Shakespeare looking down on his London from the Hemisphere…: referring to the final lines of Jonson’s famous tribute to Shakespeare, “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare” (1623), partially quoted at 103:
But stay, I see thee in the Hemisphere
Advanced, and made a Constellation there!
Shine forth, thou Starre of Poets, and with rage
Or influence, chide or cheere the drooping Stage;
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn’d like night,
And despaires day, but for thy Volumes light.

181 Fisherman Pilch in Pericles…: referring to Pericles II.i; see quotations at 99 and 397.

181 E. P. translated the Shih Ching…: EP’s translation of the Shih-ching: The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (1954), usually translated as the Book of Songs (or Odes).

181 I see it in / My motion, have it not in my tongue: from Antony and Cleopatra, qtd. 36.

181 ‘What thou lovest well remains…: continued on the next page, from EP, Canto 81.520-521.

182 Ravenna mosaic: see 184 and “A”-12.185.16-22.

182 The evil that men do lives after them…: from Julius Caesar III.ii (from Antony’s oration at Caesar’s funeral).

182 epitaph on Shakespeare’s tombstone…: see note at 309 for the epitaph.

183 A moral philosopher of the nineteenth century…: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Shakespeare, Or, the Poet” from Representative Men (1850): “Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare valuable that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been less, we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how good a dramatist he was, —and he is the best in the world. But it turns out that what he has to say is of that weight as to withdraw some attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasion which gave the saint’s meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial compared with the universality of its application. So it fares with the wise Shakespeare and his book of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of England and Europe; the father of the man in America; he drew the man, and described the day, and what is done in it: he read the hearts of men and women, their probity, and their second thought and wiles; the wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother’s part from the father’s part in the face of the child, or draw the fine demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the laws of repression which make the police of nature: and all the sweets and all the terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice. ’Tis like making a question concerning the paper on which a king’s message is written. […]
Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean and Macready dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey and express. The genius knows them not. The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes.”

183 Drawing, says Jane Harrison…: from Ancient Art and Ritual (1913, 1918); quotations from the same volume appear at 164 and 435: “And last, as already seen, the god, the first work of art, the thing unseen, imagined out of the ritual of the dance, is cast back into the visible world and fixed in space. Can we wonder that a classical writer should say ‘the statues of the craftsmen of old times are the relics of ancient dancing.’ That is just what they are, rites caught and fixed and frozen. ‘Drawing,’ says a modern critic [D.S. MacColl], ‘is at bottom, like all the arts, a kind of gesture, a method of dancing on paper.’ Sculpture, drawing, all the arts save music are imitative; so was the dance from which they sprang. But imitation is not all, or even first. ‘The dance may be mimetic; but the beauty and verve of the performance, not closeness of the imitation impresses; and tame additions of truth will encumber and not convince. The dance must control the pantomime.’ Art, that is, gradually dominates mere ritual.”

183 ‘The music and incense . . . superadded,’ says Lethaby of French Gothic…: W.R. Lethaby (1857-1931), English architect, and early modern advocate of functional architecture, but also influential for promoting historically accurate restoration. LZ quotes from his popular Architecture: An Introduction to the History and Theory of the Art of Building (1945).

184 ‘After all, why should the eye and not the mind be judge…: from Eric Newton, European Painting and Sculpture (1941, but various later editions).

184 Durham Cathedral […] Baths of Diocletian…: the various works of art and architecture that appear on this and the following page reflect the trip to Europe the Zukofskys took in the summer 1957 that is recorded in “4 Other Countries” (CSP 171-198), which directly or indirectly mentions the following: Durham Cathedral (which they visited with Basil Bunting), the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, the Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, San Zeno in Verona, the Duomo in Florence, the Victorian and Albert Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris and the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican City.

184 cisalpine: cis– [L. cis on this side.] A prefix denoting, On this side, as in cisalpine (i.e. on the Roman side) (WD). Catullus was from Verona in northern Italy and thus near the southern side of the Alps.

185 ‘doth not the earth o’flow’: from Titus Andronicus III.i, Titus speaking: “When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o’flow?”; qtd. 182.

185 Karel van Mander’s painting of two Englishmen playing chess: Karel (or Carel) van Mander (1548-1606), Dutch artist whose painting, “Chess Portrait,” dated 1604 and done while he was in England for James I’s coronation, depicts two chess players who have often, if not definitively, been identified as Jonson and Shakespeare. This passage quoted “A”-17.387.20-26; see note.

185 foison plenty, love’s fresh case (Sonnet 108): actually this first phrase is from Shakespeare, The Tempest IV.i (see Bottom 354 and 22.508.15): “Earth’s increase, foison plenty, / Barns and garners never empty.” The latter phrase is from Sonnet 108.

185 Chardin…: in a letter to Lorine Niedecker, LZ mentions his enthusiasm on seeing Chardin’s Still Life with Plums at the Frick Collection, NYC (HRC 25.2).

185 Bach’s manuscript…: during the Zukofskys’ summer 1957 trip to Europe, they bought a facsimile of Bach’s manuscript while in Oxford (HRC 25.4).

185 Kafka of Picasso…: quoted from Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees (1953).

185 Milton […] kills the image of God, as it were in the eye (1644): from John Milton, Areopagitica, A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicence’d Printing: “As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.”

185 In his elegy…: John Milton’s “Lycidas” (1637), from which the following quotations are taken; the final one concerning the “corrupt Clergy” is from the explanatory subtitle.

186 molendianorum, / qui furantur somno / lumen oculorum / Dum Dianae vitrea (Carmina Brana 37): Carmina Burana is a collection of Goliardic poetry, light verse of the 12th and 13th centuries written in Latin by students, wandering clerics and minstrels. LZ quotes from one of the best known, whose title means, “When Diana’s lamp”; the quoted lines are translated by Helen Waddell in Mediaeval Latin Lyrics, where LZ probably found this, as: “A millwheel turning, […], / These steal the light / From eyes weary of sight.”

187 Marvell […] The Definition of Love: qtd. TP 128-129.

190 Launce’s Aristotelian quip ‘stand-under and under-stand is all one’: from The Two Gentlemen of Verona II.5, qtd. 55, 66, 178, 190 and “A”-13.313.13-17.

190 Pascal’s thought…: Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pensées VIII.556: “All appearance indicates neither a total exclusion nor a manifest presence of divinity, but the presence of a God who hides himself. Everything bears this character. Shall he alone who knows his nature know it only to be miserable? Shall he alone who knows it be alone unhappy? He must not see nothing at all, nor must he see sufficient for him to believe he possesses it; but he must see enough to know that he has lost it. For to know of his loss, he must see and not see; and that is exactly the state in which he naturally is. Whatever part he takes, I shall not leave him at rest” (trans. W.F. Trotter).

191 Head: ‘The difficulties as to this word…: from W.W. Skeat, A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (1901).

191 that its genealogy is nobler…: this, like the following quotation, is from James Russell Lowell, “Shakespeare Once More” (1868).

192 “the living tongue resembled that tree…: through to “Williams’ ‘The Botticellian Trees,’” qtd. “A”-17.387.28-31; “Father Huk’s tree / Of Tartary” is mentioned in “Her Face the Book of—Love Delights in—Praises” (CSP 206). WCW’s poem begins: “The alphabet of / the trees // is fading in the / song of the leaves” (Collected Poems I, 348), and LZ included this poem in the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry (Feb. 1931).

192 Pope aged 12 saw Dryden ‘plain’ (as Browning, who missing seeing Shelley, said…: John Dryden died in 1700 when Pope was 12 and first beginning to be introduced to London literary society, including Dryden’s old circle. The Robert Browning (1812-1889) allusion is to “Memorabilia,” whose first stanza is:
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!

192 Twickenham: Alexander Pope built a villa with famous gardens in Twickenham on the outskirts of London.

192 ‘to take delight . . . to take pleasure . . . with theatres and other places…: from Spinoza, the full passage from which these phrases are extracted is at 79; qtd. “A”-12.184.17-34.

192 There cannot be too much merriment, said Spinoza: from Ethics IV, Prop. 42; qtd. 78, “A”-12.184.15 and Prep+ 54.

196 Pope: ‘Yet all along, there is seen no labour…: from Alexander Pope, “Preface to Shakespeare” (1725).

199 ‘I walked abroad on a snowy day…: one of William Blake’s notebook poems entitled “Soft Snow.”

200 ‘naturally’ logical—‘of the symbolism’—to the twentieth century philosopher: referring to Ludwig Wittgenstein; on “‘naturally’ logical” see quotation at 83 from the Tractatus 6.3 and following commentary, and on “of the symbolism” see quotation at 78 from the Tractatus 4.4611.

200 As against Dante’s Verdi, come fogliette pur mo nate and Gonzalo’s With an eye of green in ’it…: for these lines by Dante and Shakespeare’s Gonzalo, as well as discussion of “green,” see 134-135.

200 The tree which moves some to tears of joy…: although not indicated as such, this is directly quoted from Blake’s letter to Rev. Dr. Trusler (23 Aug. 1799).

201 Hearing the mind-forged manacles: from “London” in the Songs of Experience: “in every ban, / The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.”

201 more philosophical than the ‘unphilosophical’ (Smart had said): see quotation from Christopher Smart at 199.

204 Burns […] Till a’ the seas gang dry, my Dear, / And the rocks melt wi’ the sun: qtd. 424.

205 Wordsworth…: from “Descriptive Sketches” (1891/92):
Exulting ’mid the winter of the skies,
Shy as the jealous chamois, Freedom flies,
And grasps by fits her sword, and often eyes;

205 Charles Lamb […] The Old Familiar Faces: this is actually the title of a poem by Lamb.

205 Michael Faraday (1791-1867)…: LZ quotes from the same work for two of the epigraphs used in TP 1, 105.

210 Bernard Shaw […] The Apple Cart, 1930: see 14.351.24-25 where LZ incorporates the phrase, “grazing in a field” (211), from Shaw’s play.

215 which is not image or word, said Spinoza…: from Ethics II, Prop. 49, Note, see quotation at “A”-12.233.5-7.

215 ‘There all the time without you…: from James Joyce, Ulysses, qtd. 213. Stephen Dedalus is echoing the standard prayer, “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen,” which Shakespeare echoes in Sonnet 57: “Nor dare I chide the world without end hour” (line 5).

215 ‘What is that word known to all men?…: from James Joyce, Ulysses, qtd. 214.

215 “endless,” “form of his form”: from James Joyce, Ulysses, qtd. 214.

215 the nothing of Timon (IV,iii; I,I,188) that brings me all things…: the passages referred to from Timon of Athens, as well as others are extensively quoted and echoed in this sentence and throughout the following paragraph:
From IV.iii.24-27:
Timon [digging]: Who seeks for better of thee, sauce his palate
With thy most operant poison! What is here?
Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods,
I am no idle votarist: roots, you clear heavens!
From IV.iii.54-56:
Timon: I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind.
For thy part, I do wish thou wert a dog,
That I might love thee something.
From IV.iii.177-178, 193-197:
Timon: That nature, being sick of man’s unkindness,
Should yet be hungry! [digging]
[…]
—O, a root,—dear thanks!—
Dry up thy marrows, vines, and plough-torn leas;
Whereof ungrateful man, with liquorish draughts
And morsels unctuous, greases his pure mind,
That from it all consideration slips!
From V.i.58-70:
Poet: Sir,
Having often of your open bounty tasted,
Hearing you were retired, your friends fall’n off,
Whose thankless natures—O abhorred spirits!—
Not all the whips of heaven are large enough:
What! to you,
Whose star-like nobleness gave life and influence
To their whole being! I am rapt and cannot cover
The monstrous bulk of this ingratitude
With any size of words.
Timon: Let it go naked, men may see’t the better:
You that are honest, by being what you are,
Make them best seen and known.
From V.i.144-159:
Second Senator: They confess
Toward thee forgetfulness too general, gross:
Which now the public body, which doth seldom
Play the recanter, feeling in itself
A lack of Timon’s aid, hath sense withal
Of its own fail, restraining aid to Timon;
And send forth us, to make their sorrow’d render,
Together with a recompense more fruitful
Than their offence can weigh down by the dram;
Ay, even such heaps and sums of love and wealth
As shall to thee blot out what wrongs were theirs
And write in thee the figures of their love,
Ever to read them thine.
Timon: You witch me in it;
Surprise me to the very brink of tears:
Lend me a fool’s heart and a woman’s eyes, (qtd. 337)
And I’ll beweep these comforts, worthy senators.
From V.i.186-191:
Timon: Why, I was writing of my epitaph;
it will beseen to-morrow: my long sickness
Of health and living now begins to mend,
And nothing brings me all things. Go, live still;
Be Alcibiades your plague, you his,
And last so long enough!
From V.iv.70-81:
Alcibiades [Reads the epitaph]: ‘Here lies a wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft:
Seek not my name: a plague consume you wicked caitiffs left!
Here lie I, Timon; who, alive, all living men did hate:
Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay not here thy gait.’
These well express in thee thy latter spirits:
Though thou abhorr’dst in us our human griefs,
Scorn’dst our brain’s flow and those our droplets which
From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit
Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye
On thy low grave, on faults forgiven. Dead
Is noble Timon: of whose memory
Hereafter more.

216 Heinrich Heine […] ‘Es stehen unbeweglich / Die Sterne in der Höh’…:
For many thousand ages
The steadfast stars above
Have gazed upon each other
With ever mournful love.

They speak a certain language,
So beautiful, so grand,
Which none of the philologians
Could ever understand.

But I have learned it, learned it,
For ever, by the grace
Of studying one grammar,
My heart’s own darling’s face. (trans. James Thomson)

217 On Shakespeare (after saying of his country—’wie eng, wie englisch!)…: from Heine’s “Shakespeare’s Maidens and Women”:
“It takes the heart out of me when I remember that he is an Englishman, and belongs to the most repulsive race which God in His wrath ever created. What a repulsive people, what a cheerless, unrefreshing country! How strait-ruled, hide-bound, home-made; how selfish how angular, how Anglican! [Ger. eng = narrow, but the translator is trying to capture Heine’s pun].” […]
“Shakespeare has in our time often been called an aristocrat. This I would not deny. I would very much rather excuse his political inclinations when I reflect that his foreseeing poet’s eye perceived the dead-leveling Puritan time which were to make an end, with the kingdom, of all enjoyment of life, all poetry, and all bright and cheerful Art.” […]
“Everywhere the winds of his genius rustle round us, his clear eye gleams on us from every significant occurrence, and in great events we often seem to see him nod—nod gently—softly and smiling.” […]
“In this respect he is like the earliest writers of history, who also knew no difference between poetry and history, and so gave us not merely a nomenclature of the things done, or a dusty herbarium of events, but who enlightened truth with song, and in whose song was heard only the voice of truth.” […]
“Only that the ideas are somewhat broader in his mind than in ours: the stage of his dramas is the whole wide world, and that is his unity of place; eternity is the time in which his pieces played, and that is his unity of time; and in keeping with both is the hero of his dramas, who forms the central point, and represents the unity of interest. And humanity is that hero who ever dies and comes to life again; who ever loves and, hates, yet loves the most;…” […]
“But all the glosses and explanations and laborious laudation of commentators was of less practical use as regarded making Shakespeare known to the public than the inspired love with which talented actors produced his dramas, and thereby made them a subject for popular judgment. […] I say character not the works in their fullness, since to this day British actors have only felt or know what is characteristic, not the poetry, and still less the art. […] while Dr. Johnson dissected the Shakespearean characters like dead corpses, […] Garrick on the stage thrilled all the people of England, as he called with thrilling invocation the dead to life, that they might set forth to all their fearful, bloody or gay, and festive work. But Garrick loved the great poet, and as reward for that love he lies buried in Westminster near the pedestal of Shakespeare’s statue, like a faithful dog at the feet of his master” (trans. Charles Godfrey Leland). 

217 ‘. . . only one man has succeeded in putting Paganini’s true physiognomy…: the translated prose passages from Heine are from the Everyman’s Library edition of the Prose and Poetry (1934, 1948), translations by various hands.

219 Chekov […] ‘When I philosophize, I lie terribly’: this quotation is from Chekov’s first, unperformed play, which goes under various titles, but LZ is evidently quoting from the translation of John Cournos, That Worthless Fellow (1930). It is possible LZ picked this line up from a review of Robert Graves in the New York Times for 23 March 1958.

219 Montaigne…: the line LZ gives here is actually the title of a dialogue by Plutarch, which Montaigne quotes in the opening of his “Of the Inequality that Is Among Us.”

219 François de Malherbe…: “Chanson” (Song):
These kings of my life are leaving me,
These eyes, lovely eyes,
So bright that they make pale with envy
Those ev’n of the skies.
Gods, friends of innocence,
What can I have done to earn
All the pain in which this absence
will make me burn?

That wondrous girl is leaving me,
For whom day and night
In spite of all that reason tells me
I burn in love’s light.
Gods, friends of innocence, &c

In what terror of loneliness
Withdrawn from this scene
Shall I give my worriedness
Its liberty to reign.
Gods, friends of innocence, &c

The afflicted in their grief
Can have recourse to tears,
But when my eyes are fountains too,
What hope there remains?
Gods, friends of innocence, &c(trans. Brian Cole)

220 Mathurin Regnier…: from “Stances” (Stanzas):
If your eye ardent with love and light . . .
But, my God! Since it is true, eyes so soft to me,
Why do you not love me?
from “Épitaphe de Regnier” (Epitaph for Regnier):
I lived without thought,
Letting myself go gently
With the good natural law,
And it astonishes me so why
Death dared think of me,
Who never dreamed of it.

220 Jean de La Fontaine…: the first three phrases, one each from the following quoted fables, mean: “Death had reason . . . The monkey had reason . . . / the old man was right.”
from Fables VIII.8: “La Mort et le Mourant” (The Dead and the Dying):
The very moment, when the children of kings
Open their eyes to the light
Is that which sometimes
Closes their eyelids forever . . .
I cry too much; my zeal is indiscrete:
Those most like the dead most dread death.

from Fables IX.3: “Le Singe et le Léopard” (The Monkey and the Leopard):
The monkey has reason. One cannot find in dress
The pleasing diversity that is in the mind:
One always meets pleasing things;
Another in a moment tires of what he sees.

from Fables XI.8: “Le Vieillard et les Trois Jeunes” (The Old Man and the Three Young Ones):
The old man was right: One of the three
Drowned in the port, arriving in America;
Another, searching for grand distinction,
Serving the Republic in the employee of Mars,
An unexpected blow ended his days;
The third fell from a tree
Which he himself would graft.
And mourned by the old man, he carved on their stones
That which I have been recounting.

221 Molière…: from “A Monsieur Le Vayer” (To Mr. Le Vayer): Fr. “Wisdom, believe me, is able to cry herself.”
from L’Avare (The Miser):
I.i.51: Élise. I should have nothing to fear, if everyone could see you with the eyes with which I look on you; . . .
I.ii.6: Cléante. Many things, sister, all contained in one word. I am in love.
Élise. You are in love?
Cléante. Yes, I am in love.
II.ii.48: Harpagon. Can you dare, after this, to appear before me?
Cléante. Can you dare, after this, to show your face to the world . . .
Harpagon. Begone out of my sight, scoundrel! begone out of my sight!
Cléante. Who do you think is the more criminal—he who buys the money that he needs, or he who steals money for which he has no use?
Harpagon. Begone, I say, and do not break my eardrums. [Alone]. I am not so vexed about this adventure; and it will teach me to keep more than ever an eye on his actions.
III.i.28: Brindavoine. You know, Sir, that the front of my doublet is covered with a large oil stain from the lamp.
La Merluche. And I, Sir, I have a large hole in the seat of my breeches, and one can see me, saving your presence . . .
Harpagon. Peace; keep it adroitly to the side of the wall, and always show your front to the world. . . . And you, always hold your hat thus while waiting on the guests.
III.i.188: . . . I have a tender feeling for my horses, so it seems to me it is myself when I see them suffer. . . . and it is, Sir, too cruel to have no pity for one’s neighbour.

222 Jean Racine…: from La Thébaïde ou Les frères ennemis (The Thebans, 1664) III.5: Fr. “Finally I open my eyes, and I have justice.”

222 Voltaire…: for the allusion to Falstaff, see Henry IV Part II, I.ii; qtd. 24. LZ’s source for the translations from the prose is The Portable Voltaire, ed. Ben Ray Redman (1949); the passages from the Philosophical Dictionary are taken from the entries on “Testicles” and “Kissing” respectively (the quotation on Othello is from the latter), translated by H.I. Woolf; the letter to Mme du Deffand is translated by S.G.Tallentyre.
from “A Madame du Châtelet (To Madam du Châtelet):
One dies twice, I see it well:
To stop loving and being loved . . .

from “A Madame Lullin” (To Madam Lullin):
Hey what! You are surprised
That at the end of eighty winters
My muse feeble and quaint
Is still able to hum some verses? . . .

A bird may still be heard
After its season of grand days;
But its voice is no longer tender;
It sings no more of its loves . . .

“I wish in my last farewells,
Said Tibullus to his lover,
To fix my eyes on your eyes,
To squeeze you with my dying hand.”

But when we feel ourselves going,
When the soul recedes from life,
Then have we eyes to see Délie,
And hands to caress her? . . .

Our births, our lives, darling,
Our dying from whence unknown:
Each starts out from nothing:
Where do they go? . . . God knows, my dear.

from (Épitaphe):
Here lies one whose supreme law
Was to live only for oneself.
Passerby, beware following it;
Since one might say of you:
“Here lies one who never had to live.”

224 Stendhal…: LZ’s source is The Private Diaries of Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), ed. & trans. Robert Sage (1954).

230 Gustave Flaubert…: from The Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert, trans. & ed. Francis Steegmuller (1953).

230 Charles Baudelaire…: from “Don Juan aux Enfers” (Don Juan in Hell): Fr. “Gazed back and would not offer one look round.”
from “La Géante” (The Giantess): Fr. “humid mists swimming in her eyes. . . .”
from “Le Balcon” (The Balcony): Fr. “And my eyes in the dark did your eyes meet.”
from “Un Voyage à Cythère” (A Voyage to Cythera): Fr. “The eyes were two holes. . . .”
from “Á une Dame Créole” (To a Creole Lady): Fr. “In that perfumed country caressed by the sun . . . poets, / Whom your great eyes would make more subject than your negroes.”

231 Stéphane Mallarmé…:
from “Le Pitre Châtié” (The Clown Punished):
Eyes, lakes with my simple intoxication to be reborn
other than the actor . . .
renouncing the evil
Hamlet! It is as if in the waves I began
a thousand tombs to disappear into them virgin.

from “Don du poème” (Gift of the Poem):
O nurse, with your daughter and the innocence
of your and her cold feet, welcome a horrid birth:
and, your voice recalling viol and harpsicord . . .

from “L’Après-midi d’un Faune” (Afternoon of a Faun):
Couple, farewell; I go to see the shadow you became.

from “Prose (pour des Esseintes)” (Prose, for Esseintes); see “A”-19.411.3-24 where LZ adapts phrases from this poem, including this stanza:
Yes, in an island that the air loads
with sight and not with visions,
every flower showed itself to be larger
without our discussing it.

from “Feuillet d’Album” (Album Leaf); see “A”-19.410.36-411.3 where LZ adapts phrases from this poem:
It seems to me that this attempt
tried out before a landscape
has something good, when I ended it
to look you in the face.(trans. Anthony Hartley)

231 Tristan Corbière…: from “A Marcelle” (To Marcelle): We’ll see: now sing.
from “CA?” (That?): [“What? . . . / (Shakespeare)” is the epigraph to this poem] “Art does not know me. I do not know Art.”
from “Le Poète Contumace” (The Contumacius Poet): “Nights for a Romeo!—Never break of day.”
from “Guitare” (Guitar): “Seen by nobody.”
from Élizir d’Amor” (Elixir of Love):
Repeating all my roles
One-eyed—and blind too. . . .
Usually all these drolleries
Have a good eye here: . . . […]
Mistress knows me,
Dog among lost dogs:
Abelard is not my master,
Nor Alcibides either?
from “Rapsodie du sourd” (Rhapsody of the Deaf Man):
To the eye. But watch that jealous eye, taking the place
Of the nailed ear! . . . […]
Or perhaps in duck talk, like the clarinet
Of a stuck blindman who is mistaking the stops.
from “Cantique de Pardon de Sainte-Anne” (St. Anne’s Hymn of Forgiveness):
Green old woman with a worn face
Like a stone in the torrent,
Rived by the tears of love,
Dried with tears of blood? . . . […]
—Baton of the blind! . . .
from “Paria” (Pariah):
‘—The human me (ego) is hateful . . .
—I neither love nor hate myself.’

232 Arthur Rimbaud…: from “Being Beauteous,” Les Illuminations: Fr. “The colours proper to life deepen, dance, and detach themselves round the Vision in the making.”
from “Mauvais Sang” (Bad Blood), Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell):
In the morning, I would have such a lost look and such a dead face, that those I met perhaps did not see me at all . . .
I have never belonged to this people; I have never been a Christian . . .
Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am an animal, a Negro. But I am capable of being saved. You, maniacs, wild beasts, misers, are Negroes in disguise. Merchant, you’re a Negro; magistrate, you’re a Negro; general, you’re a Negro; emperor, you old scabby itch, you’re a Negro: you have drunk untaxed liqueur, Satan’s moonshine.—This people is inspired by fever and cancer. . . . The cunningest thing to do it to leave this continent, where madness prowls searching for hostages for these wretches. I am going into the real kingdom of the children of Ham.
Do I know nature yet? Do I know myself?—No more words.
Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge. I see that nature is only a display of kindness. . . .
night revolves in my eyes, under this sun! (trans. Oliver Bernard).

233 Jules Laforgue…: from Moralités legendaries (Moral Legends), “Hamlet, ou Les Suites de la Piété Filiale” (Hamlet, or The Suites of Filial Piety):
‘—Come in, my friends. Sit down and have a cigarette. Which would you like, a Duback or a Bird’s Eye? Make yourselves completely at home. . . .

A heart within whose dreamy gaze
No thought of conquest is at stake!
Art wears me out in so many ways!
To repeat myself is such a headache! . . .
Honeymoon on high,
Descend from the sky.’ . . .

‘As simple and faithless as a simple good-day
I can’t kick about forever in this anonymous state! . . . O Hamlet, Hamlet! If the world knew! Women would come to lay their mournful heads on your divine heart, as once they did on the body of Adonis—with a few centuries of civilization added. . . . And the age has really nothing whatever to do with it. I have five senses which attach me to life; but this sixth sense, this sense of the Infinite!—I am still young; and as long as my health lasts, what is there to worry about? Ah, but Liberty! Liberty! Yes, I will go away, I will give up my name and live among the good common people. I will find a wife who will be mine for ever and a day, and for every day. That would certainly prove, of all my ideas, the most Hamletic. But tonight I must objectify myself, I must act. Onward, Hamlet, onward, like Nature, over the graves!
‘. . . startled and candid gray-blue eyes, while often ice-cold, are sometimes heated by insomnia . . . Hamlet . . . like a Camaldolese monk . . .
‘—One can see that Your Lordship is not of these parts. The late king (who incidently also died of stroke . . .
‘—But Prince Hamlet surely is the son of the king’s wife, Gerutha, is he not?
‘—Far from it! Your Lordship has probably heard of the late fool, the incomparable Yorick. . . .
‘. . . Well, he and Prince Hamlet had the same mother…the most hellishly beautiful gypsy anyone, by your leave, has ever seen. . . . she died of the Caesarean that had to be performed.
‘—Ah, that fellow Hamlet was not so easily drawn into this low world them! . . .
‘. . . Alas, poor Yorick! . . . No one will ever know. There’s nothing now, not even the wraith of the sleepwalker. Common sense leaves no trace. Once there was a tongue in this head and it would burr: “Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies! Good night, good night!” It would sing, too; it would often sing smutty songs. . . . I understand everything, I worship everything, and I want to fertilize everything. That is why, as I have expressed it in this limping distich carved above my bed:
My rare faculty of assimilation
goes counter to the course of my vocation. . . .
‘—come, come! Let’s be serious now! . . . if the idea of death remains so remote to me, it must be because I am overflowing with life, because life has me in its grip and wants something form me. So, Life, let the two of us have it out! . . . dirty little thing, fished up by the dam! After she’d soaked herself so aimlessly in my library, how else could she end? Oh, my God! Now I can appreciate those big blue eyes of hers! Poor young lady! . . . Poor Ophelia, poor dear; she was my childhood sweetheart. And I loved her! That’s obvious, self-evident! I couldn’t ask anything better than to be regenerated by her smile. But Art is so great and life is so short! And nothing is feasible.’ . . .
‘soil them with a priori banalities. Pedant!! Pedicurist:’ . . .
‘she was so lovely that in the Golden Age of Greece men would have built altars to do her honor.
And so order was restored.
One Hamlet less does not mean the end of the human race. Of that you may be sure.’
(trans. William Jay Smith)

from “L’Hiver qui vient” (Approaching Winter):
I cannot lose this tone . . .
It is the season . . . farewell grape harvest! . . .
. . . all the baskets
All the Watteau-padded baskets under the chestnut tree,
It is the cough in the dormitories as boarding school returns,
It is the tea without a hearth,
The pulmonary consumption dismays the neighborhood,
And all the misery of the great centers.

from “Dimanches“(Sundays):
(My self, it is Galathea blinding Pygmalion!
Impossible to modify this situation.)

234 Francis Jammes…: from Tales, translated by Gladys Edgerton.

234 Alfred Jarry…: Ubu Roi (King Ubu) is in part a parodic recasting of Shakespeare’s Macbeth with allusions to Hamlet and King Lear as well. LZ mentions reading this play in a 22 March 1932 letter to Rakosi (HRC 20.12). Jarry’s dedication is written in faux archaic French:
(Dedication)
‘Then Father Ubu shakes
his peare, who
was afterwards yclept
by the Englishe
Shakespeare, and you have
from him in his own hand
manie lovely tragedies—
under this name.’

V.iv [the concluding passage of the play]
The bridge of a close-hauled schooner on the Baltic. . . .
Father Ubu.—. . . Get ready! Drop anchor, tack with the wind, tack against the wind. Run up the sails, run down the sails, tiller up, tiller down, tiller to the side. You see, everything’s going fine. Come broadside to the waves now and everything will be perfect. . . . Oh, what a deluge! . . .
Pile, drenched.—But watch out for Satan, his pomps and pumps.
Father Ubu.—Sir boy, get us something to drink (They all sit down to drink.)
Mother Ubu.—What a pleasure it will be to see our sweet France again, our old friend and our castle of Mondragon!
Father Ubu.—We’ll be there soon. At the moment we’ve passed below the castle of Elsinore.
Pile.—I feel cheerful at the thought of seeing my dear Spain again.
Cotice.—Yes, and we’ll amaze our countrymen with the stories of our wonderful adventures.
Father Ubu.—Oh, certainly! And I’m going to get myself appointed Minister of Finances in Paris.
Mother Ubu.—Oh, that’s right! Oops, what a bump that was!
Cotice.—That’s nothing, we’re just doubling the point of Elsinore.
Pile.—And now our noble ship plows at full speed through the somber waves of the North Sea.
Father Ubu.—A fierce and inhospitable sea, which bathes the shores of the land called Germany, so named because the inhabitants of this land are all cousins-german.
Mother Ubu.—That’s what I call true learning. They say that this country is very beautiful.
Father Ubu.—Ah! Gentlemen! Beautiful as it may be, it cannot compare with Poland. For if there were no Poland, there would be no Poles!
CURTAIN(trans. Michael Benedikt & George E. Wellwarth)

235 Guillaume Apollinaire…: all quotations previously appeared in The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire (WGA); the following translations are by Sasha Watson:
from Calligrammes (1918), “C’est Lou Qu’on la Nommait” (They Called Her Lou): “Pitilessly chaste and severe of eye” (WGA 12/13).
from “La Victoire” (Victory): “Do you know this joy of seeing new things.”
from “Sur les Prophéties” (On Prophecies): “For I do not believe but I look and when I can I listen” (WGA 38/39).
from Alcools (1913), “Le Voyageur” (The Traveler): “Life is as variable as Euripe” (WGA 48/49).
from Anecdotiques (1926): “After the recording, they replayed them on the machine and I did not recognize my voice at all” (WGA 102-103)
from Calligrammes (1918), “Toujours” (Always):
“Who are the great forgettors
Who can make us forget this or that part of the world
Where is that Christopher Columbus to whom we will owe the forgetting of a continent” (WGA 140/141)
from “La Jolie Rouse”(The Pretty Redhead): “Mouth that is order itself” (WGA 136/137).
from Il y a (1925): “It is in our eyes that the present happens and therefore our sensitivity” (WGA 178-179).
from Calligrammes (1918), “Souvenirs” (Memories):
“Open-mouthed on a harmonium
It was a voice made up of eyes” (WGA 182/183)
from Les Peintres Cubistes: Méditations Esthétiques (1913)): “Thus the literature that so few painters have done without disappears—but not poetry” (WGA 182/183).

236 Les Mamelles de Tirésias: Apollinaire’s “Drame surréaliste,” The Breasts of Tiresias, first performed in 1917. This is the first use of the term “surrealist,” before it became an -ism. LZ quotes extensively form the preface and prologue in The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire (62-67).

236 Jean Genet…: all the quotations from Genet are from the Grove edition of The Maids and Deathwatch: Two Plays (1961), translated by Bernard Frechtman with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre (included in the appendix to Saint Genet). The quotation from Our Lady of the Flowers is in Sartre’s introduction, while the quotation from The Thief’s Journal is from Frechtman’s biographical note. The word “whirligig” is also taken from Sartre who (in translation) uses the word repeatedly in his introduction, initially to introduce the quotation from Our Lady of the Flowers: “Let us indicate at once a first whirligig” (8), which leads into a discussion of the relation between Genet’s homosexuality and artifice.

236 Boy . . . And all those swearings keep as true…: from Twelfth Night V.i; qtd. 137, 230.

238 John JamesAudubon […] ‘the falling of their dung…: from Audubon’s America: The Narratives and Experiences of John James Audubon, edited by Donald Culross Peattie (1940), a selection of his journals; qtd. Ferdinand (CF 239).

238 Ralph WaldoEmerson…‘Time and space are but physiological…: “Whence then this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and majesty of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. There is no time to it. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.”

242 τό καλον: Gk. the beautiful.

247 ‘that will not see / Because he does not feel . . .’: from King Lear IV.i; qtd. 312.

247 et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata: from Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BC), Rerum rusticarum (On Agriculture); Thoreau loosely translates following.

251 ‘…let their eyes be discouraged!…: LZ quoted Walt Whitman’s “Respondez” complete at the end of the 5 Statements for Poetry (1958) version of “Poetry / For My Son When He Can Read” (Prep+ 218-221).

252 ‘Eye to pierce…and sweep the world!…: from section 13 of the long “By Blue Ontario Shore.” LZ quotes from the same section in a number of places: “A”-8.65.30-66.1, 8.81.18 and Prep+ 142.

252 ‘I see Teheran . . .’: this phrase is taken from one of Whitman’s very long catalog poems, and its specific significance for LZ is no doubt related to the fact that Basil Bunting was based in Iran and Iraq throughout much of the 1940s until 1952, and for most of the period from 1947 to 1952 was specifically based in Teheran, working first in the British Embassy and then as a reporter for The Times (London). Bunting wrote often detailed letters to LZ about his life in the Middle East, and so acted as LZ’s eyes in Persia, as well as into Persian poetry (see 120-121).

252 looks in my face?…: a different quotation from the same Whitman poem is in Prep+ 142.

254 ‘. . . Russia where, in 1901…: some phrases of this paragraph from Henry Adams were used in “A”-8.82.11f.

255 The heathen philosopher advising that ‘the poet should say very little in propria persona…: from Aristotle, Poetics 24 (1460a): “Homer, admirable as he is in every other respect, especially so in this, that he alone among epic poets is not unaware of the part to be played by the poet himself in the poem. The poet should say very little in propria persona [L. in one’s own person], as he is no imitator when doing that. Whereas the other poets are perpetually coming forward in person, and say but little, and that only here and there, as imitators, Homer after a brief preface brings in forthwith a man, a woman, or some other Character—no one of them characterless, but each with distinctive characteristics.”
Poetics 2 (1448a): “The objects the imitator represents are actions, with agents who are necessarily either good men or bad—the diversities of human character being nearly always derivative from this primary distinction, since the line between virtue and vice is one dividing the whole of mankind” (trans. Ingram Bywater).
Both remarks qtd. in “Other Comments” appended to the original version of “A Statement for Poetry 1950” (Prep+ 224).

257 Peirce…: the various quotations from the papers of Charles Sanders Peirce on this and the following two pages all are taken from W.B. Gallie, Peirce and Pragmatism (Penguin, 1952), which selects passages from throughout Peirce’s works with commentary.

258 [The seaman’s whistle…: from Pericles, qtd. 380.

262 —they had eyes . . / —and saw…: through “and not touch her flesh?” from WCW, Paterson V (Paterson 224, 230). The first three lines LZ quotes are significantly truncated; WCW’s original reads: “—they had eyes for visions / in those days—and saw, / saw with their proper eyes […]”; qtd. “A”-17.387.33-388.2. The following quotations from Villon, Shakespeare and Chaucer appear to be LZ’s correlative quotations as evidence for WCW’s thesis in this final section of Paterson V that an earlier age, particularly exemplified by Peter Brueghel, looked on the world with clarity and intensity. In any case, Villon, Chaucer and Shakespeare are all poets of whom WCW thought highly.

262 ‘Grand entr’oeil, et regard joly…: from François Villon, Le Testament, “Les regrets de la belle Hëaulmiere” (The Lament of the Belle Heaulmiere), line 495: Fr. “wide spaced eyes and pretty glance”; qtd. A”-17.388.3.

262 Corps feminine, qui tant est tendre, / Poly, souef, si precieulx: from Villon, “Le Testament,” lines 325-326: Fr. “Woman’s body, that is so tender, / smooth, soft and precious…”; qtd. 335.

262 Tous mes cinq sens, yeulx, oreilles et bouche, / Le nez, et vous, le sensitif, aussi: from Villon, “Louenge a la Court de Parlement” (Panegyric to the Court of Parliament), lines 1-2; Fr. “All my five senses, eyes, ears and mouth, / Nose, and you, touch as well.”

262 Music to hear . . . / Mark how one string…: from Shakespeare, Sonnet 8:
Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy:
Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,
Or else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?
If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.
Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;
Resembling sire and child and happy mother,
Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing:
Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,
Sings this to thee: “Thou single wilt prove none.”

262 How oft, when thou, my music, music play’st…: from Shakespeare, Sonnet 128; qtd. in full at 438.

262 Madamé, ye ben of al beauté shryne…: from Chaucer, “To Rosemunde”:
Madame, ye ben of al beaute shryne
As fer as cercled is the mapamounde,
For as the cristal glorious ye shyne,
And lyke ruby ben your chekes rounde.
Therwith ye ben so mery and so jocounde
That at a revel whan that I see you daunce,
It is an oynement unto my wounde,
Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce.

263 Savour no more than thee bihove shal…: from Chaucer, “Trouthe: Balade de Bon Conseyl”:
Flee fro the prees, and dwelle with sothfastnesse,
Suffyce unto thy good, though hit be smal;
For hord hath hate, and climbing tikelnesse,
Prees hath envye, and wele blent overal;
Savour no more than thee bihove shal;
Werk wel thy-self, that other folk canst rede;
And trouthe shal delivere, hit is no drede.

264 (“Mi perdonato . . . / the sweets of sweet philosophy…: from The Taming of the Shrew, qtd. 69.

264 (‘Love’s reason’s…: from Cymbeline, qtd. 37, 78, 88, 153, 339.

265 ‘That song / is the kiss…: all of these final quotations of the “Continents” section are from LZ’s poetry. The first three as follows:
“That song / is the kiss” from “4 Other Countries” (CSP 180-181); qtd. “A”-17.386.
“Hello, little leaves” from Some Time (CSP 114),
“See: / My nose feels better in the air” from “Light 8” in Some Time (CSP 118). “See” = Celia, who apparently made this remark (Booth 119).
The remaining quotations are from the Catullus translations LZ was working on at the time with CZ; all of these excerpts were done between 1961-1963, and were added to Bottom at the page proof stage in Spring 1963, subsequent to when LZ indicated that the book was finished in May 1960 (Bottom was published Feb. 1964). The following locates the Catullus quotations in CSP:
“Not that I look to my eyes more than your love” (#14, l.1; CSP 252)
“What blossom’s in sight sacred as nice obscurities…” (#62, ll.39, 41; CSP 281)
“. . . whose look’s to stay, posit home, path, tree, real or?” (#63, l.55; CSP 284)
“. . . by marring and vast sea visions lachrymose mantling o cool eyes…” (#63, ll.48-49; CSP 283)
“Human all key mog knee this pecks it loom in a moon the…” (#66, ll.1-4, 7-8; CSP 297)
“Hesper, a quick wile o—look you can die for joy—ignites?” (#62, l.20; CSP 280)

 

Definition

266 Lamech: descendant of Cain and therefore accursed. He was the father of Jabal, Jubal, and Tubal-cain. See Genesis 4:23-24, which includes the so-called Song of the Sword: “And Lamech said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt. If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.”

266 “Life is like a fugue…” from Samuel Butler (1835-1902), The Way of All Flesh; qtd. 210, see “A”-15.374.12.

266 To shallow rivers, to those falls: from The Merry Wives of Windsor III.i; qtd. 390.

267 Longinus […] Art is only perfect when it looks like nature…: from On the Sublime 22.1, trans. F. Hamilton Fyfe (Loeb Classical Library).

267 Lucian you like has his Dionysus say…: from Lucian of Samosata (c.125-c.180), a lecture on “Dionysus,” trans. A.M. Harmon, K. Kilburn & M.D. Macleod (Loeb Classical Library).

267 which conjecture assumes to be a horse rubbed down by other hands than Shakespeare’s…: see 14.351.25-26 where LZ incorporates the phrase, “rubbed down by other hands.”

268 my horse’s heels: from 1 Henry VI, qtd. “A”-14.351.27.

270 Between two horses: from 1 Henry VI, qtd. “A”-14.351.27-28.

278 ‘He sees his love: from Venus and Adonis, qtd. “A”-14.351.28-29.

278 Lewis Theobald…: see note at 153.

278 ‘. . . such finer nerves and vessels…: from Alexander Pope, note on “The Design” of An Essay on Man: “The science of human nature is, like all other sciences, reduced to a few clear points: there are not many certain truths in this world. It is therefore in the anatomy of the mind as in that of the body; more good will accrue to mankind by attending to the large, open, and perceptible parts, than by studying too much such finer nerves and vessels, the conformations and uses of which will for ever escape our observation. The disputes are all upon these last, and, I will venture to say, they have less sharpened the wits than the hearts of men against each other, and have diminished the practice, more than advanced the theory, of morality. If I could flatter myself that this essay has any merit, it is in steering betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite, in passing over terms utterly unintelligible, and in forming a temperate yet not inconsistent, and a short yet not imperfect system of ethics.”

278 ‘no labour . . . no preparation…: from Alexander Pope, “Preface to Shakespeare”: “The Power over our Passions was never possess’d in a more eminent degree or display’s in so different instances. Yet all along there is seen no labour, no pains to raise them; no preparation to guide our guess to the effect or be perceiv’d to lead toward it: but the heart swells, and the tears burst out, just at the proper places. We are surpriz’d, the moment we weep; and yet upon reflection find the passion so just that we shou’d be surpriz’d if we had not wept, and wept at that very moment.”

279 The first heir of Shakespeare’s ‘invention’…: in his dedication to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare famously says of “Venus and Adonis,” “But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear [plough] so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest.” Dryden later echoed this phrase with reference to Pericles.

279 Second Quarto of Hamlet: see note at 46.

279 ‘Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight…: from Hamlet, qtd. 47 and “A”-12.127.9-12.

279 Theobald’s Shakespeare Restored…: see note at 153.

279 ‘This Tibbald, or Theobald…: from Alexander Pope, the notes to The Dunciad; LZ is evidently quoting from the final four book version of1743:
“‘Tibbald:’ this Tibbald, or Theobald, published an edition of Shakspeare, of which he was so proud himself as to say, in one of Mist’s journals, June 8, ‘That to expose any errors in it was impracticable.’ And in another, April 27, ‘That whatever care might for the future be taken by any other editor, he would still give above five hundred emendations, that shall escape them all.’—P.”
“‘Wish’d he had blotted:’ it was a ridiculous praise which the players gave to Shakespeare, ‘that he never blotted a line.’ Ben Jonson honestly wished he had blotted a thousand; and Shakespeare would certainly have wished the same, if he had lived to see those alterations in his works, which, not the actors only (and especially the daring hero of this poem) have made on the stage, but the presumptuous critics of our days in their editions—P.”

282 Hiems and Ver, as they are: And cuckoo-buds. . .: Hiems and Ver are L. meaning Winter and Spring respectively. At the end of Love’s Labor’s Lost, two characters given these designations are brought in to perform a singing dialogue on the cuckoo (spring) and the owl (owl); “And cuckoo-buds…” is from the spring song, “When daisies pied and violets blue,” which is followed by “When icicles hang by the wall” (qtd. 18, 282, 406, 408).

282 Boucher textile prints: François Boucher (1703-1770), French Rococo painter, also very active in tapestry and other applied arts designs.

286 ‘A song . . . / Tell me where is fancy bred…: from The Merchant of Venice, qtd. 60 (with commentary) and mentioned 429.

287 ‘. . . if you could see their minds they do not err…: from Spinoza, qtd. “A”-12.235.7-9 and Prep+ 56, the chicken incident appears in “A”-9.108.25-26.

289 It is a world to see: from Much Ado About Nothing, qtd. 441.

290 and smile upon his fingers’ ends: from Henry V, qtd. “A”-21.448.36-37.

293 The Passionate Pilgrim and Sonnets …: LZ succinctly summarizes the publication history of this small miscellany and its contents.

293 Deloney: Thomas Deloney (1543-1600) English fiction and ballad writer. The remark on Deloney’s “halting pen” is from Sidney Lee’s edition of Pericles and Poems, see note at 294.

293 since 1905…: see note at 294.

293 343 years after Shakespeare’s death: i.e. 1959, Shakespeare died 1616.

294 1599 facsimile (edited by Sidney Lee, Oxford 1905): in the original printing of Bottom, LZ acknowledges that he was given Lee’s facsimile edition by Mark Van Doren.

297 ‘the eye of the mind’: from Spinoza, qtd. 26, 94, 325 and “A”-12.130.19.

299 ‘But that I know love is begun by time…: from Hamlet, qtd. 172 and “A”-12.138.21.

299 Coleridge says…: from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table-Talk (1823-1834).

301 Ha! have you eyes? / You cannot call it love…: from Hamlet, qtd. “A”-12.132.2-3.

302 If it be now, / ‘tis not to com; if it be not to come, it will be now; / if it be not now, yet it will come: from Hamlet, qtd. 46, 106, 358, “A”-18.406.20-22 and Prep+ 46.

302 the readiness is all: from Hamlet, qtd. 77, 152, 358 and “A”-23.554.6.

302 . . . Let be: from Hamlet, qtd. 106, 152, 302; “A”-18.397.27 and “A”-23.554.5.

305 Henry Adams, after remarking…: from Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres, Chap. 11.

307 ‘. . . it is not enough . . . to define virtue generically as a disposition…: from Aristotle, the part concerning the “excellence in the eye” qtd. 59 and referred to at 105; here LZ uses the Loeb Classical Library translation of H. Rackham, although elsewhere he uses the standard Oxford translations as is the case at 59.

309 the humility of Job…: from Job 42:5.

309 Teiresias […] ‘that which I tell you is true’: from Odyssey, Bk. XI, Teiresias prophesizes Odysseus’ future; translation by W.D.H. Rouse.

309 ‘Confused ideas follow from the same necessity…: from Spinoza, Ethics II, Prop 36.

309 Shakespeare’s epitaph: on Shakespeare’s tombstone in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-on-Avon:
Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear,
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
But cursed be he that moves my bones.

310 damnable iteration.…: from Henry IV, Part 1, qtd. 15 and “A”-8.57.22.

311 in pure kindness to his horse: from King Lear, qtd. “A”-14.351.29-30.

312 Who loses and who wins; who’s in and who’s out…: from King Lear, qtd. “A”-13.293.16, Prep+ 22and TP 141.

313 Turn’d wild in nature: from Macbeth, qtd. “A”-14.351.30-352.1.

318 Thou hast seen these signs, . . . / black vesper’s pageants […] even with a thought / The rack dislimes: from Antony and Cleopatra, qtd. 136 and latter phrases at “A”-14.351.21-23.

319 giues heauen countlesse eyes to view mens actes: from Pericles, qtd. “A”-21.457.4-5.

319 this long’s the text: from Pericles, qtd. 325, 327.

320 Your facsimile…: see note at 294. In the following pages, LZ discusses in some detail the complicated arguments concerning the text of Pericles, considered perhaps the most corrupt of all Shakespeare’s texts and effectively points out the high degree of speculative wishful thinking that invariably permeates the scholarly efforts at reconstructing the “original”; all modern editions of the play are such reconstructions.

322 Rowe, Steevens, Staunton, Tyrwhitt, Singer, Dyce, Farmer, Delius, etc.: along with Theobald and Malone already mentioned, this lists most of the major pre-20th century editors of Shakespeare’s works. Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718) produced the first attempt at a scholarly edition in 1709; George Steevens (1736-1800), produced an edition of the complete works with Samuel Johnson in 1773 (mostly the work of Steevens); Howard Staunton (1810-1874) edition of 1860; Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730-1786), critical work on Shakespeare 1766; Samuel Weller Singer (1783-1858) edition of 1826; Nikolaus Delius (1813-1888) scholarly edition of 1854-1861; Alexander Dyce (1798-1869) edition of 1857.

322 Ben Jonson, who berated Pericles…: Jonson’s comedy, The New Inn, first performed in 1629 was a resounding failure, and when he printed the play two years later he appended an “Ode to Himself upon the Censure of His ‘New Inn,’” which includes a grumpy reference to Pericles qtd at 165.

324 footnote in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria…: with good reason Coleridge was worried that he might be accused of plagiarizing Schlegel, who in fact did significantly influence Coleridge’s arguments about Shakespeare. August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845) produced a celebrated German translation of Shakespeare, completed by Ludwig Tieck.

325 ‘this long’s the text’: qtd. 319, 327.

325 the eyes of the mind, which philosophy speaks of […] are proofs: echoing Spinoza, qtd. 26, 94, 297 and “A”-12.130.19.

325 ‘. . . mistaking the conditions of a thing for its cause…: from Chap. VII of the Biographia Literaria, where Coleridge is critiquing Hartley’s philosophy.

326 ‘Have we not seen it?’ or ‘solidity of specification’—as Henry James urges…: from “The Art of Fiction” (1884):
“The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience, and experience only,’ I should feel that this was a rather tantalising monition if I were not careful immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!’
I am far from intending by this to minimise the importance of exactness—of truth of detail. One can speak best from one’s own taste, and I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel—the merit on which all its other merits (including that conscious moral purpose of which Mr. Besant speaks) helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there, they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life. The cultivation of this success, the study of this exquisite process, form, to my taste, the beginning and the end of the art of the novelist.”

326 ‘Let us cast away nothing, for we may live to have need of such a verse. We see it, we see it’: from Troilus and Cressida IV.iv, qtd. 114, 303.

326 ‘For every man has business and desire…: from Hamlet I.v, qtd. 22.

326 nature (in this case the text) herself discovers, as Aristotle said…: from Aristotle, Poetics IV (1449a); speaking of the development of drama: “Once dialogue had come in, Nature herself discovered the appropriate measure. For the iambic is, of all measures, the most colloquial: we see it in the fact that conversational speech runs into iambic lines more frequently than into any other kind of verse; rarely into hexameters, and only when we drop the colloquial intonation” (trans. S.H. Butcher).

326 Bottom’s ‘odious savours sweet’: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, qtd. 58 and “A”-12.163.7.

327 ‘this long’s the text’: from Pericles, qtd. 319, 325.

327 ‘the lady shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt for’t’: from Hamlet, qtd. 19, 145, 333, “A”-12.163.4-5 and Prep+ 224.

328 Tho everyone […] as Aristotle said, know what a song is…: from Aristotle, Poetics VI (1449b): “…as for ‘Song,’ it is a term whose sense every one understands” (trans. S.H. Butcher). See 389.

328 love lost in the ‘music of the spheres,’ even ‘unheard’…: referring to Pericles V.i; for other mentions of Pericles and the music of the spheres, see 88, 423 and 428.

329 ‘Of a cronique in daiés gon…: from John Gower (c.1330-1408), Confessio Amantis Part 1, lines 271-280.

330 Et bonum quo antiquius eo melius: L. “and the more ancient a good thing, the better”; from Pericles, the opening prologue spoken by Gower, qtd. 145, “A”-13.288.32.

333 the blank verse shall halt for the prosodist…: cf. Hamlet II.ii: “. . . the lady shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt for ’t,” qtd. 19, 145, 327, “A”-12.163.4-5 and Prep+ 224.

334 Apollonius of Tyre: the primary model for Shakespeare’s Pericles and his wandering is the romance of Apollonius of Tyre; although the Greek original is lost, it survived in both Latin and Old English versions, and adapted by John Gower in Confessio Amantis, where Shakespeare found it.

334 ‘He who wishes to revenge injuries…: from Spinoza, see related remarks from Spinoza at “A”-11.124.19 and “A”-12.233.26-234.1.

334 Mytilene, the Lesbos where Aristotle…: Mytilene, where parts of Pericles are set, is the main city of Lesbos the Greek island where Aristotle spent some of his earlier years and carried out many of his botanical and zoological studies; mentioned at 40.

334 Sonnets of 1609: the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets was the 1609 Quarto volume published by Thomas Thorpe and included all the sonnets plus “A Lover’s Complaint.”

335 nearer Aristotle’s kind…: referring to a favorite passage from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, qtd. Bottom 61; see 12.237.25 and “4 Other Countries” (CSP 177).

335 Lucretius’ riddling…: in De Natura Rerum III, Lucretius considers at some length the implausibilities of arguments for the immortality of the soul separate from the body.

335 Villon’s hurt joke—‘Corps feminine…: from Villon, “Le Testament,” lines 325-328: Fr. “Woman’s body . . . so precious, Do these ills await you too? Yes, unless you go alive to heaven” (trans. Anthony Bonner); qtd. 262.

335 W. H. or H. W….: the first 1609 edition of the Sonnets had the dedication: “To the onlie begetter of / These insuing sonnets / Mr. W.H. all happinesse / And that eternitie / Promised by / Our ever-living poet / Wisheth / The well-wishing / Adventurer in / Setting / Forth”—which has provoked endless speculation on W.H.’s identity both in and outside the sonnets. A leading candidate has been Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southhampton, a patron of the young Shakespeare.

336 Capell’s emendation: Edward Capell (1713-1781), produced a major edition of Shakespeare’s Works in 1768, which he followed up with extensive detailed notes and commentary.

337 It seems to me now there are eight..: these eight are reproduced in the section “Sonnets” from the Quarto of 1609 (436-439).

337 Rossetti’s translations…: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), The Early Italian Poets (1861; essentially the same volume later published as Dante and His Circle, 1874), an important collection of translations from Dante’s non-Comedia poetry as well as many other Italian poets of the period.

341 ‘Our children’s children / Shall see this’: from Henry VIII, qtd. 386 and “A”-12.254.18-20.

341 The Shakespeare Apocrypha: ed. by C.F. Tucker Brooke, LZ owned a copy of this volume that includes 14 plays ascribed to Shakespeare, of which Shakespeare is generally considered only to have had a hand in The Two Noble Kinsmen and Sir Thomas More.

Ember eves

342 Title: as indicated, from Shakespeare, Pericles, opening prologue spoken by Gower; see quotation at very end of this section.

342 ‘. . . the flame . . . rises from a burning coal or candle…: this quotation from the Zohar taken from Ernst Müller, History of Jewish Mysticism, trans. Maurice Simon (Paidon Press, 1946).

343 Georges de la Tour, 1593-1652 […] St. Sebastian mourned by St. Irene and her ladies: influenced by Caravaggio, La Tour is best known for paintings of night scenes lit by a single candle or oblique light source. In a 24 Oct. 1949 letter to Lorine Niedecker, LZ enthuses over a La Tour painting, The Education of the Virgin, seen in the Frick Collection, NYC, remarking that it was the first time he ever heard of this painter (HRC 25.2).

343 ‘The Flame o’th’Taper’: from Cymbeline II.ii, qtd. 338.

343 ‘But looke, the Morne in Russet mantle clad’: from Hamlet I.i.

343 ‘I life would wish, and that I might / Waste it for you, like Taper light’: from Pericles I.Gower’s Prologue, qtd. 145.

345 In discriminative laboratories where stands are implicitly made for generalization, the rout of the senses…: “stands” and “rout of the senses” echo the key Aristotle passage from Posterior Analytics II.19, qtd. 40; see also 97.

345 the Philosopher that the roots of plants…: Aristotle, De Anima II.4 and IV.2; see quotations at 62 and 338, also “A”-13.270.24.

345 Lissajour figures: or curves, are patterns that trace sound or radio frequencies that can be seen in an oscilloscope. The oscillating pattern on the screens of old sci-fi movies would be an example.

346 cyclotrons, atomic piles: a cyclotron is an apparatus for imparting high speeds to electrified particles by electromagnetic and electrostatic means, used esp. for bombarding the nuclei of atoms to produce transmutations and artificial radioactivity. An atomic pile is an arrangement of fissionable material, with a moderator (as carbon or heavy water, for slowing down neutrons) and regulating devices, designed for producing and controlling a chain reaction, as for making plutonium from uranium by the action of neutrons (WD).

Forgotten

348 Edward Dahlberg (1900-1977), irascible U.S. novelist and essayist, who was a colleague and friend of LZ when he taught at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn 1948-1950. Dahlberg rarely missed an opportunity to complain about his own neglect, and the period when he knew LZ coincided with the nadir of the latter’s own public profile. Dahlberg helped LZ in a number of ways, including the publication of a number of significant items: the British edition of A Test of Poetry in 1952 through his friend Herbert Read and the Preface and Part One of Bottom in New Directions 14 (1953). Dahlberg also gave him a number of books including the Selected Writings of Paracelsus, which LZ uses extensively in “A”-12, and Hesiod: The Poems and Fragments trans. A.W. Mair, used for “A”-13.7-16. This section of Bottom was LZ’s tribute to Dahlberg’s support, and of course The Two Noble Kinsmen is centrally concerned with questions of friendship and loyalty. This tribute may in part be a response to a poem Dahlberg wrote to LZ and published in Poetry 78.5 (Aug. 1951), “For Louis Zukofsky,” which begins: 
Homage to the plain and the obscure
Whose soul is small corn of barley
Upon which the slow cattle feed;
Homage to the man
Who is the reed Marduk gave to honest man
To write on clay—parched
Where the tamarisk grows.[…]

348 The walker in the Lyceum—for whom God was a great distance—spoke, ‘love, and that must be towards one person’: Aristotle whose philosophical school was at the Lyceum or gymnasium of Athens, where he supposedly philosophized while walking, thus the school of Aristotle was known as the Peripatetics. LZ refers to two passages on friendship from the Nicomachean Ethics:
VIII.7 (1159a): “But it is clear also in the case of kings; for with them, too, men who are much their inferiors do not expect to be friends; nor do men of no account expect to be friends with the best or wisest men. In such cases it is not possible to define exactly up to what point friends can remain friends; for much can be taken away and friendship remain, but when one party is removed to a great distance, as Godis, the possibility of friendship ceases.”
IX.10 (1171a): “Presumably, then, it is well not to seek to have as many friends as possible, but as many as are enough for the purpose of living together; for it would seem actually impossible to be a great friend to many people. This is why one cannot love several people; love is ideally a sort of excess of friendship, and that can onlybe felt towards one person; therefore great friendship too can only be felt towards a few people” (trans. W.D. Ross). See 443 and “A”-12.237.16-17.

348 Lord Acton: John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902), English historian who famously made the remark that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

348 Edward Dahlberg’s insistence (that the first part of this work Bottom: on Shakespeare be published): in a letter to Isabella Gardner, Dahlberg says he was responsible for persuading James Laughlin to publish Part One of Bottom in New Directions 14 (1953); see Epitaphs of Our Times: The Letters of Edward Dahlberg (NY: George Braziller, 1967): 213.

Greeks

352 Homer…: unless otherwise specified, the translations of Homer are from the Loeb Classical Library editions by A.T. Murray. See note at the head of “Iliad” section.

352 Iliad III.159-160: “But even so, for all that she is such an one, let her depart upon the ships, neither be left here to be a bane to us and to our children after us” (trans. A.T. Murray). LZ juxtaposes the same passage from Troilus and Cressida and the Iliad (as translated by Pope) in TP 47.

352 σύν τε δὔἐρχομένα / Iliad X.225: sun te du’ erchomenô, Gk. “When two go together.”

352 Iliad XII.437-441, 463-471 (see Arise 11): “[…] until Zeus vouchsafed the glory of victory to Hector, son of Priam, that was first to leap within the wall of the Achaeans he uttered a piercing shout, calling aloud to the Trojans: Rouse you horse-taming Trojans, break the wall of the Argives, and fling among the ships wondrous-blazing. […] And glorious Hector leapt within, his face like sudden night; and he shone in terrible bronze wherewith his body was clothed about, and in his hands he held two spears. None that met him could have held him back, none save the gods, when once he leapt within the gates; and his two eyes blazed with fire. And he wheeled him about in the throng, and called to the Trojans to climb over the wall; and they hearkened to his urging. Forthwith some clomb over the wall, and others poured in by the strong-built gate, and the Danaans were driven in rout among the hollow ships, and a ceaseless din arose.”

353 ‘a thick cloud covered the contenders for the Body of Patroclus…: LZ appears to have adapted this from the translation of W.H.D Rouse, but no doubt consulting the Loeb Classical Library text since the former does not indicate line numbers: “As they fought in this fiery conflict, you could not suppose there was either sun or moon in the sky; for a thick cloud covered all the place where the fighting men stood about the body of Patroclos. But the rest of the two armies fought at their ease in the open air; the sharp clear sunlight spread everywhere, and not a cloud was to be seen on earth or mountain” (trans. W.H.D. Rouse).

353 ’Οδυσσεύς . . . / ὠδύσαο: Odusseus . . . ôdusao, Gk. “Odysseus . . . / hated” (by gods and men); an etymological pun on Odysseus’ name.

353 ‘. . . played by the picture of Nobody’: LZ suggests an analogy here with the Cyclops scene in the Odyssey, where Odysseus tells Polyphemus that his name is “no body” or “no man.”

354 Odyssey I.161-163: “of a man whose white bones, it may be, rot in the rain as they lie upon the mainland, or the wave rolls them in the sea” (trans. A.T. Murray); qtd. 40.

354 Hesiod […] Strife between Perses and Hesiod, Works and Days, 27-41: Perses was Hesiod’s brother who, through bribery, won a pair of lawsuits concerning the inheritance of their father’s land: “Perses, lay up these things in your heart, and do not let that Strife who delights in mischief hold your heart back from work, while you peep and peer and listen to the wrangles of the court-house. Little concern has he with quarrels and courts who has not a year’s victuals laid up betimes, even that which the earth bears, Demeter’s grain. When you have got plenty of that, you can raise disputes and strive to get another’s goods. But you shall have no second chance to deal so again: nay, let us settle our dispute here with true judgement which is of Zeus and is perfect. For we had already divided our inheritance, but you seized the greater share and carried it off, greatly swelling the glory of our bribe-swallowing lords who love to judge such a cause as this. Fools! They know not how much more the half is than the whole, nor what great advantage there is in mallow and asphodel” (trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White).

354 Theogony 215f: “and the Hesperides who guard the rich, golden apples and the trees bearing fruit beyond glorious Ocean” (trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White).

354 Pandora, the All-endowed…: Works and Days, lines 61f describe the creation of Pandora, with the translator footnoting the meaning of Pandora as “the All-endowed.” Works and Days 60-64: “And he bade famous Hephaestus make haste and mix earth with water and to put in it the voice and strength of human kind, and fashion a sweet, lovely maiden-shape, like to the immortal goddesses in face; and Athena to teach her needlework and the weaving of the varied web” (trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White).

354 Works and Days, 505,568,597: “[…] and the forests which are cruel when Boreas blows over the earth” (505-506). “After him [Arcturus] the shrilly wailing daughter of Pandion, the swallow, appears to men when spring is just beginning” (568-569). “Set your slaves to winnow Demeter’s holy grain, when strong Orion first appears, on a smooth threshing floor in an airy place” (597-599).

354 Pandion: father of Philomela and mentioned in passing in Hesiod, Works and Days 568, see preceding note.

355 Sir Philip Sidney, Ad Lesbiam: / ‘My voice is hoarse. . . / My tongue to this my roof cleaves’: from Sidney’s Arcadia; qtd. TP 55, where it appears as a translation from Catullus; Catullus 51 is a rendition of a one of Sappho’s best-known lyrics.

356 Anaximander…: for the pre-Socratics that follow (356-364), with the exception of Empedocles, LZ’s primary source is Charles M. Bakewell, Source Book in Ancient Philosophy, rev. ed. (NY: Scribner’s, 1907, 1939), which gathers various translations.

356 Xenophanes […] Iris: this fragment also used in “Xenophanes” (CSP 123).

356 “A staff is quickly found to beat a dog”: from 2 Henry VI, LZ is implying a correlation with the anecdote of Pythagoras and the dog found in Xenophanes, see 103, “Xenophanes” (CSP 123) and “A”-12.210.3-4.

357 ‘. . . honest water . . .’ […] Fragments 19,20: the phrase from Shakespeare, Timon of Athens I.ii is spoken by Apemanthus, who is sarcastically commenting on Timon’s opulent banquet for his friends:
Flow this way! A brave fellow! he keeps his tides well. Those healths will make thee and thy state
look ill, Timon.
Here’s that which is too weak to be a sinner,
Honest water, which ne’er left man i’ the mire:
This and my food are equals; there’s no odds:
Feasts are too proud to give thanks to the gods.
Xenophanes, Fragment 19: “Let one but win a race through fleetness of foot, or be victorious in the pentathlon, there where lies the sacred field of Zeus, in Olympia, hard by the river of Pisas; or let him be victorious in wrestling, or in a bloody boxing match, or in the terrible contest called the pancration, —in the eyes of the citizens he will be resplendent with glory; he will gain a conspicuous seat of honor in the public assemblies, there will be feasting for him at the public expense, and a gift from his city for a token. Yes, if he should win a chariot race, all these things would fall to his lot, though not so deserving as I am. For our wisdom is better than the strength of men or of horses. This is in truth a most heedless custom; nor is it right thus to prefer strength to precious wisdom.”
Fragment 20: “Having learned from the Lydians useless luxuries, what time they were free from hateful servitude, they used to come swaggering into the place of assembly by the thousand, wearing loose mantles all purple-dyed, glorying in their flowing comely hair, and reeking with the odor of curiously compounded perfumes.”

358 ‘If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, / it will be now; if it be not now, yet it ill come: from Hamlet, qtd. 46, 106, 302, “A”-18.406.20-22 and Prep+ 46.

358 the readiness is all: from Hamlet, qtd. 77, 152, 302 and “A”-23.554.6. See 22.517.27-36, where LZ uses the same two fragments from Parmenides, the former clearly conflated with this passage from Hamlet.

359 Pindar…: the brief quotations LZ gives from Pindar are modernized from the introduction and notes to A.W. Mair, Hesiod: The Poems and Fragments (1908); LZ appears to have gotten the specific references to the quotes from Isthmians mixed up:
“In one way only know we a mirror for glorious deeds—if by grace of bright-crowned Mnemosyne a recompense of toils is found in glorious folds of verse” (Nemea 7).
“but she awaketh and her body shineth preeminent, as among stars the Morning-star” (Isthmian iii.40)
“the grace of the old time sleepeth, and men are unmindful thereof” (Isthmian vi.16).

360 stasimon: NL., from Gr. sta`simon, neut. of sta`simos, stationary, steadfast. In Greek tragedy, a song of the chorus, continued without the interruption of dialogue or anap[ae]stics (Liddell & Scott).

364 Herodotus […] The History, I,4. ‘Now as for the carrying off of women…: cf. “A”-2.6.14-15. Translations from Herodotus by George Rawlinson in the Everyman’s Library edition.

364 The History, II, 134-135, Rodôpis’ redemption by Charaxus, a Mytilenaean: “Rhodopis also lived during the reign of Amasis, not of Mycerinus, and was thus very many years later than the time of the kings who built the pyramids. She was a Thracian by birth, and was the slave of Iadmon, son of Hephaestopolis, a Samian. Aesop, the fable-writer, was one of her fellow-slaves. […] Rhodopis really arrived in Egypt under the conduct of Xantheus the Samian; she was brought there to exercise her trade, but was redeemed for a vast sum by Charaxus, a Mytilenaean, the son of Scamandronymus, and brother of Sappho the poetess. After thus obtaining her freedom, she remained in Egypt, and, as she was very beautiful, amassed great wealth, for a person in her condition; not, however, enough to enable her to erect such a work as this pyramid. […] Charaxus, after ransoming Rhodopis, returned to Mytilene, and was often lashed by Sappho in her poetry. But enough has been said on the subject of this courtesan.”

366 Aristophanes…: as LZ indicates on the next page, he uses the translations of Benjamin Bickley Rogers in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristophanes in three volumes (1924).

368 He is stout and big. / Shea sweeter fig: from Aristophanes, The Peace, qtd. “A”-18.391.9.

368 gamicandapogamic: gamic, Biol. sexual; developing after fertilization. apogamic, developing from a gametophyte without fertilzation (WD).

369 Monteverdi’s Orfeo […] Stell’ ingiuriose, ahi, ciel avaro…: Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643); the following Italian lines are from the opera:
Stell’ ingiuriose, ahi, ciel avaro (Malignant stars! Ah, greedy heavens!).
from the Prologue: ‘a l’armonia sonora / De la lira del ciel’ (with resounding harmonies / Of heaven’s lyre).
Orpheus: ‘Si, non vedro piu mai / De l’amata Eurydice I dolci rai?’ (Shall I never again see / The sweet eyes of my beloved Eurydice?)
Apollo: ‘Nel Sole e nelle Stelle / Vagheggerai le sue sembianze belle’ (In the sun and in the stars / You will be able to admire her fair likeness) (trans. Natalle Shea).
In a Dec. 1955 letter to Lorine Niedecker, LZ enthused over a recording of Monteverdi’s Orfeo he had just purchased (HRC 20.2).

369 Zauberflöte: Ger. The Magic Flute, 1791 opera by Mozart; see “A”-6.24.13.

370 Walter Porter: (c.1588-1659), English composer who studied with Monteverdi in 1613-1616; published Madrigals and Ayres (1632).

371 reason and love keep little company together now-a-days…: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, qtd. 9, 23 and “A”-12.133.15-19.

371 Good Master Mustardsee, I know your patience well…: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, qtd. “A”-12.134.15-20 and “A”-14.356.14-16.

372 Symposium, The mind begins to grow critical when the bodily eye fails’: qtd. 74; Benjamin Jowett translation.

372 Plato […] . . . but if a man ‘Sees a thing when he is alone’…: from Protagoras, see “A”-12.227.6-12.

374 ‘Expect Saint Martin’s summer, halcyon days…: St. Martin’s Summer is what is know in North America as Indian Summer, a period of unseasonably mild weather in early winter. See next note on the halcyon and its relation to a “circle in the water.”

374 ‘The nest of the Alcyon is globular…: although as LZ indicates, this passage is from Aristotle, LZ found this in Henry Green, Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers (1870), from which he quotes at some length at 433-435. Alcyon or halcyon is a mythical bird, although traditionally identified with the kingfisher, said to breed in nests floating on the sea around the time of the winder solstice when supposedly there was a period of calm weather.

375 Callimachus […] ‘periuria ridetamantum Iuppiter’: from Tibullus l. 3. Eleg. 7. v. 17. Lygdamus 6.49-50: —Periuria ridet amantum / Iuppiter, et ventos irrita ferre iubet, L. “Jupiter laughs at the false oaths of lovers.” Cf. Ovid at 407. Callimachus expresses the same idea in an epigram (XXVII in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Callimachus and Lycophron, trans. A.W. Mair).

375 Jacques Amyot: (1513-1593), French writer whose translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives was the basis of the influential English translation by Thomas North (1535-1601), which as LZ mentioned was drawn on extensively by Shakespeare for his Roman plays.

375 Timon’s epitaph: at the conclusion of Timon of Athens V.iv, read out by Alcibides:
“Here lies a wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft;
Seek not my name: a plague consume you, wicked caitiffs left!
Here lie I, Timon, who, alive, all living men did hate;
Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay not here thy gait.”
As LZ points out, Shakespeare gives two distinct epigraphs, which he found in North’s Plutarch, Life of Antony, and most editors point out that since the two are contradictory, Shakespeare probably intended to delete one or the other, but left the play unfinished:
“Now it chanced so, that the sea getting in, it compassed his tomb round about, that no man could come to it; and upon the same was written this epitaph: ‘Here lies a wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft: Seek not my name: a plague consume you wicked wretches left.’ It is reported that Timon himself when he lived made this epitaph; for that which is commonly rehearsed was not his, but made by the poet Callimachus: ‘Here lie I, Timon, who alive all living men did hate: Pass by and curse thy fill; but pass, and stay not here thy gait.’”

376 Lucian of Samosata […] ‘he may or may not have been of Semitic stock’: the quotation and the rest of the biographical information is from the introduction on Lucian by A.M. Harmon to the Loeb Classical Library edition (1913). Lucian’s Timon was probably a source for Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens.

376 Longus […] ‘It was as if he then first acquired eyes…: trans. Moses Hadas in Three Greek Romances (Doubleday, 1953).

376 Marianus Scholasticus […] Sonnets 152 and 154 adapt his epigram: from the Greek Anthology: “Beneath these plane trees, detained by gentle slumber, Love slept, having put his torch in the care of the Nymphs; but the Nymphs said one to another: ‘Why wait? Would that together with this we could quench the fire in the hearts of men.’ But the torch set fire even to the water, and with hot water thenceforth the Love-Nymphs fill the bath.”

377 Rihaku (Li Po): the great T’ang dynasty poet, Li Po (8th century). LZ gives the transliteration of the Japanese version of Li Po’s names as used by EP, via Ernest Fenollosa’s notebooks, in Cathay.

H

377 ‘Hic ibat Simois; hic est Sigeia tellus; / Hic Steterat Priami regia celsa senis.’: LZ identifies the source of these lines as from Ovid, which literally mean: “Here the Simois flowed; this is Sigeian land; / Here stood the lofty palace of old Priam.” Spoken by Lucentio who, in the guise of a tutor, is attempting to seduce Bianca.

377 honorificabilitudinitatibus: Medieval L. with honor, or more literally, the state of being able to achieve honor; believed to be the longest Latin word. The passage from Shakespeare:
Costard: I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word;
for thou art not so long by the head as
honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier
swallowed than a flap-dragon.

Iliad

LZ mentions two translators of Homer in this section: W.H.D. Rouse (379) who made a popular prose translation (1938) in which EP had a hand and A.T. Murray (388) who produced the Loeb Classical Library version (1924), also prose, which is faithful in the pseudo-archaic manner. The translations from the Iliad throughout this section appear to be LZ’s own, using these two translations and consulting the original Greek in the Loeb text.

378 measured Chapman: alluding to George Chapman’s famous Renaissance translations of Homer (Iliad, 1598-1611; Odyssey, 1614-1616) rendered into couplets, iambic fourteeners and pentameters respectively.

378 Augustine’s words…: this quotation from St. Augustine’s Confessions, as well as from On the Trinity are taken from The Age of Belief edited by Anne Fremantle (1954), the same source as the bulk of the quotations from medieval philosophers in “Continents”; translations by Edward B. Pusey and Whitney Oakes respectively.

379 Rouse’s translation sounds like Falstaff speaking…: as LZ indicates, the preceding quotation from the Iliad is taken straight from the translation of W.H.D. Rouse.

381 preface to Saint Joan…: in his preface to Saint Joan (1924), Bernard Shaw remarks: “There is the first part of the Shakespearean, or pseudo-Shakespearean trilogy of Henry VI, in which Joan is one of the leading characters. This portrait of Joan is not more authentic than the descriptions in the London papers of George Washington in 1780, of Napoleon in 1803, of the German Crown Prince in 1915, or of Lenin in 1917. It ends in mere scurrility. The impression left by it is that the playwright, having begun by an attempt to make Joan a beautiful and romantic figure, was told by his scandalized company that English patriotism would never stand a sympathetic representation of a French conqueror of English troops, and that unless he at once introduced all the old charges against Joan of being a sorceress and harlot, and assumed her to be guilty of all of them, his play could not be produced.”

382 Malone…: see note at 38.

384 φλόξ: as LZ says the meaning is “flame,” but transliterated the Greek is phlox.

384 XVI, 775 […] Trying to sound like Homer syllable for syllable…: LZ translates the latter half of line 775 and 776:
μαρναμένων ἀμφ᾽ αὐτόν: ὃ δ᾽ἐν στροφάλιγγι κονίης
κεῖτο μέγας μεγαλωστί, λελασμένος ἱπποσυνάων.

marnamenôn amph’ auton: ho d’ en strophalingi koniês
keito megas megalôsti, lelasmenos hipposunaôn.
[…] as men fought around him. But he in the whirl of dust
lay mighty in his mightiness, forgetful of his horsemanship. (trans. A.T. Murray).

386 Our children’s children / Shall see this: from Henry VIII, qtd. 341 and “A”-12.254.18-20.

388 the hawk carrying off the nightingale that speaks in Hesiod’s fable…: the preceding reference to Hesiod’s Works and Days made by A.T. Murray, the translator of the Loeb Classical Library edition of the Iliad, is to this famous fable of the hawk and the nightingale which is addressed as a cautionary tale to the poet’s brother Perses (see 354): “Thereafter, would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards. For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them. […] And now I will tell a fable for princes who themselves understand. Thus said the hawk to the nightingale with speckled neck, while he carried her high up among the clouds, gripped fast in his talons, and she, pierced by his crooked talons, cried pitifully. To her he spoke disdainfully: ‘Miserable thing, why do you cry out? One far stronger than you now holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you, songstress as you are. And if I please I will make my meal of you, or let you go. He is a fool who tries to withstand the stronger, for he does not get the mastery and suffers pain besides his shame.’ So said the swiftly flying hawk, the long-winged bird. But you, Perses, listen to right and do not foster violence; for violence is bad for a poor man. Even the prosperous cannot easily bear its burden, but is weighed down under it when he has fallen into delusion. The better path is to go by on the other side towards justice; for Justice beats Outrage when she comes at length to the end of the race. But only when he has suffered does the fool learn this. For Oath keeps pace with wrong judgements” (trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White).

388 ‘As true as truest horse that yet would never tire’: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, qtd. “A”-12.132.24, 12.226.26 and “A”-14.352.6-7.

388 ὢ πόποι, ‘ah! woe! shame!’…: opening phrase of the line LZ indicates, Iliad XX.344, with his literal translation. Continuing after the parentheses, LZ gives a homophonic rendition of the entire line, “O pop, eye! A(y) mega-thauma THAT ophthal—My Sin o Rum Eye!”; the original Gk. line with phonetic transcription is:
ὢ πόποι ἦ μέγα θαῦμα τόδ᾽ὀφθαλμοῖσιν ὁρῶμαι
ô popoi ê mega thauma tod’ ophthalmoisin horômai:
LZ follows with a translation of the subsequent two lines from the Iliad; the entire passage reads:
“Then quickly from Achilles’ eyes he scattered the wondrous mist; and he stared hard with his eyes, and mightily moved spake unto his own great-hearted spirit: Now look you, verily a great marvel is this that mine eyes behold. ‘My spear lieth here upon the ground, yet the man may I nowise see at whom I hurled it, eager to slay him’” (trans. A.T. Murray).

388 Toussaint-Langenscheidt Method…: a phonetic system for pronouncing foreign words. LZ is referring to A Pocket-Dictionary of the Greek and English Languages compiled by Karl Feyerabend, which uses the Toussaint-Langenscheidt Method, 1918; see 99. LZ notes that the date of publication was CZ’s fifth birthday; CZ born 21 Jan. 1913. Hellzapoppin’ was a very successful Broadway musical revue from 1938-1941, made into a 1941 movie, full of absurdist gags and high energy dance routines—the lindy hop scene was particularly iconic.

389 the Poetics granted that everyone knew melody: see quote from Aristotle, Poetics at 328.

389 Metaphysics praised sight: see quotation at 39.

390 To shallow rivers, to whose falls: from The Merry Wives of Windsor, qtd. 266.

391 bona terra, mala gens: L. “good earth, ill people.”

392 Dante said, the whole art—that of the canzone—comes first…: from Dante, De vulgari eloquentia Bk. 2, iii: speaking of the canzone, “…in works of art, that is noblest which embraces the whole art” (trans. A.G. Ferrers Howell), as quoted in “A Statement for Poetry (1950)” (Prep+ 224); see also The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire 184/185, Prep+ 9, “A”-12.162.31-32 and head note for the first half of “A”-9.

392 haruspex: Roman Religion. A diviner who interpreted lightning and natural prodigies, and read the entrails of sacrificial victims (WD).

392 as Socrates before his death pursued Aesop to music: alluding to a passage in Plato, Phaedo 60-61; see “A”-12.177.4-8.

Julia’s Wild

393 Julia’s Wild: Julia is the primary female protagonist in Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, who speaks the line on which LZ rings changes.

393 Cid Corman: (1924-2004) American poet, translator and editor, who edited the important little magazine Origin, whose second series (1961-1964) featured LZ. Corman and LZ were in regular, often intense correspondence from the time they first met in the summer of 1957 to early 1964. Corman’s Origin Press published “A” 1-12 at the very end of 1959, and this section of Bottom was LZ’s way of thanking Corman, who was also a keen reader of Shakespeare. LZ quotes from a 9 Jan. 1960 letter from Corman that prompted him to compose “Julia’s Wild” on 13 Jan. and the following day he sent Corman not only the poem but the rest of what is the first page of this section and then added Corman’s reply. At this time and for much of his life, Corman lived in Kyoto, Japan.  

393 explain jacks of sonnet 128 as keys: the relevant passage from Sonnet 128 is quoted at 262 and alluded to at 337; this sense of jacks is also mentioned at 66.

393 jarretière: Fr. garter.

393 Changes…: a literal translation of Metamorphoses, referring to Ovid, from which the following Latin lines are taken: “Piety is slain, and from the bloody slaughter / The last of the celestials, Astraea has left the earth” (see 440). Astraea was the goddess of justice during the Golden Age, but who on seeing the growing wickedness of humankind, fled to the heavens and the constellation Virgo.

Key

See remark on jacks meaning keys on preceding page.

395 Spit in the hole, man, and tune again: from The Taming of the Shrew, qtd. “A”-19.416.27-30.

Latine

395 ‘Shakespeare was godfather to one of Ben Jonson’s children…: this anecdote turns on a pun on “Lattin”: Latten is a mixed metal resembling brass. LZ found this in Sidney Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare (1898): 177.

395 ad manes fratrum: from Titus Andronicus, L. “to the ghosts (spirits of the ancestors) of the brothers.”

396 Plautus […] Rudens: LZ freely translated Rudens entire as “A”-21. Judging from the quotations given here, LZ used the translation by Cleveland King Chase, The Rudens of Plautus (Clinton, NY: Hamilton College, 1919).

396 Thatgiues heauen countlesse eyes to view mens actes: from Pericles, qtd. “A”-21.457.4-5.

396 . . . nothing to be got now-adayes, vnlesse / thou canst fish for’t: from Pericles, qtd. “A”-21.456.34-35.

396 . . . Think […] in the height of this bath…: from The Merry Wives of Windsor, qtd. “A”-21.457.6-9.

396 . . . throng’d vp with cold, my Veines are chill: from Pericles, qtd. 98 and “A”-21.457.9-10.

397 The great ones eate vp the little ones: […] a playes and tumbles…: from Pericles, qtd. 21.457.2-3.

397 Terence […] “Redime te captum quam queas minimo”: L. “Ransom yourself from captivity as cheaply as you can”; see “A”-23.551.14-15.

398 Cicero […] “‘Aio, Aeacida Romanos vincere posse.’”: L. “I say that you, descendent of Aeacus, the Romans can conquer.” The answer given by the Pythian Apollo to Pyrrhus, from Cicero’s De divinatione (On Divination). Ennius (239-169 BC), is commonly considered the most important of the early Roman poets; as LZ indicates the line is actually quoted by Cicero from Ennius’ Annalium (Annals), an epic chronicle of Roman history.

398 Tully: = Cicero, whose full name was Marcus Tullius Cicero.

398 Caesar […] thrasonical: vaunting. Thraso is a braggart soldier in Terence’s comedy Eunuchus.

399 Lucretius […] De Rerum Natura: for Lucretius, LZ generally used the translations of Cyril Bailey (Oxford UP, 1910) in Bottom and in “A”, but in the following references and Latin quotations LZ is presumably consulting his Loeb Library edition, so I give this translation by W.H.D. Rouse.

399 De Rerum Natura I,62-71: “When man’s life lay for all to see foully groveling upon the ground, crushed beneath the weight of Religion, which displayed her head in the regions of heaven, threatening mortals from on high with horrible aspect, a man of Greece [Epicurus] was the first that dared to uplift mortal eyes against her, the first to make stand against her; for neither fables of the gods could quell him, nor thunderbolts, nor heaven with menacing roar, nay all the more they goaded the eager courage of his soul, so that he should desire, first of all men, to shatter the confining bars of nature’s gates.”
De Rerum Natura VI,5-8, 33-41: “[…Athens] brought forth a man endowed with such wisdom, who in past days poured forth all revelations from truth-telling lips; whose glory, though he be dead, has been found almost divine, and long since published abroad is now exalted to the skies. […] and he proved that mankind had no reason for the most part to roll the sad waves of trouble within their breasts. For even as children tremble and fear all things in the blind darkness, so we in the light fear at all times things that are no whit more to be feared than what children shiver at the dark and imagine to be at hand. This terror of the mind therefore and this gloom must be dispelled, not by the sun’s rays or the bright shafts of day, but by the aspect and law of nature.”
De Rerum Natura II,1148-1149: “So therefore the walls of the mighty heavens in like manner shall be stormed all around, and shall collapse into crumbling ruin.”
De Rerum Natura I,33-37: “[Mars] who often casts himself upon thy [Venus’] lap wholly vanquished by the ever-living wound of love, and thus looking upward with shapely neck throw back feeds his eager eyes with love, gaping upon thee, goddess, and as he lies back his breath hangs upon thy lips.”
De Rerum Natura I,155: “For which reasons when we shall perceive that nothing can be created from nothing.”
De Rerum Natura II,352-360: “For often in front of the noble shrines of the gods a calf falls slain beside the incense-burning altars, breathing up a hot stream of blood from his breast; but the mother bereaved wanders through the green glens, and knows the prints marked on the ground by the cloven hooves, as she surveys all the regions if she may espy somewhere her lost offspring, and coming to a stand fills the leafy woods with her moaning, and often revisits the stall pierced with yearning for her young calf.”
De Rerum Natura III,1012-1022: “Tartarus belching horrible fires from his throat, which neither exist. But in this life there is fear of punishment for evil deeds, fear as notorious, and atonement for crime, prison, and the horrible casting down from the Rock, stripes, torturers, condemned cell, pitch, red-hot plates, firebrands: and even if these are absent, yet the guilty conscience, terrified before aught can come to pass, applies the goad and scorches itself with whips, and meanwhile sees not where can be the end to its miseries or the final limit to its punishment, and fears at the same time that all this may become heavier after death.”

400 De Rerum Natura III,870-875, 902-930: “Accordingly when you see a man resenting his fate, that after death he must either rot with his body laid in the tomb, or perish by fire, or the jaws of wild beasts, you may know that he rings false, and that deep in his heart is some hidden sting, although himself he deny the belief in any sensation after death. […] If they could see this clearly in mind and so conform their speech, they would free themselves from great fear and anguish of mind. ‘Yes, as you now lie in death’s quiet sleep, so you will be for all time that is to come removed from all distressing pains; but we beside you, as you lay burnt to ashes on the horrible pyre, have bewailed you inconsolably, and that everlasting grief no time shall take from our ears.’ Of such an one then we may well ask, if all ends in sleep and quiet rest, what bitterness there is in it so great that one could pine with everlasting sorrow. Why, no one feels the want of himself and his life when both mind and body alike are quiet in sleep; for all we care that sleep might be everlasting, and no craving for ourselves touches us at all; and yet those first-beginnings dispersed through the body are not straying far from sense-giving motions at the time when a man startled from sleep gathers himself together. Death therefore must be thought of much less moment to us, if there can be anything less than what we see to be nothing: for a greater dispersion of the disturbed matter takes place at death, and no one awakens and rises whom the cold stoppage of life has once overtake.” See “A”-12.166.20-21.
De Rerum Natura I,939-942 (precisely the same lines are repeated at IV.11-17): “But as with children, when physicians try to administer rank wormwood, they first touch the rims about the cups with the sweet yellow fluid of honey, that unthinking childhood be deluded as far as the lips, and meanwhile that they may drink up the bitter juice of wormwood, and though beguiled be not betrayed, but rather by such means be restored and regain health […].”
De Rerum Natura IV,1026-1029: “Boys often when held fast in sleep, if they think they are lifting up their garments beside a basin or refuse pot, pour forth all the filtered liquid of their body, drenching the Babylonian coverlets in all their magnificence.”
De Rerum Natura IV,1052-1057: “So therefore if one is wounded by the shafts of Venus, whether it be a boy with girlish limbs who launches the shaft, or a woman radiating love from her whole body, he tends to the source of the blow, and desires to unite and to cast the fluid from body to body; for his dumb desire presages delight.”
De Rerum Natura IV,1160: “The black girl is a nut-brown maid, the dirty and rank is a sweet disorder.”

401 De Rerum Natura IV,1286-1287: “Do you not see that even drops of water falling upon a stone in the long run beat a way through the stone?”
De Rerum Natura V,805-808: “Then first, look you, the earth gave forth the generations of mortal creatures. For there was great abundance of heat and moisture in the fields; therefore wherever a suitable place was found, wombs would grow, holding to the earth by roots.”
De Rerum Natura V,741-747: “Next in place follows parching Heat, along with him Ceres his dusty comrade and the Etesian Winds that blow from the north-east. Next comes Autumn, and marching with him Euhius Euan [Bacchus]. Then follow other seasons and winds, Volturnus [S.E. by S. Wind] thundering on high and Auster [South Wind] lord of lightning; at length Shortest Day brings the snows and Winter restores the numbing frost; after these comes Cold with chattering teeth.” See “A”-12.165.6-17.

401 De Rerum Natura, IV, 221,‘nec variae cessant voces volitare per auras’: L. “Manifold voices also fly through the air without ever slackening.” See “A”-12.166.22-23.

401 De Rerum Natura V,1379-1391: “Again, to imitate with the mouth the liquid notes of the birds came long before men could delight their ears by warbling smooth carols in song. And the zephyrs whistling through hollow reeds first taught the countrymen to blow into hollow hemlock-stalks. Next, step by step they learnt the plaintive melodies which the reed-pipe gives forth tapped by the players’ fingertips,—the pipe discovered amid pathless woods and forests, amid the solitary haunts of shepherds and the peace of the open air. These soothed their minds and gave them delight when they had had their fill of food: for that is when song is pleasant.”

401 De Rerum Natura, V,1405-1406, ‘et vigilantibus hinc aderant solacia somni / ducere multimodis voces et flectere cantus’: L. “And when wakeful, this was their consolation for sleep, to sing many a long-drawn note and to turn a tune […].”

401 De Rerum Natura, IV,385-386,‘nec possunt oculi naturam noscere rerum. / proinde animi vitium hoc oculis adfingere noli’: L. “and eyes cannot recognize the nature of things. Then do not impute to the eyes this fault of the mind.” See 138 and “A”-12.166.27-30.

401 Virgil […] ‘Tantaene animis caelestibus irae?: from Aeneid I.11, L. “Is there such anger in heavenly minds?”

402 ‘Gelidus timor occupat artus…: from Aeneid VII. 446, L. “Cold fear almost overpowers my joints,” which is echoed in Ovid, Metamorphosis III.40: ‘subitus tremor occupat artus.’

402 ‘tu modo nascentit puero, quo ferrea primum / desinet ac toto surget gens aurea mundo, / casta fave Lucina’: from Eclogue IV. 8-10: L. “Only do you, pure Lucina, smile on the birth of the child, under whom the iron brood shall at last cease and a golden race spring up throughout the world!” (trans. H.R. Fairclough).

403 Catullus […] XVI‘cinaede Furi’: L. “lewd Furius.”

404 ‘So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, qtd. “A”-12.133.9-10.

404 LXVIII A, LXXXII /mihi quae me carior ipsost, / quid carius est oculis: L. “she who is dearer to me than myself / that is dearer than eyes” (trans. Francis Cornish). As LZ indicates, he is splicing together phrases from two different Catullus poems.

404 LXXXV /Odi et amo.: L. “I hate and love.”

405 CI: Carmina 101 on the death of Catullus’ brother included in TP 114, translated by F.W. Cornish (Loeb Classical Library).

405 CXV: Carmina 115 on the estates of Mentula included in TP 10, translated by F.W. Cornish; Mentula mentioned at “A”-8.50.9, see also “A”-18.390.21.

405 Horace […] “Integer vitae, scelerisque purus, / Non eget Mauri jaculis, nec arcu”: Odes I.xxii.1-2, L. “He who is upright in his way of life and unstained by guilt, needs not Moorish darts nor bow” (trans. C.E. Bennett).

406 ‘Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero’: Odes I.xxxvii.1, L. “Now is the time to drain the flowing bowl, now with unfettered foot.” LZ means to indicate the relevance of the entire Ode, which Bennett gives the title, “The Fall of Cleopatra.”

406 ‘Bacchum in remotis’: Odes II.xix.1, L. “Bacchus in distant….” The entire Ode describes Bacchus’ power.

406 ‘Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume’: Odes II.xiv.1 (addressed to Horace’s patron, Maecenas), L. “Alas swiftly, O Postumus, Postumus….” Bennett titles this Ode, “Death is Inevitable.” Postumus was a friend of Horace, as well as the name of a character in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.

406 ‘reddere victimas / aedemque votivam memento’: Odes II.xvii.30-31, L. “Remember then to offer the victims due and to build a votive shrine!”

406 ‘Vides ut alta stet nive candidum / Soracte . . . / dissolve frigus ligna super foco’: Odes I.ix.1-2, 5, L. “Seest thou how Soracte [a mountain] stands glistening in its mantle of snow […] Dispel the chill by piling high the wood upon the hearth.” Cf. 408 where the same first line from Shakespeare is compared with Ovid.

406 ‘crescit occulte velut arbor aevo’: Odes I.xii.45, L. “like a tree, grows by the silent lapse of time.” The Loeb text has occulto.

406 Tibullus […] ‘juravit ocellos’: L. “swears by her eyes.”

406 Propertius […] Elegies III,ii. 1-8, 17-26: “Meanwhile let us return to our wonted round of song; let the heart of my mistress be moved with joy at the old familiar music. They say that Orpheus with his Thracian lyre tamed wild beasts and stayed rushing rivers, and that Cithaeron’s rocks were driven to Thebes by the minstrel’s art and of their own will gathered to frame a wall. Nay, Galatea too beneath wild Etna turned her steeds that dripped with brine to the sound of thy songs, Polythemus. […]
Happy she that book of mine hath praised! My songs shall be so many memorials of thy beauty. For neither the Pyramids built skyward at such cost, nor the house of Jove at Elis that matches heaven, nor the wealth of Mausolus’ tomb are exempt from the end imposed by death. Their glory is stolen away by fire or rain, or the strokes of time whelm them to ruin crushed by their own weight. But the fame that my wit hath won shall never perish: for wit renown endureth deathless.”
Elegies I,i.1-6, 25-28: “Ah! woe is me! ’twas Cynthia first ensnared me with her eyes; till then my heart had felt no passion’s fire. But then Love made me lower my glance of pride steadfast, and with implanted feet bowed down my head, till of his cruelty he taught me to spurn all honest maids, and to live a life of recklessness. […]
Or else do ye, my friends, that would recall me all too late from the downward slope, seek all the remedies for a heart diseased. Bravely will I bear the cruel cautery and the knife, if only I may win liberty to speak the words mine anger prompts.”
Elegies III,xi,1-4: “Why marvellest thou that a woman sways my life and drags my manhood captive beneath her rule? Why falsely dost thou hurl at me the foul taunt of cowardice, because I cannot snap my chains and break my yoke?” (trans. H.E. Butler).

407 Ovid […] ‘Iuppiter ex alto periuria ridet amantum’: from Artis Amatoriae (Art of Love), L. “Jupiter on high laughs at the lies of lovers.” Cf. almost identical quotation from Tibullus at 375.

407 ‘nox erat et tota lumino domo’: from Fasti (Ovid’s volume based on the Roman calendar), L. “it was night and the whole house was light.” Either deliberately or due to a misprint, a crucial word is left out—nox erat et tota lumino nulla domo (it was night and the whole house was without light).

408 ‘“Sed iubet ire deus.” vellem, vetuisset adire . . .’: from Heroides VII.139 (letter by Dido addressed to Aeneus), L. “‘But you are bid to go—by your god!’ Ah, would he had forbidden you to come […]” (trans. Grant Showerman).

408 Metamorphoseon (Metamorphoses) I.116-120:

             ‘Iuppiter antiqui contraxit tempora veris
perque hiemes aestusque et inaequalis autumnos
et breve ver spatiis exegit quattuor annum.
tum primum siccis aer fervoribus ustus
canduit, et ventis glacies adstricta perpendit . . .’
“Jove now shortened the bounds of the old-time spring, and through winter, summer, variable autumn, and brief spring completed the year in four seasons. Then first the parched air glared white with burning heat, and icicles hung down congealed by freezing winds” (trans. F.J. Miller). Cf. 406 where the same passage from Shakespeare is compared with Horace.

408 ‘culmen tamen altior huius / unda tegit, pressaeque latent sub gurgite turres’: from Metamorphoses I.289-290, L. “still do the over-topping waves cover its roof, and its towers lie hid beneath the flood.”

408 Metamorphoses I,463-465, 470: “Venus’ son replied: ‘Thy dart may pierce all things else, Apollo, but mine shall pierce thee; and by as much as all living things are less than deity, by so much less is thy glory than mine.’ […] The [dart] which kindles love is of gold and has a sharp, gleaming point […].”

408 Metamorphoses, II,847-851: “And so the father and ruler of the gods, who wields in his right hand the three-forked lightning, whose nod shakes the world, laid aside his royal majesty along with his scepter, and took upon him the form of a bull. In this form he mingled with the cattle, lowed like the rest, and wandered around, beautiful to behold, on the young grass.”

409 Metamorphoses, IV,73, ‘”invide” dicebant “paries, quid amantibus obstas?”’: L. “‘O envious wall,’ they [Pyramus and Thisbe] would say, ‘why do you stand between lovers?’”

409 cruor emicat alte,
non aliter quam cum vitiato fistula plumbo
scinditur et tenui stridente foramine longas
eiaculatur aquas atque ictibus aera rumpit.’ Metamorphoses, IV,121-124
“As he [Pyramus] lay stretched upon the earth the spouting blood leaped high; just as when a pipe has broken at a weak spot in the lead and through the small hissing aperture sends spurting forth long streams of water, cleaving the air with its jets.” See “A”-12.242.20 where the image, “as when a conduite pipe is crackt,” is quoted from Arthur Golding’s version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

409 Metamorphoses, IV,411, ‘perlucentibus alis’; 425,‘et triplices operire novis Minyeidas alis’: L. “transparent wings […] and three daughters of Minyas with strange wings.”

409 ‘frigora dant rami, tyrios humus umida flores:
perpetuum ver est. quo dum Proserpina luco
ludit et aut violas aut candida lilia carpit’ Metamorphoses, V,390-392
“The branches afford a pleasing coolness, and the well-watered ground bears bright-coloured flowers. There spring is everlasting. Within this grove Proserpina was playing, and gathering violets of white lilies.” See “A”-23.551.21-22.

409 ‘naidas et dryadas mediis incedre silvis . . . / in stabula alta trahit, silvis obscura vetustis’ Metamorphoses VI,453,521: L. “naiads and dryads when they move about in the deep woods […] to a hut deep hidden in the ancient woods” (the scene of Philomela’s rape).

409 ‘vivaque saxa sua convulsaque robora terra
et silvas moveo iubeoque tremescere montis
et mugire solum manesque exire sepulcris’Metamorphoses, VII,204-206
[Medea speaking] “‘living rocks and oaks I root up from their own soil; I move the forests, I bid the mountains shake, the earth to rumble and the ghosts to come forth from their tombs.’”

410 ‘et monet arcanis oculos removere profanes. . .
stricto Medea recludit
ense senis iugulum veteremque exire cruorem
passa replete sucis’Metamorphoses, VII, 256,285-287
“and warned them not to look with profane eyes upon her secret rites […] Medea unsheathed her knife and cut the old man’s throat; then, letting the old blood all run out, she filled his veins with her brew.”

410 Metamorphoses, VIII,626, ‘Iuppiter huc specie mortali’: L. “Jupiter in the guise of a mortal.” This begins a passage that describes the visit of Jupiter to the cottage of Philemon and Baucis.

410 ‘sed ut unda impellitur unda
urgueturque eadem veniens urguetque priorem,
tempora sic fugiunt pariter pariterque sequuntur
et nova sunt semper’;Metamorphoses, XV,181-184
“but, as wave is pushed on by wave, and as each wave as it comes is both pressed on and itself presses the wave in front, so time both flees and follows and is ever new.”

410 Seneca […] ‘Sit fas aut nefas . . . / Per Styga, per manes vehor.’: L. “Be it right or wrong . . . I am carried through the Stygian regions, through the shades.” Seneca’s Phaedra is often referred to as Hippolytus.

410 ‘Magni Dominator poli, / Tam lentus audis scelera? tam lentus vides?’: from Phaedra, L. “Ruler of the Great Heavens, are you so slow to hear crimes? so slow to see?”

411 Persius […] ‘nunc non e tumulo fortunataque favilla / nascentur violae?’: L. “Now over his tomb and happy ashes will not violets spring?” Cf. Hamlet V.i: “From her fair and unpolluted flesh / May violets spring.” See “A”-23.551.23.

411 Pervigilivm Veneris […] ‘Cras amat qui nunquam amavit quique amavit cras amet’: Vigil of Venus, anonymous hymn on the awakening of spring; LZ gives the refrain line: “Let whoever never loved, love tomorrow, / Let whoever has loved, love tomorrow” (trans. J.W. Mackail, but undoubtedly taken from EP, The Spirit of Romance 20).See Arise 52 and “A”-23.555.10-13.

411 Saint Jerome […] Vulgate / ‘Medice, teipsum.’: L. “Physician, thyself” (i.e. heal yourself); from Luke 4:23: “And he [Jesus] said unto them, Ye will surely say unto me this proverb, Physician, heal thyself: whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in thy country.”

411 Thomas of Celano…: an Italian Franciscan and poet, to whom the hymn Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) is traditionally but uncertainly attributed. Dies Irae was part of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass until reforms in 1970 and has been set by many composers. The following is the first stanza, which LZ included in TP 147:
That day of wrath, that dreadful day,
When heaven and earth shall pass away,
What power shall be the sinner’s stay?
How shall he meet that dreadful day? (trans. Sir Walter Scott)

411 Joannes Baptista Mantuanus […] Fauste, precor gelida quando pecus omne sub umbra ruminat: L. “Fautus, while all the cattle chew their cud in the cool shade.” Mantuanus (1447-1516), Italian Carmelite and prolific poet in Latin, best known for his eclogues in the manner of his fellow Mantuan, Vigil.

Musicks Letters

Title Musicks Letters: from Pericles, see quotation 327 and following remarks.

414 ‘gamut in a briefer sort’: gamut, 1, In music: (a) The first or gravest note in Guido’s scale of music; gamma ut. (b) The major scale, whether indicated by notes or syllables, or merely sung. (c) A scale on which notes in music are written or printed, consisting of lines and spaces which are named after the first seven letters of the alphabet. (d) In old English church music, the key of G. Also gamma. 2. Figuratively, the whole scale, range, or compass of a thing. [< Gr. γáμμα, the third letter of the Greek alphabet; ut, a mere syllable, used as the name of the first note in singing, now called do; orig. L. ut, conj., that. Guido d’Arezzo (born about 990) is said to have called the seven notes of the musical scale after the first seven letters of the alphabet, a, b, c, d, e, f, g: whence the name gamma, taken from the last of the series (g, γ), applied to the whole scale. He is also said to have invented the names of the notes used in singing (ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si), after certain intial syllables of a monkish hymn to St. John, in a stanza written in sapphic meter. The syllable ut has been displaced by the more sonorous do] (CD).
See on the same page (third complete paragraph) quotation from Leopold Mozart.

415 any air of music touch their ears […] Their savage eyes turn’d to a modest gaze: from The Merchant of Venice, qtd. “A”-14.352.8-10.

420 Wm. Byrd…: (1540-1623), English Renaissance composer who long interested LZ; see Arise 9.

420 a contemporary: ‘Pricksong (i.e. counterpoint) a fair music…: from Baldassare Castiglione, Book of the Courtier II.

421 Morley, Dowland, Weelkes, Campion, Lawes: Thomas Morley (1557/58-1602); John Dowland (1563-1626); Thomas Weelkes (1576-1523); Thomas Campion (1567-1620); William Lawes (1602-1645), English Renaissance composers particularly of secular music, including madrigals and lute pieces; Morley wrote the only definitely authenticated contemporary setting of one of Shakespeare’s songs, “It was a lover and a lass” from As You Like It.

421 the Book Bahir says, ‘the vowels abide in consonants like souls in bodies’: an early work of the Kabbalah first published in the 12th century. Also qtd. “4 Other Countries” (CSP 175). LZ’s source is Ernst Müller, History of Jewish Mysticism (1946).

421 Hebrew Book of Enoch: also known as 3 Enoch, is an ancient Hebrew text usually considered pseudoepigraphal, that is, non-canonical; see 107, 108.

422 ‘The Catte with eyne of burning cole . . . / And Time that is so briefly spent . . .’: from Pericles III.Gower’s Chorus; qtd. 342.

423 Vico fabled: man sung before he spoke: in The New Science (1725) Giambattista Vico presents a cyclical three-phase theory of history, in which the knowledge that characterizes the earliest stage is designated “poetic.” See 12.257.12.

423 Pythagoras […] the music of interplanetary stations: Pythagoras is commonly credited with originating the theory of the music of the spheres. LZ is referring to the passage in Pericles V.i, when Pericles on recovering his daughter hears the music of the spheres; see 88, 328 and 428.

423 ‘bodily motions,’ Spinoza said: see first Spinoza quotation at 421.

423 So when Dante ‘thinks’ a metric foot in De Vulgari Eloquentia a human foot stalks him like Cressid’s: whether or not LZ has a specific passage from Dante in mind it is not clear, but it may be Dante’s argument in Part II, chapter 11 against the mechanical counting of metric feet, which he articulates by insisting that properly a line is not made up of feet but rather a foot is made up of lines. The allusion to Cressid is presumably to a well-known remark in Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, IV.v (qtd. 354):
Ulysses: There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,
Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body.

423 Under the aspect of eternity, where all things exist equally…: as elsewhere throughout this and the preceding paragraph, LZ draws heavily on the terms of Spinoza, particularly the long quotation at 421-422, which ends with the phrase “in this all things are equal.” Interestingly, LZ never directly quotes the passages from Spinoza that define the famous, if often poorly understood concept of sub specie aeternitatis, and it is probable that the quotation at 421-422 serves as LZ’s understanding of the idea, which emphasizes the particularism of entities considered apart from the vicissitudes of duration, rather than emphasizing “under that aspect of eternity” as merely a process of rational abstraction. Cf. the brief preface to Found Objects, which also evokes Spinoza (Prep+ 168).

423 bass-string of humility: from Henry IV, Part 1, qtd. 420.

424 ‘in so far as it is understood by his nature’: from Spinoza, qtd. 421.

424 Apemantus’ fear that one kind of music—and that, bad…: refers to Shakespeare, Timon of Athens I.ii, where the Cynic Apemantus comments on the performance of a masque of Cupid and Amazons:
Hoy-day, what a sweep of vanity comes this way!
They dance! they are mad women.
Like madness is the glory of this life.
As this pomp shows to a little oil and root. […]
I should fear those that dance before me now
Would one day stamp upon me: ’t has been done;
Men shut their doors against a setting sun.

424 Till a’ the seas gang dry / And the rocks melt wi’ the sun: from Robert Burns, “A Red, Red Rose”; qtd. 204.

425 ‘Drake took a company of instrumentalists with him…: probably quoted from Vivian de Sola Pinto, The English Renaissance, 1510-1688 (1938).

425 Milton passionate for the freedom of print…: following quotation at the top of 426 from John Milton, Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (1644), Part III.

426 Leibniz […] thought of music as ‘number, a felt relation of counting’: see “A”-14.342.29-343.1.

426 John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera: a 1728 ballad opera, lyrics written by Gay to popular tunes, which deals with low life characters and satirizes Italian operatic mannerisms.

426 Palestrina’s many voices avoiding the devil’s dissonance…: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c.1525–1594), Italian Renaissance composer, especially known for his sacred polyphonic style. Tradition has it that he saved polyphony against the Counter-Reformation strictures of the Council of Trent (mid-16th century), which wanted to simplify church music and stress the clarity of the sung text against over-elaboration which was seen as creeping Protestant influence. The “devil’s dissonance” presumably refers to the tritone, known in the medieval period as “diabolus in musica” or devil’s interval.

426 The bodies of fiddles had two centuries to wait…: see “A”-12.150.9-10.

426 Paganini’s neighs made with horsehair and strings…:

426 Rousseau regretted the disappearance of the voice from music…:

426 Voltaire said that taste may be ruined in a nation…: from the Philosophical Dictionary (1764) entry on “Taste”: “Taste may become vitiated in a nation, a misfortune which usually follows a period of perfection. Fearing to be called imitators, artists seek new and devious routes, and fly from the pure and beautiful nature of which their predecessors have made so much advantage. […] As an artist forms his taste by degrees, so does a nation. It stagnates for a long time in barbarism; then it elevates itself feebly, until at length a noon appears, after which we witness nothing but a long and melancholy twilight” (trans. William F. Fleming).

426 ‘a type of human nature to which we may look’: from Spinoza, qtd. 421.

426 One extreme of hearing for him may be […] ‘silence’: alluding to John Cage, 4’33”, a piano work performed without the musician playing any notes; also Silence (1961) was Cage’s first and most influential collection of writings.

426 Bach’s feet it is said danced his fugue at the organ: cf. anecdote at “A”-13.366.14-17.

427 ‘in opera poetry must be the obedient daughter of music’ (Mozart): qtd. 93 and CSP 123.

Novi

428 ‘Novi hominem tanquam te’: from Love’s Labour’s Love; LZ gives a translation of the Latin.

Old Testament’s Odyssey

428 Pericles (whose name means risk): see Bottom 74 and “Claims” (CSP 155).

428 then he hears the music of the spheres: at Pericles V.i; cf. other mentions of Pericles and the music of the spheres at 88, 328 and 423.

428 The intellect of St. Thomas…: from St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Conta Gentiles, Part I.5: “Yet another advantage is made apparent by the words of the Philosopher (10 Ethic). For when a certain Simonides maintained that man should neglect the knowledge of God, and apply his mind to human affairs, and declared that ‘a man ought to relish human things, and a mortal, mortal things’: the Philosopher contradicted him, saying that ‘a man ought to devote himself to immortal and divine things as much as he can.’ Hence he says (11 De Anima) that though it is but little that we perceive of higher substances, yet that little is more loved and desired than all the knowledge we have of lower substances. He says also (2 De Coelo et Mundo) that when questions about the heavenly bodies can be answered by a short and probable solution, it happens that the hearer is very much rejoiced. All this shows that however imperfect the knowledge of the highest things may be, it bestows very great perfection on the soul: and consequently, although human reason is unable to grasp fully things that are above reason, it nevertheless acquires much perfection, if at least it hold things, in any way whatever, by faith.”

Pericles

429 Liquid crystal: see note at 73; also 75.

429 early Fancy Song: from The Merchant of Venice, qtd. 60 (followed by commentary) and 286.

430 Hume writes somewhere…: David Hume (1711-1776), “The Natural History of Religion” (1757): “The EGYPTIAN mythologists, in order to account for animal worship, said, that the gods, pursued by the violence of earthborn men, who were their enemies, had formerly been obliged to disguise themselves under the semblance of beasts.”

431 ‘Vnto thy value I will mount my selfe / Vpon a Courser, whose delight steps: from Pericles, qtd. “A”-14.352.13-15.

432 ‘as from thence, / Sorrow be euer racte’ (raz’d…: from Pericles, qtd. “A”-19.434.10-13.

432 An eye whose judgement…: as indicated, from Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), elegy on Sir Thomas Wyatt:
An eye whose judgment no affect could blind,
Friends to allure, and foes to reconcile;
Whose piercing look did represent a mind
With virtue fraught, reposed, void of guile.

432 ‘poetry enwrapped in blind fables and dark stories’…: as LZ indicates, from Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), An Anatomy of Absurdity (1589): “I account of poetry as of a more hidden & divine kind of philosophy, enwrapped in blind fables and dark stories, wherein the principles of more excellent arts and moral precepts of manners, illustrated with divers examples of other kingdoms and countries, are contained, for amongst the Grecians there were poets before there were any philosophers, who embraced entirely the study of wisdom, as Cicero testifieth in his Tusculans, whereas he saith that of all sorts of men, poets are most ancient, who, to the intent they might allure men with a greater longing to learning, have followed two things, sweetness of verse and variety of invention, knowing that delight doth prick men forward to the attaining of knowledge, and that true things are rather admired if they be included in some witty fiction, like to pearls that delight more if they be deeper set in gold. Wherefore, seeing poetry is the very same with philosophy, the fables of poets must of necessity be fraught with wisdom & knowledge, as framed of those men which have spent all their time and studies in the one and in the other.”

433 ‘. . . at Hamadan . . . a celebrated academy…: from Abbé Blacnchet, qtd. from Henry Green Shakespeare and The Emblem Writers (1870), see following pages, who introduces this parable with the remark: “The emblematism of bodily sign or action constitutes the language of the dumb” (17).

436 (thought, 1947-1960): “Pericles” was the last composed section of Bottom.

Qu’ai-je

436 ‘Qu’ai-j’oublie?’: from The Merry Wives of Windsor, Fr. “What have I forgotten?”; spoken by the French Doctor Caius.

436 She who typed this…: i.e. CZ.

Sonnets

At 337-338, “I” lists the following sonnets as those he considers Shakespeare’s best with brief remarks. Sonnet 53 is included in TP 121.

439 Sic spectuanda fides: from Pericles, L. “So is fidelity to be proved”; the motto on the shield of the fifth knight in the tournament scene of Pericles II.ii (see 435).

439 Satis quod sufficit: from Love’s Labour’s Lost, L. “enough is as good as a feast.” Spoken by the pedantic schoolmaster Holofernes in somewhat incorrect Latin.

T

439 ‘a wound here that was like a T, / But now ’tis made an H’: from Antony and Cleopatra IV.viii; qtd. 33 with following commentary, also 442.

440 ‘Terras Astraea reliquit”: from Titus Andronicus IV.iii:
Titus Andronicus: Come, Marcus; come, kinsmen; this is the way.
Sir boy, now let me see your archery;
Look ye draw home enough, and ’tis there straight.
Terras Astraea reliquit:
Be you remember’d, Marcus, she’s gone, she’s fled.
The Latin phrase is taken from Ovid, Metamorphoses I.150 (see Bottom 393), with LZ giving a standard translation that might be found in any notes to Shakespeare’s text: “The Goddess of Justice has left the earth.” The last line, “Lady Astrey whose mother was a Jew,” is apparently taken from the Arthur Golding translation of Metamorphoses: in the same passage referred to above, Golding has: “All godlynesse lies under foote. And Ladie Astrey, last / Of heavenly vertues, from this earth in slaughter drowned past” (Book I.169-170). While in Book V.178-179 appears the following: “There died also Celadon, A gypsie of the South: / And so did bastart Astrey too, whose mother was a Jew.” The recurrence of the same name obviously does not refer to the same figure—at least not in Ovid.

U (V)

440 ‘vnboyteene verd: from The Merry Wives of Windsor, Fr. “a green box”; spoken by the French Doctor Caius, this is usually emended/modernized to un boitier vert.

Videsne

Title videsne: L. do you see; see below.

440 vir sapit qui pauca loquitur: from Love’s Labour’s Lost, L. “that man is wise who speaks little.”

440 ‘Videsne quis venit? / —Video, et gaudeo.’: from Love’s Labour’s Lost, L. “Do you see who comes? / I see, and rejoice.” Spoken by Sir Nathaniel and Holofernes respectively.

Wonder

Title Wonder: see top of 428 and other instances listed in index.

441 ‘Wonder by heaven, the wonder in a moral eye’: deliberately or not, the reference for this quotation is missing: Love’s Labour’s Lost IV.iii; LZ adds the initial “Wonder” to the line.

441 ‘It is a world to see’: from Much Ado About Nothing, qtd. 289.

X

441 Chaucer wrote Xristus (An A.B.C.): see 116-117 and “A”-23.563.8; also note at “A”-23.562.36.

441 According to the glossary…: in C.T. Onions’ A Shakespeare Glossary (see 49) the only entry under “X” is Xanthippe, the wife of Socrates.

441 th’ incorporal air (Quarto 2): from Hamlet III.iv; this phrase spoken by Gertrude as Hamlet speaks to the ghost of his father which she cannot see. Modern texts of Hamlet are composites, most often using the Second Quarto version as the primary basis since it is the longest of the three surviving versions.

Z (signature)

442 I had a wound here that was like a T, /But now ’tis made an H: from Antony and Cleopatra, qtd. 33 and 439.

442 ‘Nor I am sure there is no force in eyes / That can doe hurt’: from As You Like It, qtd. 88.

442 ‘a soul feminine saluteth us’: from Love’s Labour’s Lost, qtd. 440.

443 Haydn’s setting for smiling at grief: Joseph Haydn set a passage from Twelfth Night II.iv as a canzonette (in the second set of Six Canzonettes, 1795). The passage is spoken by Viola to the Duke (bracketed phrases cut out by Haydn):
[A blank, my lord:] she never told her love,
But let concealment like a worm i’ th’ bud
Feed on her damask cheek: [she pin’d in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy]
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. [Was not this love indeed?]

443 of the ‘blessed’ apart from ‘shape’ we ‘know’: see Shakespeare, Sonnet 53 (line 12):
Speak of the spring and foison of the year,
The one doth shadow of your beauty show,
The other as your bounty doth appear,
And you in every blessed shape we know.

443 an exercise by Bach for Anna Magdalena: a keyboard work Bach compiled with and dedicated to his second wife, Notenbuch for Anna Magdalena Bach (1725), whom he married in 1721; see 18.395.7.

443 τοῦτο δὲ πρὸς ἔνα: Gr. “toward one person only” (the Greek is misprinted in the Bottom text). LZ indicates in the index that this phrase is taken from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics IX.10 (1171a), which he refers to at 348 and “A”-12.237.16-17. Since LZ is presumably consulting his Loeb Classical Library edition of the text with the facing Greek, I give that translation: “Perhaps therefore it is a good rule not to seek to have as many friends as possible, but only as many as are enough to form a circle of associates. Indeed it would appear to be impossible to be very friendly with many people, for the same reason as it is impossible to be in love with several people. Love means friendship in the superlative degree, and that must be with one person only; so also warm friendship is only possible with a few. This conclusion seems to be supported by experience. Friendships between comrades only include a few people, and the famous examples of poetry are pairs of friends” (trans. H. Rackham).

Index

445 That . . . thunders in the index: from Hamlet, qtd. “A”-14.336.27-28.