East Coker, Four Quartets(1940,1943) - T S Eliot

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East Coker, Four Quartets(1940,1943) - T S Eliot

https://youtu.be/PwU8Coq9mno

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

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

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

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엘리엇은 동양의 '순환적 통찰'이라는 안경을 쓰고, 서구의 '구원적 열망'이라는 길을 걸어간 시인?

Too me, metaphor is not a mystical escape; it is the only honest response when the truth is too vast to be captured by direct language. When reality is too vast to be addressed directly, one has no choice but to take the detour of metaphor. Again, it seems to me thet Laozi and Jesus used metaphors not to hide the truth, but to preserve its immense scale without confining it to narrow human definitions. The vast, easy path of the Tao is like the warm embrace of a hen, yet humans constantly stray into the narrow, jagged shortcuts of their own making.

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★ Eliot & Frost: Poetry Comparison

1. East Coker (T.S. Eliot)

Spiritual Rebirth through the cycle of "End and Beginning" and the denial of ego.

(Key Lines) "In my end is my beginning... And where you are is where you are not."

2. Ghost House (Robert Frost)

Peaceful Coexistence with the vanished past and the "Uncarved Block" of nature.

(Key Lines) "I dwell in a lonely house I know / That vanished many a summer ago."

3. The Wood-pile (Robert Frost)

Surrender to Decay; accepting that human labor eventually returns to the forest.

(Key Lines) "To leave the slow smokeless burning of decay / At which the sun and wind and rain alight."

4. My November Guest (Robert Frost)

Love for Sorrow; finding spiritual value in the "gray" and "bare" seasons of life.

(Key Lines) "My Sorrow... thinks these dark days of autumn rain / Are beautiful as days can be."

5. Desert Places (Robert Frost)

Existential Solitude; the terrifying vastness of the internal soul compared to the universe.

(Key Lines) I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places."

★ String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131 (1826)

https://youtu.be/RFg4YNIKHD0

"I have the A minor Quartet [Op.132] on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly, or at least more than human gaiety, about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die."

1931 Stephen Spender, The Letters of T.S. Eliot Vol. 5

★ The Boke Named the Governour / Sir Thomas Elyot

"It is diligently to be noted that the associatinge of man and woman in daunsinge... may be signified matrimonie, a dignified and commodious sacrament... Two and two, necessarye coniunction, holding eche other by the hand or the arm, whiche betokeneth concorde."

★ Eliot 노자 & Christianity: Humility Comparison

★ T.S. Eliot to Stephen Spender, 28 March 1933

"I have the A minor Quartet [Op. 132] on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of severe and long-continued suffering; it is the gaiety of a creature who has escaped from the world of suffering and can look back at it from the outside.

I should like to get something of that into verse before I die."

★ Summary of Beethoven’s Late String Quartets

★ The Divine Comedy / Dante

In the middle of the journey of our life

I come to myself in a dark wood

Where the straight [or right] way was lost.

★ Critical Sources for Section IV of "East Coker"

1. Helen Gardner / The Art of T. S. Eliot (1949), Chapter 6: "The Music of Four Quartets."

Gardner argues that the highly structured lyricism of Section IV is a deliberate use of "elaborate artistic control" to mirror spiritual discipline. She posits that by confining the poem within a strict rhyme scheme, Eliot demonstrates that the soul's health can only be found through the "strictness" of purgatorial suffering.

Key Phrases: "Elaborate artistic control", "The strictness of the form mirrors the spiritual discipline."

2. Peter Ackroyd / T. S. Eliot: A Life (1984), Part 2: "The War Years."

Ackroyd highlights the "cold, metallic precision" of the stanzaic form in Section IV. He interprets the rigid rhyme not as "musicality" in a romantic sense, but as a reflection of the sterile, rigorous atmosphere of a hospital or an operating theater, reinforcing the image of Christ as the "Wounded Surgeon."

Key Phrases: "Cold, metallic precision", "Formal tightness as a surgical necessity."

3. F. B. Pinion / A T. S. Eliot Companion (1986), Section: "Four Quartets - East Coker."

Pinion suggests that Eliot chose this traditional form to ground the "Baroque metaphysical paradoxes" of the section. He notes that the formal stanzas echo the liturgical solemnity of a Good Friday service, providing a "stable vessel" for the shocking imagery of a "dying nurse" and a "preventative curse."

Key Phrases: "Stable vessel for Baroque paradoxes", "Solemnity of a Good Friday service."

★ Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, Canto XXVI, line 148

"Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina."

"Then he hid himself in the fire that refines them."

"He threw himself into the fire that refines them." / 《황무지(The Waste Land)》 제5부 '천둥이 한 말'의 결미

★ Preface, Dante's Inferno, Canto I

"Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost."

★ Comments on 'old stones that cannot be deciphered'

"The stones are 'undecipherable' because they belong to a language of presence, not of discourse. They are the silent witnesses to the 'still point' where time and eternity meet." / Northrop Frye, T.S. Eliot: An Introduction (1963)

"The 'old stones' are the symbols of a past that has become part of the impersonal process of nature... They represent a continuity that is beyond the reach of individual memory." / Helen Gardner, The Art of T.S. Eliot (1949)

"In East Coker, the stones are the medium through which the dead and living are knit into a single pattern. Their undecipherability is the mark of their transcendence over human ego." / A. David Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Poet (1979)

★ The poet's paraphrase from St. John

★ Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (NKJV)

1 To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven:

2 A time to be born, And a time to die; A time to plant, And a time to pluck what is planted;

3 A time to kill, And a time to heal; A time to break down, And a time to build up;

4 A time to weep, And a time to laugh; A time to mourn, And a time to dance;

5 A time to cast away stones, And a time to gather stones; A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;

6 A time to gain, And a time to lose; A time to keep, And a time to throw away;

7 A time to tear, And a time to sew; A time to keep silence, And a time to speak;

8 A time to love, And a time to hate; A time of war, And a time of peace.

★ 돌고래(Porpoise)가 왜 그리스도인가? (상징의 층위)

- 혹자의 비평가가 '돌고래(Porpoise)'를 그리스도로 해석하는 이유는 고대 기독교 상징(Ichthys)에서 물고기가 그리스도를 뜻했기 때문이기도 하지만, 무엇보다 돌고래가 '물속(인간의 시간)'과 '물 밖(신의 영원)'을 넘나드는 존재이기 때문임.

- 허지만 다른 시각에서 보면, 그 돌고래는 장자의 물고기 '곤'과 다르지 않지 않을까? 좁은 내륙의 개울(나 중심의 삶)을 벗어나, 끝을 알 수 없는 **무궁(無窮)**의 세계로 나아가는 생명력 그 자체일 수 있으니까..

★ 바다제비(Petrel)가 왜 성 베드로인가?  (상징의 층위)

- 'Petrel(바다제비)'이라는 단어는 라틴어 **'Petrellus'**에서 왔는데, 이는 **'Petrus(베드로)'**의 지시어(작은 베드로)

- 성경에서 베드로는 풍랑이 이는 바다 위를 걷다가 믿음이 흔들려 물에 빠졌던 인물. 바다제비는 수면 위를 스치듯 날아다니는데, 그 모습이 마치 바다 위를 걷는 것처럼 보이고 사람들이 이 새를 보고 "물 위를 걸으려 했던 베드로를 닮았다" 하여 'Petrel'이라 부르게 된 것

★ Comparison of St. John of the Cross and T.S. Eliot 

St. John of the Cross: The Ascent of Mount Carmel

-  "In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything, desire to have pleasure in nothing."

-  "In order to arrive at possessing everything, desire to possess nothing."

-  "In order to arrive at being everything, desire to be nothing."

T.S. Eliot: East Coker (Four Quartets)

-  "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."

-  "And what you own is what you do not own / And where you are is where you are not."

Key Themes

-  Via Negativa (The Negative Way): Finding spiritual truth through negation and stripping away the self.

-  Paradox of Possession: True spiritual wealth comes from material and ego-driven poverty.

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A Selective Chronology of T. S. Eliot’s Life

Ancestry

1670 Andrew Eliot leaves East Coker, Somerset, to settle in Massachusetts
1834 Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot (Eliot’s grandfather) leaves Massachusetts to settle in St. Louis, Missouri

Early Years (1888–1914)

1888 Born September 26, St. Louis, Missouri
1896 Eliot’s father, Henry Ware Eliot, builds summer house in Gloucester, Massachusetts
1897 Composes first poem (four verses) about the sadness of having to start school again every Monday morning;

        Attends Smith Academy, St. Louis, until 1905
1905 Earliest poetry published in Smith Academy Record
1906–1910 Harvard University (studies comparative literature and Western philosophy)
       Early poetry appears in The Harvard Advocate, which Eliot edited
1910–1911 Visits Paris; studies French literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne
        Attends Henri Bergson’s weekly lectures at the Collège de France; visits London, Munich
        “Prufrock” completed
1911–1914 Attends Harvard Graduate School (studies Sanskrit and Indic philosophy)
1914 Travels to Europe; studies at University of Marburg; settles in London; meets Ezra Pound
        World War I begins 

Middle Years (1915–1944)

1915 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” published in Chicago (June)
         Becomes resident of London
         Marries Vivienne Haigh-Wood (June 26)
1916 Teaches at Highgate Junior School for four terms
         Lectures on Modern French and English Literature, extension courses at Oxford and London Universities
         Completes dissertation on F. H. Bradley
1917 Joins the Colonial and Foreign Department of Lloyds Bank
         Prufrock and Other Observations published in London
         Assistant editor of The Egoist (until 1919)
1918 World War I ends
1919 Eliot’s father dies (January)
         “Gerontion” published in London (August)
1920 The Sacred Wood
         Selected Poems published in London
1921 Suffers from nervous breakdown
1922 London correspondent for The Dial
         The Waste Land published in London (October) in The Criterion (edited by Eliot until 1939)
         Eliot wins Dial Award for The Waste Land
1925 Joins Board of Directors of Faber and Gwyer Publishers (later Faber & Faber)
         Poems 1909–1925 published in London and New York
1926 Gives the Clark Lectures at Cambridge
1927 Baptized into Church of England (June 29)
        Becomes a naturalized British citizen (November)
         “Journey of the Magi” published in London (August)
1928 Lancelot Andrewes
1929 Eliot’s mother (Charlotte Champe Eliot) dies
1930 Ash-Wednesday published in London and New York
1931 Thoughts after Lambeth
1932–1933 Visits America for the first time since 1914
         Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard; lectures published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism                 Selected Essays, 1917–1932, including most of The Sacred Wood.
1933 Legal separation from Vivienne
1934 Visits Burnt Norton
         After Strange Gods and The Rock: A Pageant Play
1935 Murder in the Cathedral
1936 Collected Poems 1909–1935
        Burnt Norton published in London (as final poem in Collected Poems)
         Visits the Medieval Church at Little Gidding
1937 Visits East Coker
1939 World War II begins; Vivienne suffers final breakdown
         The Idea of a Christian Society
        The Family Reunion
        Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
1940 East Coker published in London
1941 The Dry Salvages published in London
1942 Little Gidding published in London
1943 Four Quartets published in New York (1944 in London)

Later Years (1945–1965)

1945 World War II ends
1947 Vivienne dies
         Receives honorary degree from Harvard
1948 Awarded Nobel Prize for Literature
         Order of Merit from King George VI
          Notes towards the Definition of Culture
1949 The Cocktail Party
1953 The Confidential Clerk
1957 Marries Valerie Fletcher (January 10)
         On Poetry and Poets
1958 The Elder Statesman
1963 Visits New York with Valerie
         Collected Poems 1909–1962 published in London and New York
1964 Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley
1965 Dies January 4, London
        Ashes interred in St. Michael’s parish church at East Coker
1969 Complete Poems and Plays published in London and New York

https://interestingliterature.com/2017/02/a-short-analysis-of-t-s-eliots-east-coker/

A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘East Coker’

A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘East Coker’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘East Coker’ is the second poem in T. S. Eliot’s four-part sequence, Four Quartets. Eliot wrote ‘East Coker’ during the Second World War, and the poem was published in 1940. It became an immediate bestseller, selling 12,000 copies shortly after publication. (Characteristically, Eliot’s response was to say the poem can’t have been very good if so many people liked it.) The themes and images Eliot uses in ‘East Coker’ have been analysed and interpreted in a variety of ways.

Start with that title: as with the previous poem, ‘Burnt Norton’, the small Somerset village of East Coker is a place that Eliot had visited shortly before writing the poem. It was his ancestral home, where his namesake and distant ancestor Sir Thomas Elyot lived in the sixteenth century. Eliot will quote from Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531) in the first section of ‘East Coker’.

The first section of ‘East Coker’ continues, in effect, the theme of flux which Eliot treated in ‘Burnt Norton’. Houses are built, restored, destroyed, or replaced; time marches on; the landscape changes with the succeeding generations. The earth itself (and earth is the classical element that runs through ‘East Coker’) is composed of the remnants of 

past living things: flesh, fur, faeces, bone.

Anyone who has been to East Coker in Somerset can vouch for the experience of ‘lean[ing] against a bank while a van passes’ (the roads leading into the village are extraordinarily narrow), the ‘electric heat’ and the ‘empty silence’: even now, East Coker is miles from a main road and any busy traffic or built-up area.

Visiting this village where his Tudor ancestor once lived (Sir Thomas Elyot served at the court of King Henry VIII), Eliot imagines the simple lives of the peasants who would have lived in the village at that time. Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour, from which Eliot quotes here (‘In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie’), was published just before the Protestant Reformation occurred and England would undergo a dramatic religious change, with Henry VIII breaking with Rome (i.e. Roman Catholicism) and declaring himself Head of the Church of England. This simple rustic picture of people dancing around a bonfire to celebrate a marriage precedes this turbulent period of English history by just a few years – a contextual fact whose significance would not have been lost on T. S. Eliot the Anglo-Catholic.

In the second section, the order and pattern of the world – the seasons, the country dances, the ceremony of marriage – break apart, and we have a picture of confusion: the seasons are lumped together (late November already shows signs of snow, and not just in the ‘snowdrops’; there are also echoes of spring and summer in this autumnal month), and the cycle of nature has fallen away.

Eliot then critiques his own ‘way of putting’ this, rejecting his poetic style as ‘worn-out’ and self-consciously examining and analysing – as he had begun to at the end of ‘Burnt Norton’ – the role of ‘words’, the poet’s tools, in seeking to capture human experience. We then get a brief horror-show featuring ‘monsters’ and ‘a grimpen’ – a word Eliot lifted from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), which features a fictional place named Grimpen Mire. The only kind of wisdom that means anything, Eliot decides, is ‘the wisdom of humility’ – knowledge derived from experience can only take us so far.

The third section revisits something else Eliot had touched upon in ‘Burnt Norton’: the dark night of the soul, which is again depicted by way of modern experience – specifically, a theatre when the lights go out, the pause between stations on the London Underground when people run out of things to say to each other and silence descends, and the experience of the mind under ether or anaesthetic, when we are conscious, but only ‘of nothing’. This is the kind of darkness – what has been called ‘the way of negation’ – that Eliot believes we should embrace, as a way of reaching God. To possess what we do not possess, we must first learn what it means to experience ‘dispossession’; to learn what we do not know, we must first learn what it is we are ignorant of.

The fourth section is a brief lyric about a ‘wounded surgeon’, representing Christ. Christ is wounded (because of the Crucifixion) but he is also the surgeon, the one who can heal mankind. Our ‘sickness’, Original Sin, must be faced if we are to be healed. We need to undergo our dark night of the soul, our purgative treatment, if we are to be saved.

The fifth and final section of ‘East Coker’ sees Eliot confessing that he has tried, and failed, to wrest words into new meanings during the two decades between the two World Wars (‘l’entre deux guerres’). He feels he has failed; but still one has to try. As one grows older, one moves away from the idea of the single present moment that he had been attempting to capture in ‘Burnt Norton’; one realises there is a whole ‘lifetime burning in every moment’.

When he died in 1965, Eliot’s remains were interred in St Michael’s Church in East Coker. The memorial plaque bears two lines from the poem: ‘In my beginning is my end’ and ‘In my end is my beginning.’ Eliot begins ‘East Coker’ with the first of these, and ends the poem with the second. How are we to analyse this cyclical notion of life? As with the capturing of such circularity in poetry, there is ‘only the trying’. The pictures above are from a visit we here at Interesting Literature made to Eliot’s final resting-place in 2014.

Continue to explore Eliot’s Four Quartets with our summary and analysis of ‘The Dry Salvages’, the third poem in the sequence.

https://interestingliterature.com/2017/02/a-short-analysis-of-t-s-eliots-burnt-norton/

A Summary and Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’

https://interestingliterature.com/2017/02/a-short-analysis-of-t-s-eliots-the-dry-salvages/

A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Dry Salvages’

https://interestingliterature.com/2017/02/a-short-analysis-of-t-s-eliots-little-gidding/

A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’

https://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/eliot/section8/

Eliot's Poetry Four Quartets: “East Coker” Summary & Analysis | SparkNotes

https://www.poetryverse.com/ts-eliot-poems/four-quartets-east-coker/poem-analysis

Four Quartets 2 East Coker - poem by T.S. Eliot | PoetryVerse

A poem that insists beginnings are made of endings

The central claim of East Coker is that real renewal doesn’t come from progress, optimism, or even accumulated wisdom, but from a willing passage through loss: the acceptance that in my beginning is my end and, finally, in my end is my beginning. Eliot keeps returning to ordinary cycles—houses built and demolished, seasons turning, bodies returning to soil—until those cycles stop feeling comforting and start feeling morally demanding. The poem’s spiritual hard edge is this: if you want a truer life, you have to let cherished versions of yourself, your hopes, and your explanations die.

Houses, ash, and the unsentimental earth

The opening section begins with the domestic and historical—Houses rise and fall—but quickly grinds the scene down to matter: Old timber to new fires, then ashes to the earth, and the earth is already flesh, fur and faeces. The bluntness isn’t there to shock; it strips away the fantasy that human life floats above decay. Even the house’s interior dignity is made temporary: the wind breaks the loosened pane, shakes the wainscot, and rattles the tattered arras. Time is not only a builder; it’s a vandal. The tone here is steady and almost impersonal, but that calmness makes the demolition feel inevitable—less like tragedy than like weather.

The bonfire dance: communion that includes dung

In the same open field where buildings vanish, Eliot imagines a village dance around a bonfire: two and two, holding eche other, a marriage rite both dignified and bodily. The scene looks pastoral at first—rustic laughter, country mirth—yet it refuses to stay pretty. The dancers’ feet are earth feet, loam feet, and the joy is explicitly sustained by the dead: those long since under earth who are now nourishing the corn. The circle of fertility is inseparable from the fact of decomposition, and Eliot names the underside without flinching: Eating and drinking. Dung and death. The tension is crucial: the dance is both sacrament and metabolism. Human union is meaningful, but not exempt from the body’s destiny.

Seasons that won’t behave, and the collapse of “wisdom”

Part II jolts the reader out of midsummer ritual into a November that behaves like spring: late November arrives with disturbance, trampling snowdrops and mixing late roses with early snow. This weather-confusion becomes a cosmic one: comets weep, Leonids fly, and the world is pulled toward a destructive fire. But Eliot immediately undercuts the grand, prophetic voice—not very satisfactory—and the poem’s tone turns sharply self-suspicious. The speaker admits the deeper problem isn’t apocalypse but expression‎: the intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings.

This is also where the poem attacks a comforting cultural story: that age brings serenity and experience brings reliable knowledge. Eliot calls out the quiet-voiced elders who might leave only a receipt for deceit. Experience, he says, imposes a pattern, and falsifies, because every moment is a new and shocking / Valuation. The contradiction is painful: we need patterns to live, but patterns can become lies the moment we start trusting them too much. That is why the section ends with vanishing—The houses are all gone under the sea; The dancers are all gone under the hill—as if time doesn’t merely change things, it erases the very evidence that our lives once cohered.

The darkness that is not just nihilism

Part III begins like a chant: O dark dark dark, insisting that everyone—merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, rulers and committee chairmen—goes into the same dark. Even the institutions that pretend to outlast individuals (the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors) are dragged into meaninglessness: cold the sense and lost the motive. The poem’s fear here is not simply death, but the psychic vacuum it opens: the underground train stalled too long between stations, the face behind which mental emptiness deepen[s], the terror of nothing to think about. Eliot makes modern dread concrete and social; it’s experienced among strangers, in public systems, where the self can’t romanticize its suffering.

Yet the poem refuses to let darkness be the last word. The crucial pivot arrives in the command to the soul: be still, and let the dark come as the darkness of God. The discipline is paradoxical: wait without hope, without love, without thought—not because hope and love are worthless, but because they can be the wrong thing, attached to ego, fantasy, or control. Only then can Eliot risk the most startling reversal in the poem: the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. What returns is not a denial of pain but a transformed perception: laughter in the garden is not lost, but it points—almost accusingly—toward the agony / Of death and birth. The tone becomes simultaneously austere and tender, as if consolation is real but never cheap.

A sharpened question: is “waiting” a surrender—or the only honest action?

When Eliot asks the soul to wait and to give up the “wrong” hope and love, the demand can sound like erasure of desire. But the poem keeps implying that ordinary wanting is precisely what traps us in false patterns. If the train-stoppage terror is the panic of an unoccupied mind, then Eliot’s waiting is a kind of chosen stoppage: can a person endure the in-between without manufacturing a story to escape it?

The surgeon and the “Good Friday” logic of cure

Part IV condenses the poem’s spiritual argument into bodily images of treatment: The wounded surgeon plies the steel, and we feel sharp compassion. Healing is not soothing; it is invasive. Eliot then offers the section’s most unsettling inversion: Our only health is the disease. The “nurse” is dying, and her care is not to please but to remind us of a curse that can only be undone by passing through intensification: to be restored, our sickness must grow worse. Even the metaphor of a hospital expands until it covers existence—The whole earth is our hospital—and the care becomes almost claustrophobic: it prevents us everywhere. The contradictions stack up on purpose: If to be warmed, then I must freeze; purgatorial fires whose flame is roses. The final sting is theological and visceral: dripping blood, bloody flesh, and the blunt admission that we still call this Friday good. The poem insists that redemption, if it exists, is not an aesthetic mood but a cost paid in the body.

Words that fail, and the “middle way” that keeps starting over

In Part V the voice turns personal and historically placed: twenty years of the l’entre deux guerres, years largely wasted. The poem’s honesty here is bracing: writing becomes a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment. This is not modesty as performance; it continues the argument that patterns falsify. Even mastery over language can become irrelevant when the self no longer believes what it once could say. So Eliot offers a stripped ethic: For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. The tone is chastened but steady, like someone choosing responsibility over inspiration.

The ending gathers the poem’s scattered places—home, sea, field, darkness—into a final instruction. Home is where one starts from, yet with age the world grows stranger and the pattern more complicated of dead and living. The goal isn’t to chase an intense moment but to recognize a lifetime burning in every moment, even in old stones that can’t be deciphered. The closing lines hold the poem’s governing paradox in motion: We must be still and still moving through dark cold and empty desolation toward deeper communion. The refrain returns reversed—In my end is my beginning—not as a comforting slogan, but as a hard-won spiritual grammar: the only way forward is through what feels like disappearance.

https://www.joeledmundanderson.com/t-s-eliots-four-quartets-east-coker/

T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”: East Coker

https://youtu.be/Xxh0OYuN0vU

https://youtu.be/AJITpS-Ti5c

https://youtu.be/9QMr4nD0MZs

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

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 3. 不尙賢

不尙賢, 使民不爭,

不貴難得之貨, 使民不爲盜,

不見可欲, 使民心不亂,

是以聖人之治,

虛其心, 實其腹, 弱其志, 强其骨,

常使民無知無欲, 使夫智者不敢爲也,

爲無爲, 則無不治.

道德經 王弼本 7. 天長地久

天長地久,

天地所以能長且久者, 以其不自生, 故能長生,

是以聖人後其身而身先, 外其身而身存,

非以其無私邪, 故能成其私.

道德經 王弼本 8. 上善若水

上善若水,

水善利萬物而不爭, 處衆人之所惡,

故幾於道,

居善地, 心善淵, 與善仁, 言善信, 正善治, 事善能, 動善時,

夫唯不爭, 故無尤.

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 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 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 19. 絶聖棄智

絶聖棄智, 民利百倍,

絶仁棄義, 民復孝慈,

絶巧棄利, 盜賊無有,

此三者以爲文不足,

故令有所屬,

見素抱樸, 少私寡欲.

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 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 48. 爲道日損

爲學日益, 爲道日損,

損之又損, 以至於無爲, 無爲而無不爲,

取天下, 常以無事, 及其有事, 不足以取天下.

道德經 王弼本 57. 以正治國

以正治國, 以奇用兵, 以無事取天下,

吾何以知其然哉, 以此,

天下多忌諱, 而民彌貧, 民多利器, 國家滋昏,

人多伎巧, 奇物滋起, 法令滋彰, 盜賊多有,

故聖人云,

我無爲而民自化, 我好靜而民自正,

我無事而民自富, 我無欲而民自樸.

道德經 王弼本 61. 大國者下流

大國者下流, 天下之交, 天下之牝,

牝常以靜勝牡, 以靜爲下,

故大國以下小國, 則取小國,

小國以下大國, 則取大國,

故或下以取, 或下而取,

大國不過欲兼畜人, 小國不過欲入事人, 夫兩者各得其所欲, 大者宜爲下.

道德經 王弼本 66. 能爲百谷王者

江海所以能爲百谷王者, 以其善下之, 故能爲百谷王,

是以欲上民, 必以言下之,

欲先民, 必以身後之,

是以聖人處上而民不重, 處前而民不害,

是以天下樂推而不厭,

以其不爭, 故天下莫能與之爭.

道德經 王弼本 70. 吾言甚易知

吾言甚易知, 甚易行, 天下莫能知, 莫能行,

言有宗, 事有君, 夫唯無知, 是以不我知,

知我者希, 則我者貴, 是以聖人被褐懷玉

道德經 王弼本 71. 知不知上

知不知上, 不知知病, 夫唯病病, 是以不病,
聖人不病, 以其病病, 是以不病.

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.

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

East Coker : ADOPTING THE OLD WORLD - Kenneth Paul Kramer

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

After completing Burnt Norton, Eliot turned his attention to political and social problems related to Christian activism and to the theatre, which increasingly interested him. His 1935 play Murder in the Cathedral became far more successful than he could have hoped, and it provided him with a revived sense of creative accomplishment. Meanwhile, his daily life was taken up with routine duties, church responsibilities, various memberships and social engagements, publishing and editing deadlines, and endless correspondences. He delivered numerous lectures and, along the way, collected several honorary doctorates. Indeed, during the period from 1936 to 1939, he became increasingly visible as a prominent Church of England layperson who, like Ezra Pound and other American exiled writers, had adopted and adapted European culture “before the possibility of a transfigured return [could] be imagined.”

Nine months before Germany invaded Poland, Europeans were beginning to feel the foreboding anxiety that war was immanent, and the Chamberlain-Hitler pact, signed at Munich in September 1938, deepened Eliot’s gathering sense that the demise of Western civilization was near at hand. After war was declared in October 1939, the conditions of Eliot’s life changed dramatically, and he directed himself to the immediate cause of England’s national defense, becoming an air raid warden for the Kensington area. In the meantime, his writing suffered, and he feared he would never again write anything of consequence. Beginning in August of 1938, Vivienne took up residence in a mental hospital, and although her institutionalization continued to depress him, to his friends Eliot seemed somewhat revived, at times even playful. Partially as a result of feeling deeply guilty about Vivienne’s internment, Eliot’s interest in continued meetings with Father Cheetham, his spiritual adviser, diminished.

Despite his social duties and church obligations, Eliot managed to write a second theater piece, The Family Reunion, a tragicomic verse melodrama, which was first performed in 1939. Like Murder in the Cathedral, the play encompasses two worlds, the “normal” world and the “spiritual” world, with its leading character, Harry (Lord Monchensey), struggling for answers to religious as well as mundane problems The Family Reunion opened at the Westminster Theater in March 1939, coinciding not only with the onset of the second world war but also with Eliot’s January 1939 announcement that the Criterion (the literary review he had edited since 1922) would be discontinued. In the last editorial that Eliot wrote for the review, he pointed to the worsening worldwide political situation: “In the present state of public affairs—which had induced in myself a depression of spirits so different from any other experience of fifty years as to be a new emotion—I no longer feel the enthusiasm necessary to make a literary review what it should be.”

Following The Family Reunion, Eliot in East Coker returns to his ancestral home, bringing with him an ever-awakening acceptance, which was reenergized by his 1932–33 sojourn in America, that his writing continued to embody the co-implicating movement of setting forth from eroding traditions (whether European or American, whether theologic or aesthetic) and returning with revitalized meanings. In August 1937, Eliot visited St. Michael’s Church in East Coker, where Eliot’s ashes are interred today and from which his ancestors had migrated to the New World around 1669 in search of religious freedom. The road to East Coker is situated in the midst of a lush countryside in Somerset, west of London and not far from Stonehenge. While visiting East Coker, Eliot photographed the tiny village, where the Eliots (or Elyots, as the family name was once spelled) had lived for several centuries. The village itself is comprised of one main road and several dozen thatch-roofed cottages. On a hill that overlooks the village houses sits St. Michael’s Church, from which the Eliot family records can be traced.

It is important to recall that the same year in which Eliot joined the “English Catholic Church” as he called it (1927), he also adopted British citizenship, which embodied, for him, the principles of the Church of England exemplified in and by the values of his English ancestors, not to mention the finest spirit of European tradition. Nonetheless, Eliot recognized that the highest goal of a civilized, or mature, spirituality, grounded as it was in an ever-developing interplay between the Old and the New World, combined the “profoundest skepticism” with the “deepest faith.” For this reason, in East Coker, recognizing himself “in the middle way” (EC V)—between beginning and end, each present at the beginning—Eliot will discover that the goal of spiritual life is not “arriving” or “achieving” but exploring and still moving “into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion” (EC V). Whether in the Old World or the New, the real heart of the matter becomes what is most required to participate in the sacramentality of all existence—real humility, and “humility is endless” (EC II).

By the time he began writing East Coker, Eliot had searched out a Sketch of the Eliot Family at the British Museum and traced his earliest recorded ancestry to the village that would name his second quartet. Among the Eliots’ ancestral line, T. S. Eliot identified most with Sir Thomas Elyot, the Tudor moralist. Through 1939 and into 1940, feeling increasingly forced in upon himself, Eliot was a middle-aged introvert living mostly by and within himself. It was only in the course of writing the second quartet in this period that, as he told his close friend John Hayward—whom Eliot acknowledged at the beginning of Four Quartets “for improvements of phrase and construction” and with whom Eliot shared a large flat in Chelsea from early 1946 until his marriage to Valerie in January 1957—he began to conceive a suite of four poems organized around the basic Heraclitian elements: air, earth, water, and fire. As Eliot remarked in a 1953 interview,

Burnt Norton might have remained by itself if it hadn’t been for the war, because I had become very much absorbed in the problems of writing for the stage and might have gone straight on from The Family Reunion to another play. The war destroyed that interest for a time: you remember how the conditions of our lives changed, how much we were thrown in on ourselves in the early days? East Coker was the result—and it was only in writing East Coker that I began to see the Quartets as a set of four.

Indeed, Eliot’s phrase “thrown in on ourselves” suggests the quality of interiority heard throughout the poem.

Open Field (East Coker I)

East Coker was published in the New English Weekly on Good Friday 1940, about five years after the publication of Burnt Norton, and it immediately met with a favorable reception. Within a few months it was republished in book form, selling nearly twelve thousand copies within a year. The poem was written as regular evening bombing raids ransacked London and as Eliot suffered from chronic viral infections (that would later lead to serious bronchial problems and emphysema, exacerbated by his smoking). His energy was deflated to such an extent that he confessed to Bonamy Dobrée that “he was abandoning the writing of poems” because “he did not want to repeat himself.” Nevertheless, with memories of his 1937 visit to East Coker in mind, he began, near the end of 1939, to write another meditative poem in which a brooding darkness replaced the “heart of light” of the preceding quartet. If Burnt Norton was a confident, visionary, even mystically illumined poem, East Coker is initially dubious about mystical insight and the ability of poetry to speak meaningfully about experiences of transcendence. East Coker is both more concrete and more personal than Burnt Norton, reflecting the reality of England at war and calling on the ghosts of Eliot’s own seventeenth-century ancestors.

Though the differences, influenced by world events, between the first and second quartets are notable, their similarities underscore his motive for writing them—“trying to explain to himself his intenser human feelings in terms of the divine goal.” In East Coker, Eliot returned to the characteristic pattern he had developed in Burnt Norton, bringing us from the opening meditative landscape of the first movement (the Open Field) to the temporary illumination of the second movement (Wisdom of Humility), from which we enter into the spiritual discipline of the third movement (Be Still) and the purgative lyric of the fourth movement (the Wounded Surgeon), finally arriving at the unitive vision of the fifth movement (Union and Communion). In other words, like Burnt Norton, East Coker proceeds through (1) a landscape meditation, (2) a sudden temporal illumination, (3) spiritual practices, (4) a brief lyric interlude, and (5) a middle way vision embracing the coexistence of wisdom and practice.

Whereas in Burnt Norton the contemplative poet begins by ruminating on the simultaneity of timelessness and the flux of time, here the poet turns his attention to the seemingly purposeless, repetitive cycle of birth and death, creation and destruction. Nothing endures; everything changes. The opening phrase “in my beginning is my end,” repeated several times in East Coker, situates this quartet in both historical and personal contexts. This phrase reverses the famous motto of Mary Queen of Scots on her martyrdom: “en ma fin est mon commencement” (in my end is my beginning). “Beginning” and “end,” with manifold co-implications, interact here and throughout the poem in ways that deepen and enrich the meaning of each term for the poet’s life. For example, “beginning” marks the poetic origins of a new quartet, the familial origins of Eliot’s personal life, the theological origins of the soul, the anthropological origins of humankind imprisoned within fixed cycles of birth and death, and his historical existence in this moment of time. The phrase “my end”—indwelling each “beginning”—refers to both a direction of movement and a goal that is sought after. It also refers to the thread of death (with its many faces, many appropriations), which flows just beneath the poem’s surface, emerging for a time, then disappearing only to resurface later. Thus, already in his beginning “houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended / Are removed, destroyed” as, at the same time, “old stone to new building, old timber to new fires / Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth” (EC I).

As we will see, the pivot of death has several faces for the poet—physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual—that intertwine throughout the suite of poems. Most notably, like fourth-and fifth-century desert fathers,Eliot’s solitary nature embraced an ascetic way of meditating on death in which death becomes a metaphor for the disappearance of self-identity. Noting similarities among Christian ascetics, Indian Yogis, and Zen Buddhist monks, Thomas Merton explains the philosophy and practice of the desert fathers this way: “The only way to find solitude is by hunger and thirst and sorrow and poverty and desire, and the man who has found solitude is empty, as if he had been emptied by death.” Throughout this meditative vision, the poet-as-ascetic returns to the roots of his personal and natural history. Compare to the biblical rhythms from Ecclesiastes 3 (“A time to tear down, and a time to build”) Eliot’s lines “There is a time for building / And a time for living and for generation.” The words imply a divine context for human experience and align the rhetoric of his meditation with biblical rhythms. Stretching between birth and death, the mutability of successive temporal events is captured in the repeated conjunction “and”: the new decays and becomes old and dies in due time and season.

Edward Lobb suggests, I think quite accurately, that Eliot’s appeal to the biblical texts in the midst of an otherwise darkly ironic description is his way of maintaining a “double focus” (human and divine). Lobb writes that

in Eliot’s post-conversion perspective, the limitations of human perception are now accepted as part of the discipline of humility: with the recognition that our own perspective is limited comes the recognition that the two views of human activity in the first verse-paragraph—the ironists’ and Ecclesiastes’—are perhaps not incompatible. Irony and vision can be reconciled.

After reiterating “in my beginning is my end,” the next stanza shifts focus from his opening meditation on an “open field” late one warm, dark afternoon:

. . . 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.

It is easy to imagine yourself—indeed, the poet encourages readers to do just that by addressing us with “you”—standing on one side of a narrow road in the shadows of a fragrant afternoon, along with breathing in a silence that takes no note of itself. The imagery of “the deep lane,” the dark afternoon, the “empty silence,” and “the early owl” all suggest nightfall, conveying a transition from light to the absence of light. As the “empty alley” of Burnt Norton led to the rose garden, here “on a Summer midnight” in an open field, the poet comes upon a marriage dance.

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.

Repeating “you” three times (inviting readers into the common logos), his inclusive imagery in this passage, drawn from his readings and reanimated with a disciplined imagination, envisions the immediacy of a wedding ceremony. In this moment, the “one end” is intimately, even sacramentally, associated with this field, this earth, this music of pipe and drum, this dancing. There is no other time. The archaic spelling of words connects us to an older tradition’s view of values and spiritual community in which an entire village participated in the sacramental celebration that joined two lives together permanently. Eliot drew the language for this passage from the annals of East Coker and from Eliot family history. In The Boke Named the Gouvernour (1531), Sir Thomas Elyot strongly associated marriage with dance: “And for as moche as by the association of a man and a woman in daunsinge may be signified matrimonic, I could in declarynge the dignitie and commoditie of that sacrament make intiere volumes, if it were not so commonly known to all men that almost every frere lymitour carieth it writen in his bosome.”

Eliot was well aware of the many similarities between two ancient traditions, pagan festivals and Christian rituals, through his study of Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which describes a wide range of seasonal folktales and agricultural and marital rituals. In Frazer’s work the European Midsummer’s Eve festivals, celebrated among agricultural communities, are said to commemorate the summer solstice. Eliot, though, was less interested in Frazer’s analysis of these rituals as “homeopathic or imitative magic,” than he was with their sacramentality, that all the European Midsummer’s Eve festivals, celebrated among agricultural communities, are said to commemorate the summer solstice. Eliot, though, was less interested in Frazer’s analysis of these rituals as “homeopathic or imitative magic,” than he was with their sacramentality, that all reality is potentially the bearer of divine grace. The dance, for instance, is an external manifestation of what appears in Burnt Norton as the “dance along the artery”; the dance at the still point becomes a grace-manifesting sign of God’s presence. This sacramental dance will be transfigured later in the poem, influenced by the high Eucharistic doctrine of the Anglican church.

Eliot once remarked to his longtime friend and most valuable critic, John Hayward, “It looks as if daunsinge and not matromonie was the sacrament” here. Although in the Anglo-Catholic tradition marriage is a sacrament and dancing is not, like the pagan ritual of marriage, in which partners who trust each other enter a deeply bonded relationship embodying a past, present, and potential future, and in which each partner affirms and confirm‎s the other, dancing too signifies a mutual presence (logos). In dancing and matrimony alike, the focus is on the reciprocity of relationship—the “necessarye coniunction . . . whiche betokenth concorde”—rather than on the act itself. Whereas in Burnt Norton, lotus and rose coexist, here male and female are joined in a meaning-giving relationship. In both instances, contraries are united (though not unified), but here in East Coker the primary emphasis is on reconciling the tension between the sacramental moment and the entirely personal moment.

To begin to grasp what Eliot intends here, it is important to realize that natural or pan-sacramental consecration is neither a traditional religious ritual nor a heightened or transcendent experience. In noninstitutional traditions, the sacramental life is lived by a person who wholly, naturally gives of herself or himself into the service of the moment. Natural sacramental existence, that is, does not follow an acquired set of rules, inherited techniques, or traditional value systems but is always new, always occurring for the first time. For example, according to Buber, “sacramental presence” emerges from inter-activity between persons or between persons and the world, in which the spirit of genuine reciprocity unfolds. Buber writes that sacramental existence “can be awakened and liberated in each object and in each action—not through any methods that one can somehow acquire but through the fulfilling presentness of the whole, wholly devoted [person]. . . .” What makes sacramental reciprocity genuine—when the relationship between persons and ritual form is openly, honestly chosen by each partner who surrenders completely into it—involves mutual stand-taking and mutual self-giving. The spirit emerging from sacramental reciprocity, indeed generating it in the first place, embodies mutual trust and respect.

Buber indicates that the human task, in moments of sacramental existence, is to awaken a holy power laid in things as sparks, and in the process liberate from its isolating shell “the divine spark” living in everything and everyone. This happens when one’s entire energy turns toward whatever engages one in the moment. Buber writes, “The people we live with or meet with, the animals that help us with our farm work, the soil we till, the materials we shape, the tools we use, they all contain a mysterious spiritual substance which depends on us for helping it towards its pure form, its perfection.” Accordingly, the necessary concord of which the poet speaks comes to fruition as the dancers enter a genuinely reciprocal relationship with each other. They dwell where divine presence dwells. Through the dynamic interchange between the divine presence and authentic reciprocity that exists in genuine relationships, the “mysterious spiritual substance” comes-into-being.

At this point, the poem intensifies into the sensual rhythms of the wedding dance:

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.

Here, Burnt Norton’s “heart of light” can be glimpsed in the fire at the center of the circling dancers. “Keeping time” through primitive rhythms—the dancer’s steps “rising and falling” (“reconciled among the stars” in Burnt Norton)—now becomes incarnate and reconciled on earth. As the dancers circle round, man and woman, stillness and movement, joy and sadness are harmonized. The dance is rustic, tied to the earth; the dance is awkward, tied to the history of the village; the dance is in time, tied to the rhythms of life; the dance is sexual, tied to marital love.

In the midst of new promise, the ever lurking reminder of death in human affairs—an inevitability that breeds both horror and fascination—surfaces. The poet’s eye pulls back to another time of day, to other places.

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.

Subtle yet vital hope concludes this movement: “dawn points,” on the one hand, to a new day and, simultaneously, toward the sea of The Dry Salvages. Though we remain landlocked in this quartet, which takes earth as its element, for a brief moment, we smell a breath from the ever-present sea. And in that brief moment the poet realizes a deep insight, which echoes mantra-like through the rest of the poem: “I am here / Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.” That is, no matter where he is, he is always here, beginning to do what needs to be done in that moment and in the next. The phrase “in my beginning” does not refer just to a point in time, therefore, but to a new way of knowing, knowing with “a beginner’s mind,” a transformative awareness continually radiating in time. Each redeemed moment, therefore, is not a timeless now, but a unique moment full of surprise, replete with challenges—existing nowhere, and yet everywhere.

Wisdom of Humility (East Coker II)

The second movement of East Coker both echoes the immediate experience of the first movement and draws new and deeper insights from it. As in Burnt Norton II, the opening sequence of the second movement of East Coker begins with a series of abruptly short, irregularly rhymed lines. The orderly conduct of the first movement now becomes disorderly, and we are confronted with an unreconciled conflict between the seasons: “What is the late November doing / With the disturbance of the spring . . . ?” And the “late roses” are filled with “early snow.” Apocalyptic images of disharmony whirl around: “Until the Sun and Moon go down” and “comets weep and Leonids fly.” It is as if the traces of Burnt Norton’s serene vision have been eclipsed by “that destructive fire / Which burns before the ice-cap reigns” (EC II).

As powerful as this depiction of global disturbance and natural chaos may seem, the poet begins the next stanza (as he does in the fifth movements of Burnt Norton, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding) by expressing a recurring dissatisfaction with his own poetry:

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.

The outright concern about poetic language, at least about the kind just read, which typically does not surface until the end of each quartet, appears early in East Coker. As he did in Burnt Norton V, the poet now reflects “the intolerable wrestle / With words and meaning,” words that both strive and fail to adequately articulate the power of the singular Word. If “the poetry does not matter”—a proposition that at first seems both surprising and puzzling spoken by a poet—this is because the “one way” is the way of reversal, the way downward and backward, and the poetry is only a vehicle. More important than the poetry itself, behind the words that the poet cannot speak lies the divine mystery, the mysterium tremendum. No matter how ingenious, no matter how descriptive, no matter how breathtaking a statement about God may be, it reveals nothing of God’s relational presence.

Where Burnt Norton is filled with illuminating light, East Coker unfolds in the shadow of darkness: the darkness of the sky over the field; the darkness of the late November; the darkness into which Eliot’s ancestors have peered before him; and the spiritual darkness into which the poet enters especially in the next movement. In spite of Eliot’s latent admiration for the past, now he wonders “what was to be the value of the long looked forward to / Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity / And the wisdom of age?” (EC II). Were Eliot’s Puritan forbearers, the poet asks, wrong to assert that through diligent practice and patience one comes to glean wisdom? “Had they deceived us / Or deceived themselves”? Is their knowledge of now-dead secrets no longer of value? Were they, in fact, afraid to peer into the indefinable darkness that confronts those who seek meaning beyond the deception of mere precept? And was the knowledge they left “only the knowledge of dead secrets”? Questions like these fire the poet’s impetus to arrive at wisdom beyond poetry. We are given both a warning and a realization. The wisdom derived from personal experience is falsified by the pattern that knowledge imposes on it.

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.

Every real encounter with nature, every authentic meeting with unique persons is a new valuation of this moment and of an entire life. To be “shocked” includes a range of feelings (from elevation to terror), but more significantly, here it shakes the poet loose from old habits of mind.

Temporarily, the poet brackets the realization that “the pattern is new in every moment.” In the repeated experience of retrieving remembered timeless moments and allowing that retrieval‎—always taking new forms—to reorient his life, this bracketing quickly dissipates. At this point, however, he reflects on his own situation.

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.

It is easy to associate these lines with The Divine Comedy, in which Dante begins:

In the middle of the journey of our life

I come to myself in a dark wood

Where the straight [or right] way was lost.

Yet, at the same time, Eliot’s phrase “all the way” indicates his willingness to push through darkness, through bramble and grimpen (a bog), where one must risk confrontation with menacing monsters and such fanciful apparitions as the “fancy lights” appearing at the dance in the first movement.

Having recognized again, as he will continue to do, the sense of darkness implicit in the human condition, the poet turns to the central focus of the second movement. In Burnt Norton, the apprehension of wisdom leads to the “completion” of a “partial ecstasy” and the “resolution” of a “partial horror.” Here, however, true wisdom is seen as humility, or, more succinctly, the way to true wisdom is through humility:

. . . 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.

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire

Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

Aware of the ultimate futility of will power and the precepts it generates, and resolved to resist the pull of the past, the poet now recalls only his elders’ folly, fear, frenzy. A main poetic argument becomes clearer. If the law of progress has proved itself illusory, as it certainly had by the outset of World War II, wisdom cannot be reduced to or contained by an accumulation of knowledge. Instead, he is directed toward “the wisdom of humility.” But how does Eliot understand this image, especially since it can take on very different meanings?

At the end of his lectures on The Idea of a Christian Society (given at Cambridge in 1939), Eliot reflected that he was “deeply shaken” by the events that eventually led to war with Germany and argued that the gathering war demanded a personal “humiliation” and “an act of personal contrition, of humility, repentance and amendment.” Eliot spoke in this lecture from a deep sense of social and cultural responsibility wedded to a theological and spiritual commitment to working toward righting a profound human immorality. In Western contemplative traditions, appropriately, the practice of humility is seen as countering all forms of self-love and self-centeredness. As Eliot understood it, the perfection of humility brings the soul toward union with God through a selfless love, empty of the desire for its own way. True humility, therefore, as we will be told in the next movement, means not being concerned about one’s self at all, but choosing to surrender oneself into ever-deepening relationships with the unique particulars of one’s current situation.

Age, the poet now realizes, has brought (both to himself and to humankind) neither serenity nor mature wisdom. True wisdom, as distinct from ego-centered self-affirmation, begins with “endless humility.” False wisdom, on the other hand, like false humility, desires the perfection of the self as a self-reflecting ego, unable to love. While the wisdom of humility does not permanently overcome “fear and frenzy,” it does make real joy possible because it is grounded in grace-infused trust. The realization and practice of endless humility, as Edward Lobb has argued, “is the central drama of the Quartets generally, and of ‘East Coker’ in particular.” While it would be, I believe, difficult, if not impossible, to attribute the “central drama” of Four Quartets as a whole, or even of East Coker, to any single theme or motive, the wisdom of selfless humility does describe as the second movement’s mood.

More ethical than mystical, more a deeply embodied attitude toward life than a principle to be learned, the poet’s illumination that true wisdom is humility has deep roots in Christian monastic tradition. Practicing humility, in this context of human powerlessness, opens a person to the liberating possibilities of grace. In The Rule of St. Benedict, for instance, the three virtues of obedience, silence, and humility are closely linked. Though true humility, Benedict wrote, involves twelve steps, he does not ask monks to count but to climb. To illustrate his point, Benedict, like St. John, used the image of Jacob’s ladder: “The ladder represents our life in the temporal world; the Lord has erected it for those of us possessing humility. We may think of the sides of the ladder as our body and soul, the rungs as the steps of humility and discipline we must climb in our religious vocation.” Fittingly, this image captures the endless wisdom of humility in that it combines not only body and soul but human and divine will as well. In the religious vocation, humbling oneself elevates one’s soul, and the religious vocation of humility, the poet reminds us, is impossible without divine grace.

Be Still (East Coker III)

The third and centering movement of East Coker, like the central movements of Burnt Norton before it and The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding after it, transitions into an interspiritual discipline. And as in the other quartets, the signifying motive of this practice in East Coker is grounded in writings of the mystics. The closing lines of the first movement—“The houses are all gone under the sea. / The dancers are all gone under the hill”—have paved the way for this movement by reintroducing the threatening specter of mortality. Echoing Milton’s Samson Agonistes, the third movement opens by meditating on the ever-present, mutually embodied fact of death (memento mori): “O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, / The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.” “They,” for the poet, are

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.

Not to be forgotten, the poet adds: “And we all go with them, into the silent funeral, / Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury” (EC III). All those just mentioned, plus the poet himself, plus you the reader, are included in the silent funeral’s inevitable presence.

From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Four Quartets, Eliot consistently broods on the sudden disappearance of life into the night of final darkness. By the 1930s, he had become acutely suspicious of fame, especially in the face of death’s inevitability, and he includes himself here among the “eminent men of letters” in this somewhat satirical catalogue of those who will die. At this point, however, we recall that in the third movement of Burnt Norton, darkness is not only the darkness of the temporal world, marked at every moment by the impending darkness of death, but also the yearned-for mystical darkness, the darkness of the mystical night, which is

. . . darkness to purify the soul

Emptying the sensual with deprivation

Cleansing affection from the temporal. (BN III)

Like Saint John before him, the poet, in sending himself into darkness, voids himself from the sensual temptations of time.

Having accepted, first, the limitations of knowledge and, now, the limiting inevitability of death, the poet presents humility as intentional stillness (as he will again in Little Gidding). He begins by addressing his soul directly: “I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you / Which shall be the darkness of God.” The impact of these two lines, crucial to the development of this movement, gains in significance if we juxtapose them with a relevant remark that Eliot once made in a 1937 letter to his friend Paul Elmer More: “I know a little what is the feeling of being alone—I will not say with God, but alone in the presence and under the observation of God—with the feeling of being stripped, as of frippery, of the qualifications that ordinarily most identify one: one’s heredity, one’s abilities, and one’s name.” Ancestry and poetry, which have brought poem and poet to this place, are, in the balancing relation between death and eternal life, rendered irrelevant. According to Ronald Schuchard, “nowhere does Eliot describe more vividly the shadow of the dark angel coming upon him than in East Coker, but there he waits, at last, not in fear but in stillness, faithfully waiting for the darkness to become the light.” This darkness, to which the soul submits, is not vacancy but the “darkness of God,” and the “darkness of God” is not just emptiness but a necessary stage in the soul’s progress toward purification, the stripping away of self-satisfactions.

Eliot’s key image of this necessary stage in the spiritual life, the “darkness of God,” is envisioned through a three-fold simile: (1) it is like the movement of darkness upon darkness, when theater lights are extinguished; (2) it is like the mental emptiness behind faces when the underground train stops longer than usual and people are left with the terror of nothing to speak of or think about; and (3) it is like being etherized when “the mind is conscious of nothing.” The image of the train ride in Burnt Norton that brought us “into a world of perpetual solitude” and “internal darkness” returns in these lines, as does Eliot’s theological debt to St. John of the Cross (that of acquiring, as Eliot once noted, “the highest criteria”). St. John writes in The Ascent of Mount Carmel (I, ii, 1):

We can offer three reasons for calling this journey toward union with God a night. The first has to do with the point of departure, because the individual must deprive himself of his appetite for worldly possessions. This denial and privation is like a night for all the senses.

The second reason refers to the means or the road along which a person travels to this union. Now this road is faith, and for the intellect faith is also like a dark night.

The third reason pertains to the point of arrival, namely God. And God is also a dark night to man in this life. These three nights pass through the soul, or better, the soul passes through them in order to reach divine union with God.

This spiritual path into the darkness of God’s night, in other words, introduces a new element, one that requires a deliberate withdrawal of sense, reason, and will.

The metaphor “the darkness of God” therefore refers, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Snowman,” to the nothing that is there and the nothing that is not. Not only must temporal ambitions and comforts be rejected, but spiritual aspirations themselves must be discarded for the soul to advance along the ladder of faith. This is true not only of St. John’s point of departure up the ladder (privation and denial) but of the entire road of faith. St. John’s spiritual poverty—the poverty of emptiness, of desolation, and of total abandonment—is captured by his hyperbolic expression‎ on his illustration of the path: “nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.” Yet it is unlike the corresponding section in the third movement of Burnt Norton, which spoke of acquiescing to a state of “internal darkness,” deprivation, and

. . . Dessication of the world of sense,

Evacuation of the world of fancy,

Inoperancy of the world of spirit . . .

Here, now, darkness associates with possibilities leading to moments of illumination. To enter fully into this process, to partake of the infinite beauty of the created universe that manifests its creator, one empties of finite attachments.

In the midst of this darkness, the poet’s invocation takes on incantatory rhythms:

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

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

The dialogue between the poet and his soul, which is similar, structurally, to Yeats’s poem “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” is an exchange between two natures of the same person: the embodied, visible personality and the embodied, invisible, animating spirit. Unlike Yeats’s poem, however, in which the soul summons the self “to set all your mind upon the steep ascent,” the poet in East Coker asks the soul to refrain from acting (i.e., thinking, hoping, loving). It is only through stillness, through emptiness, that the soul can listen beyond personal preoccupation and projections and ascend, led by God, toward its source. Fittingly, Eliot’s “dialogue of self and soul” echoes The Ascent of Mount Carmel by including three signs by which the spiritually awakened mind passes from reason to contemplation: (1) when one no longer takes pleasure in the reasoning-imagining process; (2) when one has no desire to fix one’s attention on any particular object; and (3) when one is able to wait without performing any particular meditation. According to St. John, waiting without hope, love, and thought—that is, waiting in darkness—becomes a prerequisite for passing through contemplation toward inward peace and union with God. Beneath the desiring chatter of the mind, the contemplative spirit sinks to the deepest and most silent place of the soul.

The significance of this interior self-address can be understood more clearly if we position it in the context of Martin Heidegger’s distinction in Discourse on Thinking between two kinds of waiting: “waiting for” and “waiting upon.” “Waiting for” involves having a fixed and concrete result of that waiting in mind, a result that is not yet present but which, by human effort, can be made present. In other words, it involves an attempt to control the fulfillment of human desire. “Waiting upon,” by contrast, involves allowing insight to emerge from the field of awareness without a prior desired result. Heidegger characterized this waiting as “releasement,” an “openness” toward mystery that leads to a new grounding in that which is most meaningful. Heidegger’s distinction, applied to the Quartets, suggests the impassable difference between goal-oriented cognitive thinking and the open-minded meditative thinking that Eliot explores throughout the poem.

In this sense, waiting without thought does not mean waiting mindlessly or clearing the mind of impure thoughts by concentrating on some external object. It means, rather, a radical quieting of thoughts, even the thought of waiting without thought. If one already has an idea about the purpose and quality of waiting, or if one already has thoughts about its benefits, the source of that waiting, the divine presence, will remain eclipsed. Hope (not hope in an external reality), love (not the love of someone else), and faith (not the faith in or the faith that) are perfected as they dwell within the positive spiritual act of waiting. Throughout Eliot’s later poetry, and particularly here in East Coker, meditative thinking gives form to an unmitigated surrender of self-control that remains attentive to life without imposing anything upon it. Rather than waiting for a specific end, the poet waits upon an as-of-yet undisclosed possibility and is willing to dwell in not knowing.

After the assurance that “the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing,” the poet recalls past moments of vital reciprocity—moments in time, but not of time.

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.

As in Burnt Norton V and in the fifth movements of The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding as well, a recollected moment of immediate interrelational experience is retrieved by a disciplined imagination along with engaged humility. The significance of these timeless moments of elemental togetherness, both here and throughout Four Quartets, requires not an intuition or private insight or theological doctrine but retrieving and integrating its life-giving insights into the incessant struggle between “death and birth.” What sense this coupling of death and birth makes becomes one of the most important questions addressing the reader.

We find a clue to this question in Eliot’s 1927 poem “Journey of the Magi,” published a month after his baptism. In it, the hardship of the soul’s faith journey is symbolized, in its opening, by wise men making their way to find the infant Jesus: “ ‘A cold coming we had of it, / Just the worst time of the year” (CPP 68). The next stanza, rehearsing a variety of distractions encountered along the way (sore-footed camels, cursing and grumbling men, a lack of shelter, dirty accommodations, and high prices), demonstrates the challenges to the Magi’s faith. Despite temptations to abandon their journey, they continue and arrive “at evening, not a moment too soon / Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.” Wrestling with the conflict between self-will and willed selflessness, the central dilemma for the Magi is the necessity of the soul’s dying and being reborn in the presence of God:

There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. (CPP 69)

The “hard and bitter agony” of “our death” and this “Birth” are joined in one necessary movement: Christian ecstasy (moments of drawing near to the divine presence) and agony (moments of spiritual dryness fueled by the eclipse of God) are inseparable. They both challenge and clarify one another. Most importantly, here and in the Quartets, practicing endless humility involves the voiding of self—the courage to become empty of habitual impulses that perpetuate self-serving attitudes.

In keeping with the spirit of this earlier poem, as we approach the end of East Coker, Eliot borrows from and alters the via negativa of St. John even more directly than he has already:

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.

Some critics have suggested that in this passage the poet builds a construct to convince readers of the nobility and difficulty of his own craft. While the poet clearly attempts to engage readers with his descriptive elaboration of spiritual practice (using the inclusive pronoun “you” seventeen times), Eliot’s words both express and exemplify the poet’s method of repetition, of echoing passages from his own or others’ writings. What repetition grants, at the intersection of time and memory—besides reanimation of an event—is, for the poet, the ability of one text to transfigure and be transfigured by another. “In subjecting his recollections to repetitions, Eliot frees himself to feel and express their new possibilities, to inhabit and orchestrate the coexistence of nostalgia, despair, faith, and skepticism in the unfolding remembrance that is his present.” Almost verbatim, in this passage, the poet paraphrases from St. John and points not to his particular poetic path but to the path of contemplative union. St. John writes:

In order to arrive at that wherein thou hast no pleasure,

Thou must go by a way wherein thou hast no pleasure.

In order to arrive at which thou knowest not,

Thou must go by a way that thou knowest not.

In order to arrive at that which thou possesses not.

Thou must go by a way that thou possesses not.

In order to arrive at that which thou are not,

Thou must go through that which thou art not.

In both Eliot’s passage and St. John’s, anything that can be imagined (by the inner or outer senses or thought about, or ritually recited) has nothing to do with the reality of God. Rather, as Paul Murray indicates, Eliot’s “central and almost exclusive concern, at this stage of the poem, is with the purification and negation of the interior life of the spirit.”

In St. John’s unrelenting insistence on a total self-emptying, Eliot recognized what he had earlier recognized in the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, who wrote:

Since there is no dharma whatever originating independently, No dharma whatever exists which is not empty.

He who is without possessiveness and no ego—He, also, does not exist. . . .

When I and mine have stopped, then also there is not outer nor an inner self.

The road to attain wisdom, both Nagarjuna and St. John assert, must go through the way of negation. The annihilation of self was, for St. John, the foundational illumination: “this negation must be similar to a complete temporal, natural and spiritual death, that is, in reference to esteem of the will which is the source of all denial.” As much as it depends upon courageous intention and a willing self-surrender into not-knowing, spiritual death—dying before dying—finally involves the liberating gift of grace that reactivates the divine-human relationship. It is necessary, therefore, to recognize that the only thing we own is precisely that which we are most unwilling to surrender: the illusion of self. Clearly, Eliot’s paraphrase of St. John was not the celebration of a craft, but recognizing practical implications of his faith, the expression‎ of which, of course, is encumbered by an imperfect craft.

The Wounded Surgeon (East Coker IV)

After the landscape-inspired meditation of the first two movements of East Coker and the via negativa renunciation of the third movement, the fourth movement casts Christ’s (and humankind’s) suffering in a seventeenth-century verse form laced with metaphysical wit. Integrally connected to the interior quietude of the third movement, the fourth movement expresses a selfless appropriation of being still before the Eucharistic mystery. Eliot once remarked that the fourth movement of East Coker, a lyric revolving around the Christian themes of Good Friday, represents “the heart of the matter.” Elsewhere, however, Eliot wrote that “the poem as a whole—this five part form—is an attempt to weave several quite unrelated strands together in an emotional whole, so that really there isn’t any heart of the matter” at all. The phrase “emotional whole” clarifies the apparent contradiction between these two statements: for Eliot, the sacramental “heart of the matter,” hinted at throughout each quartet, gains expressive efficacy by virtue of unexpected rhetorical and surprising associations.

The real “heart of the matter,” it can be persuasively argued, especially in light of the first movement’s marital dance, is grounded in Eliot’s understanding and expression‎ of sacramental existence, especially the interplay between its less traditional, primitive associations in the first movement and its more traditional, Anglo-Catholic associations here. From the pan-sacramental ritual of sacred marriage, in which the consecrated partners consummate a covenant with the Absolute, the poet discerns that sacramental consecration is not merely a celebratory experience but, even more, a participatory relationship in which partners are seized at their innermost core by the spontaneous spirit of reciprocity. Everything, in this view, all nature, all activity, is replete with sacramental substance ever ready to flash up with life-claiming power. And from the Anglo-Catholic ecclesiastical practice of sacramental consciousness, he discerns that the ritual of Eucharist does not cause grace automatically but involves a free gift of God joined by the participant’s faith and devotion—a relationship that, in turn, disposes the recipient to grace. Like the poet’s remembrance of timeless moments of vital reciprocity, Eucharist is a ritual act of remembrance (anamnesis), remembering the person of Christ in a way that makes Christ effectively present again. The “real presence” of Christ, therefore, does not rely upon the belief of individual participants but upon the redemptive power of mutual dependence between a believer’s affirming faith and God’s liberating presence.

These somewhat different views of holy contact, rather than illegitimizing or neutralizing each other, enlarge the sacramental province on the one hand and provide a historically repeated ritual form on the other. Further, each practice (pan-sacramentalism and Eucharist) in its own way centers on the necessary partnership between the Absolute and the human, between the spirit embodied in the consecrated forms and the spirit embodied in those who surrender into sacramental action. Analogously, as early as 1913, in Josiah Royce’s advanced seminar in comparative methodologies, Eliot used the phrase “intuitive sympathy” to depict the meaning of primitive ritual behavior. And in 1928, just a year after his conversion, Eliot suggested that, unlike a person attending a drama, the devout person attending a Mass “is participating—and that makes all the difference.” “Intuitive sympathy,” which is not individually controlled thought but the ability to assume both sides of the relationship, is similar to what Eliot means by “participating,” the two-sided action of choosing and being chosen, of acting and surrendering. By participating, Eliot did not mean intensifying his own identity or defining the ritual itself more clearly. Rather, a sacrament draws participants into a deeper reciprocity with the sacred.

Imitating the poetry of Donne and Crashaw, the intellectual and emotional structure of this movement is expressed through five stanzas of five lines each, which begin by linking Christ’s redemptive task with that of a surgeon:

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.

The supreme archetype of the Lenten season is, as Grover Smith writes, the downward way—the death and burial of Christ—and the poem, inter-religiously woven until now, here becomes Christocentric. In a major inspiration for these lines, John Donne’s “Good Friday, 1613,” the poet travels with his back facing eastward (toward the scene of Christ’s crucifixion), haunted by the realization that Christ’s death atones for sin, which “eternally benighted all.” As both victim and savior, Christ, the wounded healer, here resolves the disease of the world through compassionate suffering. For Eliot, the soul’s descent into darkness, like Christ’s descent into the dark night of the tomb, unites the way up and the way down.

The “dying nurse” of the second stanza, “Whose constant care is not to please / But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,” is a figure of the church. Here too, contrary images abound: “Our only health is disease,” and to be restored from “Adam’s curse,” one must first accept the complete consequences of our original, or originating condition. “The whole earth is our hospital,” the next stanza continues, “endowed by the ruined millionaire” [Adam]. Glaringly poignant paradoxes arise, the most difficult of which is: “to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.” By dying to the disobedience that “prevents us everywhere” and by waking to Christ’s redeeming message, one receives life-transforming grace. In the next stanza, in a pattern that will remain consistent through each of the quartets’ fourth movements, a contradiction leads to a paradox. “The chill [of death] ascends from feet to knees,” for to be warmed “I must freeze” and “quake in frigid purgatorial fires / Of which the flame is roses [eternal life], and the smoke is briars [the wounded savior’s crown of thorns].” These lines point ahead to the fourth movement of Little Gidding, in which Eliot will write: “The only hope, or else despair” is to be “redeemed from fire by fire” (i.e., redeemed from the fire of damnation through the fire of divine love and purgatorial grace).

The final stanza of this movement culminates at the Eucharistic altar:

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.

The celebration of the Eucharist, as Eliot knew it, was the central and most important sacrament of the church, bearing the full mystery of Jesus—his life, teaching, suffering, death, and resurrection. However, like Søren Kierkegaard before him—who emphasized Christianity’s need to express its redemptive teachings in new, unusual, unexpected ways—Eliot expresses the “heart of the matter” in deliberately stark language. Spiritually poignant in its Eucharistic and sacrificial context, the “dripping blood” and the “bloody flesh” become our only sustenance through empathetic experience. That is, the Eucharist fulfills its sacrificial significance by inviting celebrants to participate by bringing their own self-sacrifice to the real presence of Jesus. In sacramental time, the past (the life/death/resurrection of Jesus) and the future (the redemption of the church community) are immediately present to the believer who is able to become empty of self. That is, the poet keeps us grounded in the metaphysical landscape by emphasizing the devotional practice of the believer’s sacrifice.

Both the formal and the symbolic structure of this lyric, written for Good Friday, at times seem strained, awkward, and primitivistic; however, this effect only serves to accentuate the spiritual values addressed. Through the atoning unity of suffering and action, the goodness of this Friday culminates in the death of Jesus, from which new life springs. Another coincidentia oppositorum flourishes. In the sacrament of Eucharist, God incarnates Jesus; Jesus becomes bread; death and resurrection become both the partaker and the partaken. Most important, spiritual comfort is offered to the ordinary believer for whom the mystical heights of Saint John, though desirable, remain an unattainable goal because they are, for most, impracticable. For the believer, at least, the Eucharist embodies the incarnate logos—the redemptive wisdom common to all—to whom the poet turns for spiritual sustenance and direction.

Union and Communion (East Coker V)

As in the fifth movement of Burnt Norton, the fifth movement of East Coker gathers the various motifs of the quartet together and reconciles the tensions generated between them—between beginning and end, death and birth, darkness and light—in metaphors of middle-way immediacy. At the same time, the multiple inner connections between “beginning” and “ending” deepens his discovery that the spiritual goal is not to be achieved by “arriving” but by ever-renewed striving. The final movement of East Coker begins by recalling the poet’s earlier paraphrase of Dante’s middle way:

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.

This opening reference to the “middle way” achieves multiple effects. It is both candid and intimate; as if, in a relaxed and conversational style, the poet is taking the reader into his confidence. At the same time, his words are only tentatively conclusive; they reiterate the fifth movement’s characteristic unitive reconciliation, underscoring the darkness of the poem with the depression felt as the poet recalls his largely wasted years.

When Eliot speaks of himself as “entre deux guerres” (between two wars), many interpreters have suggested that he was referring to the period between World War I and World War II. Yet the “middle way,” for Eliot, included multiple voices and interpretive perspectives. Initially, the poet refers to the period between the wars and to his own biographical age. (Eliot was fifty-two at the time of writing these words.) On one level then, the “middle way” refers to his struggle with language, for he had spent twenty years trying to overcome the “intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings.” However, especially in light of Eliot’s use of the battlefield story from the Bhagavad Gita that will appear in the third movement of the next quartet, a further possibility is worth considering. In the metaphysical structure of the Bhagavad Gita, the great war in which Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna as God incarnate takes place on two battlefields simultaneously: kuru-keshetra, the field of the Kuru (the literal place of the battle) and dharma-keshetra, the field of dharma (the spiritual battleground). The two wars here, then, could refer simultaneously to the outer war (World War II) and to the always-raging inner battle between acting and acting-without-acting (the Gita’s main teaching).

Looking back over the years between the wars, Eliot recognized a twofold pattern in his poetry: the finding that every moment is a fresh beginning and the realization that each new attempt is “a raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment.” In Burnt Norton the poet struggled with the question of how to arrange words in time-bound patterns that could capture experiences of eternal dimensions. Single isolated moments of speech and action, with no real before or after, were reified and severed from experience after the fact. In East Coker, the question of how to get the better of words (as well of the difficulties along one’s spiritual path) is intensified by his awareness that as soon as he speaks, his words are altered in and by time’s passing. Therefore,

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.

The recognition that words embody only what has already been discovered in thought reminds him of a somewhat frustrating inevitability in his spiritual life—that his goal has shifted from achieving a transformation of consciousness to retrieving revealing reciprocities from events in which he had participated.

In this struggle—ours as well as his—he comes to a place where he must let go and give up his attachments to producing aesthetically or morally pleasing words. Back and forth, again and again—now striving to remember encounters with the logos, now disclosing an endless humility—the poet realizes, then forgets, then rediscovers that his goal is called forth only in the trying. These evolving and necessarily repeated realizations of the goal-less goal only accentuate his attention to the significance of sacramental existence as a practice (certainly not the only one) that elevates, even redeems the “trying” by introducing grace into the heart of its movement. A leading undercurrent of this fifth movement, therefore, hinted at in Burnt Norton and anticipating a central theme of The Dry Salvages, is personal detachment, which “may be thought of as the practical side of ‘the wisdom of humility.’ ”

The question of where to begin saying what the poet is struggling to express is resolved here in a return to the opening of East Coker: “Home is where one starts from.” Yet growing older brings with it not only increased complications in the relationship between living and dying but, as well, the growing realization that

Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

These relationships burn in every moment of awakened attention and not just those relationships occurring in this life only. The poet becomes more aware, growing older, of a community of persons to whom he is significantly related that stretches across the limitations of death and birth. With this realization comes another, more profound, recognition to which he will return in the next two quartets. Human love is most truly human—that is, completely for others—when it is not dependent on how he may feel either in this moment or at this place. For love to be genuine, these attachments to “here and now” must fall away.

Reminding us of images of that sea whose influence moved inland in the first movement, the meditation culminates in a brief passage that offers a somewhat encouraging, though difficult to practice, suggestion: the ever-present threat of becoming trapped in time’s kingdom—which is annihilated “Not with a bang but a whimper”—elicits the need to be “still and still moving.”

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.

At the close of East Coker the poet urges those who would be explorers to enter into “a deeper communion”—a divine contemplation—whose goal (“a further union”) and method (“being still and still moving”) are essentially the same. In this “deeper communion,” time becomes redeemable as the temporal becomes immersed with the sacred.

The closing words, “In my end is my beginning,” reverse the beginning of this quartet: “In my beginning is my end.” Provocatively, William Spanos suggests that “the end, in all its senses—the ‘termination’ of the process of writing ‘East Coker,’ old age (of the poet, of the literary tradition, of Western civilization), and spiritual goal—does not bring the com-pletion, the ful-fillment, the satisfaction expected by ‘old men,’ but rather the imperative to explore in the midst, in the realm of difference.” Recognizing the implications arising from the awareness that each new beginning of the spiritual journey already, at least in some sense, embodies its “end” (or goal) is itself a spiritual practice. At the same time, recognizing that the “end” of one’s journey is already embodied, in part at least, in the beginning returns the poet’s focus to here and now, not as a goal to be achieved but as a “condition of complete simplicity” through which one becomes new. While this reversal, or nonlinear coupling of two phrases, reinforces a central paradox of the poem—the need to “be still and still moving,” to travel in search of and to wait in contemplation—this closing passage points ahead to the “vast waters / Of the petrel [Peter] and the porpoise [Christ]” of The Dry Salvages.

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

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

T. S. Eliot, Tradition and Individaual 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

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

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.