“This music crept by me upon the waters”: Shakespeare’s Tempest

Abstract

After the Waste Land clerk and the typist have sex, Eliot quotes again from Ferdinand’s “Where should this music be?” speech. The line he borrows, this time unaltered, is “This music crept by me upon the waters.” Here is the end of the clerk-typist scene, the Ferdinand line, and the section that follows:

She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone.

‘This music crept by me upon the waters’

And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.

O City city, I can sometimes hear

Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,

The pleasant whining of a mandoline

And a clatter and a chatter from within

Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls

Of Magnus Martyr hold

Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold. (WL 255–65)

Here, the music the typist puts on the record player merges with Ariel’s music. It creeps not only upon the water but also up the streets of London, where it blends with another kind of music—the “pleasant whining of a mandoline.” Even as the music forms a continuous stream, though, the quotation marks bracketing off Ferdinand’s remark separate his voice from the stream of voices, a rare moment of respect for the conventions of quotation.