Four
Quartets is a book of poetry by T. S. Eliot which was published in 1943. The
four quartets are named after places: “Burnt Norton” (the original Norton
manor, located in Gloucestershire, burned down in 1741), “East Coker” (a
village in South Somerset, England), “The Dry Salvages” (“...a small group of
rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. Coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Salvages
is pronounced to rhyme with assuages,” as we are told in the
introductory note to this section on page 20), and “Little Gidding” (a small
village in Cambridgeshire, England with a Christian worship legacy). Each
quartet has five parts (movements), beginning with a roman numeral. There is
quite a bit of variation in form for these sections, shifting between rhyming
and not-rhyming sections. There are long stanzas and short stanzas, long lines
and short lines, alliteration, repetition, indentations (though few) and
enjambments. Each line begins with a capital letter, and sentences are not
always used. The language is fairly straightforward, though in the first
movement of “East Coker,” there is a line that begins with “Whiche betokeneth.”
Where Gary
Snyder's work exemplifies everything I've learned in writing classes about
poetry and fiction in general, Eliot deviates. Where Snyder uses gritty and
precise language to paint a specific picture of an image, Eliot delves into the
prophetic. Don't get me wrong, there are certainly moments of intense imagery,
at times seemingly out of nowhere. The second part of “Burnt Norton” begins as
such: “Garlic and sapphires in the mud / Clot the bedded axle-tree (4).” While
this imagery does surprise and sounds incredible (it works), it is
abstract and difficult to associate with an absolute and relate-able meaning.
The text ambitiously spans topics from metaphysics and existentialism to the
passing of time and the very concept of poetry. These vast topics are tackled
matter-of-factly, with surprisingly-worded observations.
I have heard
warnings for beginning poets to avoid using the boring and clichéd words which
are generally associated with love. You might say I've even been wary to
attempt writing about topics in the arena of love, for fear of boring language.
Eliot, however, is a master and has seemingly no qualms about tackling such
topics wholly and confidently. And, apparently, poetically: “Love is most
nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter (17).”
I have to
say that it took until almost the end of the book for me to come to terms with
the fact that Eliot is allowed to make these statements in his poetry. I have
become so accustomed to aspiring to read and write poems that are good because
they speak of a moment, paint a picture, relay an experience through concrete
imagery. Eliot sort of throws all that to the wind, injecting these moments of
pure introspective genius and what could be considered, I suppose “life
lessons” throughout. He defines things in an extremely attractive “x is ___”
type of way, and this works because the way these lessons are conveyed is so
carefully wrought and intricately portrayed.
Some of my
favorite “defining” moments are as follows:
§
“Only through time time is conquered (5).”
§
“Distracted from distraction by distraction (6)”
§
“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 (13).”
§
“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. / The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility:
humility is endless (14).”
§
“Wait without thought, for you are not ready for
thought: / So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing
(15).”
§
“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 which 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 (15).”
§
“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 (17).”
§
“Time the destroyer is time the preserver, (24)”
§
“Midwinter spring is its own season (31)”
§
“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 (38).”
§
“What we call the beginning is often the end /
And to make an end is to make a beginning (38).”
§
“Is not redeemed from time, for history is a
pattern / Of timeless moments (38).”
§
“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 (8).”
It is one thing to say that the
book is only 39 pages long, but I think I could contemplate these last eight,
short lines (not even a full stanza, let alone a movement or a quartet mind
you) for a good 39 hours. These momentous statements are balanced with
surprising images; as in the next seven lines: “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 (8).” Again, the meaning of these images is not necessarily
available on the surface of the text. It's sort of like a puzzle to put
together.
I've done a
little background research on Eliot and this book, and by all accounts it seems
“Four Quartets” incorporates Eliot's religious inclinations; in some circles it
is actually criticized for drawing too heavily on these views. Some daring soul
who checked the book out of the library before me offered their summation of
three out of four movements (for some unknown reason excluding “The Dry
Salvages”) as well. For “Burnt Norton,” she (?) thinks that: “Life of word is
continual death since contexts and usages change. In the pattern of a poem
word's life preserved beyond its life in speech.” On “East Coker:” “Stresses
craftsmanship of words. Poets inevitable defeat—outgrows his own idiom and
rhythm.” The word theme is continued in her observation of “Little Gidding:”
“Mysterious union of words in poetry—symbol of process by which past and future
are woven together into meaning in our personal lives and in history.” My point
is that there is no limit to the meaning one could find in this book; and in my
opinion, that is the measure of great poetry. It is a universally
powerful but specific experience; albeit one which may be read very differently
by different people.
~Amanda Pratt~
