Poems you should read before you die: Four Quartets — T.S. Eliot
On first reading it’s hard to know what to make of Four Quartets. Consisting of four long poems (quartets) composed between 1935 and 1941, the parts written and published separately, it contains such a mix of styles that at times reading it seems to lack the unity of Eliot’s other works such as The Waste Land. The late Thomas Howard, Professor Emeritus at Gordon College in Massachusetts, described Four Quartets as “in a class with Shard Cathedral, Eyck’s painting the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, Bach’s B Minor Mass, and the Mozart Requiem…one of the great monuments of Western Christian civilisation.”
My first encounter with the poem was at university, bored during holidays I spent some time in the South of England where I was studying visiting old or abandoned churches I could find out of a peculiar interest in them. In one remote and virtually abandoned Norman chapel, fenced off near the back of some farm houses, I found hymn sheets left in the pews, and printed after the hymns in the list were the final lines of Little Gidding, culminating in the sublime chorus: “And 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.”
I had already encountered the Waste Land, and was stuck by the religious context of the lines so I went home and read the rest. What to make of a poem that is both desolate, ponderous and difficult, but also at home on the final pages of a hymn sheet?
The first point of contact in the poem is to note that the voice is the poets. This sounds obvious, but T. S. Eliot frequently uses staccato changes in voice or speaker, a detachment from character and retraction of personal openness that makes his earlier work so characteristic. The Waste Land mystifies you with it’s absence of continuous voice. Burnt Norton instead opens with the musings of the poet: “Time present and time past / Are perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable.”
This sets the frame for much of the poem, it is ponderous, self-reflective. Now in middle age, Eliot is contemplating time through the prism of the personal to the philosophical to the religious. The result is a work of extraordinary tenderness and grandeur, starkly confessional (So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years — / Twenty years largely wasted… trying to use words), yet lofty and profound. At times in the poem, particularly this passage in East Coker, or lines such as “I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant”, almost draw you to question if the poem becomes too personal, if the candour and self-reflection in these lines meanders into a kind of ‘bathtub reflection’ that loses Eliot’s searing detachment of other works. But instead these passages seem to create a kind of launch pad for some of the most sublime moments of reflection in the work, lines like “Love is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter”, catch you out, take you unawares and in doing so are extraordinarily moving. Unlike much of his other work Eliot unmasks himself enough to allow Four Quartets to posses a kind of compelling sincerity. Whenever you are about to question if it is too personal or too meandering his pen seems to take flight again, as if to remind you you are still reading the work of a poet thoroughly in possession of his powers.
This mirroring of styles between the personal and the poetic reflects the tension in Eliot’s development of thought — time is both here and present (“On a winters afternoon, in a secluded chapel / History is now and England”) and yet also “a pattern / of timeless moments.” Composed before and during the second world war, history was in a time of fear, turmoil and uncertainty. A time W. H. Auden would coin as “The Age of Anxiety”, the title of a long poem he created during the second world war. Eliot was a fire warden during the blitz, and Little Gidding is filled with the images of fire descending, mixing the images of fear and destruction with the purifying of pentecostal fire: “The only hope, or else despair / Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre — / To be redeemed from fire by fire.”
The Quartets is distinctly a religious poem. Eliot converted to anglicanism in 1927, and shortly after wrote Ash Wednesday, a conversion poem that can be seen as an intermediary, preceding later work where religious themes become more clear. Little Gidding uses the image of suffering, or fire, as the necessary path to redeeming the burden of time. In one strange passage he encounters a ghost on a road at night, who after lamenting the labour of ageing says “From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit / Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire”. Only beyond this Eliot sees redemption. The recurring phrase “all shall be well” is a quote taken from Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth century anchoress and mystic, the first recorded women whose writing is preserved in the English language, who upon dying of illness at the age of thirty had a series of visions of Jesus, which she recorded in a work called “Revelations of Divine Love.” In it she wrestles and goes back and forth on the theme of Christian suffering, and is answered with assurance of Jesus’ tender love, that “sin is behovely”, and that “all manor of thing shall be well.”
This is not trite or poorly won religious piety, Julian lived through the plague, the peasants revolt and the suppression of the lollards, surrounded by suffering and death her remarkable return to the simple redeeming love of God is a theme Eliot carefully resorts to, but for Eliot this suffering is a necessary part of the redemption of time. Here Dante again looms, while the Waste Land leant on the images of Inferno in Four Quartets the images of Paradiso seem to recur as images of what lies beyond the moving wheel of time: Dante sees the divine light as the centre from which everything moves, the first cause or unmoved mover. Eliot describes “the still point of the turning world”. In the culmination of the poem, the rose, Dante’s image for the celestial paradise, is one with the purgatorial fire.
T. S. Eliot’s approach here is perhaps the necessary one of any religious person during tumultuous times. Pessimism about suffering is necessitated by reality, redemption lies in transcendence, in a hope beyond the inevitability of time. In our murky and strange postmodern time, still an uncertain world, this monument of literature remains, perhaps not as a soaring cathedral, but more like Eliot’s “secluded Chapel”, where I first encountered words I still return to, the climax to the final quartet:
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, unremembered 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 flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
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Bless you, Matthew.
