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Little Gidding by T. S. Eliot
I
Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?
If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull façade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
II
Ash on an old man’s sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house—
The wall, the wainscot and the mouse.
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.
There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth.
Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.
In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
Both one and many; in the brown baked features
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another’s voice cry: ‘What! are you here?’
Although we were not. I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other—
And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
And so, compliant to the common wind,
Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
I said: ‘The wonder that I feel is easy,
Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:
I may not comprehend, may not remember.’
And he: ‘I am not eager to rehearse
My thought and theory which you have forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both bad and good. Last season’s fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
He left me, with a kind of valediction,
And faded on the blowing of the horn.
III
There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between
them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of no immediate kin or kindness,
But some of peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and quiet,
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.
IV
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
V
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
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Robert Frost
Eliot and I have our similarities and our differences. We are both poets and we both like to play. That’s the similarity. The difference is this: I like to play euchre. He likes to play Eucharist.
—from The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (1963)
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Comment on Little Giddingfrom Redeeming Time T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets of Kenneth Paul
Kramer CHOOSING BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
Almost immediately after completing The Dry Salvages early in 1941, Eliot began working on the final quartet. Arguably, Little Gidding should have been the easiest of the four poems to write, since the form and themes of the collection had already been established; it proved however to be the most difficult. Eliot was still exhausted from the strain of the war, and he often contracted feverish colds while battling his ongoing bronchial trouble. Yet, for various reasons, including the incessant bombing raids conducted by Hitler’s air force on London, he felt pressured to finish the poem. As he told his close friend John Hayward, however, he thought that his writing had become too forced and self-conscious. He wrote: “My suspicions about the poem are partly due to the fact that as it is written to complete a series, and not solely for itself, it may be too much from the head and may show signs of flagging.”1 Therefore, in July 1941, after completing a first draft, he abandoned the project until August of the following year. Before he was finished, he had produced five drafts of Little Gidding (more drafts than for any other quartet) and thirteen typescripts. Little Gidding was to be his last published poem.
Embodying the spirit of Nicholas Ferrar, who established the first lay community of the English church there in 1625, the small and obscure shrine of Little Gidding had (and has) become a place of spiritual pilgrimage. Originally, the Little Gidding community consisted of about thirty men, women, and children who adopted a common rule of disciplined prayer and daily work. While the community was not monastic (only Ferrar and two of his nieces Book of Common Prayer chapel in May 1936, Little Gidding must have occupied a special place in Eliot’s spiritual imagination, for here we encounter the most intensive reflections of his Anglo-Catholic sensibilities.
Little Gidding had a psychological and literary interest for Eliot in addition to a spiritual one. The earlier metaphysical poets Richard Crashaw, John Donne, and George Herbert, who Eliot rediscovered in the 1930s and in whom Eliot found the highest expression of the English mystical tradition, had all congregated around Ferrar’s charisma and associated themselves with this developing spiritual community. For this reason, Ronald Schuchard has persuasively suggested that Herbert and the fourteenth-century English mystics are the “guiding spirits” ofLittle Gidding and that Herbert’s spirit in particular “informs the poem.” Schuchard writes that Eliot “saw Little Gidding as a distant paradigm of the contemplative life, founded as it was on a mystical devotional spirit which [Eliot] would embrace with increasing intensity.”2 It is no wonder that Eliot, finding Herbert to be a genuine and passionate devotional poet, said in a 1938 lecture: “What is relevant is all there, and we do not ask to know more of him [Herbert] than what is conveyed in his utterence of his meditations on the highest spiritual mysteries. Within his limits, therefore, he achieves the greatest universality in his art; he remains as the human soul contemplating on the divine.”3
by the likes of Bishop Laud and King Charles, favored elaborate liturgies held in richly furnished churches. Puritans, on the other hand, to counter what they deemed the “papist idolatry” of the Church of England, preferred more austere forms of worship. While Ferrar preferred high-church sensibilities, he was perfectly willing to adopt forms of Puritan worship as he saw fit. Because he was able to strike a compromise between the primary warring factions in English Christianity, the community remained strong during Ferrar’s life and lasted until 1647, and as a result of Oliver Cromwell’s victory it was dispersed by the Puritan parliament toward the end of the Civil War. The poem Little Gidding thus takes as its backdrop two wars—the three hundredth anniversary of England’s Civil War and the third year of World War II.
Eliot’s 1936 visit to Little Gidding’s restored medieval church (it was rebuilt in the nineteenth century after being ruined by fire) was likely motivated by the fact that sometime earlier George Every, himself a poet and playwright, whom Eliot had visited at the Society of the Sacred Mission at Kelham, had sent Eliot the draft of an unpublished verse play, Stalemate: The King at Little Gidding. Every’s play focuses on Charles I’s last visit to the cloister in May 1646, when he sought refuge after the battle of Naseby. In the play Ferrar converses with Richard Crashaw, who argues that, since King Charles’s ecclesiastical cause has been defeated in the war and bloodshed of the Reformation era, the Ferrarites should escape over the channel, where “the monks chant their plainsong, while in England the forest fire burns.” Ferrar responds: “Would you walk away or walk your way through the fire? . . . We do not know what is beyond the fire. / We can only know enough to see the fire.”4 Fire, as we will see, was to become the governing element of Eliot’s last quartet.
Tongued with Fire (Little Gidding I)
The road to Little Gidding leads north of London through Cambridge and then west through Peterborough to the Hamlet of Great Gidding in the county of Huntingdonshire. Almost hidden in the sparsely populated countryside, situated behind a farm and next to a pigsty, the Little Gidding church, like Burnt Norton’s manor, is not easy to find, even with a map and an experienced driver. At the time of Eliot’s visit, other than the church only a farmhouse remained of the original manor where Ferrar’s community had moved to escape the urban dampening of religious spirit. The remote countryside surrounding it is populated with a few farmhouses, cottages, and barns. Today, one approaches Little Gidding from the northeast by a narrow, rough lane, which leads to a farmhouse, an adjoining chapel, and more recently constructed residential dwellings.5 Passing through the farmyard, visitors “turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade / And the tombstone.” Ferrar’s tombstone sits in the middle of a narrow path leading to the church and must, therefore, be walked around on the way in. Over the entrance of the Little Gidding church, a stone memorial bears Ferrar’s words: “This Is None Other But the House of God and the Gate of Heaven.”
Not surprisingly, the poem Little Gidding follows the basic pattern established in the other quartets. Coming from the almost hidden rose garden of Burnt Norton, the quiet village of East Coker, and the powerful river and ocean of The Dry Salvages, Eliot concludes Four Quartets at a place of spiritual pilgrimage. The landscape meditation of the first movement (the prayer tongued with fire) and the related temporal illumination of the second movement (a dialogue with the compound ghost) lead to the spiritual discipline in the third movement (purifying the motive) and the associated purgatorial lyric of the fourth movement (pyre or pyre) that culminates in a unitive vision of the “complete consort dancing together.” Having moved through the visionary, airy images of Burnt Norton and through the earthy East Coker and watery The Dry Salvages, here in the final quartet we will encounter the pentecostal fire, which “stirs the dumb spirit” and quickens the soul.
In fact, on a notepad Eliot jotted his preliminary scheme for Little Gidding, indicating his intention, in the final poem, to juxtapose fires of the Inferno and Pentecost:
Winter scene. May.
Lyric. air earth water end &
demonic fire. The Inferno.
They vanish, the individuals, and
our feeling for them sinks into the
flame which refines. They emerge
in another pattern & recreated & reconciled
redeemed, having their meaning to-
gether not apart, in a union
which is of beams from the central
fire. And the others with them
contemporaneous.
Invocation to the Holy Spirit
Eliot’s outline for Little Gidding reveals a trajectory of thought that remarkably parallels Martin Buber’s understanding of Heracliltus’s logos. Similarly, Eliot writes that when “individuals” (those who sink into the Inferno) become transformed (recreated, reconciled, and redeemed by the power of the Holy Spirit) they become “We,” persons “having their meaning together” through communal speech-with-meaning.
The first movement of Little Gidding, one of the most powerful movements in the poem, is comprised of three stanzas: from a season “suspended in time,” to a rough road in England in the “voluptuary sweetness” of May, to the Little Gidding church itself. Initially, we find ourselves in an ephemeral season of “midwinter spring” that recalls lines from the second movement of East Coker: “What is the late November doing / With the disturbance of the spring . . .?” The Heraclitian elements of the first three quartets—air, earth, and water—are now completed by the element of pentecostal fire that “stirs the dumb spirit.” In this “springtime / But not in time’s covenant” apparent opposites—frost and fire, pole and tropic, melting and freezing, budding and fading—are held together, as a “glare that is blindness in the early afternoon” converts what is most darkened and most frozen into what is most alive. This winter season “between melting and freezing” is trans-seasonal: light is reflected from ice and suspended; fire is not consumed. The sky is clear. Whereas the poet in Burnt Norton appeared to feel a bit like a trespasser in the garden, in Little Gidding he has a more immediate relationship to the landscape: here, there are no pauses, no conditional phrases, no hesitations. Completely in tune with the thawing trees, “The soul’s sap quivers.” Death and rebirth coexist.
The dualities between winter and spring dissipate in the paradoxical season of “Midwinter spring,” a season that is “not in the scheme of generation.” With the question “Where is the summer, the unimaginable / Zero summer?” we recall how the poet responded to a timeless moment in the second movement of Burnt Norton: “I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. / And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.” Wedding the natural scene to a spiritual perception, the midwinter “zero summer” blazes with pentecostal fire into the natural sphere like sun reflecting off the frozen pond, evoking the heart’s heat. Martin Buber’s words, in another context, fittingly reflect and reinforce the spiritual clarity of this passage: “only now can his own being thrive, ripen and bring forth fruit, and the law by which seasons of greenness and seasons of withering succeed one another in the life of the living being, no longer holds for him—his sap circulates continually in undiminished freshness.”7
The conversational verse paragraph that follows grounds this visionary landscape in May’s “voluptuary sweetness” at a specific place of pilgrimage near Cambridge. The places from which one would likely have come to enter Little Gidding’s church have already been imaged in the earlier quartets. We have emerged from Burnt Norton’s underground, where a light flickers upon the advertising boards that run from platform to ceiling and conversation is reduced to a dull, flat, voiceless chattering; from the chain of endless deaths and rebirths envisaged in East Coker; and from the wailing uncertainties of the fishermen’s travail and their wives’ fears of a futureless future in The Dry Salvages, where the ocean tosses up reminders of our past and where the tolling bell reminds us of a time older than we can measure. These are the places that entrap us between past and future, where servitude to history breeds fear of death.
Having come to Little Gidding’s sacred place, where the power of incarnate logos had shaped a believing community, Eliot discovers that what held that community together—valid prayer—is more than anything that is uttered by “the praying mind” itself. More than words, more than sounds, more than meanings, valid prayer is vital reciprocity between the one praying and the One who perfectly hears and perfectly responds in language, like the communication of the dead, “tongued with fire.” Called deeper into the spring day’s landscape, we are brought to enter the “dull façade” For
. . . what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment.
Here, at the end of the pilgrimage, the usual linear relationship between “purpose” and “fulfillment” is undone. The fulfillment, itself beyond his original purpose, alters that purpose from accomplishing a goal imagined in the past by placing him in the middle of a future possibility in which each accomplishment becomes a prelude to a new discovery. Ironically, this place, which had become a shrine attracting pilgrims, is bland on the outside, lacking any aesthetic quality, dull and situated behind a pigsty. Seemingly nothing in itself, this church nevertheless embodies the whole of spiritual substance. Inside, beyond the narrow benchseats that face one another across a narrow aisle, an altar stands at the front, behind which three brass tablets are engraved with the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Apostle’s Creed. Above these tablets, an arched stained glass window depicts Christ on the cross, flanked by his mother, Mary, and the beloved disciple.
Recalling those who came this way (the likes of Ferrar and Herbert), the poet continues:
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Now we are placed where spirit has been embodied, where the sacrament of the Eucharist has been practiced, and, most significantly, where prayer has been valid. Now we see what Eliot was referring to in “Usk,” a brief landscape poem written several years earlier, when he warned against putting faith in the “old enchantments” of fertility rituals or the grail legend; instead he sought the spirit “Where the gray light meets the green air / The hermit’s chapel, the pilgrim’s prayer” (CPP 94).
Once again, in this place of Little Gidding (“where prayer has been valid”), and at this moment in history, the poet recognizes that what he used to think (that prayer is “the conscious occupation / Of the praying mind”) is no longer authentic.Rather, valid prayer is intimately connected with the speech of the dead. In light of the common logos, even the dead, with whom the poet once took part in dialogue (either in person or through what they handed on to posterity), join with him in prayer. Readers here are asked to exercise both physical imagination (in other words, to imagine walking into Little Gidding’s church) and what William James called “ontological imagination,” through which we sympathetically coexperience the spiritual sensibilities of a pilgrim’s kneeling practice of prayer.
Commenting on the lines “You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid,” Eliot once noted: “What I mean is that for some of us, a sense of place is compelling. If it is a religious place, a place made special by the sacrifice of martyrdom, then it retains an aurora. We know that once before a man gave of himself here and was accepted here, and it was so important that the occasion continues to invest the place with its holiness.”8 If “you” were to come to this place, you too, like the pilgrim, Eliot is saying, would first have to empty yourself of the reasoning mind in order to kneel humbly in prayer beyond the confines of time. According to the poet, the nature of prayer—its essence—is entering the deepest reciprocity with God through submission and self-surrender. Indeed once, while visiting Virginia Woolf in her London home, Eliot was asked about what he experienced while praying. In response to this question, he “described the attempt to concentrate, to forget self, to attain union with God.”9 Recalling his study of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, in which the practice of yoga begins with “controlling” or “stopping” physical distractions and calming the mind, the prayer into which we are invited demands yogic-like concentration. While the presumption of genuine prayer is the person’s readiness to turn wholeheartedly and unreservedly toward God’s presence, according to Buber, in a person’s speaking to God “whatever else is asked, ultimately [a person] asks for the manifestation of the divine Presence, for this Presence’s becoming dialogically perceivable.”10
The stone set in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey on January 4, 1967, to commemorate Eliot’s life and death invokes the key lines from this section of Little Gidding:
Thomas
Stearns
Eliot
O.M.
Born 26 September 1888
Died 4 January 1965
“the communication
of the dead is tongued with fire beyond
the language of the living.”
But who are “the dead”? And how do they communicate? Are they the voices of Ferrar and his community, or voices of all the saints and mystics throughout the history of the church whose experiences have inspired faith? Are they, as well, dead poets from whom the living poet continues to learn? In response to an inquiry about these lines, Eliot once said,
I had chiefly in mind that we cannot fully understand a person, grasp the totality of his being, until he is dead. Once he is dead, the acts of his life fall into their proper perspective and we can see what he was tending toward. Also with the living presence removed, it is easier to make an impartial judgment, free of the personality of the individual.11
teachers and influential poets (like Dante, Herbert, and Yeats [and Eliot as well]) and philosophers (like Augustine, Henri Bergson, and Francis Herbert Bradley) and spiritual teachers (like St. John, Ignatius, and Lancelot Andrewes) who, because they are no longer living, provide the living with access to the direction in which their lives were heading. On the other hand, “the dead” refer to those who, while yet living, completely surrender themselves into the deepest aspects of reality, which is necessary to make prayer valid. Eliot has already pointed to the necessary “agony / Of death and birth” (EC III), to the reality that “the time of death is every moment” (DS III), and to the suggestion that the “intersection of the timeless / With time” occurs “in a lifetime’s death in love” (DS V).
What is discovered here is a kind of unity across persons and time: communication between the dead and the living requires the humility and courage of letting go, of surrendering oneself into the unknown, of dying to one’s time-conditioned identity. When this happens, prayer’s communication is “tongued with fire,” that is, made possible by the same spirit present at Pentecost (to which he will return in the fourth movement). A dual grace is embodied in the pentecostal metaphor—collective and individual. According to the teachings of the church, the pentecostal spirit (tongues of fire) gave birth both to a new community (the church) and to a new consciousness (the rebirthed believer). This pentecostal spirit, thus, contains and gives rise to the inextricable connection between the body of redeemed humanity (the church) and the liberating effects of redeeming time (inner freedom from suffering and attachments).
This spiritual sensitivity resonates with the way Ferrar described his community in a letter to Arthur Woodnoth: “All day they laboured and in the night they found time for long prayer; and while they laboured, they ceased not from contemplation. They spent all their time with profit; every hour seemed short for waiting upon God.”12 Putting away categories, suspending desires, not attempting to prove, judge, learn, or describe anything, the poet aligns his will with the divine will through prayer beyond words. Indeed, it was this spirit of contemplative prayer that Eliot drew from the seventeenth-century Church of England bishop Lancelot Andrewes, whose work he was introduced to by fellow American William Force Stead shortly after they met in 1923. Andrewes was the first great preacher of the English Catholic church because he was, as Eliot once noted, born spiritual. Eliot saturated himself with Andrewes’s devotional prose and sermons, arguing that Andrewes’s devotional writings were superior to those of John Donne because Donne was primarily a personality, whereas Andrewes spoke with the authority of the church. Eliot was most deeply influenced by a slim volume called Private Prayers. Printed after Andrewes’s death, these prayers, like his sermons, harmonized intellect and sensibility and took a place, for Eliot, beside the Exercises of Saint Ignatius and the works of St. Francis de Sales. Andrewes’s ability to constantly find objects adequate to his feelings and to be wholly absorbed in the emotions of the object led Eliot to remark that “Andrewes’ emotion is purely contemplative; it is not personal, it is wholly evoked by the object of contemplation, to which it is adequate; his emotions wholly contained in and explained by its object.”13
Two cryptic lines bring the opening meditation in Little Gidding to a close: “Here, the intersection of the timeless moment / Is England and nowhere. Never and always.” We have passed through a season beyond the natural order, to a specific road leading to the historic church, to enter it and to kneel in prayer. This movement from physical to metaphysical awareness now repeats itself in these two lines. For the poet, the timeless present occurs simultaneously on two planes: on the plane of the “here and now” (which, in this instance, is England’s restored church at Little Gidding) and on the plane of “nowhere” (which, in this instance, points to everywhere). If the place of deepest prayer were limited and bound to the physical and temporal plane, communion with God would be culturally and temporally limited, and offer little redemptive possibility for the larger human community. Genuine prayer is only possible because of this intersection between “here and now” and “never and always”—“never,” because it does not come into existence and then disappear, and because it only manifests itself occasionally, at the right moment, and “always,” since the “one end” is continuously present. This theme, struck throughout the Quartets, finds an objective correlative at Little Gidding, where the pilgrim comes from the bondage of endless birth, death, and time to rest in the fiery grace of God’s redeeming presence.
Compound Ghost (Little Gidding
The associated second movement of Little Gidding begins, following the established pattern of the Quartets, with a formal lyric that leads to a longer-lined temporal illumination. Recapitulating Heraclitus, the poet offers a powerful rehearsal of death and decay, gathering together symbolisms that run throughout the Quartets. In three brief songs, three faces of death—psychological death (the temporary and reversible termination of cognitive, emotive, and spiritual vitality), physical death (the irreversible cessation of bodily functions), and spiritual death (the transformational termination of inauthenticity through death and rebirth of the self)—appear consecutively. To put it somewhat differently, Eliot was aware that the variety of the world’s sacred religious traditions have encouraged both the de-repression of death anxieties (dread and fear in the face of dying) and the cultivation of methods for overcoming these anxieties. In that sense, dying spiritually before dying physically fosters fearlessness (at least in the moment of rebirth) in the face of death.14
Recalling the “twittering world” of the London Underground of Burnt Norton III—a “place of disaffection” where wind blows “in and out of unwholesome lungs,” and where the “strained time-ridden faces” of “unhealthy souls” are “whirled by the cold wind”—death’s psychological face comes into focus. The poet now alludes to the German aerial bombings over London, when the accumulated debris and dust after a bombing raid was suspended in the air for hours before slowly descending to cover one’s clothing. The fragrant beauty of Burnt Norton’s roses have now become “Ash on an old man’s sleeve;” and the houses of East Coker have now crumbled into dust. Especially in light of Eliot’s earlier poetry, this dust, “the death of hope and despair,” suggests cognitive impotence, emotional dissonance, volitional habitude, and intuitive paralysis. It was to this debilitated state of human consciousness that Eliot referred in The Waste Land when he wrote, “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many” (CPP 39). In the first stanza a life story ends, yet the storyteller still lives (albeit emotionally numbed). In the second stanza, however, not only is there no one left to despair, now even the water and the sand are “parched” and “eviscerate[d],” drained of all life. Physical death here—“Dead water and dead sand / Contending for the upper hand”—recalls the open field of the first movement of East Coker, where “Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf” both “live and die”—“This is the death of earth.”
The most intriguing of the three faces of death is the third, a spiritual death, which points toward a transformation of consciousness rather than to a cessation of faith. Spiritual dying—“the death of water and fire”—is neither a subjective activity nor an objective forgetfulness. Rather, it is a death/rebirth through which attachments to the self-reflexive, isolated ego again and again naturally and spontaneously dissolve through contemplative practice. He writes:
Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.
Commenting on these lines, A. David Moody rightly notes that “the natural elements [of water and fire] may assume religious overtones,” suggesting “the waters of baptism and purgation, and 15 Notably, the fire in Eliot’s cosmology is not just literal fire but an internal and purgative fire as well, descending from above and ascending from within—namely, a graced process of purgation from sin. Significantly, in an earlier draft Eliot concluded this stanza with three extra lines that underscore his intention to develop the theme of spiritual death and rebirth:
Fire without and fire within
Shall purge the unidentified sin.
This is the place where we begin.16
What follows the beginning lyric of the second movement of the previous three quartets is a discursive reflection on time and timelessness. Here, instead, we next overhear an intense dialogue between the poet and a composite figure of several former teachers. The closing passage of the second movement of Little Gidding stands out from the rest of the poem both in terms of style and content. For Eliot, they were among the most difficult lines in the poem to write because they were written to carefully approximate Dante’s three-line terza rima verse form (an Italian rhyme scheme: aba, bcb, cdc). In “What Dante Means to Me,” Eliot wrote that this section of Four Quartets was “intended to be the nearest equivalent to a canto of theInferno or the Purgatorio, in style as well as content, that I could achieve.”17 It is also the only passage in the entire poem in which the poet encounters another speaker.
The main scene that closes the second movement of Little Gidding occurs “In the uncertain hour before the morning / Near the ending of interminable night” filled with the horrific sight of diving, dark-dove bombers with flickering tongues that serve as an ironic counterpart to the flaming tongues of the dead and to the pentecostal tongues of fire. The hellacious night ends with the “all clear” signal, after which no sound can be heard other than the rattling of dead leaves. Smoke rises “between three districts” (suggesting, perhaps, Dante’s Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven). Fulfilling his responsibilities as an air raid warden, while on his dawn round, Eliot meets, through the smoke, “one walking, loitering and hurried,” a stranger who at first has the appearance of a half-recalled dead master whose eyes remind him of several former teachers.
I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
Both one and many; in the brown baked features
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
Many interpreters of these remarkable lines attempt to identify the “compound ghost” with either some individual or a combination of traits: William Butler Yeats;18 a Yeatsian current and a Dantean current;19 a combination of Brunetto Latini (Dante’s beloved master whom he meets in the Inferno XV) and Yeats;20 a kind of Yeats “towards a greater generality”;21Dante, Shakespeare, or Tourneur;22 Jonathan Swift;23 Irving Babbitt.24 Cleo McNelly Kearns, meanwhile, writes thatthe “compound ghost” is part other, part deep self, “a less tangible figure, one that has aspects of the etheric or astral double of the occultists, or even the double as deep self or witness, the atman.”25 A. Walton Litz suggests that the compound ghost “is both the masters of the past and Eliot’s complex Anglo-American other self.”26 As if in response to these suggestions, Derek Traversi reminds readers that “it is essential to understand, however, if we are to respond to the full scope of the poet’s intention, that we are here dealing with an intimate self-confrontation.”27
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another’s voice cry: ‘What! are you here?’
Although we were not. I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other—
And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
And so, compliant to the common wind,
Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
Almost immediately, like Brunetto Latini, whom Dante was astonished to meet in Hell, the ghost is humorously aghast to meet the poet. The “What! are you here?” question is delightfully ambivalent—it addresses poet, stranger, and reader alike. It asks, which “you” is really present before these words? What questions, needs, and concerns do “you” bring to the text? At the same time, it would be textually inaccurate to assume that both voices are Eliot’s own because the poet sees the stranger’s eyes and the poet hears “another voice” addressing him as “you.” But who speaks when the spirit of the dead master encountered on the London streets “speaks”? To what extent the ghost’s voice is mostly the poet’s own voice or achieves a life of its own remains an open question. While Eliot intimated in the first movement of Burnt Norton “My words echo / Thus, in your mind,” here the poet sympathetically co-experiences (i.e., assumes a double part) another’s shifting voice while retaining his own.
The dynamics of this exchange are hinted at in an earlier draft of this section, where Eliot wrote:
Although we were not. I was always dead
Always revived, and always something other,
And he a face changing.28
29 In response to the poet’s request for the stranger to speak, the ghost is, at first, “not eager to rehearse / My thought and theory which you have forgotten.” The confrontation between the poet and his envisioned double produces deliberate renunciations of “last season’s” creative efforts: “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language / And next year’s words await another voice.” This only serves as a reminder of the poet’s need to confront himself, and to seek some estimate of a lifetime’s creativity. Since there is no obstacle between himself and
. . . the spirit unappeased and peregrine [foreign]
Between two worlds become much like each other
So I find words I never thought to speak.
What is clear is that the presence of death enters the dialogue from each side,30 and the dialogue is not directed to some other whom Eliot wished to place in Hell.
Provocatively, the poet’s pentecostal perspective is located “between two worlds,” not only between life and death, but also between a timeless moment and time. The interlocutor, like Brunetto Latini in the Divine Comedy, in response to being asked to “speak,” now offers counsel grounded in hindsight by disclosing what death has helped him to realize.
‘. . . Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains. . . .’
Many commentators, at this point, focus on the intersection between poetic vocation and the vicissitudes of daily life. Yet, more significantly, this passage embodies revealing words spoken by a former mentor, which reminds the poet of their common concern with speech (evident in the final movement of three of the four Quartets), a concern that bonded them in a mutual vitality “to purify the dialect of the tribe. . . .” As the fragment from Heraclitus, quoted in the first epigraph of the poem, reminds us, the process of this purification can no longer be limited to the eloquence of one poet’s craft. Rather, purifying language now manifests more fully in the common logos, a communal speaking and listening in the service of meaning.
Accordingly, in the communal speaking between the stranger and the poet, they “genuinely think with one another because they genuinely talk to one another,” a common speaking and thinking that existentially effects a “communal guarding of meaning” and shapes “a single common world whose unity and community they work on in all real waking existence.”31 His challenge to refine language and revitalize speech—to appropriate the right words from tradition and society, which, when properly aligned, as perfectly as possible, articulate and evoke their purpose—always coincidental to the poet’s spiritual process, urges “the mind to aftersight and foresight.” That is, the former (aftersight from the perspective of death) generates the latter (foresight from life’s vantage point).
The stranger now gives voice to the ironic disclosure that advancing age bestows three gifts upon the writer: diminished senses, lacerated consciousness, and shameful memories. Moreover, as “body and soul begin to fall asunder,” the stranger indicates that an ever-narrowing creativity will be experienced. After directing the poet to an agonizing self-assessment upon the effort of a lifetime through the eyes of old age, the ghost ends:
‘. . . From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’
The poet’s “exasperated spirit” rages at “human folly” and at “the shame / Of motives late revealed,” continuing to move back and forth “unless” (the key word in this passage) restored through a purging fire. If there is to be a remedy, it will come via a “refining fire” of deprivation and endless humility in which one moves “like a dancer” in partnership with the divine. This image of the dance echoes the second movement of Burnt Norton (“at the still point, there the dance is”), the first movement of East Coker (“Keeping the rhythm in their dancing”), and the third movement of East Coker (“So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing”). This necessary renewal of spirit occurs, for the poet, at the intersection of his life and his art, where the one enriches the other. About this redeeming turning point, Derek Traversi writes: “It may, therefore, be an appropriate occasion for us, as readers, to ask ourselves certain questions. What, we may fairly ask, does all that we have read in following this series of poems add up to in terms of actual, definitive achievement?”32 Or, to put it more practically, how do these poems influence and shape our lives in specific ways?
I will return to this question in the conclusion, but it is important here to recall that, while the main redeeming reciprocity in Burnt Norton occurs between poet and rose garden, in East Coker between poet and sacramental ritual, and in The Dry Salvages between poet and sacred text, here, for the first time, it occurs between poet and the “other.” When reciprocity is genuine, one enters a timeless domain, since self-reflective awareness is temporarily suspended, replaced by, as Martin Buber wrote, “a memorable, common fruitfulness which is to be found nowhere else,” that is “the dynamic of an elemental togetherness,” that emancipates individualistically oriented attachments to temporal existence.33 By stepping into a direct relationship with this “brown baked stranger,” the poet comes to discover that entering reciprocal relationship involves both being chosen and choosing, both acting and surrendering. Nothing foreknown, no agenda, no distraction intervenes between them. The poet recognizes, in his meeting with the ghost, that the renewing spirit arises again and again through relational space (the oscillating sphere between himself and what meets him) when dialogical partners are able to express themselves in truth by mutually and unreservedly turning toward one another, listening attentively and responding responsively. In this interaction, what would otherwise remain hidden can unfold in a way that transforms each person.
For this reason, according to Buber, if not Eliot as well, the words spoken by the stranger become “tongued with fire” in that the poet glimpses the divine presence in their interaction. If God is the nearest One, the always ready, supreme partner in dialogue, if God addresses us by standing with us directly, nearly, and lastingly as the eternal partner who is always ready to become dialogically present, we might then wonder what type of mutuality can exist between human beings and God. Doesn’t dialogue require each partner to speak? In describing God as “absolute Person,” Buber was signifying the empowerment of interhuman relationships by suggesting the dynamics of how God communicates with humans.34 As a “Person,” God enters into direct relationship with us in creative, revealing, and redeeming acts, making it possible for us in turn to enter into direct relationships with God and with others. Not a person in any finite way, God becomes personal in order to speak to us through the language of everyday interhuman exchanges. God speaks to the whole person, in contrast to the individual (neither the starting point nor the goal of human existence), who turns body and soul—honestly, attentively, withholding nothing—to another. In this section, God’s speaking penetrates through their genuine relationship, especially when the words of the stranger stand out for the poet (penetrate into his innermost being) as “instruction, message, demand.”35
Purify the Motive (Little Gidding III)
The third and centering movement in each quartet shifts from the apprehended wisdom of a temporal illumination of the second movement to a spiritual practice moving toward the redemption of time. While the third movements of Burnt Norton and East Coker adapt St. John of the Cross, and The Dry Salvages primarily appropriates insights from the Bhagavad Gita, Little Gidding combines Lord Krishna’s emphasis on detachment with the teachings of the devotional mystic Dame Julian of Norwich. Having experienced the fiery presence of the “zero summer” and having entered into a dialogue with the “familiar compound ghost” (who both is not and is himself), the poet begins by recalling Krishna’s teaching of the “three conditions which often look alike”—attachment, detachment, and indifference. Of the three, “indifference” (psychological death) is most to be avoided. “Attachment to self and to things and to persons” corresponds to desire (“movement / Not in itself desirable”) in Burnt Norton, while “detachment / From self and from things and from persons” corresponds to “abstention from movement” and to “waiting without thought.”
Both attachment and detachment play a necessary role in 36 These three conditions parallel Krishna’sadvice to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita:
One must understand the nature of prescribed action,
And must understand the nature of prohibited action,
And one must understand the nature of inaction:
The way of action is mysterious. (IV:17)37
From Krishna’s point of view, “prescribed,” or detached, action is not attached to desired outcomes, while prohibited action spawns indifference. Disciplined action, which liberates one from being trapped in karma-bound temporality, inaction in action, is detachment from everything, including himself or herself, that distracts a person from being fully present in the moment. Eliot’s sense of the complex and subtly layered relationships between attachment and detachment is expressed in a brief summary for the third movement, written in the processof composing these lines:
The use of memory.to.detach oneself
ones own
From the past.—they vanish & return
in a different action.a new relation-
ship. If it is here, then, why regret it? . . .
Detachment
& attachment
only a hair’s width
apart.38
Neither by attachment nor detachment alone is redemption attained, Krishna teaches, nor by inaction, for no one can be freed of action for even a moment (III:5). For Krishna, as for Eliot, the key to actionless action lies in throwing off the delusion of an imaginary ego, of an “I” who acts or does not act (III:27). But how, if the goal is not to be self-conscious, is this to be attained?
Pondering what Krishna meant by the “three conditions” of attachment, detachment, and indifference, the poet evokes an interplay between self-transcendence and self-consciousness by reintroducing the power of memory. Memory, here, means more than a mere repetition of past ideas or events. Rather, through the “grace of sense,” when linked with a disciplined imagination, reanimated moments of timelessness point the way toward redeeming time:
. . . This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
Echoing the English mystics and St. John, for whom purifying the memory is a necessary ingredient of mystical union, Eliot suggests that the emancipating practice of remembering one’s actions in a way that brings freedom requires detachment from desires, from intellectual constructs, and from the power of one’s own insights. Memory, we discover—as a primary faculty of the soul when engaged without desires for a predicted outcome but as a pointer toward what has yet to be realized—exists for liberation. Eliot uses the term “memory” here not simply to refer to the pastness of the past but in the sense suggested by the Greek word anamnesis, which refers to the immediate presence of the past evoked through its detailed re-presentation. Through non-attached memory, the power of grace expands human love beyond worldly desires and attachments; in the meditative process love 39 This new perspective—“memory / For liberation”—both points from past-oriented compulsions and leads to a condition “not less of love but expanding / Of love beyond desire.”
At this point in the poem, another voice is recalled: that of Dame Julian of Norwich (1343–1416), a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, an anchoress (a solitary person living in a cell) who devoted her life to prayer and meditation. Often in the depths of prayer this English visionary was given a vision from a “courteous” God who is concerned with human well-being and Showings, or Revelations of Divine Love:
Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.40
Just as in The Dry Salvages, in which Krishna’s teaching and Mary’s selfless actions were juxtaposed, here Krishna’s teaching of detachment is counterpoised with Julian’s teaching of purification. Yet as Julian notes, the sins of believers (by “behovely,” Julian means a necessary and unavoidable aspect of human behavior) shall be transformed into joy and glory. Though it would seem at first that Julian’s Showings has little in common with the Gita, this is not the case for the poet. An inner dialectic comes to life between Christian sin and the Indic description of ignorance (avidya). In Hindu and Buddhist teachings the Sanskrit term avidya (beginningless ignorance) suggests maya (illusion, or false appearance) and karma (action-reaction). Like sin, avidya undermines attempts at human liberation. At the same time, just as avidya can be overcome by yogic practice, the effects of sin can be overcome through entering into the presence of God by devotion, prayer, and sacrifice.
Realizing the impossibility of translating with “a painstaking exactitude the Hindu and Buddhist philosophy and experience into his own original Christian vision,”41 Eliot shifts our attention to an instance of Christian spiritual practice, recalling, once again, the historical visitors to Little Gidding. The poet reflects back over three hundred years to the English Civil War with a detached mind, and in the process he becomes aware that “History may be servitude, / History may be freedom.” In the light of the poet’s contemplation of the Gita and Julian’s Showings, “the faces” and “the places” now “become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern,” as contemplation of history gives way to “the inner freedom from the practical desire, / The release from action and suffering” (BN II).
Even while remembering and detaching from the history of the Reformation, the poet imaginatively reanimates the Little Gidding community (“If I think again of this place”) and the people associated with it: “All touched by a common genius, / United in the strife which divided them.” A straightforward definition of memory as sentimental attachment to the past comes into play here, but only insofar as it is contrasted with the deeper meditation suggested by the presence of the compound ghost that memory creates. Recalled in this spirit is the “peculiar genius” of the Church of England poet George Herbert and the “common genius” of Ferrar along with Charles the First (who visited the chapel at nightfall), Crashaw (who befriended Nicholas at Cambridge and also visited the Little Gidding community), and Milton (“who died blind”). The poet, however, even while remembering the compound ghost, wonders “Why should we celebrate / These dead men more than the dying?” As long as we merely escape into the past, refusing to face present inadequacies, we only “ring the bell backward,” or “summon the spectre of a Rose,” or “follow an antique drum.” These historic figures on both sides of the civil war are now seen
As his mind slips back and forth among memories of these earlier writers, the poet again recalls Julian, this time adding two more lines from different revelations in her Showings:
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.
The term “beseeching” (referring to the soul’s longing for the will of God) is here used to reinforce the notion of journeying, of not possessing, of enduring till the end—a devotion. Julian writes: “Beseeching is a true and gracious enduring will of the soul, united and joined to our Lord’s will by the sweet, secret operation of the Holy Spirit.”42 In Julian’s words, “Our Lord brought all this suddenly to my mind, and revealed these words and said: I am the ground of your beseeching.”43 Beseeching is closely related, for Julian, with real prayer. She writes that one needs to pray wholeheartedly, even though one may feel nothing; for in dryness and in barrenness, in sickness and in weakness, then is your prayer most pleasing to God, though you think it almost tasteless to you. In other words, “all shall be well,” insofar as our motives are inspired by faith and rooted in prayer that invites divine grace into the foundation of our action.
Here, then, the goal and direction of historical awareness are linked with ascetic practice of contemplative prayer already spoken of in the first movement. As a result, the history of Little Gidding becomes transformed through purified or graced motives in the ground of nonattached beseeching. Having been perfected beyond indifference, the lives of Ferrar, Herbert, Charles, Laud, Strafford, Crashaw, and Milton all participate in catapulting this
Here, then, the goal and direction of historical awareness are linked with ascetic practice of contemplative prayer already spoken of in the first movement. As a result, the history of Little Gidding becomes transformed through purified or graced motives in the ground of nonattached beseeching. Having been perfected beyond indifference, the lives of Ferrar, Herbert, Charles, Laud, Strafford, Crashaw, and Milton all participate in catapulting this transformative recomposition of the poet’s imagination into his life. These figures embodied, or sought to embody, divine will in the midst of their daily activity. As “symbols perfected in death,” they exemplify Eliot’s recontextualizing of Krishna’s teaching in The Dry Salvages—that “the time of death is every moment.”
Pyre or Pyre (Little Gidding IV)
As we have seen, the associated lyrical fourth movements of Four Quartets not only recapitulate, in a more intense manner, major thematic motifs running throughout the sequence but also provide progressive glimpses into redemptive moments. In Burnt Norton IV an unearthly light glistened off the kingfisher’s wing; in East Coker IV the wounded surgeon plied the steel;in The Dry Salvages IV the Lady was petitioned to intercede for those in need. Moving from the divine light of Burnt Norton to the paschal sacrifice of Jesus to the selfless service of Mary, we arrive at Little Gidding, in which each of these sensibilities is celebrated and affirmed by the purifying fire of the Holy Spirit. Now,
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sins and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
It has been suggested that this stanza offers the most challenging moment of Little Gidding for the reader because it “asks our participation and assent, demands not just elucidation and appreciation but communion in prayer.”44 While the insistence of this statement somewhat limits its challenge, it can be said that this passage draws us into a close encounter with the poet who asks us to reflect on our own spiritual sensibilities in light of Little Gidding’s affirmation of hope. In light of the “tongued with fire” prayer in the first movement, the “incandescent terror” leads to one last freedom and obligation: the freedom, and the obligation, to decide between the flame of senseless death and destruction and the eternal flame of redemptive love.
While one cannot finally understand whether, or the extent to which, we are consumed by fire, we can (indeed, must) decide which fire we are seeking: the consuming, torturous flame of Dante’s Inferno (“each wrapped in what is burning him” [XXVI:48]), or the refining, redeeming fire of the Purgatorio (in whose midst “you would not lose one hair” [XXVII:27]). This choice between two opposing fires also suggests a choice between worlds of two opposing wills—the will to earthly power (leading straight to the fire of the Inferno) or the will to God (perfected in the fire of Purgatorio). Indeed, like Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Bhagavad Gita speaks of two kinds of fire: an insatiable fire of desire, passion, and anger (III:37, 39), and the fire of wisdom that transforms works of desire to ashes (IV:37). Further, like Dante’s purgatorial fire, wisdom’s fire in the Gita has “the power to cleanse and purify” (IV:38).45
In the Anglo-Catholic counterpoint to this background of Eliot’s poetry, the Apostles’ experience at Pentecost recalls the divine fire pouring forth from heaven. Fifty days after Passover, followers of the crucified Jesus were gathered together, tradition records, in the upper room where the Last Supper had transpired. Without warning, a powerful wind filled the entire house: “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability” (Acts 2:3-4). Yet, these “tongues” were understood by those present as if spoken in each other’s own language. As in Dante’s Purgatorio and the Buddha’s sermon, fire here paradoxically brings liberation from suffering. Through purgatorial love, spiritual death/rebirth brings with it the realization of renewed life. Through the power of the Spirit descending on the disciples, 46 As a result of this dawning consciousness, the Spirit begins drawing those who are encountered by it into the mystery of a redemptive relationship to life and, in the process, to the Divine.
By juxtaposing the sacred stories and associated rituals of Indic and Anglo-Catholic spiritual traditions, the poem intensifies and deepens its contemplative attentiveness. Had Eliot not evoked multiplicitous fires, the question that follows in the poem would not have the impact it now wields:
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
Though the word “love” has not been absent from Four Quartets, we may reasonably be caught off guard by the poet’s assertion that love is the generative force behind both “incandescent
In both a destructive sense and a divine sense (in the purgative discipline that burns away the passion of self-love), love either weaves the “intolerable shirt of flame” (Hercules was consumed by the poisoned shirt of Nessus as a result of his human passions) or authors pentecostal tongues that no human power can apprehend. Eliot seems to be preparing to draw theQuartets together by affirming the purifying force of suffering and that us: Dante’s infernal “flame” that destroys the soul or St. John’s eternal “living flame of love” that purifies the soul. In a profoundly subtle manner, Little Gidding presents its readers a demanding choice, not just between two worlds (old and new), but between two fires (redeeming love or aversion and desire): “We only live, only suspire / Consumed by either fire or fire.”
While “love” makes a somewhat surprising appearance in a poem that brought us through several literal and figurative purgations and hells, if we look back at each fourth movement, it is possible to discern the trace of the poet’s interrelated intuitions that support this assertion of needing to make a choice. In Burnt Norton he apprehends a natural epiphany, an illumination of light reflected off the kingfisher’s wing, at the “still point of the turning world.” East Coker shifts to an image of the “wounded surgeon” who practices the “sharp compassion of the healer’s art,” as readers are invited to participate in Good Friday’s “frigid purgatorial fires.” The Dry Salvages then focuses on the selfless action of the “Lady” whose shrine stands on the promontory and who is both “Queen of Heaven” and “daughter of her Son.” In Little Gidding these are drawn together in a redemptive, purifying fire. That fire—the compound illuminating fire of Mary, Krishna, Christ—burns at the still point of compassionate love.
Dancing Together (Little Gidding V)
The last movement of Little Gidding contains two conclusions: the conclusion to Little Gidding itself and the conclusion to Four Quartets as a whole. In this movement, we encounter a final gathering together of motifs and a final celebration of timeless possibilities within temporal inevitability. The unitive spirit of contemplative concentration appears—for instance, in BurntNorton V—as “the co-existence” of words and silence, of beginning and end, of movement and stillness. In East Coker V it appears in the call for “a further union, a deeper communion” The Dry Salvages V contemplative attention leads to the apprehension of an “impossible union” between spheres of transcendence and the historic. From the perspective of “timeless moments” penetrating chronological time, these primal opposites are included in reciprocal fruitful communion with each other andtransmuted into the discernment of a higher viewpoint.
The last movement starts:
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
Echoing the opening phrase of East Coker, the poet retrieves the recognition that any accomplishment, resulting from his exploration, cannot be affirmed as final, or completed. Doing so would remove him from the temporal process. At the same time, he recognizes that if the beginning of poetry is silence, its end is wisdom. Where every word is at home with every other word, where none are brash or ostentatious, where each provides an easy footpath from old ideas to new ones, and where each voice
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
“We die with the dying” to the extent that we share in and empathize with their sufferings; at the same time, “we are born with the dead” in that we are continually renewed by the genius and compassion of previous generations. The interplay between death and rebirth, central to these memorable lines, recalls the “new and shocking / Valuation of all we have been” in East Coker II.
The confluence of eternity and time is thus a pattern of history, a cycle of births and deaths, in which we all play a part. In terms of Eliot’s poetry itself, the confluence of eternity and time is implicit in the endless interactions between lines that have “died” in earlier quartets and then are continuously reborn as the series progresses, every word depending on what has passed on before. Along these lines, it is instructive to note that prior to the completion of Little Gidding, Eliot wrote a preface for an anthology of mystics, poets, philosophers, and saints from all traditions. In it the anthologist included a passage from Maurice Maeterlinck, which provides us with a valuable interpretive lens that can be utilized to clarify this stanza: “The dead and the living alike are but moments, hardly dissimilar, of a single and infinite existence,” and then continues that “they live in us even as we die in them.”47
Approaching the hour of winter dusk, we are reminded that
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
Just as in The Dry Salvages, in which we were exhorted to consider the rose and the yew tree with an equal mind, symbolically this equation gives new meaning to history. The pattern of history is crucial, for if time is to be redeemable, pivotal experiences need to be brought back into the present and then fulfilled in light of one’s current circumstances. This double movement—retrieval and renewal—of timeless moments brings a new fullness to life, a new meaning to the present in light of the sacramental immediacy of existence itself—not because it is “eternally present,” but because it is eternal and present. The rose and the yew underscore this insight by evoking temporal and eternal life simultaneously. On the one hand, a rose lives only a few days, the yew tree for centuries, but seen through the vision of time redeemed by grace, their duration is equal. Of course, this equality includes their difference: they are not tree and rose conflated. That is, they are not a kind of hybrid “eternal presence”; from a contemplative perspective in which human history is restored as “a pattern / Of timeless moments,” they do not become only “the same.”
In the transition to the concluding passage of Little Gidding the poet calls on the anonymous English author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth-century treatise on contemplative prayer, to reiterate the point that redemption is an act of mutual love: “With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this / Calling.” Typographically suspended on the page, forming a hinge between what came before and the final summing-up, these lines bring us near the conclusion of Little Gidding and Four Quartets as a whole. The Cloud of Unknowing’s author writes, “A weary and wretched heart, indeed, is one fast asleep in sloth, which is not awakened by the drawing power of his love and the voice of his calling!”48 This short exhortation, in its context, is addressed to those whose hearts, in the stirring impulse of one’s own consent, Showings, the Cloud reveals a loving God who desires to enter into union with those who turn wholeheartedly toward the divine. Yet, whereas Julian speaks from the heart of personal experience, the author of the Cloud, as a teacher, invites his pupils to study the experience of deeply loving God from the outside in order to bring that endless love into their lives.
By introducing The Cloud of Unknowing at this point, Eliot reiterates the purifying necessity of “prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action” (DS V). Writing for those who were unsatisfied with more standard practices of Christian piety, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing proposes pursuing relentlessly the double cloud of unknowing and of “forgetting” the self and, paradoxically, becoming more aware of the self. For Julian of Norwich as well, forgetting is letting go, leaving oneself “naked” (i.e., profoundly forgetful of self) and prepared for the calling of grace-infused love. This “Love” and this “calling” emerge, as the poet continues to discover not by virtue of his own actions only, but through a graced enactment of endless humility.
The pivotal significance of this “calling”—the “devout impulse of love that is continually worked in the will, not by the soul itself but by the hand of almighty God, which is always ready to perform this work in every soul that is disposed for it”49—arises from ever-new responses to inspired texts on the one hand and the natural world on the other. From this perspective, we can now more fully appreciate the poet’s contemplative vision of love that appears especially in each fifth movement: “Love is itself unmoving, / Only the cause and end of movement, / Timeless, and undesiring / Except in the aspect of time” (BN V); “Love is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter” (EC V); “a lifetime’s death in love, / Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender” (DS V); and “With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this / Calling” (LG V). When read together, this spectrum of images affirms the compassionate heart of the poem, that the “one end” of life depends upon the radiance of unconditional love. We come to see that human life is redeemable when unconditional love, implicitly present from the beginning, renews the face of the world by in-dwelling the poet’s relationship to the world.
Weaving together key symbols and metaphors from preceding movements, the last stanza is one of the most musical stanzas of Four Quartets. The poet reiterates that unending exploration is inherent in his spiritual journey.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
This imperative challenges both readers and poet alike. At the end (being present here and now) of our exploration, “we” (poet and reader in dialogue) are brought back to our “beginning”(always right here, right now)—now, however, recognizing the necessity of unending exploration. These four lines are reinforced and energized by echoes from the beginning of this stanza:
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
Considered in consort, these two passages activate complementary insights: (1) we arrive ceaselessly “where we started” only now ready to make a new, more aware start; (2) the end of our exploring is not to conclude the journey, but to reenter the world, ever-differently, with a “beginner’s mind.” Indeed, the momentum of these lines reemphasizes one of the most important themes running through Four Quartets: the redemptive significance of timeless moments, rather than something known, is a new way of knowing, a “new innocence.”50 In contrast to ending with an enclosed, logocentric view of the world, the poet “arrives,” each time as if for the first time, in the midst of choosing to be chosen by the world and of surrendering into relationship with what meets him in the moment.
As he has in each of the quartets, the poet recalls several such moments:
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything).
The gate through which poet and reader entered Burnt Norton is both “unknown” (“the door we never opened / Into the rose-garden”) and “remembered” (“the first gate / Into our first world”). Burnt Norton’s gate, the “last earth” of East Coker, the source of the “longest river” of The Dry Salvages, and the voice of the “hidden waterfall” and the original innocence of “children in the apple-tree” of Little Gidding are all “half-heard, in the stillness” of contemplation. The inner silence of soul evoked in East Coker (“be still, and let the dark come upon you”) here becomes analogous to “the stillness / Between two waves of the sea.” In this stillness we hear again: “the hidden laughter / Of children in the foliage” (BN V), the “whisper of running streams, and winter lightning” (EC III), and the “music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all” (DS V).
The words “Quick now, here, now, always” are identical to a line in the last movement of Burnt Norton. Whereas in Burnt Norton, as William Spanos rightly remarks, these words evoke the presence of an “abiding logos—the still point in the turning world,” in Little Gidding they come to mean “something quite different to Eliot and the reader.”51 However, this difference is not just another experience, or awareness, or even, as Spanos suggests, “a new kind of music of poetry,” but rather a new attitude, the poet’s willingness to turn back into the world, toward the vital reciprocity arising between himself and what comes to meet him. A deeper difference is evoked, I believe, by the poet’s retrieval of “beginnings” in the “end.” More than an inner experience, or realization, he turns toward the realm of mutuality, a relational space that ever-and-again reconstitutes his meetings with the world such that a liberating freedom arises. Emerging from a “new innocence,” his perception of what otherwise remains hidden within earth-bound time now becomes a “condition of complete simplicity.” In this purification of his motives, the urgency of the dance (“Quick now, here, now, always”) and the quiet of the still point in-fold into one another.
Recalling Dante’s ending to the Paradiso, the last five lines of Four Quartets conclude in a final orchestration of the whole, which reemphasizes Eliot’s spiritually charged one end–one way convergences:
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
and bring us with them.”52
Notably, in an earlier draft of Little Gidding, Eliot gave the poem a slightly different final line, “And the fire and the rose are the same.” When he showed this version to John Hayward, Hayward responded by putting “as one” in place of “the same.” Eliot further modified the suggested change and replied in a letter, “Very well then, And the fire and the rose are one.”53To fully appreciate the subtle difference between “the same” and “one,” we should keep in mind that, for Eliot, oneness is not the monistic oneness of Brahmanic practice as it is reflected in the Upanishads but rather a union-with-difference “oneness” of the Mahayan Buddhist tradition. “Fire” and “rose,” while one, do not conflate. Rather, their differences include and transmute each other. Eliot’s “oneness” reflects the co-inherence (not merger) of diversity and unity, of timelessness and time, of self and letting go of self, of contemplation and action. The relational oneness of “fire” and “rose” is impossible to comprehend or apply unless received traditions and teachings are included and transmuted by a new consciousness. Rather than resolving or covering over the immediate differences between “fire” and “rose,” Eliot’s end re-reconciles them in moments of “new innocence,” only to return again into the world of difference.54
Four Quartets begins and ends recognizing that the immediate reciprocity of timeless events, when retrieved by an interplay of revivifying memory and disciplined imagination, opens fresh possibilities for redeeming time. Unlike Dante, who began his journey confused and lost, and unlike Arjuna, who began his adventure on the battlefield confused and dejected, in a very real sense the poem begins at its end (“What we call the beginning is often the end”) and ends where it began (“The end is 55 Indeed, the closing affirmation ofLittle Gidding—“And the fire and the rose are one”—returns us exactly to the place the poet’s contemplative framework suggests it must. Just as we have entered Little Gidding through “the unknown, remembered gate,” we entered Burnt Norton, and therefore the entire poem, through the first gate, into “our first world,” into the “heart of light.” Illuminated by the flames of human purgation, self-denial, and suffering, and by graced moments of selfless love, we return to our places in the world, our places in time, only to remember “where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
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A Selective Chronology of T. S. Eliot’s LifeAncestry
1670 | Andrew Eliot leaves East Coker, Somerset, to settle in Massachusetts |
1834 | Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot (Eliot’s grandfather) leaves Massachusetts to settle in St. Louis, Missouri |
Early Years (1888–1914)
1888 | Born September 26, St. Louis, Missouri |
1896 | Eliot’s father, Henry Ware Eliot, builds summer house in Gloucester, Massachusetts |
1897 | Composes first poem (four verses) about the sadness of having to start school again every Monday morning; attends Smith Academy, St. Louis, until 1905 |
1905 | Earliest poetry published in Smith Academy Record |
1906–1910 | Harvard University (studies comparative literature and Western philosophy) |
Early poetry appears in The Harvard Advocate, which Eliot edited | |
1910–1911 | Visits Paris; studies French literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne |
Attends Henri Bergson’s weekly lectures at the Collège de France; visits London, Munich | |
“Prufrock” completed | |
1911–1914 | Attends Harvard Graduate School (studies Sanskrit and Indic philosophy) |
1914 | Travels to Europe; studies at University of Marburg; settles in London; meets Ezra Pound |
World War I begins |
Middle Years (1915–1944)
1915 | “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” published in Chicago (June) |
Becomes resident of London | |
Marries Vivienne Haigh-Wood (June 26) | |
1916 | Teaches at Highgate Junior School for four terms |
Lectures on Modern French and English Literature, extension courses at Oxford and London Universities | |
Completes dissertation on F. H. Bradley | |
1917 | Joins the Colonial and Foreign Department of Lloyds Bank |
Prufrock and Other Observations published in London | |
Assistant editor of The Egoist (until 1919) | |
1918 | World War I ends |
1919 | Eliot’s father dies (January) |
“Gerontion” published in London (August) | |
1920 | The Sacred Wood |
Selected Poems published in London | |
1921 | Suffers from nervous breakdown |
1922 | London correspondent for The Dial |
The Waste Land published in London (October) in The Criterion (edited by Eliot until 1939) | |
Eliot wins Dial Award for The Waste Land | |
1925 | Joins Board of Directors of Faber and Gwyer Publishers (later Faber & Faber) |
Poems 1909–1925 published in London and New York | |
1926 | Gives the Clark Lectures at Cambridge |
1927 | Baptized into Church of England (June 29) |
Becomes a naturalized British citizen (November) | |
“Journey of the Magi” published in London (August) | |
1928 | Lancelot Andrewes |
1929 | Eliot’s mother (Charlotte Champe Eliot) dies |
1930 | Ash-Wednesday published in London and New York |
1931 | Thoughts after Lambeth |
1932–1933 | Visits America for the first time since 1914 |
Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard; lectures published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism Selected Essays, 1917–1932, including most of The Sacred Wood. | |
1933 | Legal separation from Vivienne |
1934 | Visits Burnt Norton |
After Strange Gods and The Rock: A Pageant Play | |
1935 | Murder in the Cathedral |
1936 | Collected Poems 1909–1935 |
Burnt Norton published in London (as final poem in Collected Poems) | |
Visits the Medieval Church at Little Gidding | |
1937 | Visits East Coker |
1939 | World War II begins; Vivienne suffers final breakdown |
The Idea of a Christian Society | |
The Family Reunion | |
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats | |
1940 | East Coker published in London |
1941 | The Dry Salvages published in London |
1942 | Little Gidding published in London |
1943 | Four Quartets published in New York (1944 in London) |
Later Years (1945–1965)
1945 | World War II ends |
1947 | Vivienne dies |
Receives honorary degree from Harvard | |
1948 | Awarded Nobel Prize for Literature |
Order of Merit from King George VI | |
Notes towards the Definition of Culture | |
1949 | The Cocktail Party |
1953 | The Confidential Clerk |
1957 | Marries Valerie Fletcher (January 10) |
On Poetry and Poets | |
1958 | The Elder Statesman |
1963 | Visits New York with Valerie |
Collected Poems 1909–1962 published in London and New York | |
1964 | Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley |
1965 | Dies January 4, London |
Ashes interred in St. Michael’s parish church at East Coker | |
1969 | Complete Poems and Plays published in London and New York |
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Poetry
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
Poems (1919)
The Waste Land (1922)
Poems, 1909-1925 (1925)
Ash Wednesday (1930)
East Coker (1940)
Burnt Norton (1941)
The Dry Salvages (1941)
Four Quartets (1943)
The Complete Poems and Plays (1952)
Collected Poems (1962)
Prose
The Sacred Wood (1920)
Andrew Marvell (1922)
For Lancelot Andrews (1928)
Dante (1929)
Tradition and Experimentation in Present-Day Literature (1929)
Thoughts After Lambeth (1931)
John Dryden (1932)
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)
After Strange Gods (1933)
Elizabethan Essays (1934)
Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)
The Idea of a Christian Society (1940)
The Classics and The Man of Letters (1942)
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1949)
Poetry and Drama (1951)
The Three Voices of Poetry (1954)
Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern (1954)
Drama
Sweeney Agonistes (1932)
The Rock (1934)
Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
The Family Reunion (1939)
The Cocktail Party (1950)
The Confidential Clerk (1953)
The Elder Statesman (1958)
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Four Quartet
Burnt Norton
I
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,20
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,40
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
II
Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
And reconciles forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before60
But reconciled among the stars.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,80
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
III
Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces100
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.
Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world.
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,120
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.
IV
Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.
V
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,140
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.
The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.160
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.
East Coker
I
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light20
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.
In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodious sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing40
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.
Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
II
What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars60
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.
That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered80
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
The houses are all gone under the sea.
The dancers are all gone under the hill.100
III
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing façade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen120
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess140
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
IV
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care160
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
V
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres—
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating180
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself200
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
The Dry Salvages
(The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages. Groaner: a whistling buoy.)
I
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.
The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the hermit crab, the whale’s backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity20
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.
The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard; the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
The distant rote in the granite teeth,
And the wailing warning from the approaching headland
Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
Rounded homewards, and the seagull:
And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,40
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.
II
Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?
There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable—
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.60
There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.
Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind’s tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.
We have to think of them as forever bailing,
Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
Not as making a trip that will be unpayable
For a haul that will not bear examination.
There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,80
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of the one Annunciation.
It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy,
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:100
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.
Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony
(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
Is not in question) are likewise permanent
With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better
In the agony of others, nearly experienced,
Involving ourselves, than in our own.
For our own past is covered by the currents of action,
But the torment of others remains an experience
Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.
People change, and smile: but the agony abides.
Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
The bitter apple and the bite in the apple.
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,120
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.
III
I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant—
Among other things—or one way of putting the same thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.
You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,140
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think ‘‘the past is finished”
Or “the future is before us.”
At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,
Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,
The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)
“Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
At the moment which is not of action or inaction
You can receive this: ‘on whatever sphere of being
The mind of a man may be intent
At the time of death’—that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which shall fructify in the lives of others:160
And do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare forward.
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who come to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.”
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.
IV
Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,
Pray for all those who are in ships, those
Whose business has to do with fish, and
Those concerned with every lawful traffic
And those who conduct them.
Repeat a prayer also on behalf of
Women who have seen their sons or husbands
Setting forth, and not returning:
Figlia del tuo figlio,
Queen of Heaven.
Also pray for those who were in ships, and
Ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea’s lips180
Or in the dark throat which will not reject them
Or wherever cannot reach them the sound of the sea bell’s
Perpetual angelus.
V
To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend200
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union.
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement220
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.
Little Gidding
I
Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?
If you came this way,20
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull façade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,40
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
II
Ash on an old man’s sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house—
The wall, the wainscot and the mouse.
The death of hope and despair,60
This is the death of air.
There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth.
Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.
In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending80
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
Both one and many; in the brown baked features
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another’s voice cry: ‘What! are you here?’
Although we were not. I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other—100
And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
And so, compliant to the common wind,
Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
I said: ‘The wonder that I feel is easy,
Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:
I may not comprehend, may not remember.’
And he: ‘I am not eager to rehearse
My thought and theory which you have forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both bad and good. Last season’s fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
But, as the passage now presents no hindrance120
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness140
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
He left me, with a kind of valediction,
And faded on the blowing of the horn.
III
There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between
them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action160
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of no immediate kin or kindness,
But some of peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and quiet,
Why should we celebrate180
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.
IV
The dove descending breaks the air200
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
V
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,220
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring240
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction of Redeeming Time T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets
by Kenneth Paul Kramer
When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.1
—T. S. ELIOT
Four Quartets was initially published as separate pamphlets—Burnt Norton in April 1936, East Coker in March 1940, The Dry Salvages in February 1941, and Little Gidding in October 1942—and first appeared collected in one volume in May 1943. Each secluded landscape, three in England and one in the United States, is drawn from Eliot’s life experiences and influenced especially by his conversion to the Anglican church.
As if anticipating Four Quartets, in a letter to William Force Stead, Eliot mentioned his long-cherished intention to explore a mode of writing “between the usual subjects of poetry and ‘devotional’ verse.” Like spiritual autobiography, this style of writing involves the experience of searching for God and “trying to explain to himself his intenser human feelings in terms of the divine goal.”2 For this reason, before turning to the currents of Four Quartets, it is important to recount Eliot’s 1927 conversion to the Church of England, which shifted the style of both Quartets—I will briefly examine two organizing components, or interpretive keys, that support the poem’s rhetorical design: (1) its meditative voice and (2) its musical form. The interplay between these components generates a network of twenty theme words that map what Eliot called, in Little Gidding, “the complete consort dancing together” (LG V).
On June 29, 1927, T. S. Eliot, who thought of himself at the time as a “skeptic with a taste for mysticism,” was received into the Church of England by William Force Stead, chaplain of Worcester College, Oxford. In the afternoon quiet of St. Peter’s Day, Eliot entered the inconspicuous Finstock parish church in the Cotswolds. The doors remained locked behind him, and a verger was posted in the vestry to guarantee the privacy of the proceedings. His wife, Vivienne, was not present. Since the Unitarian church of Eliot’s birth does not recognize or practice the sacraments, Eliot had first to be baptized to enjoy full membership in the Church of England. Stead, who performed the baptism, later noted that “it seemed odd to have such a large, though infant, Christian at the baptismal font.”3
On the following day, the bishop of Oxford confirmed Eliot as an “Anglo-Catholic,” and when Eliot announced his conversion and began describing himself as “anglo-catholic in religion” (refusing at first to capitalize the title) it surprised and even alienated many of his admirers, particularly those who had come to associate him with The Waste Land. Ezra Pound wrote a caustic couplet to describe his reaction: “In any case, let us lament the psychosis / Of all those who abandon the Muses for Moses.”4 While Pound expressed here the suspicion of many intellectuals of his generation that religion was an opiate, a dogma, or a mere manifestation of private ecstasy, Eliot departed from this view, 5 To experience his sensibilities with sympathy, then, one needs to realize that, for Eliot, religious traditions mattered because they addressed the deep and recurring longing within human beings for a redemptive, timeless presence.
Since Eliot’s shifting spiritual attentions, evident throughout his career and culminating in his conversion, resulted from forces that intermixed over a long period of time, the spiritual biography behind Eliot’s decision to become a member of the Church of England can never be fully apprehended. Even Eliot was unable to account for it completely. Suggestively, he once remarked after his conversion that the “Christian thinker—and I mean the man who is trying consciously and conscientiously to explain to himself the sequence which culminates in faith, rather than the public apologist—proceeds by rejection and elimination.” Every person “who thinks and lives by thought must have his own skepticism, that which stops at the questions, that which ends in denial, or that which leads to faith and is somehow integrated into a faith which transcends it.”6 Through a process of spiritual and intellectual elimination and evaluation, Eliot joined the Church of England with the belief that he had chosen a faith that was “less false” and that balanced his “profound skepticism with the deepest faith.”7
To trace Eliot’s spiritual development and sensibilities from his liberal Unitarian family background, through his years of philosophical skepticism and Indic metaphysics, his move to England and unsuccessful marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, his ten-year period of mental stress and depression, to his conversion, requires a broad collection of biographical information beyond the immediate scope of this introduction. We know, for example, that Eliot considered the Church of England a middle ground between undogmatic Unitarianism and overly dogmatic Catholicism, but at the same time his request that no official biography of his life be written makes tracing the psychology of his conversion difficult.
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversations, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But. . . .
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
Yet in spite of Eliot’s resistance to seeing his biography written in his lifetime, it is fruitful to wonder what Eliot’s life was tending toward prior to his conversion and in what ways it may have influenced Four Quartets.
Several biographers, including Lyndall Gordon, indicate that the twenty-two-year-old Eliot passed through a period of deep emotional and spiritual turmoil. Representing Eliot as a tireless seeker of perfection who bore a “solitary burden of the soul,” Gordon states that Eliot “began to measure his life by the divine goal as far back as his student days, in 1910 and 1911.”8 In a poem called “Silence,” written during this period, he described an ecstatic visionary experience of the kind which, he later said, may be had only once or twice in a lifetime:
Along the city streets
It is still high tide,
Yet the garrulous waves of life
Shrink and divide
With a thousand incidents
This is the hour for which we waited—
This is the ultimate hour
When life is justified.
The seas of experience
That were so broad and deep
So immediate and steep,
Are suddenly still.
You may say what you will,
At such peace I am terrified.
There is nothing else beside.9
A sense of communion with the divine is expressed here through a momentary illumination of the mind. The arresting power of the timeless presence of the divine is amassed in progressively interrelated symbols of human powerlessness: the city streets, garrulous waves, a thousand incidents, the ultimate hour, the seas of experience, broad and deep, immediate and steep. Though the poem records a visionary moment penetrating temporality with hints of ultimacy, it also records the poet’s terror in the face of the transcendent presence it elicits. In Eliot’s writing from this period appear both the optimism of a wavering faith and the sense of urban decay and spiritual disillusionment that eventually made its way into The Waste Land. From this period onward, Eliot’s poetry would continue to mix atemporal moments of ecstasy with moments of temporal horror.
At the same time, there were other foreshadowings of Eliot’s shift in spiritual sensibility. Perhaps the foremost among them was the significance of his relationship (or lack thereof) with his wife, Vivienne. In 1914, having completed his postgraduate studies at Harvard in philosophy, Eliot decided to accept a traveling fellowship to spend a year at Merton College, Oxford, to study Aristotle. There, he met Vivienne (she abbreviated it to Vivien and was commonly known as Viv), who was quite unlike any of spontaneity. Certainly Eliot was attracted by her exuberant though somewhat brash high spirits and by her ability to engage him in stimulating and creative conversations about his writing.
Almost from the start, their marriage began to disintegrate. In a way, each of them wanted something opposite—Eliot wanted to enter more deeply into the fabric of English culture, and Vivienne wanted to escape it. Raised in the Church of England from birth, she had become disinterested in its rituals, participating at most in weddings and funerals. Without a doubt, they contributed mutually to each other’s unhappiness: her neuroses and frequent illnesses stymied his creativity and distanced him from the relationship; his neuroses and frequent exhaustion blunted her fragile exuberance. To cope with her condition, she sought medical remedies that included morphine-based depressants, bromides, and ether. As the marriage wore on, Eliot would spend more weekends away without her. It is likely, therefore, that Eliot’s turn to the church was in part a turn toward the sacrament of confession. Gordon writes: “The sense of damnation, the remorse and the guilt that Vivienne evoked were essential to Eliot’s long, purgatorial journey” and directed him to the “ascetic way of the Catholic mystics.”10
Eliot’s biographers suggest guideposts leading toward Eliot’s “conversion”: his dissatisfaction with his Puritan background; his guilt over a failed marriage with Vivienne; his attraction to the conservative religious thought of Irving Babbitt, Charles Maurras, and other cultural authorities; and his varying degrees of interest in Indic mysticism, the void of the Buddhist dharma, and his skeptical humanism. And yet the most compelling ingredient 11 One can glean insights into Eliot’s conversion by reading through his correspondence, especially with Princeton professor Paul Elmer More. According to Eliot, the correspondence gave him much pleasure and allowed him to discuss matters of theology and literature.
Just two years after joining the church, Eliot wrote:
What I should like to see is the creation of a new type of intellectual, combining the intellectual and the devotional—a new species which cannot be created hurriedly. I don’t like either the purely intellectual Christian or the purely emotional Christian—both forms of snobbism. The coordination of thought and feeling—without either debauchery or repression—seems to me what is needed.12
Though tempting, it would be too simplistic to conclude that Eliot himself was “a new type of intellectual.” I will, however, make the less risky assertion that “combining the intellectual and the devotional” remained a goal toward which Eliot aimed, and a compelling possibility glimpsed in Four Quartets.
At least three examples support the assertion that Eliot, in his life and art, strove to combine the intellectual and the devotional. Eliot’s eight lectures on metaphysical poetry at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the first three months of 1926, for instance, exemplify his interest in the interaction between intellectual activity and the mystical impulse. With their publication as the Clark Lectures, Eliot’s attraction to the contemplative monastic tradition came into clearer focus. In these lectures he distinguished between the classical philosophical mysticisms of the --- cogitation (intellectual activity without devotion), meditation (sustained focus on a spiritual goal), and contemplation (freely gazing beyond reason and imagination).13 For Eliot, as for Richard, contemplation was an attitude of mind, a proclivity of soul, a process of perceiving (and communicating), a “more penetrating gaze of mind.”
Two other examples are experiential. Confirming the depths of Eliot’s spiritual life, Wallace Fowlie provides a rare and privileged eye-witness account of Eliot’s devotional practice. He writes that in the early 1930s, when Eliot was the Charles Eliot Norton lecturer at Harvard University, he often attended Mass at the Episcopal church of St. John the Evangelist on Beacon Hill in Boston. Eliot was drawn there in part because the church was served by the Cowley Fathers, whose monastery was in Cambridge. During his time at Harvard, Eliot was a daily communicant at the monastery chapel. At one Mass, attended by Eliot and only two others (including Fowlie), after Eliot received the Eucharist and returned to his place, he seemed to fall “flat on his face in the aisle, with his arms stretched out.” But Fowlie adds, “it was obvious at a glance he had not fallen.” Indeed, when Fowlie helped Eliot to his feet, almost no physical effort was required. Fowlie continues, “I realized that Eliot had just undergone a mystical experience.”14
The third, and perhaps most compelling, example is Eliot’s relationship to the monastic community at Kelham in England. In September 1933, he paid the first of many visits to the Society of the Sacred Mission at Kelham, an Anglo-Catholic religious community near Newark in Nottinghamshire, to which he retreated from his work two or three times a year until World War II. At Kelham, along with monastic companionship, he enjoyed periods of profound quietude. According to George Every, who entered the community in 1930 as a novice,
liturgical activity was understood as the expression of our will to live and work together in obedience to Christ and in accordance with traditions derived from monasticism. Each student participated in manual labor in one of these departments: the house department (i.e., sweeping, polishing, dusting); the chapel department (i.e., cleansing, polishing); and the grub department (i.e., preparing food, washing dishes, setting tables). Much of this work was done in silence.15
Indeed, motivated in part by the distinction he consistently made between “natural love” and “divine love,” Eliot became, for a period after separating from his wife, a kind of lay monk, feeling at times like a hermit without a hermitage. It would not lead us too far afield, therefore, to intimate that the root and branches of Eliot’s conversion gradually grew out of the silent depths of contemplative life as he studied it intellectually and later practiced it.16
For Eliot, religious and spiritual life finally came to mean understanding and practicing a degree of monastic life. Arguably, what attracted Eliot to Kelham was not the thought of becoming a monk within the communal practice of contemplative Christianity, as has been suggested, but his attempt to get in touch with the “monk” within himself and to express it concretely in the world. In short visits, Kelham provided Eliot with the enjoyment of the company of lay brothers and students, a community that worked and studied in complete silence. These monastic silences echo through the moods and voices of Four Quartets, bringing readers to the frontiers of what cannot be spoken.
Eliot’s intellectual proclivities developed in the academic study of written religious traditions and combined with a devotional spirit. Both study and devotion nourished his conversion and became a compelling influence behind the composition of Four Quartets. To apprehend “the point of intersection of the timeless / With time” (DS V), as Eliot expressed the contemplative experience in The Dry Salvages, an interplay among cognition, meditation, and contemplation capable of quieting the clatter of undisciplined thoughts was required. Indeed, following St. John of the Cross, in the third movement of East Coker the poet underscores the point that “In order to arrive at what you do not know, / You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance,” for “what you do not know is the only thing you know.” Coordinating the intellectual and the devotional allowed Eliot, as he wrote to Stead, to cross “a very wide and deep river . . . and that in itself gives one a very extraordinary sense of surrender and gain.”17
While I do not want to suggest that Four Quartets are primarily biographical, Ronald Schuchard’s point that “if we cannot look to the biographer to explore and map the planes and intersections where life and art meet, then the job of constructing the interactive dynamic falls to the biographical critic” is compelling in Eliot’s case.18 Peter Ackroyd, for instance, has noted that “throughout Eliot’s work, the idea of pattern or ordering becomes the informing principle. It can be found everywhere; in literary tradition, in ritual, in political myth, and in English history,”19 and as Eliot once noted, a design emerges in great poetry “which reinforces and is one with the dramatic movement,” a design that has “checked and accelerated the pulse of our emotion without our knowing it.”20
Considering the possibility that the spirit of Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic frame of reference was written into his late poetry, what might this tell us about the pattern of Four Quartets? Further, addressing the question of Eliot’s design for the Quartets must recognize the unity of their parts, which, at the same time, like the contemplative sensibility that engendered them, are always becoming new in each reader’s individual encounter with them.
The more familiar readers become with the whole of Four Quartets, the clearer the importance of its pattern of sequences, both within each quartet and as each quartet relates to the whole of appreciation for a poem, Eliot felt, needed to become enlarged through the reading into a greater self-understanding, and this called for acts of personal reorganization. Reading poetry was thus not simply the process of accumulating the sum of one’s experience with the text but also of renewing the poem “in another pattern.” For this reason, it would become important for Eliot that the ideal reader apprehends the Quartets in its totality, finding “a new pattern of poetry arranging itself in consequence.”21
At the same time, Eliot’s overall logic of imagery is controlled enough to remind us of the need for, and the danger of, forging a pattern out of the chaotic, irregular, and fragmentary moments of everyday temporal experience. In Eliot’s words,
and yet
knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. (EC II)
Attempting to balance this tension between discovering a rhetorical pattern through which words can almost touch the unsayable and the ever-newness of the form that grants unforeseen meanings, Eliot writes of the need “to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern” (LG III).22 By what means, though, does Eliot express this always-forming, always-transfiguring rhetorical design? To put it another way, in the words of Elizabeth Drew, “What designs upon us does he have?”23 Responding to this question, I believe, leads to identifying two interrelated components of the poem’s overall design—its meditative voice and its
The question of how Four Quartets was formed, in this case, involves the complementary question of how the poem is to be received by the reader. In a letter to Stead, Eliot provides a clue that helps us begin to answer these parallel questions: “A theory I have nourished for a long time, that between the usual subjects of poetry and ‘devotional’ verse there is a very important field still very unexplored by modern poets—the experience of man in search of God, and trying to explain to himself his intenser human feelings in terms of the divine goal.”24 Eliot concluded his 1930 letter by adding that he had “tried to do something of that in Ash Wednesday.” Like Ash-Wednesday, Four Quartets takes the form of an unhurried conversation unfolding through the process of mining essential memories, sudden illuminations, and reanimated timeless moments. Fittingly, throughout the interior drama of Eliot’s postconversion poetry, the way out of the “Waste Land” involves sinking deeper into it, becoming still, and waiting, since—to paraphrase Heraclitus and John of the Cross—“the way up and the way down are the same.”
Following the path laid out from the bleak psychological death depicted in The Waste Land to the search for rebirth and renewal, accentuated in “Journey of the Magi” and Ash-Wednesday, the poet in Four Quartets meditates through two constituent human conditions—a deep dissatisfaction with the temporal limitations of life and its antithesis, and the soul’s resolutelonging to apprehend the eternally unlimited redemptive presence of the divine. In the process of examining these constituent human conditions, the poet’s intenser human feelings are awakened by stillness and nurtured by a spirit of silence for the purpose of prying open inner doors to the soul.
To put it more simply, Four Quartets is a new mode of meditative --- Quartets have noted its mystical impulse, and Eliot once remarked that while writing the Quartets, “he was seeking to express equivalents for small experiences he had had, as well as for mystical insights derived from his reading.”25 Indeed, Paul Murray has remarked that “the poet’s essential method and the poet’s mysticism have become one and the same thing.”26 While this assertion bears some merit, it is also important to recall Eliot’s reservations with regard to what he perceived as the “warm fog” of false or feeling-oriented mysticism.
At the same time, for Eliot, mystical spirit without intellectual activity lacks creativity, self-reflection, and meaning, and intellectual activity without mystical spirit lacks fullness and depth. The mystical impulse that holds the various meditational movements of the Quartets together combines what Evelyn Underhill describes, in her classic study Mysticism (which Eliot once studied), “recollection of mind,” “quieting of will,” and “contemplation of heart.” According to Underhill, spiritual life and practice require both “conversion,” a shifting away from ordinary world concerns, and “introspection,” or a deepening degree of spiritual interiority. While the complete path toward unitive awareness can be described in paired stages, the design of Four Quartets draws upon the preparatory process of recollecting spirit-charged landscapes, quieting will and imagination, and then passing into the unitive state of contemplation.27
Recollection commonly begins with concentration or meditation and develops into inward silence or quiet, which, as it becomes deeper, passes into contemplative union. Of these three introspective stages, contemplation—distinct from meditation, which is governed by a limiting set of psychic conditions—is the highest. Contemplation is an intuitive act of relational union with the divine that embraces and apprehends that which is most hidden. Neither purely intellectual nor purely mystical, Eliot’s meditative poetry joins recollection, quieting, and contemplation and, in the process, is sustained by creative interactions among them. Intellectual activity without a taste for mysticism lacks fullness and emptiness, surprise and gratefulness. On the other hand, mystical awakening void of intellectual reflection tends to lose its capacity for being integrated into life.
Introspection: | |
Awakening of Self | Recollection of Mind |
Purification of Self | Quieting of Will |
Illumination of Self | Contemplation of Heart |
As in the meditational experience, the poet’s process depends upon interactions between a “projected, dramatized part of the self” (e.g., introspective self-examination) and the whole mind of the mediator (e.g., an illumined self-knowing). Meditation, especially as it was understood by the metaphysical and devotional poets of the seventeenth century, proceeds by stages from memory and imagination to a vision of spiritual union and then to a devotional response to that vision. Louis Martz writes that a meditative poem “creates an interior drama of mind . . . by some form of self-address, in which the mind grasps firmly a problem or situation deliberately evoked by the memory, brings it forward toward the full light of consciousness, and concludes with a moment of illumination.”28 The significance of Eliot’s meditative self-address—“I said to my soul, be still, and wait” (EC III)—both as a process in spiritual life and as an organizing impulse within Four Quartets provides an openness toward mystery leading to a new grounding in what is most meaningful for the poet.
This component of the poem’s rhetorical design is found clearly in Eliot’s meditative voice, which, according to A. David Moody, speaks with words that might be thought of as “instrumentalities” or “modes of mind” through which the “mind of the poem” itself speaks.29 Yet we can ask if the narrator (the “I”) of Quartets is Eliot’s autobiographical voice or the voice of a created persona with a life of its own? Or is it more accurate to suggest that the poem’s “I” is more specifically the inward interactions between the two—both the voice of the late 1940s to early 1950s Anglo-Catholicism and of the meditative persona? The question of who speaks in Four Quartets, especially when the “I” speaks, is central to apprehending Eliot’s contemplative grain.
A pivotal moment in the fourth quartet, Little Gidding, suggests the validity of a “both/and” understanding of the poem’s voice. For ten months during 1940–41, as London was bombed night after night, Eliot walked the streets as an air raid warden. In the midst of this biographical experience, at an early hour, in the second movement of Little Gidding, the poet “meets” a shadowy figure, a stranger with “brown baked features” and “the eyes of a familiar compound ghost.” At this point in the poem, the poet says, “So I assumed a double part, and cried / And heard another’s voice cry: ‘What! Are you here?’ ” D. W. Harding has described this strange meeting and ghostly conversation as “the logical starting-point of the whole poem,”30explaining that the poet’s “double part” unlocks the Quartets’ continuity. By this sleight of hand, the narrator assumes the double part of his old self (who “met one walking”) and new self (who was blown toward him to compel recognition). The “What! Are you here?” question thus invites readers into the text to engage and be engaged by the meditative voice.
Hugh Kenner, commenting on the colloquial intimacy and meditative deliberation of the Quartets, speaks about Eliot’s voice as his last feat of technical innovation: “Of this Voice we may remark first of all its selflessness. . . . No persona, Prufrock, 31 That is, it is not central to reading the poem that the first person pronoun hoard the reader’s attention. Instead, what comes to the fore is the first person’s almost complete disappearance—“I can only say,there we have been: but I cannot say where” (BN II). Indeed, Dante’s journey up the mountain of Purgation dramatically presents this need for self-purification. Along the way, Eliot’s chief poetic mentor views lost souls covered with the rust of self-love. For the poet of the Quartets, detachment from this self-love—what Richard of Saint Victor called self-simplification and St. John of the Cross called self-emptying—takes the form of spiritual poverty that overcomes desires and attachments. Ironically, the poet’s temporary disappearances only serve to intensify the impact and meaning of his words.
The poem’s second organizing component, interrelating to the first, is its musical form. In the context of Eliot’s deep appreciation for music as the highest form of aesthetic sensibility, his use of the classical string quartet as the appropriate musical analogy for his poem takes on a translinguistic coloring. In a 1933 lecture, Eliot said that he wanted to create poetry “so transparent that in reading it we are intent on what the poetry points at, and not on the poetry.” To accomplish this would be “to get beyond poetry as Beethoven, in his later works, strove to get beyond music.”32
Along similar lines, Eliot wrote to his good friend John Hayward that the Four Quartets “are all in a particular set form which I have elaborated, and the word ‘quartet’ does seem to me to start people on the right track for understanding them (‘sonata’ in any case is too musical). It suggests to me the notion of making a poem by weaving in together three or four superficially unrelated themes: the ‘poem’ being the degree of success in making a new whole out of them.”33
While a musical analogy to the way in which Eliot’s themes echo and interweave should not be insisted upon too rigidly, it does suggest ways that time and timelessness unfold in Four Quartets. In a 1942 essay, “The Music of Poetry,” Eliot wrote that the properties of music that most concern the poet are “the sense of rhythm and the sense of structure” and that “there are possibilities” within this structure “of contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter.”34 Drawing from Underhill’s tripartite mapping, each quartet’s five movements can be arranged into three divisions—preparatory recollections, interior quietude, and unitive contemplation—in order to track how each movement contributes to the divine goal. In light of Eliot’s admiration for Beethoven’s later quartets—“I should like to get something of that into verse before I die,” he wrote—it is not surprising that a dynamic five-part movement forms the structural basis of each poetic quartet.35
The first movement of each quartet presents a landscape meditation in which philosophical/spiritual tensions between time and timelessness are evoked and pondered. The second movements offer a lyrical and then a colloquial interior geography of the soul, reflecting and illuminating images from the first movements. The third and centering movement of each quartet offers an interspiritual discipline meant to move toward retrieving the intersection of timeless moments. This discipline involves multifaceted interactions between self-surrender and transforming one’s will. All of the fourth movements dramatically shift the tone of each quartet by presenting a short purgative lyric. The final movement of each quartet consists of a colloquial then a lyrical reconciliation of that quartet’s central themes. The apprehended wisdom of the Preparatory Recollections (first two movements) and the spiritual action of this wisdom expressed through Interior Quietude (in the third and fourth movements) are included and transmuted in the final movement’s Unitive Contemplation, which binds time’s distractions and timeless immediacy. Together, the five movements of each quartet—(1) a meditative landscape; (2) a temporal illumination; (3) a descending/ascending spiritual practice; (4) a purgative lyric; and (5) a unitive reconciliation—continually form “new wholes” so that the pattern in each movement is fresh yet contains echoes of previous movements.
The power of Eliot’s words, phrases, images, idiosyncrasies, and metaphors draws readers into meaningful dialogues with the poem such that Quartets articulates us (intensifying our awareness as readers) as we articulate it (intensifying our awareness of text/author). Herein lies the motive behind this reading. I agree with the dialogical hermeneutics of Martin Buber (1878–1965), for whom poetry does not originate in the senses responding to the world but arises from the oscillating realm of the between, whose interaction embraces the whole being of both text and reader.36 According to Buber, when employing a dialogic approach to literature, the nature of our inquiry becomes an existential one occurring between a living text (in which one can hear the author’s voice) and a reader who is vitally interested in understanding and applying its meaning. The artist, Buber affirmed, beholds the “whole embodied form” of what is encountered, and leads its inspirited form into language, where it can be categorized and viewed by others. Yet the languaged form that can be brought back into life, can “blaze up into presentness and enter the elemental state from which it came, to be looked on and lived in the present by [readers].”37
In thus engaging and being engaged, the reader makes the words immediately present, as if hearing the voice of the author by turning receptively toward the speaker with one’s whole being, receiving the indivisible wholeness of something spoken, and lifting written words into the sphere of living words. The invigorating renewal of this approach to poetry, which continues to break through intellectual boundaries, transforms both text and reader/hearer because, as another dialogical interpreter, Mikhail Bakhtin, suggests: “there is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future).”38
This excursus into the matter of textual interpretation is particularly salient because what I discover about the world and myself is always discovered and animated anew. That is, readingFour Quartets through a dialogic lens, one continues to discover and respond to links between personal life and textual insights. The activity of reading takes place then in a conversational field and involves reciprocal and reciprocating interactions between author and poem, author and reader, and reader and poem. For this reason, Quartets is not just a soliloquy or a monologue, nor can the poem be reduced to any single understanding or interpretation. Rather, a fruitful mutuality exists among Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot, and the reader, with the meaning and value of inquiry.39 Rather than projecting subjective presuppositions onto the text, my reading of Four Quartets, accordingly, is situated in open-ended, disclosing exchanges between the horizon of Eliot’s poetry—itself constructed in the rhetoric of address-response language—and the horizon of constructive response to its voices.
In this fashion, one’s interactions with Eliot’s poetry become individually—if not also socially—meaningful each time something the poet says penetrates and then supplements the reader’s situation from within, revealing or clarifying his or her motives, thoughts, or behaviors in new ways. Moreover, and what bears immediate significance again and again throughoutQuartets, Buber wrote that the poem’s spokenness, “if one does not mean by that the subject of a biography and the author of many works, but just the living speaker of this very poem,”40discloses dimensions of reality of which a reader is unaware. The successful poem, for Buber, is an extension of the spoken word (both its present continuance and its potential possession) in that it challenges readers into give-and-take interactions with the text/author. For this reason, when the poem’s embodied spokenness addresses me wholly, calls me out of my concrete situation, to make a personal response to its newly awakened meanings, then, Buber wrote, “will its unfamiliarity not become merely an alienating oddness.”41
We now approach the distinctive design of this reading: the main components of a dialogic motive (self/other, author/text, silence/speech, address/response) can all be seen as tools for the interpretive relationship. What concerned Eliot in structuring Four Quartets was the way that the poem supported intersections -- and from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that context to all the other meanings which it has had in other contexts, to its greater or less wealth of association.”42It is possible, with this in mind, to form a comprehensive figure of the poem, presented through twenty theme words that correspond to the poem’s twenty movements, no one of which can be understood without reference to the unified structure of the whole. Through this distinctive interpretive technique, which highlights the essential spokenness of the poem, a unity of style and content can be found. Each poetic movement, that is, can be characterized by its leading “word complex” or phrase. These theme words, embodying the poem’s key motives and intenser feelings, provide hermeneutical nodes for grasping the poem’s primary interspiritual wisdoms and practices.43
By “theme words,” I mean unitive metaphors that give focus to the section in which they occur and that are then (explicitly or analogously) repeated in the same movement and/or throughout the poem. These central words or phrases serve a double function. First, read individually, they reflect the unique theme and mood of each movement; second, taken together, they form a unitive yet polyphonous backdrop within which the inner rhythm of the poem unfolds. These guiding words suggest that Eliot used key utterances to arouse the reader’s attention to music-like connections between stages in the poetic narrative. Moreover, they provide an interpretative code that illumines levels of meaning not at first apparent—namely, the soul’s resolute longing and search for divine presence. Though assembling and arranging the network of theme words is not the ultimate point of reading the Quartets, and while this arrangement only makes sense in the context of reading the poem as a whole, doing so, in this instance, uniquely highlights the poem’s overall rhetorical design.
Eliot hints at this verbal strategy when he writes, in the first movement of Burnt Norton, “my words echo / Thus, in your mind.” This echoing needs to be attended to because “the full meaning of Eliot’s key words is gathered only when one catches in a given context the overtones that the word carries from its use at other points in the poem, and may of course be further enriched when one catches overtones carried from outside the poem.”44
Simultaneously, consecutively, and cross-consecutively, the poet’s words interrelate with other words, images with images, symbols with symbols, and the poem becomes more meaningful through repetition and recontextualization of these guiding words.45 The poem incorporates two interrelated design unities, side-by-side in a continuing embrace. Read consecutively, each individual quartet’s narrative unity passes from an opening meditative landscape, through interior regions of the mind and a new awareness borne by a temporal illumination, through centering spiritual and purgative renunciations; it then opens into a unitive vision reconciling the prior themes and moods. Readers enter the “first world” of Burnt Norton, for instance, through the first movement’s opening meditative landscape (the rose garden) and are led from there to the second movement’s sudden illumination (the still point) generated by the landscape. We are then brought through the interspiritual disciplines of the third movement (descend lower), to the purgative lyricism of the fourth movement (the kingfisher’s wing). The coexistence of words and silence, beginning and end, then culminate in the last movement’s gathering unitive vision.
Simultaneous with the consecutive movement, a cross-consecutive movement shifts attention from chronological narrative to comparative, self-referential sections. The transitions among the four meditative landscapes of the first movements (i.e., the rose garden, the open field, the river and sea, and finally inside Little Gidding’s chapel) lead to Indic and Anglo-Catholic images of spiritual practice. Reading cross-consecutively, each of the third movements offers a different yet compatible interspiritual practice: Burnt Norton and the way of darkness (descend lower), East Coker and the way of stillness (be still), The Dry Salvages and the way of yogic action (fare forward), and Little Gidding and the way of purification (purify the motive). Understanding the interior structure of the poem thus embodies significant interactions between the first movements and third movements, wherein the consecutive pattern is incomplete without the simultaneous implications of the cross-consecutive pattern, and vice versa.
The poem’s whole existing order, as Eliot noted in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” accommodates itself uniquely to each reader, in ways that “ever so slightly alter” both46 This double alteration achieves richer implications for readers in relation to Four Quartets than in relation to others of his poems because of Eliot’s juxtaposing a conversational style (repeatedly using personal pronouns like “we,” “you,” “us,” “our”) and his discovery of contemplative silence, which influenced both the way he read spiritual texts and his later poetry. For this reason, Eliot spoke of reading spiritual texts not only with the mind but with the whole being (advice that also serves readers of the Quartets).
In a preface to an anthology of texts drawn from devotional literature across a variety of religious traditions, Eliot made the startling claim that very few people really know how to read spiritual literature. Devotional reading, he wrote, “is the most difficult of all, because it requires an application not only of the mind, not only of the sensibility, but of the whole being.” Moreover, after affirming the importance of examining the work as a whole, Eliot wrote of the need to “read two or three passages (at first, choosing passages in the same section), to attend closely to every word, to ponder on the quotations read for a little while and try to fix them in my mind, so that they may continue to affect me while my attention is engrossed with the affairs of the day.”47 Eliot addressed here not only the method to be employed for reading devotional texts but also the spirit in which such texts are to be read. The correct way to read a spiritual text, Eliot insisted, is to abandon some of our usual motives for reading (e.g., delighting in the language of the poetry or in the poet’s life) and to remain directed toward the love of God, which is the true destination intended.48 Perhaps it was his renewed ability to attend to the “whispered incantation” of this destination that enabled Eliot to hold Four Quartets up as his greatest poetic achievement.
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T.S Eliot's Four Quartets: a pattern for Christian Living - Jay Parini
https://youtu.be/Kh6W4m38gE4?list=PL754GdiyBm6YqS0RmqOwglBRahv8LJSzt
The Woodberry Poetry Room is a special collections reading room and audio-visual archive at Harvard University. Located in Lamont Library and overseen by Houghton Library, the Poetry Room features a circulating collection of 20th and 21st century poetry and a landmark collection of audio recordings (1933 to the present). With over 6,000 recordings on a range of media that span the 20th and 21st centuries--- including phonodiscs, magnetic tape (reel to reel and cassette), CDs, DATs, and born digital---the collection is one of the largest and earliest poetry-specific sound archives in the United States. The archive includes unique recordings of such authors as John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Creeley, E. E. Cummings, Robert Duncan, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, Allen