Table of contents |
2 Burnt Norton (1935) 3 East Coker (1940) 4 The Dry Salvages (1941) 5 Little Gidding (1942) 6 See also |
Four Quartets is the name given to four related poems by T. S. Eliot, collected and republished in book form in 1943. They had been published individually from 1935 to 1942. Their titles are Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding.
Eliot considered Four Quartets to be his masterpiece, as it draws upon his vast knowledge of mysticism and philosophy. Each of its four poems runs to several hundred lines total and is broken into five stanzas. Although they resist easy characterization, they have many things in common: Each begins with a rumination of the geographical location of its title, and each meditates on the nature of time in some important respect--theological, historical, physical, and on its relation to the human condition. A reflective early reading suggests an inexact systematicity among them; they approach the same ideas in varying but overlapping ways, although they do not necessarily exhaust their questions.
Christian imagery and symbolism in the poems is abundant: T. S. Eliot had converted to Anglicanism in 1927 and was in fact a devout Christian. There are also numerous references to Buddhist symbols and traditions.
Part IV of Little Gidding was set to music by Igor Stravinsky in Anthem: The Dove Descending Breaks the Air (1962).
The first verses are the best summary of the poem:
Then he meditates on the meaning of eternity, using a figure of which Eliot is very fond, "the still point of the turning world" (the center of a turning wheel is not turning) is really the source of movement:
The third stanza is a first clear statement on what the poet sees as the way to redeem time and to give a value to our actions in time: to free oneself from worldly attachments,
A quotation from Burnt Norton appears around the water feature The River in Birmingham's Victoria Square - see [1]
The poem starts again with a reflection on the power of time to change things (reflected in the changes happened to the place), the inability of humans to prevent it and hence, the little use of getting anxious, with a clear parallel of Ecclesiastes 3:1-9:
Introduction
Burnt Norton (1935)
As all the quartets, Burnt Norton is a deep mediation on the meaning of time and its relationship with human beings and the Christian meaning of Redemption.
With plastic images as "the passage which we did not take", "the door we never opened", a "rose garden" full of children who weren't there, the poet sees himself before those things which "might have been" but never were and perceives him as a powerless witness of unreal things.
But human beings, still submerged in time and movement, are not able to perceive it, because
and consciousness is required to catch the glimpses of eternity.
This is a repetitive idea in Eliot's later (after The Waste Land) poems (and will appear several times in the Four Quartets), and reflects his devotion for the Church's teaching concerning poverty and detachment, together with the parallel doctrines of Nirvana in Buddhism.East Coker (1940)
The starting sentence
which can be understood as a poetical expression of his desire that his ashes be kept there, is also a derivation of Mary Queen of Scots' motto (In my end is my beginning, En ma fin est mon commencement).
Which is remembered again at the end of the first stanza
The second and third stanzas are a sad and melancholic evocation of those who were before as, which brings to mind our own weakness and nothingness; there is nothing left from them as there will be nothing left from us. There is only one escape, for the poet, and that is humility:
But then, what hope is there? That of hoping against all hope (from Romans 4:18) and hence going through the dark night of the soul; here Eliot quotes almost literally St. John of the Cross' Subida del Monte Carmelo:
- To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not
- You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy [...]
- [...] the quote goes on for some ten verses [...]
- And where you are is where you are not.
After the night of the soul, or maybe because of the detachment the soul has achieved, there comes Christ (disguised as a surgeon who has to produce pain in order to cure) to heal us, in one of the few rhimed parts of the whole work.
- 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 [...]
- Love is most nearly itself
- When here and now cease to matter.
- [...]
- We must be still and still moving
- Into another intensity
- [...]
- [...]. In my end is my beginning
The Dry Salvages (1941)
Before placing himself at the title's place, Eliot starts describing his feelings towards the river as opposed to the sea. Being born in St. Louis, he had a profound child experience concerning rivers (the Mississippi). He sees the river as a
- [...] strong brown god --sullen, untamed and intractable,
- Patient to some degree[...]
- 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 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
- It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
- the shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
- And the gear of foreign dead men.
The second part starts with six nested stanzas of six verses (which rhyme between stanzas, not in them) presenting life at the sea (seamen and their wives specially) as an image of ordinary life and its sufferings. Human beings cannot control time nor fully understand it, as fishermen cannot control the sea:
- 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.
- There is no end of it [...] (the suffering, wreckages...)
- [...]
- [...]. Only the hardly, barely prayable
- Prayer of the one Annunciation.
Then comes (third stanza) another reflection on the future, and a long meditation on human behaviour and attitude towards live, comparing it to a voyage. Here, Eliot makes use of his knowledge of Buddhist myths, specifically, Krishna's words. There is in life, as in any voyage, no point of wishing well, but simply of going on:
- Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging
- [...] Not fare well,
- But fare forward, voyagers.
The poem ends (fifth stanza) with a description of men's efforts to understand history and divine the future (personal and human) by magic, horoscopes, etc... and stating that
- [...]; all these are usual
- Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press
- [...]. But to aprehend
- The point of intersection of the timeless
- With time, is an occupation for the saint--
Little Gidding (1942)
A long and intense description of Midwinter spring starts the last quartet, the scenery being Little Gidding. Then, the poet warns the visitor of the place that its meaning is beyond any comprehension, and that even if there was any hint of "purpose" in the visit, it has been overcome by a superior one. Whatever the reason, the meaning of the place (the religious community that was there, the return of Charles I...) is over it:
There are two parts in the second stanza. The first one is a set of three stanzas with a very rythm which is in contrat with their content (vanity of human efforts and power of death over everything). They start with the famous
Then a long passage, in nested endecasyllable tercets, mirroring Dante's relates in the Divine Comedy, one of the works which most influenced Eliot's literary education (he usually carried a copy of it, and read it in the Tuscan original). This twenty-five tercets resemble Dante's accounts of his meetings with people in Hell, Purgatory and Paradise: description of the situation, meeting with the person in question (What! are 'you' here?), words of the writer to the other, answer of this one (usually somewhat cryptically) and parting of both.
The conversation deals with the usual topics of eternity and the little objective importance of human acts, and the gifts reserved for age: the expiring sense, the lack of true feelings, the rending pain of re-enactment // Of all that you have done, and been, the discovery of the real motives of one's actions... The parting goes as follows:
- The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
- He left me, with a kind of valediction,
- And faded on the blowing of the horn.
- [...] all shall be well and
- All manner of thing shall be well
- By the purification of the motive
- In the ground of our beseeching.
Fourth part is a patent homage to the Holy Spirit (The dove descending breaks the air), and an exaltation of his omnipotence and power to redeem. He is also the Love which is the opposite of the fire of passions (or even of Hell) and between which two lie our decissions:
- We only live, only suspire
- Consumed by either fire or fire.
- What we call the beginning is often the end
- And to make and end is to make a beginning.
- [...] All shall be well and
- All manner of thing shall be well
- When the tongues of flames are in-folded
- Into the crowned knot of fire
- And the fire and the rose are one.
See also
- Encyclopedia Britannica's guide to the Nobel Prizes
- T. S. Eliot
- The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrok
- The Waste Land