“Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea”: Sappho

Abstract

The clerk-typist scene begins with a long sentence about dusk:

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins. (WL 215–23)

Eliot emphasizes the quality of light at this time of day—what he calls “the violet hour,” when the sun has gone down but darkness has not yet fallen and the air looks blue or purple. “The violet hour” is repeated twice and then modified to “the evening hour,” which names the time of day instead of the color of twilight, and which controls strong and purposeful verbs: it “strives / Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, / The typist home at teatime” (WL 220–22; emphasis added). Bodies and taxies throb, turn, and wait; Tiresias throbs and sees; the typist clears and lights and lays out, but the central trajectory of the sentence is the impulse to return home at the end of the day. That this desire to return happens every day, over and over, is conveyed by repetition: in addition to “violet hour …violet hour … evening hour,” we hear “waits …waiting,” “throbbing … throbbing,” “homeward … home … home.” The sentence is filled with doubles and triples; its structure fits its content, which focuses on the dailyness of coming home.