Burnt Norton, Four Quartets(1935, 1943) - T S Eliot

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Burnt Norton, Four Quartets(1935, 1943) - T S Eliot

The entrance to the garden at Burnt Norton

A view of the lower-level garden at Burnt Norton

The dry pool at Burnt Norton

https://youtu.be/Ga8tQrG4ZSw

T. S. Eliot reads his Four Quartets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJTkbVBC0VE&list=PLjck-19-CcVOkO7ZGATU674ZzMN1BM3Km

Although the Logos is common to all

We live as if by our own wisdom;

The way up and the way down are the same.

—HERACLITUS

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,

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,

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.

unredeemable: 되돌릴 수 없는, 구제할 수 없는

Thrush: 개지빠귀새 (유혹과 환상을 상징하는 새)

II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle-tree.

The trilling wire in the blood

Sings below inveterate scars

Appeasing long 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 before

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,

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.

bedded: (진흙 등에) 박힌, 파묻힌

appeasing: 달래는, 진정시키는

Inveterate: 뿌리 깊은, 상습적인

Erhebung : 봉기, 반란, 혁명, 고양

resolution : 해결, 해소, 결심

enchainment : 속박, 연결, 사슬에 묶임

arbour : 정자, 퍼골라, 덩굴·나뭇가지가 덮인 쉼터

draughty : 외풍이 있는, 찬바람이 스며드는, 통풍이 지나치게 잘 되는

smokefall : 해 지기 무렵, 안개나 연기처럼 깔리는 어두워짐

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 faces

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.

tumid apathy : 부풀어 오른 무감각, 오만한 권태

unwholesome : 불건전한, 유해한, 부패한

eructation : 트림, 무의미한 분출, 공허한 소음

torpid : 무감각한, 휴면 상태의, 마비된

Hampstead, Highgate: 북런던 고급 주거지 언덕

Clerkenwell: 이스트엔드 근처 노동자 지역

Campden(Kensington), Primrose(Hill): 웨스트엔드 예술가·부유층 동네

Putney, Ludgate: 사우스·시내 상업지

twittering : 재잘거림, 분심을 일으키는 소음

    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,

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.

desiccation : 건조, 바짝 말림, 영적 메마름

Inoperancy : 무효성, 무효 상태, 기능 상실, 비(非)작동 상태

abstention : 절제, 자제, 움직임으로부터의 물러남

appetency : 갈망, 탐욕, 본능적인 욕구

metalled : 포장된, 길들여진, (철로처럼) 정해진 궤도

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.

clematis : 으아리꽃, (기어오르는) 덩굴식물

tendril : 덩굴손, (무언가를 붙잡으려는) 가느다란 줄기

spray : 작은 가지, (꽃이나 잎이 달린) 잔가지

yew : 주목나무, 죽음과 영생의 상징

kingfisher : 물수리(물반새), 찰나의 빛을 낚아채는 전령

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,

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.

precede : 시간적으로 앞서다

disconsolate : 절망적인, 위로할 수 없는, 슬픔에 잠긴

chimera : 키메라, 근거 없는 환상, 가공의 괴물

The detail of the pattern is movement,

As in the figure of the ten stairs.

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.

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소로의 문장은 도끼자국처럼 선명하고, 엘리엇의 시어는 정밀한 기계 부품처럼 맞물리며,

프로스트의 시어에는 겉으론 평이하나 속엔 깊은 웅덩이가 있고, 노자의 글은 아예 언어를 넘어선 침묵을 지향하는 듯

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★ Quick now, here, now, always

★ T.S. Eliot's Theory of Rightness in every phrase and every sentence

Every phrase and every sentence 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. / Little Gidding", Section V (1942)

★ The Figure a Poem Makes(Frost, 1939)

"Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another."

★ Tradition and the Individual Talent(T. S. Eliot, 1919)

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion;

it is not the expression‎ of personality, but an escape from personality."

★ Eliot's 4 main channels of the Dante Stanzas

★ St. Augustine's theory of time

St. Augustine's theory of time, outlined in Confessions Book 11, defines time as a subjective "distention of the mind" (distentio animi) rather than an objective reality.

Time exists only in human consciousness through three interdependent "presents":

Past: A present of things past, sustained by memory.

Future: A present of things to come, formed by expectation.

Present: A fleeting "present of things present," grasped by attention, but instantly vanishing.

"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it, I know not." (11.14)

"It might be correct to say that there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things future." (11.20)

​"The past is now no longer, the future is now still nothing... My soul is on fire with these anxieties: it rebels against itself." (11.28, on distentio animi)

Unlike created time's flux, God dwells in an eternal "standing present" (nunc stans)—unchanging, embracing all without succession. Time began with creation and measures change in finite beings.

★  St. Augustine 『Confessions』 Book IX Chapter 12

"And I gave way to the tears which I before restrained, to overflow as much as they desired; repose my heart upon them; and it found rest in them, for it was Thine ears that heard me, not those of man..."

★ The Divine Comedy (Lawrence Grant White, Purgatorio Canto XXVI

  『신곡』, 연옥편 제26곡

"I am Arnaut, who weep and singing go; Contrite I see the folly of the past, And joyful see the hoped-for day before. Now I beseech you, by that Virtue which Leads you unto the summit of the stair: Be mindful in due season of my pain!"

Then he dived back into the fire that refines them.

★ 2 timothy 4:7-8

★ West-Running Brook  / Robert Frost

★ C. S. Lewis against T. S. Eliot

"The Milky Way and the Great Wall of China are the kind of things that a poet can use to separate himself from the wilderness of common speech."

"To describe a state of mind is not to create a work of art... A poet’s business is not to tell us what it feels like to be a man, but to tell us what a man is."

"The Great Wall is there to keep out the barbarians. When the wall is broken, the city becomes a heap of ruins."

★ T. S. Eliot's eulogy on Robert Frost

"Robert Frost is perhaps the most eminent, the most distinguished, and I would say, the purest poet of our time."

"He is a poet who has the courage to look at things as they are, and the honesty to say what he sees."

"There is a kind of terror in Frost's poetry... because it is so terrifyingly honest about the human condition."

★ Robert Frost 's eulogy on T. S. Eliot 

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)

"You have it all your own way here, Eliot."

★ HERACLITUS vs 노자

Although the Logos is common to all

We live as if by our own wisdom;

— HERACLITUS

大道甚夷, 而民好徑

— 노자

https://youtu.be/Xxh0OYuN0vU

The Hidden Structure of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets - Adam Walker

https://youtu.be/Xxh0OYuN0vU

How Poetry Becomes Music | "Burnt Norton" Eliot's Four Quartets - Adam Walker

★ 제미나이와의 대화

1. 철학사에서 가장 난해하면서도 매혹적인 헤라클레이토스의 '로고스(Logos) 사싱

우주의 지휘자, '로고스(Logos)'

로고스는 우주 전체를 관통하는 '하나의 법칙이자 '이성'입니다.
보편적 질서: 세상 모든 것은 제멋대로 움직이는 것 같지만, 사실은 거대한 질서(로고스)에 의해 조율되고 있습니다. 오케스트라의 수많은 악기가 각자 소리를 내도 지휘자에 의해 하나의 교향곡이 되는 것과 같습니다.
깨어 있는 자의 지혜: 헤라클레이토스는 대부분의 사람이 자기만의 꿈속에 갇혀 살지만, 지혜로운 자는 만물에 흐르는 이 '공통의 법칙'을 듣기 위해 깨어 있어야 한다고 강조했습니다.

로고스의 실체, '살아있는 불(Fire)'

그는 로고스가 구체적으로 어떤 모습인지 묻는다면 '불이라고 답했습니다.
영원한 에너지: 불은 한순간도 멈춰 있지 않고 끊임없이 변합니다. 하지만 그 변화 속에서도 일정한 '정도의 차이'를 유지하며 타오릅니다. 헤라클레이토스는 우주 자체가 **"적절한 정도로 타고, 적절한 정도로 꺼지는 영원히 살아있는 불"**이라고 보았습니다.
변화 속의 불변: 강물은 계속 흐르지만(변화), '강'이라는 본질(법칙)은 유지되듯, 불은 만물을 변화시키면서도 그 변화의 법칙(로고스) 자체를 상징합니다.

대립물의 일치 (The Unity of Opposites)

헤라클레이토스 철학의 가장 독특한 점은 **'투쟁과 조화'**입니다.
긴장의 미학: 활이나 리라(하프)의 줄은 양쪽으로 팽팽하게 당겨지는 '반대 방향의 힘'이 있어야만 화살을 날리고 아름다운 소리를 냅니다.
일치된 길: "올라가는 길과 내려가는 길은 같다"는 말처럼, 낮과 밤, 삶과 죽음, 겨울과 여름은 서로 반대되는 것 같지만 결국 로고스라는 하나의 순환 안에서 맞물려 돌아가는 **'하나의 짝'**이라는 것입니다.

한 줄 요약

"우주는 영원히 타오르는 불과 같아서 끊임없이 변하지만, 그 변화 안에는 결코 변하지 않는 신성한 질서(로고스)가 흐르고 있다."

2. 엘리엇은 왜 헤라클레이토스를 선택했나?

엘리엇은 『사중주』라는 대작을 통해 **'시간 속에서 영원을 찾는 여정'**을 노래하고 싶어 했습니다. 헤라클레이토스는 세상의 모든 변화 속에서 변하지 않는 법칙을 말한 철학자였기에, 엘리엇의 의도를 여는 가장 완벽한 열쇠였죠.

첫 번째 문장: "로고스는 공통된 것이나..."

원문: "로고스(Logos)는 만인에게 공통된 것이나, 사람들은 저마다 자기만의 지혜를 가진 양 살아간다."
선택한 이유: **"진리는 이미 우리 곁에 있다"**는 것을 말하기 위해서입니다.
설명: 엘리엇은 우리가 일상 속에서 느끼는 고독이나 혼란이 사실은 '나만의 생각'에 갇혀 있기 때문이라고 보았습니다. 우주를 흐르는 거대한 질서(로고스)는 누구에게나 열려 있는데, 사람들은 자기만의 작은 고민과 지혜가 전부인 줄 알고 고립되어 살지요.
의미: 엘리엇은 시의 도입부에서 "이제 내 시를 통해 당신의 개인적인 방을 나와, 우리 모두를 흐르는 거대한 생명의 질서를 함께 바라보자"고 손을 내미는 것입니다.

두 번째 문장: "올라가는 길과 내려가는 길은..."

원문: "올라가는 길과 내려가는 길은 하나요, 같은 길이다."
선택한 이유: **"모든 역설적인 순간의 일치"**를 설명하기 위해서입니다.
설명: 『사중주』에는 과거와 미래, 시작과 끝, 삶과 죽음 같은 상반된 개념들이 계속 등장합니다. 헤라클레이토스는 산을 올라가는 사람에게는 '오르막'이지만 내려가는 사람에게는 '내리막'인 그 길이, 사실은 **'같은 하나의 길'**임을 꿰뚫어 보았습니다.
의미: 아내분이 겪으신 '병원 생활(내려가는 길처럼 느껴지는 시간)'과 다시 '서귀포 집으로 돌아오는 길(올라가는 길)'이 사실은 아내분 인생이라는 하나의 고귀한 여정 안에 있는 똑같이 소중한 길임을 엘리엇은 헤라클레이토스의 입을 빌려 말하고 싶었던 것입니다.

한 줄 요약

엘리엇은 이 두 문장을 통해 독자들에게 이렇게 속삭입니다.
"혼자라고 느끼지 마세요. 우리 모두는 하나의 거대한 질서 속에 있습니다." (첫 번째 문장)
"지금 겪는 고통이나 기쁨, 그 어떤 순간도 결국 당신의 완성된 삶으로 가는 똑같은 길입니다." (두 번째 문장)

3, 그리스 철학의 **'로고스(Logos)'**가 기독교의 **'말씀(Word)'**으로 번역되면서 겪은 거대한 의미의 축소와 변질 과정

번역의 시작: 'Logos'에서 'Verbum'으로

요한복음 1장 1절 "태초에 로고스가 계시니라"의 '로고스'는 그리스인들에게 우주의 질서, 이성, 조화, 법칙을 총칭하는 단어였습니다. 하지만 복음서가 라틴어로 번역되면서 균열이 생깁니다.
라틴어역 (불가타, Vulgate): 4세기경 제롬(Jerome)은 로고스를 라틴어 **'베르붐(Verbum)'**으로 번역했습니다. '베르붐'은 순수하게 '말(Word)' 혹은 '단어'를 뜻합니다.
언어의 한계: 라틴어에는 로고스가 가진 '우주적 이성'과 '말'이라는 이중적 의미를 한꺼번에 담을 수 있는 단어가 없었습니다. 여기서 '우주적 원리'로서의 로고스는 휘발되고, '소리 내어 발화되는 언어'로서의 의미가 강화되었습니다.

유럽 각국어로의 전이: 'Word', 'Wort', '말씀'

라틴어 '베르붐'은 이후 유럽 근대어 번역의 표준이 되었습니다.
영어: 킹 제임스 성경(KJV)에서 **'Word'**로 번역.
독어: 루터 성경에서 **'Wort'**로 번역.
한국어: **'말씀'**으로 번역.
이 과정에서 로고스는 '우주를 지탱하는 보편적 법칙'이라는 철학적 외연을 상실하고, **'신이 인간에게 건네는 계시나 명령'**이라는 좁은 종교적 의미로 고착되었습니다.

'말씀'으로 전이되면서 발생한 결정적 한계점

① '이성(Reason)'과 '법칙'의 거세
그리스인들에게 로고스는 수학적 질서와 논리적 이성을 포함하는 개념이었습니다. 하지만 '말씀'으로 번역되면서, 기독교는 이를 논리적 이해의 대상이 아닌 **'무조건 믿어야 하는 선포'**로 치부하게 되었습니다. 신앙과 이성이 분리되는 결정적 계기가 된 셈입니다.

② '만물의 공통성' 상실
헤라클레이토스가 말한 로고스는 "모든 사람에게 공통된 것"이었습니다. 그러나 '말씀'은 특정 종교의 경전 안에 갇힌 언어가 되었습니다. 숲속의 고사리나 베토벤의 음악 속에도 흐르는 '우주적 질서'로서의 로고스가 아니라, 성경 책장 속에만 존재하는 '말씀'으로 좁아진 것입니다.

③ 역동적인 '운동성'의 박멸
헤라클레이토스의 로고스는 '타오르는 불'처럼 역동적으로 변하며 만물을 조화시키는 힘이었습니다. 반면 '말씀'은 고정된 텍스트, 즉 박제된 교리로 받아들여질 위험이 커졌습니다. 엘리엇이 『사중주』에서 로고스를 다시 꺼내온 이유도, 박제된 종교 언어에서 벗어나 **'살아 움직이는 우주의 질서'**를 회복하고 싶었기 때문입니다.

한 줄 요약
"헬라어 '로고스'는 우주 전체를 움직이는 '거대한 엔진'과 같은 단어였는데, 번역 과정에서 그 엔진 소리인 '말씀'으로만 남게 되어 그 힘이 줄어들고 말았습니다."

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Directive / Steeple Bush(1947) - Robert Frost

Back out of all this now too much for us, 
Back in a time made simple by the loss 
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off 
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather, 
There is a house that is no more a house 
Upon a farm that is no more a farm 
And in a town that is no more a town. 
The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you 
Who only has at heart your getting lost, 
May seem as if it should have been a quarry— 

Great monolithic knees the former town 
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered. 
And there’s a story in a book about it: 
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels 
The ledges show lines ruled southeast northwest, 
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier 
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole. 
You must not mind a certain coolness from him 
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain, 
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal 
Of being watched from forty cellar holes 
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins. 
As for the woods’ excitement over you 
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves, 
Charge that to upstart inexperience 
Where were they all not twenty years ago? 
They think too much of having shaded out 
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees. 
Make yourself up a cheering song of how 
Someone’s road home from work this once was, 
Who may be just ahead of you on foot 
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain 
The height of the adventure is the height 
Of country where two village cultures faded 
Into each other. Both of them are lost 
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself 
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you 
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me 
Then make yourself at home. The only field 
Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall. 
First there’s the children’s house of make believe, 
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine, 
The playthings in the playhouse of the children 
Weep for what little things could make them glad. 
Then for the house that is no more a house, 
But only a belilaced cellar hole, 
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough. 
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest. 
Your destination and your destiny’s 
A brook that was the water of the house, 
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source, 
Too lofty and original to rage. 
(We know the valley streams that when aroused 
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.) 
I have kept hidden in the instep arch 
Of an old cedar at the waterside 
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail 
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it, 
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t. 
(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.) 
Here are your waters and your watering place. 
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

---------------------------------

West-Running Brook / West-Running Brook(1928) - Robert Frost

"Fred, where is north?"

                       "North? North is there, my love.

The brook runs west."

                       "West-Running Brook then call it."

(West-Running Brook men call it to this day.)

"What does it think it's doing running west

When all the other country brooks flow east

To reach the ocean? It must be the brook

Can trust itself to go by contraries

The way I can with you―and you with me―

Because we're-we're-I don't know what we are.

What are we?"

                    "Young or new?"

                                 "We must be something.

We've said we two. Let's change that to we three.

As you and I are married to each other,

We'll both be married to the brook. We'll build

Our bridge across it, and the bridge shall be

Our arm thrown over it asleep beside it.

Look, look, it's waving to us with a wave

To let us know it hears me."

                                    "Why, my dear,

That wave's been standing off this jut of shore―"

(The black stream, catching on a sunken rock,

Flung backward on itself in one white wave,

And the white water rode the black forever,

Not gaining but not losing, like a bird

White feathers from the struggle of whose breast

Flecked the dark stream and flecked the darker pool

Below the point, and were at last driven wrinkled

In a white scarf against the far-shore alders.)

"That wave's been standing off this jut of shore

Ever since rivers, I was going to say,

Were made in heaven. It wasn't waved to us."

"It wasn't, yet it was. If not to you,

It was to me―in an annunciation."

"Oh, if you take it off to lady-land,

As't were the country of the Amazons

We men must see you to the confines of

And leave you there, ourselves forbid to enter―

It is your brook! I have no more to say."

"Yes, you have, too. Go on. You thought of something."

"Speaking of contraries, see how the brook

In that white wave runs counter to itself.

It is from that in water we were from

Long, long before we were from any creature.

Here we, in our impatience of the steps,

Get back to the beginning of beginnings,

The stream of everything that runs away.

Some say existence like a Pirouot

And Pirouette, forever in one place,

Stands still and dances, but it runs away;

It seriously, sadly, runs away

To fill the abyss's void with emptiness.

It flows beside us in this water brook,

But it flows over us. It flows between us

To separate us for a panic moment.

It flows between us, over us, and with us.

And it is time, strength, tone, light, life, and love―

And even substance lapsing unsubstantial;

The universal cataract of death

That spends to nothingness―and unresisted,

Save by some strange resistance in itself,

Not just a swerving, but a throwing back,

As if regret were in it and were sacred.

It has this throwing backward on itself

So that the fall of most of it is always

Raising a little, sending up a little.

Our life runs down in sending up the clock.

The brook runs down in sending up our life.

The sun runs down in sending up the brook.

And there is something sending up the sun.

It is this backward motion toward the source,

Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,

The tribute of the current to the source.

It is from this in nature we are from.

It is most us."

                              "Today will be the day

You said so."

                            "No, today will be the day

You said the brook was called West-Running Brook."

"Today will be the day of what we both said."

THE PASTURE


I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.


I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.


Robert Frost

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道德經 王弼本 15. 古之善爲士者

古之善爲士者, 微妙玄通, 深不可識,

夫唯不可識, 故强爲之容,

豫焉若冬涉川, 猶兮若畏四隣, 儼兮其若容,

渙兮若氷之將釋, 敦兮其若樸, 曠兮其若谷, 混兮其若濁,

孰能濁以靜之徐淸, 孰能安以久動之徐生,

保此道者, 不欲盈,

夫唯不盈, 故能蔽不新成.

道德經 王弼本 80. 小國寡民

小國寡民,

使有什佰之器而不用, 使民重死而不遠徙,

雖有舟輿, 無所乘之, 雖有甲兵, 無所陳之,

使人復結繩而用之,

甘其食, 美其服, 安其居, 樂其俗,

隣國相望, 鷄犬之聲相聞, 民至老死不相往來.

道德經 王弼本 1. 道可道 非常道

道可道, 非常道, 名可名, 非常名.

無名天地之始, 有名萬物之母,

故常無欲以觀其妙, 常有欲以觀其徼,

此兩者同, 出而異名, 同謂之玄,

(此兩者, 同出而異名, 同謂之玄,)

玄之又玄, 衆妙之門.

道德經 王弼本 13. 寵辱若驚

寵辱若驚, 貴大患若身,

何謂寵辱若驚,

寵爲下, 得之若驚, 失之若驚, 是謂寵辱若驚,

何謂貴大患若身,

吾所以有大患者, 爲吾有身,

及吾無身, 吾有何患,

故貴以身爲天下, 若可寄天下,

愛以身爲天下, 若可託天下.

道德經 王弼本 16. 致虛極

致虛極, 守靜篤,

萬物竝作, 吾以觀復,

夫物芸芸, 各復歸其根,

歸根曰靜, 是謂復命,

復命曰常, 知常曰明,

不知常, 妄作凶,

知常容, 容乃公, 公乃王, 王乃天, 天乃道,

道乃久, 沒身不殆.

道德經 王弼本 25. 有物混成

有物混成, 先天地生, 寂兮寥兮,

獨立不改, 周行而不殆, 可以爲天下母,

吾不知其名, 字之曰道, 强爲之名曰大,

大曰逝, 逝曰遠, 遠曰反,

故道大, 天大, 地大, 王亦大,

域中有四大, 而王居其一焉,

人法地, 地法天, 天法道, 道法自然.

道德經 王弼本 38. 上德不德

上德不德, 是以有德, 下德不失德, 是以無德,

上德無爲而無以爲, 下德爲之而有以爲,

上仁爲之而無以爲, 上義爲之而有以爲,

上禮爲之而莫之應, 則攘臂而扔之,

故失道而後德, 失德而後仁, 失仁而後義, 失義而後禮,

夫禮者, 忠信之薄, 而亂之首,

前識者, 道之華, 而愚之始,

是以大丈夫處其厚, 不居其薄, 處其實, 不居其華,

故去彼取此.

道德經 王弼本 20. 絶學無憂

絶學無憂,

唯之與阿, 相去幾何,

善之與惡, 相去若何,

人之所畏, 不可不畏, 荒兮其未央哉,

衆人熙熙, 如享太牢, 如春登臺,

我獨泊兮其未兆, 如嬰兒之未孩, 乘乘兮若無所歸,

衆人皆有餘, 而我獨若遺, 我愚人之心也哉, 沌沌兮,

俗人昭昭, 我獨昏昏,

俗人察察, 我獨悶悶,

澹兮其若海, 飂兮若無止,

衆人皆有以, 而我獨頑似鄙,

我獨異於人, 而貴食母.

道德經 王弼本 53. 使我介然有知

使我介然有知, 行於大道, 唯施是畏,

大道甚夷, 而民好徑,

朝甚除, 田甚蕪, 倉甚虛,

服文綵, 帶利劍, 厭飮食, 財貨有餘,

是謂盜夸, 非道也哉.

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https://youtu.be/ccupYGfiDEw

Alec Guinness reads Four Quartets by TS Eliot

https://youtu.be/t-Thyoyx4zA

T. S. Eliot - Four Quartets (Read by Jeremy Irons)

https://youtu.be/fnTqmpti6So

***** A Reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" **********

https://youtu.be/Kh6W4m38gE4

T.S Eliot's Four Quartets: a pattern for Christian Living - Jay Parini

https://blog.naver.com/yoonphy/224042794049

짧은 영시 (99-20) T. S. 엘리엇 / 네 편의 사중주 Four Quartets / 번트 노튼 Burnt Norton

https://youtu.be/AozoUXTukg0

https://blog.naver.com/himoon25/223104505403

영국시: ‘엘리엇’(2-1) <네 사중주(Four Quartets)> 1. 번트 노튼(“Burnt Norton”)

https://youtu.be/DdCYHORa6Yg

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Four Quartet - T. S. Eliot

Redeeming Time : T. S. ELIOT’S FOUR QUARTETS

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Introduction of Redeeming Time T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets

 by Kenneth Paul Kramer

THEME-WORD DESIGN

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).

Eliot’s Conversion

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!

(Whether his mouth be open or shut). (CPP 93)

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:

Silence

Along the city streets

It is still high tide,

Yet the garrulous waves of life

Shrink and divide

With a thousand incidents

Vexed and debated:—

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

A New Type of Intellectual

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

Emerging Pattern

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,

Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness (BN IV)

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 

Meditative Voice

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.

The Mystic Way
Convesion:Turning from Appences	Introspection: Turning toward Reality
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.

Musical Form

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.

Dialogic Motive

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

Theme Words

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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Comment on Burnt Norton from Redeeming Time T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets of Kenneth Paul

Burnt Norton : ENTERING OUR FIRST WORLD - Kenneth Paul Kramer

(Redeeming Time : T. S. ELIOT’S FOUR QUARTETS)

Although the Logos is common to all

We live as if by our own wisdom;

The way up and the way down are the same.

—HERACLITUS

In the years after Eliot’s 1927 conversion to the Church of England, a period of reflection and realignment, he plunged wholeheartedly into minute details of the Anglo-Catholic tradition and liturgy. In September 1929, barely two years after he had abandoned his family’s Unitarian faith and his own American nationality, Eliot’s mother, Charlotte Champe Eliot (née Stearns), died. The possibility that she had not really understood his marital choice, much less his poetry, left him feeling guilty and deeply disappointed. Emerging from this loss, in 1930 he published Ash-Wednesday, which drew largely upon images from scripture, the liturgy of the Mass, and Dante. Weaving together personal experiences and memories, the poem marks a turning point in Eliot’s life. What was new in Ash-Wednesday was the poet’s point of departure: there, he began with his decision not to turn back to the false deceptions of life but to explore faithfully the irreversible act of conversion. The themes of spiritual wisdom and ascesis, or self-denial—central to that poem—would continue to guide his search for divine presence.

Upon returning from the United States in 1933 (after his first visit in seventeen years), Eliot did not return to his wife, Vivienne. Rather, he took residence in a boarding house in Kensington, near St. Stephen’s Church, and adopted, with some difficulty, a self-imposed vow of celibacy. This vow, for him, was one of the many meditative practices that represented part of a profound struggle to avoid becoming trapped by the relativity of private experience. Soon thereafter, Eliot became warden of that church (in 1934), and Father Eric Cheetham, the vicar, offered him boarding in his presbytery at  Grenville Place. Eliot readily and gratefully accepted. The situation was ideal. It offered him a dependable spiritual companion, and Father Cheetham’s homilies were to Eliot’s liking. The room gave him privacy, the company of priests, and space to work without interruption on the pageant drama “Choruses from The Rock” (published and performed in 1934), and Murder in the Cathedral (commissioned in May 1934 and performed in June 1935). For the first time in his life, Eliot saw a wide audience responding positively to his writing.

Written in the autumn of 1935, the genesis of Burnt Norton lay in Eliot’s 1934 visit to a vacant country manor house and formal rose garden, which are set apart from the rest of the world on a high hill overlooking a verdant English countryside in Chipping Camden, near Gloucestershire. Burnt Norton was first published independently as the final poem in T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909–1935. East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding would follow in 1940, 1941, and 1942. According to Eliot, Burnt Norton might have remained by itself had it not been for World War II, which diverted Eliot from writing for the stage and turned him in on himself. It was only in writing East Coker, Eliot said, “that I began to see the Quartets as a set of four.”

Before reading a word of the poem itself, at the beginning of Burnt Norton, the reader faces the problem of understanding two fragments from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, which are left untranslated. These aphorisms announce thematic notes that echo throughout the poem:

Although the Logos is common to all, the majority live as though by a private wisdom of their own.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

These fragments, now appearing as an epigraph for the whole poem, provide an interpretative lens through which the narrator’s personal religious experience may be clarified and enriched. Aside from the question of what these fragments mean individually, it is equally important to recognize what implications the connection or disconnection between the two fragments make. That is, in choosing these lines, Eliot highlighted a liberating relationship between the timeless pattern common to all and the transient flux of daily life. The first fragment points to the logos (“one end” or goal of life that is common to all), which is recognized and explored especially in each quartet’s first two movements.The second points to its associated path (the “one way” or spiritual practice up and down), which is recognized and explored especially in each quartet’s third and fourth movements. Through “a grace of sense,” the logos and its paths are then drawn into a deeper communion in each quartet’s fifth movement.

The key term logos, as used by Heraclitus, and by Plato, Philo, and John, presents many problems for translators and has been rendered Universal Law, Word, or Truth. In each case, the need to capitalize the word chosen to define logos indicates a tendency in philosophy and theology to view it as a uniquely universal or transcendent reality, the realized knowledge of which brings liberation into the world. Eliot quoted from his own copy of Hermann Diels’s arrangement of the Greek fragments (1901), and it is likely that he would have agreed with Diels’s translation of logos as “Word,” especially since this translation includes a creative interplay between philosophical renderings and its Christocentric use in the Gospel of John. The poststructuralist critic William Spanos rightly challenges modernist commentaries that give privileged authority to a logocentric vantage point—of a fully established concept of eternal being, ontologically prior to contingency—from which to interpret logos.

While I agree with Spanos that reading the Quartets cannot be based on oversimplified interpretations that assume an onto-theological, centered, or closed understanding of the universe, I disagree with his privileging Martin Heidegger’s understanding of logos. Unlike Heidegger, for whom the logos of Heraclitus names not an unchanging truth but an individual disclosure of being as it emerges in existence, Martin Buber claimed that the ever-changing logos can be understood only in relation to meaningfully spoken words that are common to everyone. Buber argues that while each soul has its logos deeply within itself, “the logos does not attain to its fullness in us but rather between us; for it means the eternal chance for [human speech-with-meaning] to become true between [persons].” What constitutes logos, for Buber, and I would suggest for Heraclitus and Eliot as well, is born of reciprocal and reciprocating sharing of knowledge—a “genuine We.” It is this communal speaking that generates and is generated by a common cosmos, the shaped order of what is experienced. Eliot placed this Heraclitian fragment at the beginning of Four Quartets to situate the poems in the realm of a common logos: the immediate presence of unreserved, spontaneous mutuality common to each person, yet reaching beyond the sphere of either. Impossible to objectify, this unifying presence of reciprocal sharing (e.g., a memorable common fruitfulness between poet and readers) comes alive through common speech-with-meaning from which the uniquely human arises ever anew.

The second Heraclitian fragment embodies an existential demand that a person become disengaged from those satisfactions in life that curtail our ability to engage the common logos. Heraclitus affirms that “the way up” (the via positiva) and “the way down” (the via negativa) are both necessary and, in moments, complementary paths toward the common logos of meaningful speech between persons. The poet begins the second quartet, East Coker, with a line that is applicable here: “In my beginning is my end.” That is, life’s goal (to apprehend “the point of intersection of the timeless / With time” [DS V]) and its associated path (to descend lower into spiritual darkness, and to fare forward with purified motives) become reconciled in moments of genuine reciprocity with life. Therefore, Burnt Norton, and Four Quartets as a whole, continually challenges individual wisdoms (including the poet’s own), or private insights limited to one’s own experience, and proposes instead the practice of endless humility from which genuine commonness can emerge. To move toward this dynamic goal, Eliot emphasizes returning again and again from temporal confusion and disharmony to interspiritual values both in one’s present situation and in relationship with tradition.

The Lotos Rose (Burnt Norton I)

Burnt Norton’s spacious manor, built in the seventeenth century, sits secluded on the edge of the Cotswolds, ninety miles northwest of London, overlooking the Vale of Evesham and the Malvern and Welch Hills. The grounds are located far from the main road, a mile and a quarter north of Chipping Campden, Oxford. The manor house, which was once a home for boys, was named Burnt Norton because it was built on the site of a house that had burned to the ground in the eighteenth century. The Burnt Norton garden is approached by way of a long private road that runs over a cattle grid and leads beyond a caretaker’s house. Partially covered with ivy, the manor itself is relatively unimposing. Surrounded by a brick wall, a large formal garden lies to one side of the house. A gate opens to a rose-bordered walkway leading to another bed of roses. Two sets of stone steps descend to the lower level of the garden. To the left are two empty pools: one larger and rectangular; the other smaller and semicircular. From a knoll to the right, one can look out over the expansive and rolling valleys of Evesham.

Landscapes in English poetry, especially English Romantic poetry, often reflect elusive, spiritual, and emotional sensibilities. According to Marshall McLuhan, Eliot’s principle poetic innovation was that of le paysage intérieur or the “psychological landscape.” That is, Eliot’s “objective correlative” (a physical expression‎ of the poet’s state of mind) becomes “the places and things which utter themselves.” Moreover, according to Nancy Duvall Hargrove, five major “landscape clusters” representing five major psychological states can be located throughout Eliot’s poetry: “The city (boredom, triviality, sterility), the country (release, fertility, rebirth), the desert (chaos, terror, emptiness), the garden (ecstasy, innocence, serenity), and the sea or river. . . .” Each of these landscapes and states of mind appears in Four Quartets.

Prior to entering the serenity of the rose garden, however, we hear a philosophical meditation on time, which directs reader, poet, and poem toward contemplation of what is always present. Burnt Norton opens in a relaxed atmosphere of internal inquiry. In Eliot’s oral reading of these lines, the word “time” is intoned meditatively in a way that clothes it with an importance beyond its ordinary usage. Burnt Norton begins with ten lines that frame not only Burnt Norton but the entire Four Quartets in the context of time and timelessness.

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.

A central subject of the poem, as well as the ground of its discourse, is the ever-changing relationship between the timeless logos and the field of time. In these opening ten lines, the poet interweaves four distinct senses of time: chronological, eternal, speculative, and “always present.” First, time is presented as a chronological series of events, stretching between past and future. The first three lines present the possibility that present, past, and future “perhaps” coexist, each present in time past and time future. Second, time is imaged as eternally present. In such an eternal present, however, the future is already determined and thus unredeemable. Third, time is pondered as a series of unfulfilled potentialities that might have been realized differently. Abstracting one’s self from the present moment to consider “what might have been,” however desirable it may seem, remains an unrealizable speculation. Finally, all these possible manifestations of time point to the “one end” (the logos common to all), which is “always present.” The fuller significance of the interplay between these distinct senses of time, only hinted at here, unfolds throughout the poem’s spirit-charged landscapes.

Many commentators have noted that the specter of time and the presentation of its various “enchainments” haunt much of Eliot’s verse. Prufrock’s repeated “There will be time, there will be time,” for instance, only allows “for a hundred indecisions / And for a hundred visions and revisions” (CPP 4) within which time itself is lost. The futility of time-bound existence is again explored in The Waste Land. In “A Game of Chess,” for instance, a voice repeats: “What shall I do now? What shall I do?” Magnifying the underlying futility of the question, the voice repeats, “What shall we do to-morrow? / What shall we ever do?” (CPP 41) but finds no answer to this question. Later, however, in the Ariel poems, the poet’s voice, though still distracted by the temporal process, begins to evoke hints of a timeless design that, when directly experienced and then recalled with a disciplined imagination, temporarily releases him from being trapped in the temporal flux.

Determined neither to succumb to time’s enchainments nor to escape into his own imagination, the poet in Ash-Wednesday (1930) draws inspiration from the Lady (a compound figure embodying the Virgin Mary, Dante’s Beatrice, and perhaps the mythic Isis) who wears “white light folded, sheathed about her” and whose presence restores Eden’s innocence. With a “new years walk,” she brings with her a “new verse” that transforms “ancient rhyme” with a liberating message:

. . . Redeem

The time. Redeem

The unread vision in the higher dream. (CPP 64)

Adapting the biblical metaphor of “turning” (teshuva), redeeming time embodies a double movement: turning away from self-centered orientations and toward becoming reconciled with the world. In other words, redeeming acts involve release from self-imprisonment and meaningful implications of the soul’s awakening toward God. This liberating message is taken into Four Quartets, where, as we will see, the poet addresses readers in ways that include them in the poet’s situation and glimpses, in the process, that the whole created order is in need of redemption.

Eliot’s poetic imagery, in Four Quartets, divides itself between the ceaselessly restricting repetitions of “time before and time after” (BN III) and the echoed ecstasies of “movement / Timeless, and undesiring” (BN V). Remembered ecstasies, recollected in detachment and appropriated in different forms, prove liberating to the poet in unforeseen ways. Time is first restored to its original, undivided innocence (e.g., “you are the music / While the music lasts” [DS V]), and second, it is renewed, or filled with new immediacy (e.g., “I am here / Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning” [EC I]). This double emphasis on restoring and renewing time will be reinforced and expanded, for instance, toward the end of Little Gidding, where the poet says,

. . . A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. (LG V)

Four Quartets, accordingly, is characterized by a necessary back and forth movement between unredeemed and redeeming time. Being redeemed in time, we will discover, is a transforming condition that brings “inner freedom from practical desire” and “release from action and suffering” (BN II). It is a “condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)” (LG V), which results from the reciprocal relationship between unpredictable grace and an undistracted openness to the fullness of the moment.

In this light, the significance of Burnt Norton’s opening passage consists both in what is said about time and its restoration and renewal as well as the meditative form of discourse that Eliot introduces. Looking through a contemplative prism, the pluralities of time (present, past, and future) reflect and co-implicate one another. The unredeemable “eternal present” (a perpetually speculative possibility) and the always present “one end” (timeless moments in time yet not of time) visually conflict with, though at times complement, one another. Chronological time, eternal time, speculative time, and the “always present” intertwine, especially as the poet evokes the power of memory, with varying degrees of significance throughout the poem. Reconstructions of remembered experiences and of images drawn from earlier poems, themselves remembered, traverse the poet’s terrain.

Burnt Norton thus begins with speculation on the possibility of experiencing and retrieving timeless moments in the endless flux of temporal existence. Reverberating in time,

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.

The rose garden is filled with echoes—both earthly and mythic, personal and universal, from the present situation and from inner recesses of his memory. A feeling of excitement enters the poem. The sound of birds fills the rose garden and urges the poet to risk the terror and ecstasy of entering a new world. Initially, the thrush’s call—“Quick said the bird, find them, find them”—is deceptive, and we follow it only as an act of trust. Is the bird’s call, “in response to / The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,” reliable? Will it lead us to Edenic redemption? Adding to the excitement, he notes: “And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses / Had the look of flowers that are looked at” (BN I). As we will see in each quartet, repetition (whether of a rhetorical pattern or of one’s own experience) alters, in the echoing, the meaning formally attributed to what is recalled. The power of memory, for the poet, did not simply involve recalling the details of past events. From Augustine, Eliot recalled that memory is the seat of both self-consciousness (memoria sui) leading to self-transcendence and the intuitive awareness of God’s presence (memoria Dei). And from Dante, Eliot learned “to consider memory not simply as the repository for images of the past, but as a power that allows us to reshape and interpret past experiences into a new and different form.”

The poet’s “we” and “your,” meanwhile, suggest the presence of another person. On the one hand, the disposition of the poet to engage his audience in the address-response spirit of dialogue becomes evident in his desire to create an ethos of intimacy and trust. In each quartet, the poet uses “we” or “us” or “our” (BN I, II; EC II, III, IV, V; DS I, II, V; LG II, III, IV, V) to draw readers more deeply into his intense reciprocities with spirit-charged landscapes. Moreover, the poet’s use of “you” (EC I, III; DS III, V; LG I, II) challenges readers not only to enter into the landscape but also to consider turning away from time-conditioned, unthinking phatic chatter and toward the “still point of the turning world” (BN II). The poet thus reaches out to the minds and hearts of readers and urges us to participate with him through meaningfully encountering the logos common to all.

At the same time it is likely that Eliot had first visited Burnt Norton in 1934 with his longtime American friend Emily Hale (1891–1969), who was visiting her aunt and uncle in Chipping Camden at the time. Beside his mother, Charlotte, who proudly admired him, Hale, whom he had met in his junior year at Harvard, was one of the few significant women in Eliot’s early life. What drew her to him, aside from their family circles, was their shared literary tastes, especially their mutual interest in religious poetry. A correspondence between them ensued and deepened. Starting in 1923, Eliot would send her inscribed copies of his works, including his conversion poem “Journey of the Magi” and all four of the Quartets.

Emily visited Tom (as she called him) in England every summer between 1934 and 1938, except the summer of 1936. He felt very much at ease with her, and, in that spirit, they would often take long walks together. According to her American friends, after Eliot’s separation from his wife, Vivienne, she felt unofficially engaged to him. Indeed, one of her friends in Chipping Camden remarked that Emily was “incurably and most uncomfortably in love for so many frustrated years, always believing that if she were patient long enough, her moment of glory would assuredly arrive.” It is safe to assume that, in addition to “we” as readers, Emily Hale is the other person of the “we” and “us” in the garden appearing as an idealized, faceless companion instead of as a unique woman.

The unfolding drama, signaled by the poet’s repetition of “first”—“through the first gate / Into our first world”—takes us further back, biographically, to Eliot’s childhood, mythically to the garden of Eden, and contemplatively to the primal senses of consciousness. Commentators have pointed out that these lines refer to Milton’s account of Adam and Eve, who “were dignified, invisible.” The stress on invisibility in the garden—unheard music from unseen sources, disembodied voices echoing, and the “unseen eyebeam crossed”—suggests the presence of spirits diffused in the garden. In the midst of the autumn heat and vibrant air, arrestingly, the “unheard music” and the “unseen eyebeam” in “our first world” bring new life to the roses as well as the poet himself. Rounding the corner of the concrete wall that opens into the garden of “our first world” represents, from a contemplative viewpoint, a “return to the primal senses of consciousness, [where] the scenes enacted in ‘our first world,’ provide both a first destination for the ‘strategic withdrawal’ into inwardness and the starting point in the reconstitution of identity on a new footing.” This withdrawal into inwardness, as Eliot indicated, temporarily at least, is necessary for the poet to then maximize his interactions in the world.

Lined with box hedges, the formal garden at Burnt Norton is rectangular and crowned with a half-circle. A drained pool sits next to a smaller, semicircular pool, at the center of the garden. The garden’s shape is reminiscent of a mandala (meditational pattern), at the center of which is an empty pool, or “bindu point” (into which mediators disappear in contemplation). When the thrush call leads the visitors past the flowers and out from the entrance walkway into the contemplative midpoint of the garden, we come to the pool.

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.

But who are “they” in this passage? As intimate, invisible presences, “they” (perhaps the innocent children of Eliot’s youth whose laughter is heard in the leaves) are also dignified and accepting guests in the “First World” garden.

Out of nowhere, the poet is overtaken by a visionary experience:

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.

In these six lines—which Martin Scofield called “as close to perfection as poetry has reached in [the twentieth] century”—a gray-brown desolate empty pool becomes transfigured by a glittering light. Flanked on one side by a large tree and on the other by a smaller, shallower half-circle pool (that may at one time have surrounded a fountain), the central pool’s walls are cracked from neglect, a reminder of time passed. Yet the empty pool has an almost hypnotic effect on the poet. Chronological time empties into an illumined moment of new birth as, suddenly, the pool’s bottom (littered with moss and leaves) is filled with the sun’s light through which he sees “the lotos rose.” As the poet struggles to speak of this invisible light, he captures only its reflection at the surface, where his words end.

What happened to the poet here (commentators have suggested a wide range of interpretations from a mystical experience to a hallucination) cannot finally be determined or understood. However, the metaphors he uses to describe the event open up provocative possibilities. The “lotos rose,” for instance, joins Eastern and Western spiritual symbols in ways that transfigure the intended meanings of each. As a graduate student at Harvard University, Eliot had studied the “lotos” symbol in relation to both the Hindu true self (atman) and the Buddhist absolute emptiness (shunyata). In each of these traditions, it is said that heart-mind transforms through direct realization of one’s true identity, symbolized by the lotus.

In the Bhagavad Gita, for instance, Krishna teaches Arjuna about the yoga of actionless action (karma yoga). When Arjuna asks to see Krishna’s bodily form, Krishna reveals his dual (material and spiritual) nature. Krishna’s infinite brilliance manifests, in response, as a thousand suns. Upon seeing Krishna’s infinite form, Arjuna’s first words are: “Brahma, the Lord [I see], throned on the lotus seat.” Analogously, in the Buddhist tradition, rooted in but not limited to the mud of temporal and physical reality, the pure “lotos” of the true self rises out of the muddy water of experience. According to Eliot’s lecture notes from Masaharu Anesaki’s Harvard seminar, “Schools of Religious and Philosophical Thought of Japan,” the lotus can be distinguished from other plants by its flower and its fruit. Some flowers bear no fruit, while others (like the poppy) bear many fruits. And sometimes, as in the case of the peach or the plum, it takes many flowers to bear one fruit. The lotus, in other words, is the fruit it bears.

Just as the lotus functions as a central symbol in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, the rose has come to occupy a central place in traditional Christian poetry. Indeed, the poet’s epiphany in the garden parallels the radiance of Dante’s Empyrean—“The heaven of pure light.” In Paradiso, Dante (like Arjuna), after seeing the final and only true heaven, is momentarily blinded by its divine effulgence. Dante’s “multifoliate rose,” in Canto XXX, radiates “the heaven of pure light. And in Canto XXXIII, the Supreme Light of God is so dazzling that Dante has to turn immediately away.

I saw within its depth how it conceives

All things in a single volume bound by Love,

Of which the universe is the scattered leaves.

Here, the Book of God and the Rose of earthly existence are metaphorically one, and the conflict between Word and immanent reality is resolved. When asked about the significance of roses in Four Quartets, Eliot once remarked, “There are really three roses in the set of poems; the sensuous rose, the social-political Rose [always spelled with a capital letter] and the spiritual rose; and the three have got to be in some way identified as one.” The “lotos rose,” it can be said, becomes a fourth kind of rose in the Quartets, acting as both a noun (a lotus and a rose that are united) and a verb (a lotus that “rose” from the pool). Subtle yet profound interactions generated by including and transmuting symbols from these two spiritual traditions—“the lotos” (emptiness, or true self) and “the rose” (fullness of the divine)—reverberate through the poem.

Yet what happened to the poet in the rose garden happened between time-conditioned, self-reflective consciousness and the consciousness that transcends time. What happened emerged from the reciprocal and reciprocating relationship between poet and garden. For this reason, the event cannot be reduced to the private wisdom of his own experience, no matter how remarkable that experience was. Instead, having already been seized by the spirit of the garden, the poet then becomes drawn into direct, exclusive relationship with the empty pool. The pool now becomes no longer pool. In this transfiguring occurrence, the poet experiences himself addressed by a unique presence beyond ordinary words. More than the sum of its qualities (color, texture, setting), the illuminating wholeness of this structure addresses him with a full presence that cannot be detached from his relationship to the pool. The poet receives what he did not have before—the elevating power of full mutuality stirs his soul with an inexpressible confirmation of meaning. Analogous to the poet’s glittering “heart of light,” Martin Buber, following Plato’s Seventh Epistle, likens this “betweenness” of spontaneous mutuality to light that is kindled from “leaping fire.” Situated in these reciprocities (between poet and garden, between poet and reader) a new quality of communication leaps forth. Our ways of understanding become communal.

In light of Eliot’s dissertation on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley, it has been suggested that the “lotos rose” represents the poet’s “immediate experience,” that is, experience of timeless unity prior to the distinction between perceiver and perceived, which is not an object of nature or thought anywhere present to anyone, yet which cannot be analyzed away. Yet, Bradley’s term, whether intentionally or not, still seems to emphasize the content of one’s own experience, no matter how transcendent that experience is perceived to be. In light of his understanding of the Heraclitian logos, Buber, on the other hand, speaks of “the between”—a genuine third alternative between inner and outer, subjective and objective, that is, the presence of spontaneous mutuality that comes alive in and through powerful moments of relational grace. Beyond “immediate experience,” in the redeeming reciprocity between poet and the fully sensible, unique wholeness of the rose garden, common to each yet reaching out beyond either, poet and garden affirm each other’s unpredictable uniqueness and simultaneously surrender to each other’s innermost wholeness.

Further, Charles Taylor has argued that the modernists like Pound and Eliot have articulated epiphanies not of being but of that which “comes from between the words and images.” Taylor therefore indicates that it is appropriate to speak of an “intertemporal epiphany,” for “only when we recall it in memory can we see behind it to what was revealed through it,” and “the epiphany can’t be seen in an object but has to be framed between an event and its recurrence through memory.” It is important to add, I believe, another interdependent reciprocity to this frame—what is between the poet’s address and the reader’s intelligent response. Without the interpretive grasp of my voice “the lotos rose” loses its meaning-bearing value. The “leaping fire” that opens heart and mind is extinguished. Just at this “moment,” though, as suddenly as his awareness of time ceased, a cloud passes over what “has been,” and the timeless vision disappears into memory. Burnt Norton’s “heart of light” is hidden again in the empty pool.

The bird that initially invited the visitors into the garden (“quick, said the bird, find them, find them”) suddenly and urgently calls them to leave their “first world.”

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

The intense vision—the rising pulsing light—disappears into emptiness. It is here that the poet records a glimpse into the overwhelming significance of the timeless moment. The sublime moment in which the “lotos rose quietly, quietly,” apprehended not in the poet but emerging from the vital reciprocity between him and the “heart of light” from which it issued, cannot be sustained. Indeed, the bird’s call necessarily brings us back from the perilous frontier of ultimacy and back into the things of this earth. Restating and recapitulating the heart of the opening mediation, the last three lines of the first movement of Burnt Norton remind us, however, that the always-present “one end,” is now hidden, or forgotten.

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

As it will continue to do, the poet’s meditative voice concentrates upon this “always present” redemptive possibility of being released, temporarily at least, from the restrictive effects of the temporal process.

The Still Point (Burnt Norton II)

As each quartet shifts from the first to its associated second movement, the initial landscape meditation unfolds into a deeper rumination, which, through “a grace of sense,” brings release from temporal suffering. In the meditative tradition of the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets—who sought, as Eliot emphasized in his 1926 Clark Lectures, to balance the intellect, the emotions, and spiritual sensibility—the soul, longing for union with the divine and attempting to bring focus to its spiritual journey, projects itself through “interior dramatization.” Speaking of Eliot’s interests in the metaphysical poets, Louis Martz’s comments describe Four Quartets as well:

A meditative poem is a work that creates an interior drama of mind; this dramatic action is usually (though not always) created 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, where the poet’s self has, for a time, found an answer to its conflicts.

In composition of place in Burnt Norton, self-examination takes the form of interior mindfulness pictured in exterior scenery, a pattern that is repeated throughout Four Quartets. Here the poet moves from a description of the external landscape to an internally oriented expression‎ of the contemplative truths that it reveals.

The second movement of Burnt Norton begins with a fifteen-line lyric in which the “lotos rose” of the garden is transmuted into an earth-bound metaphor: “Garlic and sapphires in the mud / Clot the bedded axle-tree.” Provocatively echoing the Buddhist wheel of samsara, as well as the manger and the cross, the “bedded axle-tree” reconciles above and below. Below, hunter and hunted in the round of daily existence “pursue their pattern as before”; above, our earthly movements are “reconciled” in the heavens. Opposing elements—the “garlic” is a white, pungent-smelling transmution of the lotus warring against the “sapphire,” a blue mineral signifying stars glistening—are sunken into dark mud. These seemingly different images manifest in two planes at once: dancing “along the artery” and “figured in the drift of stars.” The axletree—or axis of the world, symbolically equated with the Tree of Life—reconciles them, becoming a fixed point at the center of the turning world. When one draws a circle and bisects it horizontally and vertically, as Northrop Frye has pointed out, the horizontal line represents linear time or the Heraclitean flux, whereas the vertical line represents the presence of the divine entering time.

Garlic and sapphire, artery and boar, heaven and earth gather together

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 the 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.

Suddenly, we are brought into the realization that except for the still point—a moment of timelessness within time—there could not be genuine reciprocity. One glimpses the poet’s struggle here to recognize the logos common to all, arising from a multiplicity of consequent sensibilities and behaviors, arising from presence as well as absence. To make some sense of these conflicting temporalities, the poet, like Heraclitus before him, relies on paradox. This rhetorical act of negation/affirmation allows him, by pushing language beyond its immediate boundaries, to enter his experience more deeply and opens fresh possibilities for understanding the logos.

It should be remembered that when Eliot left the Harvard philosophy department in the summer of 1914, after three years of study, he was awarded a travel fellowship to spend the academic year 1914–15 at Oxford studying Aristotle’s philosophy with Professor Harold Joachim. Though Eliot was never to return to Harvard’s philosophy department as a teacher, the work of Aristotle continued to interest him, especially the De anima, in which Aristotle, quite rationally, presents an image of the good, which both moves desire and attracts desire to the unmoved center of a wheel (III.10).

Viewed through overlapping philosophical and spiritual traditions that interested Eliot, the “still point” echoes the stillness alluded to in Ash-Wednesday. In the 1930 poem, the poet prayed to the “Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden”: “Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still” (CPP 67). In a sense, the entire dance of the poem revolves around the intertextual image of stillness. The stillness of “the still point,” essential to the dance of life as well as to graceful interaction between people, does not refer, as one may too quickly assume, to the opposite of motion or to doing nothing. Nor does it identify a state of peace within the poet. It refers, instead, to an altogether different kind of inaction-in-action, which is why, in Ash-Wednesday, the poet asked to be taught how to care without caring. The “still point” refers to the oscillating sphere of genuine reciprocity between poet and rose garden, for example, or between poet and the kingfisher of the fourth movement. Beyond the sum total of poet and rose garden, a reciprocal and reciprocating mutuality—the “still point”—joins them briefly in a spontaneous mutuality that only later can be spoken as a timeless presence. As we have and will see, just as the poet ruminates on the varieties of time-bound existence framing our lives—its frenzies, distractions, and enchainments—he also repeatedly evokes moments of grace that restore a necessary balance between activity and stillness.

The significance of the next eleven lines sets them apart.

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.

These lines bear behavioral consequences of his recognition in the rose garden that “only through time is time conquered.” From spatial and temporal images, the poet now evokes ascetical tensions. Intuitive sensations release him from temporal compulsion. Remembering moments of immediate connection with his environment—not moments measured in time, but timeless moments—his spiritual history reactivates the “inner freedom” of these moments. Two things occur. First, he “must be still and still moving,” and second, he must become “surrounded / By a grace of sense.” The immediate sensation of renewal lies outside sense experience as we know it, and the words “I cannot say” point to the fact that extraordinary meaning cannot be contained in time-determined words. Pushing beyond speech, the intensely contemplative experience overcomes subject-verb-object relationships through genuinely reciprocal relationships with the world in the midst of the logos common to all.

What is made explicit here, or is understood in a new way, are the behavioral effects arising from entering a genuine reciprocal relationship with nature, or persons, or art. He likens this experience to being at a physical and metaphysical still point, which, at the same time, is moving like the hub of a wheel that does not seem to move at all as the wheel turns. While he intuitively realizes that the still point does not release him from the limits of time-bound existence, the evocation of “inner freedom” (“surrounded / By a grace of sense”) suggests positive behavioral consequences of the still point. The poet’s experience of “inner freedom” can be understood in a redemptive sense in that, on the one hand, it brings release from attachments to desire and action, suffering and compulsion, and, on the other hand, it brings exultation (Erhebung) to consciousness. Beyond yet within time, supported by a “grace of sense,” the intuition of a new “first world” includes and transmutes the old such that the old is revealed in a new light.

Though the all-important phrase “a grace of sense” reads easily, apparent contradictions—“Erhebung [lifting up, exultation] without motion,” and “concentration [gathering together at the center] / Without elimination”—strain old vocabularies beyond their normal capacities. The poet’s renewed imagination gains him access to previously unapparent similarities-in-differences and differences-in-similarities. “First world” states of soul are glimpsed where contradictory actions are neither one nor two, rendering the limitations of old world attitudes (one, not two) more deeply explicit. Resulting from the event of real mutuality in the rose garden, contrary views, voices, styles, and goals both challenge and reify each other. Fittingly, just a year after publishing Burnt Norton, Eliot wrote: “The human mind is perpetually driven between two desires, between two dreams each of which may be either a vision or a nightmare: the vision and nightmare of the material world, and the vision and nightmare of the immaterial. Each may be in turn, or for different minds, a refuge to which to fly, or a horror from which to escape.” Such feelings of ecstasy and horror are, in Burnt Norton, held in fruitful tension: horror (fear and trembling before the divine) is connaturally a part of life’s ever-unique, ever-surprising ecstasies.

In a gripping image, the poet concludes this movement by necessarily juxtaposing the positive, even redemptive, effects of genuine reciprocity by acknowledging that restrictive limitations are endemic to fleshly existence:

Yet the enchainment of past and future

Woven in the weakness of the changing body,

Protects mankind from heaven and damnation

Which flesh cannot endure.

In these lines, separating disincarnated contemplation from genuine contemplation, the poet distinguishes between contemplation that excludes everything, and contemplation that includes everything, especially the body. Since past and future are woven into the flesh, one is at least “protected” from being overwhelmed by “too much reality.” At the same time, it is precisely because of, and within, temporal “enchainments” that the poet can say,

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.

Memory—moving both backward into the past and forward into the present—is now introduced as an agency for retrieving redemptive moments from unliberated temporality. As it becomes a major theme in the poem, remembering (through smells, sounds, sights) both recollects special places and moments of past experiences (now altered and transfigured) and integrates their transfigurations into the present moment. The “moment in the rose-garden,” the “moment in the arbour,” and the “moment in the draughty church,” are retrieved from time past and become a spirit-infused lens through which to engage the present. By restoring these moments of “immediate experience,” in which the enchainments of past and future are broken, if only temporarily, the soul, burdened by temporal limitations, is awakened to new life. After timeless moments are directly, albeit briefly, experienced, then later retrieved from memory, when revivified in time through a disciplined imagination, the poet is liberated from himself. For this reason, the poet, throughout the Quartets, attempts to distance himself from the deleterious distractions of his personal, historic, and artistic life, in order to pass back into life with maximum potency.

Descend Lower (Burnt Norton III)

If the first movement presents a meditation on the poet’s immediate experience in the rose garden, and the associated second movement evokes a temporal illumination by which the inner freedom of the still point is glimpsed, the third movement elicits the spiritual discipline necessary to purify the soul in its journey toward union with the divine. The third and centering movement of each quartet evokes a descending-ascending spiritual practice, oriented toward redeeming moments of time. In Burnt Norton, this core movement has two parts: acknowledging weary routines of the “twittering world” and yet, in response, describing the necessity of practicing traditional ascetic paths.

The first half of the third movement shifts the poem’s atmosphere from the light-filled garden of our “first world” down into the darkness of the London Underground. (Eliot often took the train from Glouster Road Station to work.) Before we can realize it, we descend into the contemptible underworld of Dantesque half-light that is neither the full light of day (“investing form with lucid stillness / Turning shadow into transient beauty / With slow rotation suggesting permanence”), nor the true darkness of the soul’s dark night, nor the true darkness that purifies the soul (“emptying the sensual with deprivation / Cleansing affection from the temporal”). Underworld dwellers, those who have passed from elevation into a twilight world, are dominated by distracted, empty, tumid, unwholesome, faded, and torpid consciousness. In this time-bound world, “time before and time after,” there is neither daylight nor darkness, neither “lucid stillness” nor the darkness of the physical world that lies at the entrance to a mystical darkness purifying the soul. Here, there is neither plentitude of meaning and value nor vacancy of sensual attachments. Here, in these dark moments, there are only “strained time-ridden faces.”

The death-undone faces that flowed over the London Bridge in The Waste Land echo here: frightened, troubled, confused, dull, sweaty, almost dead. These masks for human faces recall the headpieces “filled with straw” in “The Hollow Men,” where “between the motion / And the act / Falls the shadow” and where we confront the horror of eyes that cannot see, ears that cannot hear. The unhealthy atmosphere also recalls the yellow, putrid fog in “Prufrock” that settles in the tedious streets, “the burnt-out ends of smoky days,” the “dull head among windy spaces.” The “chilled delirium” of “Gerontion” and the twisted faces tossed up from the bottom of the street by waves of fog in “Morning at the Window” also make their way into the underground’s “teetering world.” One of Eliot’s most memorable phrases—“Distracted from distraction by distraction”—effectively encapsulates the negative power of this “twittering world,” where there is only “tumid apathy.”

But the third movement of Burnt Norton does not only denounce the lesser darkness of clockwork time. The next stanza opens by juxtaposing a redemptive possibility in the midst of a more radical darkness. A central realization of Ash-Wednesday resurfaces: overcoming the impact of the “Waste Land” on the human soul involves sinking downward more deeply into the darkness. John Senior notes that “since the central meaning of the poem is the idea that the way out is down and through, as if the answer to all questions could be found by pulling the questions inside out like a sock, Eliot [at this point] pulls the poem inside out.” Echoing the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Aquinas, and especially St. John of the Cross, the poet introduces the way of darkness (via negativa) and proposes that the way up and the way down are, mystically, the same.

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,

Inoperancy of the world of spirit

The poet especially echoes here a profoundly mystical, contemplative theologian, Carmelite reformer, and poet, St. John of the Cross (1542–1591), best known for The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night of the Soul, and The Living Flame of Love. According to St. John, toward whom Eliot’s intenser spiritual sensibilities often turned, one’s faith journey must pass through a “dark night of the soul.”

St. John, in his often-studied mystical writings, describes the “dark night” as an episode of emptying the self of desires and passions. Forsaking the time-conditioned, time-restrained ego, choosing to renounce temporal gratifications—it is suggested—opens up possible liberation from this world’s “metalled ways” by reconnecting the soul to its source.

Then, the poet brings forward a compatible path

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.

One of St. John’s major themes involves a radical shift in our ordinary habits of thought by choosing forms of detachment and depravation that lead through purgation to illumination and encountering the divine. For St. John, the negative way of “deprivation” and “internal darkness”—if deliberately chosen—involves becoming reduced to a state of emptiness, poverty, and abandonment, for the sensual part is purified in emptiness and the spirit is purified in darkness.

St. John also emphasized that both the active path of prayer and the passive path of waiting on God remain in creative tension with one another and are mutually necessary:

This first night is the lot of beginners, at the time God commences to introduce them into the state of contemplation; it is a night in which the spirit of man also participates. . . . The second night of purification takes place in those who are already proficient, at the time God desires to lead them into a state of divine union. This purgation, of course, is more obscure, dark and dreadful.

One path necessarily resonates and is implicated by the effects of practicing the other. The poet’s most important phrase in the passage quoted above (“and the other / Is the same”) suggests that each path—the one of movement (practiced by beginners on the spiritual path), and the one of abstention from movement (practiced by more experienced contemplatives)—is sufficient and complementary. Each way can become a means for finding reconciliation with ultimate reality, and each can move the practitioner (metaphorically) both upward and downward.

That his darkness is reoriented toward awareness of God becomes clearer if one juxtaposes the spiritual discipline of each third and centering movement. In the third movement of East Coker, after the poet takes a Miltonic descent into the darkness of death, a meditative voice will resurface: “I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you / Which shall be the darkness of God.” In the third movement of The Dry Salvages, after beginning with Krishna’s teaching that the future is futureless (since we are not the same people in the future), the poet is brought to consider past and future with “equal mind.” And in the third movement of Little Gidding, after meditating on the three conditions of attachment, detachment, and indifference, the poet will speak about becoming “transfigured, in another pattern.” The images in each of these centering passages move from the external world into inner silence, from what we can know to what is unknown, and from descent to purification. By holding each of these third movements together, the poet’s interspiritual path moves from self-disappearance into darkness, from self-transfiguration into actionless action.

Kingfisher’s Wing (Burnt Norton IV)

Burnt Norton began with a “heart of light” vision “at the still point of the turning world,” then descended into a “world of perpetual solitude,” where the spiritual practice offered is characterized by destitution of property, desiccation of senses, evacuation of fancy, inoperancy of spirit, and “abstention from movement.” In the fourth movement of each quartet, the poet’s tone shifts, becomes more liturgical, even devotional. The brief lyrical interlude reflects the basic themes of the first two movements and deepens the spiritual practice related in the third. And while it may be too provocative to suggest that the whole meaning of the quartet is embodied in this movement, the possible implications of that suggestion do not become clear, or really useful, until we have read through the poem more than once.

Since the fourth movement of Burnt Norton is so compressed, it is helpful to read it in its entirety.

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.

This entire passage, it has been suggested, focuses on death and burial. But is that all? While the bell’s clanging marks the disappearance of the sun, it would have reminded him of its monastic context, where the bell also signals a call to prayer, a call to break out of ordinary time. During the Mass (as Eliot knew it), a bell was rung at the moment when the bread and wine were consecrated and became the transubstantial body and blood of the risen Christ. A powerful ambiguity emerges: the bell announces the death of the day (and by implication hastens a necessary kind of dying) and yet is accompanied by images of new life and the hope that a sunflower will soon greet the new dawn. The sense of this interlude is evoked by a single, isolated word—“Chill”—around which sunflower, clematis, and fingers of yew intertwine. The single, monosyllabic sound achieves more than just a linguistic effect. It seizes his spirit. One emerges from the darkness of the preceding section with a double sensation: the cold extinction of death and the delicate warmth of nature’s light. It is helpful here to note that Eliot associated the yew tree, often found in English churchyard burial sites, with both death and new life in resurrection.

In response to the redemptive question—will the sunflower, will the clematis turn to us?—the kingfisher answers “light to light.” As perceived in the rose garden, yet uniquely here, a visionary light breaks through the clouds. From a grave darkness, light beyond light glances off the kingfisher’s wing. The contrast between “has” and “is still” pulls us into a present heading toward a redeemed future. At the same time, the “still point” arises from the reciprocity between poet and kingfisher and radiates the cusp between present and future, where seeming opposites are held in creative tensions. While some commentators emphasize that the kingfisher in folklore represents Christ (the fisher of men, whose light reflects the divine light and defeats the powers of darkness), the poetic stress is not only on the “kingfisher,” or on the “light” reflected off the kingfisher’s wing, but on their relationship. One commentator has suggested that “the light of the kingfisher passage is the light of the illuminative way. The logic of this is simple. If the darkness of the first lines of this passage represents the night of the senses, which lies at the entrance of the illuminative way, the light . . . is part of the total characterization of the illuminative way that also involves the yew.”

At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that these disclosures are occasional and relational rather than progressive and individual. “They occur as sudden and discontinuous eruptions generated by encounter, which are subsequently covered over or subsumed under the poet’s restatement in the old metaphysical language.” At the same time, our understanding of the disclosures can be enriched through comparisons. In devotional stillness, the light “is still / At the still point of the turning world,” shattering the darkness of the soul. The rose garden’s “heart of light” becomes a visible reminder of the Invisible Light of God. In moments like these, at the center of the rose garden and here at the center of the turning world, a “heart of light” still point quickens the contemplative’s soul.

The Coexistence (Burnt Norton V)

The fifth movement of each quartet brings forth the “one-end/one-way” unitive awareness hinted at throughout that quartet. The poet now attempts to reconcile, albeit provisionally, the apprehended wisdoms and spiritual practices already introduced. Poetic and purgative movements have activated a sanctuary for the soul and, in the midst of an intellectual and emotional struggle deep within the self, a unitive presence emerges. Concurrently, it begins to feel as if the conflict between time and the timeless has been reconciled. Still, as it will continue, the poet reflects on the troubling question of how words can evoke redemptive possibility drawn from immediate experience.

Recalling the rhetorical difficulties of his own verbal process, he says:

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence.

The poet’s only hope, since he must work with language, lies in discovering verbal patterns that can glimpse, if only briefly, the deeper insights arising from silence. Throughout the Quartets, poetry arises from this silence and ultimately—contemplatively—evokes and embodies its deeper significances. Using words to “reach / The stillness, as a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in its stillness,” becomes a spiritual practice. A classical spatial form gives the poet a metaphor of indwelling opposites—stillness and movement. This stillness is not just the absence of sound,

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.

The dynamic image of “the co-existence”—like the images of “a further union, a deeper communion” in East Coker V, the “impossible union” in The Dry Salvages V, and “the fire and the rose are one” in Little Gidding V—juxtaposes seemingly differing elements in ways that allow the joined differences to fructify in the poet’s imagination. Here, light and darkness, words and silence, music and stillness, end and beginning are, temporarily at least, engaged. Simultaneously, their differences become included and transmuted in the poet’s unitive recognition.

What Eliot affirms here, although tentatively, is both the impossibility of transcending the limits of language and the drive to do so despite that impossibility. Eliot reflected on this urge to write poetry that transcended itself in an unpublished lecture called “English Letter Writers.” He wrote that he aimed

to write poetry which should be essentially poetry, with nothing poetic about it, poetry standing naked in its bare bones, or poetry so transparent that we should not see the poetry, but that which we are meant to see through the poetry, poetry so transparent that in reading it we are intent on what the poem points at, and not on the poetry, this seems to me the thing to try for. To get beyond poetry, as Beethoven, in his later works, strove to get beyond music.

In fact, this may well serve as a partial “statement of intent” for the Quartets. No longer just poet, the spiritual pilgrim descends into inner stillness, into the quietude of the soul, and returns to articulate the practices of renunciation, purgation, devotion, and faith. While rhythms of stillness and silence perpetually move beneath the verbal patterns of Burnt Norton,

. . . 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.

While continuing to lament the intrinsic limitation of words, in the midst of this apprehension he shifts focus from the mutability of words to “the Word,” an interplay between the incarnate logos of the Greek (Heraclitus) and Christian (St. John) traditions. Recalling closely analogous lines from Ash-Wednesday—“Where will the Word / Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence” (CPP 65)—enriches an understanding of this section. Interior silence, it is implied, the quiet force of contemplative practice, is here called for as an antidote to the absence of the transforming Word. The Word—both the Heraclitian speech-with-meaning rising dialogically from the “genuine we” that is common to all and the incarnation of divine wisdom and compassion in the historical person of Jesus—is attacked in the parched desert by illusions of the individual’s mind. It is significant here to remember that the teachings of Jesus as incarnate Word are formed from the preserved nucleus of authentic conversations that once took place between Jesus and his disciples as well as his enemies. One can infer that Jesus taught and was always willing to enter into unconditional, situation-specific dialogues with others, which are embodied in his parables and his life. For this reason, one realizes the importance of reciprocal relationships for Jesus, as exemplified in his saying, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matthew 18:20). That is, Jesus both recognized and embodied the spirit of the logos.

In the poet’s spiritual quest, restimulated by Burnt Norton’s “first world” rose garden epiphany, Eliot discovers, or comes to the threshold of discovering, that remembering and retrieving in his life “the still point of the turning world” (BN II)—the Word (logos)—will liberate him from the attachments and sufferings of temporal existence. In the process, and here I disagree with William Spanos and others who argue for “absence” rather than “presence” at the still point, the poet recognizes the liberating coexistence of absence (timelessness) in presence (“the end and the beginning were always there”). The poet realizes that escaping the life-diminishing limitations of remaining caught in “the aspect of time” is quickened by retrieving remembered moments (“timeless and undesiring”)—themselves temporal, and therefore in need of “a grace of sense,” of “concentration / Without elimination” (BN II)—and in the process allowing the fractious splinters of one’s thoughts, feelings, dissatisfactions, insights to disappear at the still point.

Ironically, by virtue of the threatening voices of temptation and destruction, self-pity, existential doubt, and mistrust, that populate clockwork time, the spiritual quest is deepened. Following his attestation of the redemptive Word, the poet shifts to dynamically short, discursive lines to exemplify its associated behavioral consequences.

The detail of the pattern is movement,

As in the figure of the ten stairs.

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.

In his continual search for the rhetorical pattern’s detail that matches his intenser feelings, the poet recalls St. John of the Cross’s “figure of the ten stairs,” or ten rungs, of the mystical ladder of love, representing spiritual ascent in our temporal lives. The first five stages toward contemplative realization of divine love are stages of the Dark Night of Faith:

1. Love which causes the soul to languish in desire.

2. Love which actively seeks God.

3. Love which works fervently toward union with God.

4. Love which causes habitual suffering for God, without weariness.

5. Love which desires God.

The second five are those stages on the illuminative way toward becoming united with God:

6. The soul runs to God and touches him again and again.

7. Love which is vehement, without judgment or restraint.

8. The soul grasps and holds fast to God.

9. The soul is burned with sweetness in God.

10. Whole assimilation/clear immediate vision of God/going forth from the flesh/becoming like God.

Involving faith, hope, and union, the secret of the ladder, according to St. John, refers to the spiritual fact that it may be used for both ascending and descending, that descending is ascending and ascending is descending, since, to paraphrase the Beatitudes, one who humbles oneself is exalted. When ascending-and-descending in ecstasy-and-humiliation, the soul is not caught by desire but perfected by love that is “timeless and undesiring.” “The tenth and last step of this secret ladder of love causes the soul to become wholly assimilated to God, by reason of the clear and immediate vision of God which it then possesses; when, having ascended in this life to the ninth step, it goes from the flesh.” Contemplation of God in stillness only seems to leave the contemplative within the limitations of temporal existence “between un-being and being.” God’s unconditional love, however, is beyond time, and Eliot’s vision of perfect love in Burnt Norton assimilates the soul to this love.

Reflecting the ecstasy and terror of contemplative union, the last lines of Burnt Norton reaffirm manifestations of the still point.

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.

From a time-bound “shaft of sunlight,” there rises in memory—briefly and passingly—a poignant recollection of a timeless moment (“Quick now, here, now, always”) marked by children’s laughter. This recalled glimpse of the rose garden event intuits redemptive life, to begin with, by reminding him to become fully present in the succession of nows. “What might have been” (i.e., the mythic garden of Eden) and “what has been” (i.e., the mystical adventure of the soul) “point to one end, which is always present.” In the “first world” of inner stillness, time past and time present in-fold and transmute into Edenic experience and are subsequently recalled through intuitive apprehension and then brought, in a different form, back into life. How ridiculous, in contrast, the sad and spiritless time that is wasted day to day.

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T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

from The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920)

https://youtu.be/bHB77gPhVyg

T. S. Eliot, Tradtition and Individual Talent

 I

IN English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to "the tradition" or to "a tradition"; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is "traditional" or even "too traditional." Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archæological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archæology.

Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are "more critical" than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historica   sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value—a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.

To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible, the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and highly desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind—is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show.

Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.

I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the mætier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I shall, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.

II

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it. In the last article I tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of "personality," not being necessarily more interesting, or having "more to say," but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.

The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.

The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art. It may be formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several; and various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result. Or great poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely. Canto XV of the Inferno (Brunetto Latini) is a working up of the emotion evident in the situation; but the effect, though single as that of any work of art, is obtained by considerable complexity of detail. The last quatrain gives an image, a feeling attaching to an image, which "came," which did not develop simply out of what precedes, but which was probably in suspension in the poet's mind until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to. The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of "sublimity" misses the mark. For it is not the "greatness," the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts. The episode of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression of. It is no more intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which has not the direct dependence upon an emotion. Great variety is possible in the process of transmution of emotion: the murder of Agamemnon, or the agony of Othello, gives an artistic effect apparently closer to a possible original than the scenes from Dante. In the Agamemnon, the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator; in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the difference between art and the event is always absolute; the combination which is the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that which is the voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of elements. The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.

The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.

I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with fresh attention in the light—or darkness—of these observations:

In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it. This balance of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech is pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion.

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that "emotion recollected in tranquillity" is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not "recollected," and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is "tranquil" only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression‎‎‎ of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

III

This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad. There are many people who appreciate the expression‎‎‎ of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression‎‎‎ of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living. 

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Four Quartet - T. S. Eliot

Although the Logos is common to all

We live as if by our own wisdom;

The way up and the way down are the same.

—HERACLITUS

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,

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,

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.

unredeemable: 되돌릴 수 없는, 구제할 수 없는

Thrush: 개지빠귀새 (유혹과 환상을 상징하는 새)

II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle-tree.

The trilling wire in the blood

Sings below inveterate scars

Appeasing long 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 before

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,

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.

bedded: (진흙 등에) 박힌, 파묻힌

appeasing: 달래는, 진정시키는

Inveterate: 뿌리 깊은, 상습적인

Erhebung : 봉기, 반란, 혁명, 고양

resolution : 해결, 해소, 결심

enchainment : 속박, 연결, 사슬에 묶임

arbour : 정자, 퍼골라, 덩굴·나뭇가지가 덮인 쉼터

draughty : 외풍이 있는, 찬바람이 스며드는, 통풍이 지나치게 잘 되는

smokefall : 해 지기 무렵, 안개나 연기처럼 깔리는 어두워짐

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 faces

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.

tumid apathy : 부풀어 오른 무감각, 오만한 권태

unwholesome : 불건전한, 유해한, 부패한

eructation : 트림, 무의미한 분출, 공허한 소음

torpid : 무감각한, 휴면 상태의, 마비된

Hampstead, Highgate: 북런던 고급 주거지 언덕

Clerkenwell: 이스트엔드 근처 노동자 지역

Campden(Kensington), Primrose(Hill): 웨스트엔드 예술가·부유층 동네

Putney, Ludgate: 사우스·시내 상업지

twittering : 재잘거림, 분심을 일으키는 소음

    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,

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.

desiccation : 건조, 바짝 말림, 영적 메마름

Inoperancy : 무효성, 무효 상태, 기능 상실, 비(非)작동 상태

abstention : 절제, 자제, 움직임으로부터의 물러남

appetency : 갈망, 탐욕, 본능적인 욕구

metalled : 포장된, 길들여진, (철로처럼) 정해진 궤도

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.

clematis : 으아리꽃, (기어오르는) 덩굴식물

tendril : 덩굴손, (무언가를 붙잡으려는) 가느다란 줄기

spray : 작은 가지, (꽃이나 잎이 달린) 잔가지

yew : 주목나무, 죽음과 영생의 상징

kingfisher : 물수리(물반새), 찰나의 빛을 낚아채는 전령

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,

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.

precede : 시간적으로 앞서다

disconsolate : 절망적인, 위로할 수 없는, 슬픔에 잠긴

chimera : 키메라, 근거 없는 환상, 가공의 괴물

The detail of the pattern is movement,

As in the figure of the ten stairs.

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.

wainscot: 판벽, 징두리 판벽, 벽판

tattered: 너덜너덜한, 넝마가 된, 다 해진

arras: 아라스, 벽걸이 융단, 태피스트리

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 light

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 dancing

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.

s 

matrimonie: (현대어 matrimony) 결혼, 혼인, 부부 생활

commodious: (옛 뜻) 적절한, 유익한, 형편이 좋은 / (현대어) 널찍한

sacrament: 성례, 성사(종교적 의식)

coniunction: (현대어 conjunction) 결합, 연결, 합

betokeneth: (현대어 betokens) 나타내다, 상징하다, 전조가 되다

concorde: (현대어 concord) 화합, 일치, 조화

rustic: 시골의, 투박한, 소박한, 거친

mirth: (즐거움으로 인한) 웃음, 환희, 즐거움

wainscot: 판벽, 징두리 판벽, 벽판

tattered: 너덜너덜한, 넝마가 된, 다 해진

arras: 아라스, 벽걸이 융단, 태피스트리

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 wars

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.

snowdrops: 설강화 (이른 봄에 피는 작고 하얀 꽃)

hollyhocks: 접시꽃 (여름에 피는 크고 화려한 꽃)

scorpion: 전갈자리 (가을을 상징하는 별자리, 파괴적 힘)

leonids: 사자자리 유성우 (11월에 쏟아지는 별똥별 무리)

vortex: 소용돌이 (휘몰아치는 소용돌이, 소용돌이꼴)

ice-cap: 만년설, 빙하 (지형을 덮고 있는 거대한 얼음층)

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 peered

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,

Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

periphrastic : 완곡한, 에두르는, 장황한

hebetude : 무딘 상태, 제정신이 아님, 우둔함

bramble : 가시덤불, 찔레나무

grimpen : 늪지대, 발을 삼키는 수렁

menace : 위협, 협박, 위험한 존재

enchantment : 마법, 황홀경, 매혹 

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.

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 deepen

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

the Almanach de Gotha : 유럽 귀족 족보, 세속적 신분·계보의 기록

Gazette : 관보(官報), 신문, 세상의 공식적인 정보와 소식

rumble : 우르릉거리는 소리, (무대 장치가 이동하는) 둔탁한 울림

façade : 건물의 정면, 가공된 겉모습, 허식(虛飾)

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 possess

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 care

That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

prevent: 선행(先行)하다, 인도(引導)하다, 예방(豫防)하다

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.

purgatorial : 연옥(煉獄)의, 정화하는, 고통을 통해 죄를 씻어내는 과정

briars : 가시덤불, 들장미 줄기, 치유와 개화(장미)를 위해 통과해야 하는 고난의 찔림

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 deteriorating

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.

l’entre deux guerres : 두 전쟁 사이, 전간기(戰間期)

inarticulate : 입이 떨어지지 않는, 형언할 수 없는

unpropitious : 불길한, 형편이 좋지 않은

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 itself

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.

communion : 교감(交感), 성찬(聖餐), 합일

petrel : 바다제비 (혹은 폭풍제비) 근대 라틴어 **'Petrellus'**에서 유래, Little Peter(작은 베드로)

porpoise : 알락돌고래 (쇠돌고래류), 수직적 유영(신성과 인성의 결합) 항해의 인도자 등의 성격으로 그리스도를 의미

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,

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.