The one that got away

I forgot to include in an earlier post this clue from today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword: 14-D, four letters, “‘___ by night, a chest of drawers by day’: Goldsmith.” I will give away the answer, from Oliver Goldsmith’s poem “The Deserted Village,” in lines that describe a now-gone inn or tavern, a “house where nut-brown draughts inspired”:

The chest contrived a double debt to pay,
A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day.

Those lines seemed familiar, and not because I have Oliver Goldsmith on my mind. I thought of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the enervated coupling of the typist and clerk:

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.

There’s no note for these lines in Eliot’s often-parodic “Notes on The Waste Land,” but there is a note for lines that soon follow:

When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.

Eliot’s note: “V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield.” Here’s the song.

Was Eliot consciously borrowing from Goldsmith with the divan/bed thirty lines earlier? Unconsciously borrowing? I think it must have been one or the other.

The coupling of the clerk and typist seems to have extraordinary resonance in contemporary college classrooms, at least in my experience of teaching The Waste Land. It’s an emotional blank, presented in fourteen lines that — guess what? — turn out to be a Shakespearean sonnet.