T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets were written between 1935 and 1942 when the poet was in his late 40s and early 50s, an internationally famous man of letters who had not yet attained iconic status. The matter of his age is noteworthy because the Quartets are often thought of as an illustrious ageing poet’s last work of any significance, a kind of grand old man’s testament. In fact, they came into being as a result of, and in constant struggles with, the middle-aged writer’s anxieties about whether he still had anything to say in the first place and if he had, what medium would be suitable for it.
Despite his pontifical manner, Eliot was never complacent about his writing. Always aware of the necessity for an artist to keep developing, he was wary of becoming his own imitator (let alone parodist) but uncertain of what directions change and development should take. His turn to the theatre in the 1930s was part of that pattern of uneasy exploration, and Four Quartets began in the dramatist’s workshop: discarded Murder in the Cathedral passages deemed unsuitable for stage production began to live a life of their own, finally coming together in a poem which was given the name “Burnt Norton”. Its five-part structure resembled that of The Waste Land, but the two poems could hardly have been more dissimilar. Instead of a ragged multi-voiced block of fragments harshly jammed together without transitions and signposts, the reader of “Burnt Norton” encountered a voice whose register comprised several very different tones or modes, like the instruments in a string quartet, but whose utterance came across as emanating from a single consciousness. The shifts from personal reflection to prophetic exhortation, from chiselled lyric to meditative discourse, were sometimes abrupt but never violent. Occasional taut lines were certainly reminiscent of Eliot’s early work, and there were echoes of the liturgical cadences of Ash-Wednesday, but even so this was a new Eliot.
“Burnt Norton” might have been a one-off but for the events of 1939: the outbreak of war decreased public interest in the theatre, and Eliot’s second – and, in the view of a good many Eliot scholars, most interesting – verse drama, The Family Reunion, flopped. Turned back on poetry, he began to write a second long poem along the same structural lines as “Burnt Norton”, but imbued with a far more sombre mood: the first words one is apt to think of in connection with “East Coker” come from its third section, the Miltonic “O dark dark dark”. It was during his work on “East Coker”, around 1940, that Eliot conceived the idea of writing four poems according to the same five-part structure.
Given this history, one may well wonder whether it is really correct to think of Four Quartets as one poem rather than as four separate texts. For the purpose of this article, however, it is regarded as a whole consisting of four parts. The structural and thematic similarities between the four individual poems are apparent, and even their dissimilarities repay joint consideration. Readers have felt this from the first publication of Four Quartets as a unit, in 1943, and people with any sort of interest in the Quartets are more likely to want information on the entire work than independent discussions of the constituent parts.
In this entry on Four Quartets, a joint discussion of titles, themes and structure is followed by separate commentary on “Burnt Norton”, “East Coker”, “The Dry Salvages” and “Little Gidding”, whereupon the status of Four Quartets in the work of T. S. Eliot is briefly considered by way of conclusion.
Titles, themes and structure
Each Quartet is named after a place of special significance to T. S. Eliot. Burnt Norton is an estate in Gloucestershire whose garden Eliot visited with a woman friend in 1934 (a previous manor house on the estate had been destroyed by fire, hence “Burnt”). East Coker is a Somerset village from which his English ancestor Sir Andrew Eliot emigrated to America in the late seventeenth century. The Dry Salvages are a group of rocks off the coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts, where Eliot had spent happy boyhood summers. Little Gidding is a village not far from Cambridge where a Utopian religious community was set up in the seventeenth century; Eliot visited its chapel in 1936.
The fact that Eliot named the Quartets after places of peculiar importance to himself is a striking change from the “impersonality” of his earlier verse. To be sure, the London landmarks in The Waste Land were also part of his personal life, but the images he constructed round them had no obvious autobiographical relevance. In the Quartets, by contrast, autobiography obtrudes – sometimes in comments along the lines of “So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years” in “East Coker” V, sometimes in musings occasioned by the places themselves and his experiences of and in them.
Personal poetry, in other words; but the notion of impersonality that Eliot took such care to foster around himself and his writings is present here too in the insistence on the futility of the individual human being’s aims and efforts. Humanity is represented as weak, distracted, disaffected, misguided, ineffectual, fearful, anxious, deluded, inert, unaware – one of the best-known sentences from Four Quartets (and Murder in the Cathedral, where it originated) is “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality”. It is an unsparing indictment of humanity, but the articulator spares himself least of all. From “Burnt Norton” to “Little Gidding” the speaking subject lays bare his own inadequacies – as a person with responsibility for others, as an artist and as a religious believer.
Eliot scholars have often said that the people who have difficulties with Four Quartets are non-Christians in general and left-leaning non-believers in particular, whereas fellow Christians are usually admirers. Actually, though, Christians can also find the bleakness of the Quartets hard to stomach. There is little of the essence of faith, trust in God’s love and gratitude for Christ’s redeeming sacrifice – the sacrifice is acknowledged (in the much-criticised “East Coker” IV), but without the thankfulness of the knowing recipient of grace. The Christian’s duty to love others as one loves oneself sits uneasily with the patent self-disgust in the Quartets. There is no warmth towards fellow beings, no praise of God’s goodness and no celebration of his creation. This kind of Christianity is far removed from the optimistic faith of Eliot’s Unitarian forebears. Christianity is not the only religion in Four Quartets; Eliot had studied Indic religions from his undergraduate days, and the repudiation of physical pleasures and urges recalls Oriental, especially Buddhist, asceticism.
On the few occasions when the creation inspires a sense of wonder, it is when ordinary linear time is challenged. For instance, the seasons are momentarily suspended, as when late roses are filled with early snow and pentecostal fire burns in the dark time of the year; and the shared laughter of childhood crosses the threshold of time-bound memory to actual – and frightening – reality. Time is one of the most important themes in Four Quartets: God exists in an eternal present outside any linear time-frame, but human beings live in chronological time, and only the saint can perceive where eternity and linear time intersect (“The Dry Salvages” V). Every Christian should be aware of at least one such point of intersection, the birth of Christ into human time; but in the world of the Quartets even that event, the Incarnation, is only a “hint half guessed, [a] gift half understood”.
The Quartets often speak of history, and of the timeless significance of certain historical moments. People able to recognise that history is now may know at least a moment’s freedom from the tyranny of time. An example from “Little Gidding” illustrates the idea: the fleeing King Charles I is said to have sought temporary refuge with the religious community in Little Gidding. By summoning up that moment in the last Quartet, Eliot caused the local Civil War of 300 years ago to meet the ongoing global conflict, the Second World War: in “Little Gidding” V, “History is now and England”.
Another vital concern in Four Quartets is art, especially literature. The idea that the works of artist and poet outlast societies, even civilisations, is an ancient one, and the Quartets tap into that tradition when suggesting that the perfect artwork transcends time and achieves simultaneous equilibrium and movement at the still centre of “the turning world”. Such perfection is rare, however, and most artists and writers suffer great hardships during their struggles for the necessary precision. The slipperiness of language is a source of constant frustration, even despair – “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” (“East Coker” V).
As the Quartets take such a pessimistic view of human capabilities, and often speak of waiting as commendable and stillness as desirable, it would be tempting to conclude that they advocate passiveness; but this is not the case. On the contrary, Four Quartets makes it clear that human beings must act, “dance”, as well as wait, submitting to the will of God as the people in Dante’s Divine Comedy do – the reprobate sinners because they must, the repentant sinners because they want to, and the souls in bliss because God’s will is what they inhabit. However misguided effort may be, inertia is not an option: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business” (“East Coker” V); “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” (“The Dry Salvages” V). It is a characteristically Occidental determination, recalling Goethe’s assurance that whoever always strives to the utmost may attain salvation.
All these themes recur throughout the Quartets, with variations, as in a musical composition. The term “quartet” refers to the presence of four constituent instruments, not to a formal pattern of sections or movements. Quartets have varying numbers of movements; Beethoven’s A minor quartet (Op. 132), said to have inspired Four Quartets, has five.
Scholarly endeavours to map out structural patterns in the Quartets have produced a useful rationale (the review presented here relies on the classic analyses of Helen Gardner, Hugh Kenner and, especially, C. K. Stead): Each Quartet is connected with a particular element, “Burnt Norton” with air, “East Coker” with earth, “The Dry Salvages” with water and “Little Gidding” with fire. The first section or movement (the word “section” will be used here) addresses the course of time, interspersed with brief timeless moments. Section II deals with worldly experience, which only leads to disillusionment; the second section of a Quartet usually begins with a concentrated lyrical passage, which is then followed by a discursive passage in a very different tone. The third section is also enacted in the world of ordinary human beings, speaking of human attempts to escape from bondage to the world; a journey or voyage is usually suggested here. Then follows the brief fourth section, a prayer for, or acknowledgement of the need for, divine intercession. Finally, the fifth section addresses problems of art which are seen to be akin to the difficulty of attaining spiritual health.
This is just an outline, and there are individual exceptions. For instance, the fourth section of “East Coker” is unusually long, and the second part of the second section in “Little Gidding” is anything but discursive. By and large, though, the structure holds. Eliot certainly took a great deal of trouble over each Quartet, drafting, writing and reworking, sometimes – as with “Little Gidding” – over a period of several months. In other words, there is nothing haphazard about the deskwork which resulted in Four Quartets.
Quartet by Quartet: Burnt Norton
Unlike the subsequent Quartets, “Burnt Norton” is headed by an epigraph. Consisting of two Heraclitean fragments, it may be translated as “Although the Word (Logos) is common to all, most people live as if they had a private insight of their own” and “The way up and the way down is the same way”. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus is especially relevant to the four-elements dimension in the Quartets. According to him, all matter is in a state of flux, which means that one element will be transformed into another in a kind of chain movement; there is temporary distinctness but no enduring fixity. At one level, the assertion that the way up and the way down are one and the same is a truism: no way can lead up without also leading down. But in the present context, the observation gains significance when related to the statement “I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where” (“Burnt Norton” II). It is the being that matters, not the where and when. A kindred notion, inspired by the Spanish mystic St John of the Cross, ends “East Coker” III: “And where you are is where you are not”.
These paradoxes prepare the reader for the tentative philosophising of the first section of “Burnt Norton”, which suggests that there is really no difference between what happened and what did not: all time is always now. The moment in the garden brings the visitors close to their innocent childhood selves, an enduring reality unadulterated by subsequent failures to act and perceive. It passes, however, because “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality”, and the bird that summoned the visitors into the garden orders them out again. The collocation of childhood and closed doors to enchanted gardens will make readers think of the classic English garden stories for juvenile readers such as Alice in Wonderland and The Secret Garden, and this is perfectly natural: Eliot’s intertextuality is not snobbish.
The short lyric that introduces Section II embodies a complex web of allusions which cannot be unravelled here (Grover Smith’s 1956 T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning is still the best place to go for help with Eliot’s references). Two features are especially striking: the auditory effects – such as the dullish dark noises of the hunt below the foliage – and the image of the wire in the blood, which cancels ordinary conceptions of linear time. The “long forgotten wars” may belong to a distant past which nobody even remembers; but below the places where ancient war weapons cut through human flesh, blood is still pulsating, soothing the past pain that is still felt with its insistent song: everything is now.
The lyric is followed by a discursive passage, tautness and economy giving way to the reflective mode that Hugh Kenner brilliantly called “meditation picking its way”. The contrast was deliberate: in his essay “The Music of Poetry”, which was written at the same time as the Quartets, Eliot said that “in a poem of any length, there must be transitions between passages of greater and less intensity, to give a rhythm of fluctuating emotion essential to the musical structure of the whole”. This particular instance acknowledges that redeeming memories exist in, and can only be called up within the framework of, chronological time: “Only through time time is conquered.”
The third section of “Burnt Norton” takes the reader into an underground region which conflates London’s Tube with traditional notions of the netherworld. These notions include Dante’s Vestibule, where those who did not dare to commit themselves to anything, good or bad, in life spend eternity aimlessly rushing about (Inferno Canto III, which had enduring significance for Eliot). Dante began his journey by descending through hell, and if we wish to move upward we too must first go down.
The lyric in Section IV introduces one of the central images in Four Quartets, “the still point of the turning world”. As a wheel moves around its hub, human life in time moves around the still centre where there is still light when darkness drops, as it must, on the world in which humans live.
The last section of “Burnt Norton” introduces the theme of art, especially literary art, as a component in the struggle against the rule of chronological time. The frustrations of the poet’s craft come out in the irritation with words that “will not stay in place, / Will not stay still”, like naughty children. A Chinese jar (like Keats’s Grecian urn), though a mere object, moves forward through linear time and remains significant; “that which is only living / Can only die”, and as the object of art is not a living thing it is also deathless. Movement is necessary, says the concluding passage; God’s love, the still centre, moves the human soul upward to him, up the “ten stairs” of St John of the Cross, who envisaged the soul’s ascent to God as a staircase with ten steps.
The ending of “Burnt Norton” implies that it is possible to make contact with the everlasting now, with the moment in the garden, “now, here, now, always”, and that everything else is futile. The concluding lines emphasise that the “[r]idiculous ... waste sad” time to which human beings are bound may in fact be transcended, thereby embodying a measure of hope.
East Coker
There is very little hope in “East Coker”, the bleakest of the Quartets. Ronald Bush has argued that it reverberates with fury against the naive optimism of “Burnt Norton”, and even those who find it difficult to conceive of the first Quartet in such terms cannot but register the contrasting darkness of its successor. The anger of which Bush speaks is patent in, for instance, “the intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings” and the accusations against “the quiet-voiced elders” in “East Coker” II. In one sense linear time may be the enemy, but it is unbearable to contemplate having wasted so much of it making so little progress (V).
Where Mary Queen of Scots’ motto was “In my end is my beginning”, Eliot initially turns the idea around into the doom-laden “In my beginning is my end” (subsequently allowing the original motto to end the poem). The first section of “East Coker” reflects on the seasons of human life, weaving in an allusion to the famous passage in Ecclesiastes ii:1-7 (“a time to be born, a time to die”). The second passage of Section I takes the reader to the village of East Coker in the present, including some sharp images which show that Eliot could still command the kinetic incisiveness of his early work when he chose to. The third passage, beginning “In that open field”, conjures up a village scene from the distant past: a ghostly vision of a rural couple dancing emphasises the harmony of humans long ago with each other – but also with the soil to which they were bound and of which they soon came to form part. Eliot borrowed the words in old spelling from a work by an ancestor, Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named The Gouvernour (1531). The last lines remind the reader of the non-placing of the speaker in “Burnt Norton”: “I am here / Or there, or elsewhere.”
The pared-down and heavily rhythmic lines that open “East Coker” II bring images of confused seasons into conjunction with cosmic imagery, producing an out-of-order impression with apocalyptic dimensions. If this is how time behaves when it is out of joint, imprisonment in ordinary linear time would seem preferable. Nevertheless, the lines have a certain majesty, and it is something of a shock to be told that they amount to “A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion”. The line that introduces the discursive “response” to the lyric, “That was a way of putting it – not very satisfactory”, is one of the most frequently quoted snippets from the Quartets. That circumstance serves to remind us that many of the most memorable Quartet lines actually come from the “conversational” passages whose alleged slackness has come in for so much censure.
The most striking aspect of the second, meditative passage of “East Coker” II is its resolute onslaught on the notion of the wisdom of old age. Such wisdom should have been based on experience, but here experience is held to be worthless: “every moment is a new and shocking / Valuation of all we have been”. Old men are represented not as venerable sages but as small-minded creatures who refused to commit themselves (Dante’s Vestibule comes to mind again, as does Eliot’s early poem “Gerontion”) when they had the chance. This passage looks forward to the corresponding part of “Little Gidding”, where the ghost of a dead master tears away every shred of hope for what “East Coker” II sardonically terms “autumnal serenity”. As A. David Moody has observed, Four Quartets systematically subverts and inverts “normal” human values. The “East Coker” rejection of the idea that old people know better is a particularly noteworthy example. Humility, accepting that all we can know is that we know nothing, is the only decent attitude. Having established that, the speaker leaves no house or agent, “dancer”, standing: all go under.
In the third section darkness has swallowed all marks of human worth and distinction along with their bearers. Beginning with a quotation from Milton’s Samson Agonistes, in a passage that rejects any “hope of day”, it leads on to the exhortation – based on St John of the Cross’s Ascent of Mount Carmel – to suspend everything that moves and excites the individual human being. If there is to be any hope for reconnection with the innocent, paradisal “laughter in the garden”, the adult must divest himself or herself of all the painfully acquired attainments of maturity.
The fourth section of “East Coker” drew harsh criticism from the first. Its metaphors are, unusually for Eliot, of a simple one-to-one character: the wounded surgeon is Christ, the ruined millionaire is Adam, the dying nurse is the Christian Church. This, said critics, is mere code, and crude code at that, establishing that suffering is necessary for salvation and little else. There have been few attempts to defend the section; but those who connect memorableness with literary value may wish to ponder the words “Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good” – a line with a peculiar resonance.
At last, in the fifth section, the darkness lifts a little. The artist’s struggle to communicate calls for stern self-subjugation, as does the quest of anyone who desires salvation, but at least the struggle is not intrinsically hopeless. “Old men ought to be explorers” – they should not sit around dispensing advice, they should go out and learn, giving and hazarding all they have. To the very end, “East Coker” slashes every stirring of human pride in one’s own merits.
The Dry Salvages
The third Quartet is the odd one out, not so much because it evokes America rather than Britain but because it has been the butt of so much hostility. It is “rather a bad poem”, said Donald Davie in one of the classics of Quartets criticism. In another such classic, Hugh Kenner could only account for “The Dry Salvages” by regarding it as a deliberate parody, a “false reconciliation” paving the way for the true reconciliation of “Little Gidding”. Even the Quartets admirer Denis Donoghue admitted that the defects of this poem are real and serious, attributing them to Eliot’s having wished to extend the discursive element and incorporate something of a chorus, as he did in his verse dramas. The outcome was a disappointment, said Donoghue; Eliot failed “to conduct a piece which he scored for an unmanagable number of voices”.
Certainly “The Dry Salvages” is the only Quartet to open with a deliberately prosy sentence, the less than ringing “I do not know much about gods”, which has struck many as frankly bathetic (though F. R. Leavis and Helen Gardner admired the opening of “The Dry Salvages”). There is, as several critics have pointed out, more than a hint of Whitman in this passage, and Eliot in Whitmanesque mode has never been deemed a success. If it is an infelicity, it is not the only one; “time counted by anxious worried women / Lying awake”, also in “The Dry Salvages” I, would have caused Ezra Pound to draw his blue pencil to cut out at least one of the adjectives (in the Waste Land manuscripts, Pound ruthlessly excised superfluous descriptive matter). What, then, does “The Dry Salvages” in fact say?
The introductory section reminds the reader that the great river – Mississippi is of course what St Louis-born Eliot had in mind – and the sea are forces untameable by humans, obeying their own laws. Littered by humanity and its pursuits, they are themselves essentially untouched by the men who lose their lives in them. Both are connected with the time theme in the Quartets: the river runs its course, as linear time does, and the ground swell of the sea is more ancient than humanity and human notions of time.
The first part of the second section is made up of six six-line stanzas resembling a sestina. In stanzas two to five, the sestina’s recurrent words are exchanged for others that rhyme with them (for example “motionless–emotionless–devotionless–oceanless–erosionless” and then back to “motionless”). Describing the toil and peril of mariners” lives, these stanzas paint a dark picture of human existence. Ebbing physical strength leaves the old fisherman resenting his “failing powers”, and the only prospect of hope is held out by the Annunciation: the Incarnation of Christ and the Virgin’s acquiescence.
The sestina is followed by another deliberately engineered contrast between carefully wrought “poetic” language and almost aggressively prosy discourse. It is the discourse of a fastidious mind that uses abstract terms and rejects material human pleasures (including the “very good dinner” that has come in for much scorn among critics). Again, old age fails to bring wisdom and serenity; indeed, the accumulation of experience tends to dull our awareness of abiding agony, whose sting is more keenly “appreciated” if we study the suffering of others. These are uncomfortable lines, and the interspersed throwback to section I, “Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops”, only makes it more so. However, the section ends with a description of the group of rocks that gave “The Dry Salvages” its name, a description couched in tight, four-beat lines leading up to a powerful conclusion: “but in the sombre season / Or the sudden fury, is what it always was” – a reminder of a creation ungovernable by humankind.
Section III begins with another line that admirers of the Quartets have found hard to defend, the notorious “I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant”. Whatever one thinks of its tone, though, the reference to Krishna is an integral part of the argument here. What Krishna did in the Bhagavad-Gita was to exhort Arjuna to engage in battle, as action must be embraced regardless of its consequences, and the death of a body entails the transmigration of the soul (“[fructifying] in the lives of others”, as Eliot has it). In other words, the exhortation “Fare forward” in “The Dry Salvages” III rests on the contention that a living being always undergoes change of some sort, and that it makes no sense to try to escape this. The travel images reinforce that notion: the passenger who leaves a station or port is not the same as the person who arrives.
The fourth section in “The Dry Salvages” is a prayer to the Virgin (“Figlia del tuo Figlio”, “daughter of your Son”, a quotation from the first line of Canto XXXIII in Dante’s Paradiso) for those who are in ships, whatever their business. Nobody can visit the fishing hamlets on America’s East Coast without noticing the visible reminders of the precariousness of life in these communities, from the “widow’s walks” on housetops to the shrines built by Roman Catholic fishermen whose families originally came over from Southern Europe.
Section V ridicules the various superstitions by which human beings strive to tell what the future will bring. Even honest attempts to school one’s attentiveness so as to catch the occasional “moment in and out of time” yield nothing more than “hints and guesses” if there is any hope at all, it consists in “prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action”. Whatever change comes to us we must accept, including the changes to our corpses as part of “The life of significant soil”. It is a grim ending to the third of the Quartets.
Little Gidding
The last Quartet restores the balance after the unevenness of “The Dry Salvages”, above all by virtue of the Dantean second passage in the second section, universally praised and often held to constitute the peak of Eliot’s poetic achievement. “Little Gidding” brings the themes that run through the previous Quartets to some kind of resolution, although it stops short of rationalising paradoxes and winding up arguments – after all, “hints and guesses” are all that humanity can have.
”Little Gidding” begins with an approach to the chapel where Nicholas Ferrar established his community of devout Christians in 1626 and George Herbert’s The Temple was first printed and bound in 1633 (book-binding was the chief secular occupation of the community). The many references to winter set the time in “the dark time of the year”, but the seasons are thrown together in paradoxical expressions – “Midwinter spring”, “Zero summer”. The snow on the hawthorn briefly creates a visual effect like its white May blossom. It does not matter when or why the visitor, addressed as “you” by the speaker, came here; what matters is what you come to: a place where you can communicate with those whose prayers were “valid” here, and still are. “[T]he communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living” (the inscription on the Eliot memorial stone in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey), and in a timeless moment you may experience it.
The introductory lyric of the second section ties the elemental imagery of Four Quartets together. Nodding to Heraclitus and his theory of the elements, it evokes the concrete realities of the London Blitz: Eliot was an air-raid warden in the Second World War and saw many buildings crumble into dust. The physical world is destroyed and returned to its basic elements, and human effort – manifested in building houses and churches, and in the farming of the soil – is brought to naught. It is a forbidding prelude to the meeting which overshadows every other expression of human communication in Four Quartets.
Unlike the other “responses” to lyrics in second Quartet sections, the meeting with the dead master adheres to a tight formal pattern, an approximation of Dante’s terza rima in which Eliot invested much labour. In fact, the whole passage went through much reworking. Based on Canto XV of the Inferno, in which Dante meets his old master Brunetto Latini, it is an even more powerful denunciation of the idea of serenity and dignity in old age than the corresponding passage in “East Coker”.
Encountered as a ghostly presence in the street immediately after bombs have fallen, before the all-clear (’the blowing of the horn”) has sounded, the “dead master” reveals what he ironically calls “the gifts reserved for age”. Humanity and its ways will seem increasingly repulsive, he says, and the years bring ever-sharper insights into one’s own shortcomings, worst of all the bad things one did believing oneself to be acting for the best and taking pride in it. Receiving honours knowing of one’s dishonour adds to the shame. There is only one hope: submission to the will of God, becoming “restored by that refining fire / Where you must move in measure, like a dancer”. As usual in Four Quartets, the image of the dance represents disciplined movement in obedience to rules emanating from the divine will.
Various persons have been suggested as “being” the dead master, among them Mallarmé, Virgil, Swift, Milton and Yeats, but the word “compound” should dispel the idea of an easy identification. All these poets, and others too, were part of that tradition into which Eliot poured his individual talent.
The third section in “Little Gidding” raises the subject of attachment and detachment, touched on in the earlier Quartets but probed in some depth here. It recalls a poem written some 15 years earlier, Ash-Wednesday I, which prayed for the ability to care and not to care. To care in the right way for the right things and persons is no easy matter. Some readers have found Eliot’s way of speaking about love disturbingly frigid, but it is as usual a fridigity which does not spare the speaker. The insertion of the qualification “as it could” in the following quotation reads like an awkward but sincere acknowledgement of emotional limitations: “See, now they vanish, / The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them”.
Julian(a) of Norwich’s “All shall be well, and / All manner of thing shall be well”, which returns at the end of the poem, is borrowed from a work suffused, unlike Four Quartets, with love of God, in whom the writer reposes a boundless trust – a contrast which adds to the poignancy of the quotation. “Sin is Behovely” (“expedient, appropriate” also from Julian) accords sin its given place in a world designed by an omnipotent God. Eliot does not pursue the problem of sin beyond that, however. Instead, the remainder of the third section muses on the men of the past who gave their lives in the “strife which divided them”. The reasons why they fought so heroically have fallen victim to time and are gone; in the history that is now and England, the former enemies “are folded in a single party”. What remains is one thing only: the struggle for what they believed in, sacrificing all they had.
Some of the most terrifying lines in the Quartets make up the fourth section of “Little Gidding”, where God’s love is represented as an agony which can only be ended by the annihilation of the self. The “shirt of flame” is a reference to the Nessus shirt that drove its tormented wearer Hercules to commit suicide by burning himself alive. “[T]he choice of pyre or pyre” is all that human beings have: we can either burn in our worldly desires (the Waste Land reader remembers “The Fire Sermon”) or accept that suffering is part of a merciful divine order and willingly undergo it. The “dove descending” is the German bomber of “Little Gidding” II, the “dark dove with the flickering tongue”, but the image also recalls the dove that is the Holy Ghost, exemplifying the metaphorical fusion of discrete connotations that Eliot was such a master of.
After all the intimations of darkness and suffering in earlier parts of the poem, it may be difficult to believe in the promises of the last section of “Little Gidding” with its incantatory “All manner of thing shall be well”. It does, however, recapitulate the ideas of the preceding sections and the other Quartets while investing them with a dimension of hope: our beginning may be our end, but the end can also be a new beginning. Arriving back where we started and knowing the place for the first time – another much-quoted Quartet passage – we may be able to pass through the door we never opened, to become part of the paradisal fire rose (again, the imagery owes much to Dante) that is God’s love. But it will, as we are parenthetically reminded, cost not less than everything.
The impact and status of Four Quartets
In the mid-twentieth century, when Eliot’s renown was at its height, Four Quartets was frequently held up as his masterpiece, the triumph of his mature poetic style. After his death in 1965, and throughout the late twentieth century, Eliot suffered a loss of prestige that would have seemed incredible in the 1950s. There were a number of special reasons for that loss, including the accusations of racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny. However, fluctuating reputations are of course a common phenomenon in literary history, and a reaction against Eliot’s superstardom was only to be expected. Where has this reaction left the Quartets?
Most present-day Eliot scholars acknowledge that Four Quartets is a flawed work, and quite a few admit, at least privately, that they prefer Eliot’s early poetry up to and including The Hollow Men. As the preceding review has indicated, the philosophical and religious content of Four Quartets is peculiarly incompatible with the present time. The secularisation and shift of focus from the collective interest to the development of the individual that have been spreading through Western culture from the mid-twentieth century onwards have made the teachings of the Quartet seem strange and forbidding. Besides, contemporary readers are unused to long poems that call for patient and repeated close reading on their own terms. The discursive style of much of the Quartets, which caused an irate George Orwell to talk about “the gloomy mumblings” of a man who “does not really feel his faith” back in 1942, has not worn well.
And yet anyone who listens to scholars of literature – including non-Christians, rampant individualists and devotees of creature comforts – talking about the great existential issues will often hear illustrative references to Four Quartets. Clearly, the Quartets express some aspects of human life forcefully enough for them to be able to cross all sorts of ideological and religious boundaries. There is even something oddly consoling about these uncomfortable poems. Confronted by one’s own shortcomings, it is reassuring to be shown that they are part of one’s essential humanity. That may not make one better, but at least one feels better knowing that one is not alone. During periods of misery, the articulation of despair in Four Quartets extends the support of a fellow-sufferer as one attempts to “fare forward”, hoping at least to find the place where one started and know it for the first time.
The fact that Four Quartets possesses such enduring strength has more to do with its refutation of one of its own claims than with any “message” or “teaching” that may be extracted from it. “East Coker” II claims that “The poetry does not matter”, but that is exactly what it does. T. S. Eliot’s “intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings” resulted in luminous images and haunting phrases that remain in any consciousness that opens itself to them, living their own lives there regardless of what else that consciousness contains. Paradoxical though that may seem, paradox is what these poems live by.
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Citation: Thormahlen, Marianne. "Four Quartets". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 January 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5073, accessed 07 November 2024.]
