Four Quartets

        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~