A QUARTET OF T. S. ELIOT
BY Prof. S. S. HOSKOT,
M.A.
(St.
Philomena's College, Mysore)
Of
the poetry produced in England during the War years, Indisputably the most
significant is contained in T. S Eliot’s Four Quartets. These poems are
a series of meditations’ on a metaphysical theme which may be variously defined
as the relation of Time and Timelessness, or the significance of history, or
the redemption of Man. Their tone is hesitant, tentative and exploratory. The
poet lays no claim to self-assurance or dogmatic certainty and is content with
‘hints and guesses’. The poems record no conclusions that can be set out in a
logical framework. The poet adumbrates no philosophical or theological system
but utilises many suggestions from Eastern and Western mystical thought as
hypotheses for personal exploration. Though the themes-viz., death and
immortality, heredity and personal identity, the reality and the illusion of
Time,–are utterly unworldly find abstract, the poet contrives to shed over his speculations
an air of intense earnestness and intimacy. The names of the places
which provide the titles of the four poems–Burnt Norton, East Coker, the Dry
Salvages, Little Gidding–“each with a significant religious
association, invoke the earth, the lives lived in flesh and stone, deeply
rooted traditions.” Eliot has indeed given us, in these poems, an entirely
novel form of the philosophical lyric.
It
would not, however, be correct to suppose that, when he wrote these poems,
Eliot had broken entirely with his past. Many naive and uncritical critics were
incensed by his formal change of faith in the Thirties and his desertion of the
literary tradition of Donne and Baudelaire, in the reintroduction of which in
the present century he had himself played such a notable part. But so far as
his poetry is concerned, it is clear that Mr. Eliot’s acceptance of a closed
religious stem has not come in the way of his “intolerable wrestle with words
meanings”. On the other hand, it is equally clear that, though his earlier
poems apparently seem to be inspired wholly by a negative attitude,–viz.,
by scepticism, frustration and recoil,–there is implied, in practically every
one of them, a belief in the need of positive enquiry and constructive faith,
and that this belief emerges increasingly to the surface in the series of his
major poems, from Gerontion to Ash Wednesday. It was only to be expected
that this, the deeper trend in his personality, should constitute the line of
his poetical development.
The
differences between the style and form of his earlier and later poetry may be
explained by the increased self-assurance the poet has gained in his quest for
a satisfying and stable relationship with the facts of experience. His earlier
poetry was dramatic and overlaid with elaborate allusions and obscure
references, because he was diffident about the value of his own endeavours and
afraid that, if he spoke his thoughts in his own person, he might be laughed
at. But by the end of the Thirties, he seems to have realised that there was no
escape in escapism, that ‘old wisdom’ was of little avail in the darkness that
confronts us, and that we must face our problems ourselves with courage and
wisdom. This newly awakened sense of responsibility and faith in the importance
of personal exploration and endeavour enables him to speak in the Quartets with
a bare directness that contrasts so markedly with the impersonality, the
intricacy and brilliance of his earlier poems.
It
is not, however, intended to suggest that the Quartets are easy poems.
No poetry, at once so steeped in tradition and so original, could be easy.
True, Eliot uses words as precisely as a scientist or a philosopher and never
attempts to produce blurred, impressionistic pictures or to create a personal
language of his own. The obscurity of these poems arises, not from imprecision
of feelings or expression, but from the technique. This technique, however,
enables Eliot to do what otherwise can probably not be done at all, viz., to
suggest through symbolic patterns of words and music, the processes of an
extremely subtle and sensitive mind, trying to explore an order of existence
that transcends the range of the senses as well as that of the discursive
intellect. The poems represent an attempt to record the elusive mental
operations of “search and exploration into the moment of consciousness of human
individuals who are capable of suddenly perceiving a pattern within events, a
pattern which has the significance of a Reality always present, though it is
contained within a world in which future succeeds to the past, in which the
idea of a point in time called ‘now’ is entirely fictitious.”1 It is
no wonder that such poems should “continually escape from the logic of
discourse into the conditions of musical thought”. 2
Obviously
no exposition of the thought of such poems can do justice to them. For any
interpretation, to use Miss Helen Gardner’s simile, would at best “bear about
as much resemblance to the poems as a map does to a landscape.” But, as the
same critic points out, a map is useful to strangers, and even to others, it
may suggest unfamiliar routes and places that have been overlooked.” It is in
this belief that the following prose renderings of the Quartets are
presented to the reader. Though valuable commentaries on the poems do exist, no
line-by-line paraphrase has, to my knowledge, yet been published.
The commentaries of
Helen Gardner and Raymond Preston have been extremely useful to me in the
understanding of many difficult points. I have used many phrases and some
passages from them. The articles by Philip Wheel-wright and B. Rajan in ‘Focus
Three’ and Shibnarayan Ray’s two articles in the November issues of Le Courrier
des Indes’ have also provided me with illuminating hints. In paraphrasing East
Coker, I have frequently drawn upon Mr. Don Sebastian Moore’s article “East
Coker, the place and the poem” in Focus Two.3
The
brief but timeless moment of illumination which seems like a moment of spring
in midwinter is a unique experience. It is felt as an union of opposite
seasons, a suspension of time and place, a condition between pole and tropic.
It is not ‘spring’ in time, for it is not accompanied by the awakening of the
life of nature. Its duration is short, yet it is brighter than any day of spring.
It is as if frost and fire coexist, as if the brief sun flames the ice on pond
and in ditches and reflects on the water a blinding glare in the early
afternoon, while the still, wintry cold turns the heart to seek the warmth of
divine comfort. A glow more intense than that of the blaze of branches or
heaters stirs the dumb soul from its torpor,–for even though there is no
movement of air anywhere, the fire of pentecost (signifying the descent of the
Holy Ghost in tongues of fire) in alive in this dark period of the year. Caught
between the freezing cold of nature and the warm radiance of this flame of
divine love, the soul experiences the shock of an unexpected spiritual
awakening that shakesit to its depths. There is no smell of earth or any other sign
of the stirring of life, for this miraculous spring is not in time’s covenant.
There are no blossoms on any tree, but the hedgerow in Little Gidding wears for
a brief hour an unexpected bloom of snow, a bloom subject to neither birth nor
death, because it transcends the cyclic operations of nature. Coming across
this sudden bloom, one finds oneself looking forward to the vision of that
unimaginable, timeless state of being of which it is an earnest and a symbol.
(Lines 1-21)
If,
instead of coming to Little Gidding in winter, you happen to come in May, you
will find the hedges white with flowers blossoming with voluptuary sweetness.
But time and place and matter make no essential difference. Whether you come
here in the usual way or come secretly like King Charles The Martyr, defeated
in war and broken in spirit, and whether you know what you came for or not, you
will have much the same, unforseen experience. You suddenly realise that what
you thought you came for is only a shell, a husk of meaning, and the true
objective is revealed, if at all, only when it is fulfilled. You realise that
the ultimate purpose of life is beyond the goal that you set for yourself and
that its pattern changes as you proceed in your quest. (Lines 21-37)
Little
Gidding is indeed, at any time or season, a place of destiny. It is one of
those places where you suddenly feel detached from the world and seem to stand
on the threshold of the Timeless. There are other places perhaps where you may
undergo a similar experience, –for example, when caught in the jaws of the sea,
or crashing from the air into a dark lake, or dying in war in a city or a
desert like Palestine. Little Gidding is however nearest to you of such spots
in place and time. It is now, here, in England itself. (Lines 37-41)
But, at whatever time and season you come here and by whatever route, you may have the spiritual vision that this place can give you, only if you are previously prepared for it. This preparation involves the total surrender of the functions both of the intellect and the senses. It is futile to come to Little Gidding in order to satisfy curiosity or to verify hypotheses or to carry a report to the press. You must come here in a spirit of humility and self-submission, ready to kneel and pray,–pray, not mechanically or self-consciously, but with your whole being. This is a place where the validity of such prayer has been vindicated before. And those ancestors of ours, long since dead, whose prayer was here answered, have still a message for you–a message which they can deliver, now that they are dead, with far greater power and authority than they could when living. For, the message of the dead, unlike those of the living, are tongued with the flaming wisdom and vitality of the entire past of the human race. (Lines 41-53)
Here,
in Little Gidding, you are on the borderland between two worlds, the world of
Time and the world of the Timeless. You are in England and nowhere, never and
always. (Lines 54-55)
The
life of one who has had no conviction of spiritual values in his life’s work,
who has never ‘knelt and prayed’, is futile and ends in a desolate death. The
earth, air, fire and water that constitute the elements of his existence become
the means of his destruction and dismissal; and they are themselves destroyed.
The end of materialistic existence is utter futility and despair. (Strophe I)
Sensuous
love and pleasure burn out to ashes and leave only an old man’s perishable
memory. All the monuments of past glory that once signified a rich life turn to
dust that vanishes into thin air. The structures of man’s spirit, such as the
decayed manor house at East Coker, that once represented a living human
tradition become dust of air,–a meaningless void. (Stanza I)
The
tears of sorrow and the dryness of the throat are the sole fruits of our
struggle for existence. The struggle is as sterile and meaningless as the
unceasing struggle for mastery between flood and drouth in nature. Nature
itself seems to mock mirthlessly at the vanity of human labour which is as
futile as the cultivation of a parched, disemboweled soil. Man’s efforts and
the restlessness of elements are alike fruitless. This is the death of earth.
(Stanza 2)
Urban
and agricultural civilisations are alike liable to decay and ultimately
swallowed up by fire and water. The Eucharist, whose symbolic significance we
have denied, seems to be mocked by the elements of fire and water when they
destroy our gutted choirs and the water-logged ruins of our sanctuaries. This
is the death of water and fire. (Stanza 3)
All
the elements having been thus destroyed, there is left only utter negation, a
void too terrifying to contemplate. (Strophe II)
Somewhere
between three districts whence the smoke arose, at an uncertain hour near the
close of the interminable night, in which men incessantly end their journey
only to begin it again, after that mysterious comforter, the flame-tongued Holy
Ghost, had passed beyond the horizon of time, while the dead leaves rattled on
like tin the otherwise silent, asphalt roads, I met one loitering with a
hurried gait, as if he was being blown towards me like metal leaves driven
irresistibly by the urban dawn-wind. As I fixed upon his down-turned face the
pointed scrutiny with which one is apt challenge the first-met stranger in the
waning dusk, I suddenly caught a glimpse of some dead master-poet, whom I had
known and forgotten and now only half-recalled. He seemed to remind me of one
poet but in fact represented many. In his brown-baked features, shone the
cumulative experience of many poets, so that, though looking familiar, he was
not to be identified with any particular poet of the past. So I assumed a
double part–the part of myself and Dante–and echoed Dante’s words, “What! are
you here?, echoed back, although in fact we were not together in any temporal
sense. I was still my own self and yet knew myself to be transformed into
somebody else, and he was still too vague a form to be identified.
Yet the words that I uttered before I recognised him sufficed to complete the recognition. Thus moved by a kindred impulse and too far removed from each other in time for mutual misunderstanding we met in concord at this moment of the intersection of Time the Timeless, where there is no past or future, and walked together on the pavement in silence. I observed: “The wonder that I feel in meeting you is easily explained. Yet the cause of my wonder is the freedom from constraint with which we meet. Therefore speak, though I may not understand you, nor remember what you say.” He replied: “I am not anxious to repeat my thought and poetic theory which your age has forgotten. My thought and theory have served their purpose and are superseded. Your thought and theory will similarly be superseded some day. Pray that the future generations will forgive you for them as I pray you to forgive me for mine–both the good and the evil in them. As the beast having fed itself fully on the fruit of the last season kicks away the empty pail, each generation absorbs the kernel of past wisdom and throws away the shell. The words of wisdom uttered in one age reflect the zeitgeist of that age alone, and a new age demands other language and other voices for its expression. But now, because, in this timeless moment wherein the past and the future are gathered, the restlessly wandering spirit is faced with no temporal obstacles to its Communication. I have found it possible to say things which I never thought of saying in streets, which I never thought of revisiting, when I died on a distant shore. Since our business concerned speech and our common goal was to purify the language of our peoples, and to urge them to explore the past and future (with a view to the understanding of the true meaning of Time), let me reveal to you the gifts which age brings, so that you may bring your life’s effort to its fulfillment. The first of these gifts is the torment of the decaying senses, and the increasing detachment of the body and the soul, accompanied by sterile, hopeless disillusion that makes the fruits of the earth as bitterly tasteless as the dead-sea fruit. The second is the realisation of the futility of anger at human folly and the tearing pain of that joyless laughter of mockery which is no longer amusing; and last comes the rending pain of rehearsing all that you have done and been and of the consequent realisation of the shame of motives formerly regarded as noble, and of deeds ill-done or done to others’ injury, but hitherto regarded as virtuous. When you have attained this self-knowledge, the eulogy of worldly men stings and their honour stains. You realise that the desperate soul proceeds without end from one blind alley to another, unless it is liberated from the cycle of time by the purifying fire alone that can bring us into harmony with the rhythmic pattern of eternal Reality.”
The
day was breaking; with a sign of farewell, he left me in the street disfigured
by bombs, and faded away like King Hamlet’s ghost on the blowing of the horn.
The
condition of one’s attachment to self, persons and things often naturally fades
into and becomes one with that of detachment from them. Between
these two states of the soul, unfruitful like the half-dead nettle, lies the
Indifference of the Stoics and the Agnostics, the sterile, apparent freedom
from desire of those who have never felt love. This is virtually a state of
death, for it implies a denial of wordly life as well as the life of the
spirit. (Attachment is to detachment as desire is to love) Memory which helps
us to relate the past with the present may, if rightly, utilised, free our
motives of longing for personal gratification. It may teach us true detachment,
which is not denial of love but expansion of love beyond personal desire.
Spiritual liberation is not achieved by rejecting the past but by understanding
it in its true perspective, not as something actual and complete in itself, but
as an integral part of a pattern which subsists in all time. From this
standpoint we realise that detachment is not opposed to attachment but grows
out of it. Thus love of one’s country, which begins as a narrow attachment to a
limited field of action, is a necessary step to a more comprehensive love,
which includes in its pattern the love of one’s country but so transcends it as
to reduce it to insignificance.
If, instead of looking into history for what is potential in it, we look into it for what was actual, i.e., look for the faces and places in it to which we can attach ourselves, then history spells slavery for us and not freedom. But when contemplated in a spirit of disinterestedness, these faces and places assume a different meaning. They are comprehended in their proper significance–as parts of the pattern of Timeless Reality.
When
we learn to regard history in this light, even sin itself appears to be lovely.
It is accepted as a necessary instrument of spiritual discipline and a means of
liberation. We thus acquire the calm confidence that, in the scheme of things,
everything is ultimately for the best.
If I think again of Little Gidding and of the 17th Century figures associated with it, imperfect as they were, and related to me by no special ties of blood or spiritual kinship, it is because they were all touched by a peculiar genius–a genius common to them and binding them together, enemies though they were. All of them lived for the same truth and died for the same finality. I think again of King Charles I, who secretly visited this place at night, of King Charles, Stafford and Laud who died on the scaffold, of others–the exiled Romanists–who died elsewhere, and of Milton, who died blind and quiet. Why should we celebrate these dead men more than the living? Certainly not because we wish to escape into the past, nor because we wish to surrender our judgment to the spectre of a rose. We cannot revive old factions or restore old policies or enthuse over old causes. The acrimonies which divided these men have been stilled by their death and cannot be summoned back to life. The pattern of history now reveals that their goal was fundamentally one. What we can gain from these men–failures though they were in the eyes of the world–is a spiritual symbol, an example completed beyond this life.
When
we realise this, we acquire humility and our motives are so purified of
selfishness that everything in creation is felt to be for the best–for,
everything springs from and is gathered into love.
The dove, the messenger of God, perpetually descends bringing with it the terrifying fire of divine love, to which we must surrender or be consumed by the flames of sin and error. Humanity cannot help loving; it must choose between the fire of self-love and damnation, and the fire of the purifying love of God.
The
inescapable and excruciating torments which divine love inflicts on us are
designed to awaken our soul to the preception of its light. 4 Just
as it preserved the love of Hercules by tormenting him to death, divine love
feeds our spiritual aspirations by scorching us with the flames of suffering.
So long as we live, we must suffer either the torments of spiritual love or the
flames of worldly desire.
All
that we can think of as happening in time forms a pattern so complete that we
cannot say where any part of it begins or ends. Human life is a part of this
pattern and not a sequence in time. What we regard as the goal is often really a
starting point. The end, the purpose of the whole pattern, is where we must
start from. Every phrase and sentence that is right (i. e., every phrase and
sentence, whether common or formal, that exactly fits into the pattern,
being neither too diffident nor ostentatious), is a symbol of unity,
linking up, as it does, the past and the present in one rhythmic harmony. Every
such phrase and sentence is a beginning as well as an end. Every poem, that is
thus complete in itself, is an epitaph, “a movement into another intensity”,
that is always taking place now. Every such spiritually significant act is
indeed a step to the annihilation of self in the flames of divine love, a step
towards the purifying fire of purgatory. Every such act is a renewed
realisation of the true meaning of history, a true understanding of our
historic and pre-historic heritage. It is only after, and on the basis of this
understanding, that we can start our spiritual quest. The past is not dead. It
lives dormant in us and it is only when our soul awakens to its significance,
that we truly realise the purpose of our existence. When we are not in touch
with it, we are spiritually dead. “As the thousand years of the yew-tree are
equivalent in value to the hour of the rose’s perfection, so it is not duration
that matters. It is that quality and intensity of life which, if it exists for
one moment, exists for all time.” 5 A People without history are
not, on that account free from the bondage of time; on the other hand “they
lack the redeeming benefit of those moments of inspiration which marks the
greatness of a people, moments in which history triumphs over time. For
“history is the field of the operation of the spirit”. It is not a sequence of
events in time but a pattern of timeless moments. The historic moment, the
moment of choice is always here. It is now, in England, on a winter afternoon
when the light fails in the secluded chapel of Little Gidding. When we awaken
to the call of eternal Love which is always near, we realise that life is an
unceasing process of exploration, and the purpose of all this exploration is to
arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. We are thus back
again in the rose-garden (of Burnt Norton), passing through the first
gate into the Earthly Paradise, which is our First World, the world where we
should rightfully live, though it is the last to be discovered in our earthly
existence. The source of the longest river, the voice of the hidden waterfall,
and the laughter of the children concealed in the Apple trees in the Rose
Garden are all symbols, whose significance we do not fully appreciate, only
because we do not look for it. But this significance flashes across our mind in
those moments of stillness, those ‘virgin moments’, when we feel suddenly
emancipated from the sequence of sense-impressions that beat upon our
consciousness with the unceasing regularity of the waves of the sea. In those
moments, “effort and exploration are forgotten in the sense of the given. We
realise that living is the discovery of the already known, and beginning and
end are one.” The moment of illumination may come any time, quick and sudden
like the darting of a bird. It is a condition of complete simplicity, of
perfect wholeness; but it costs the previous surrender of every earthly
attachment. When we experience this condition, the sense of discord and
conflict between earthly desire and spiritual satisfaction is resolved in the
realisation of the unity of creation and its unreserved and tranquil
acceptance. The rose that is the symbol of natural love and beauty, we realise,
becomes one with the fire, the love by which all things are created; when the
tongues of flame of the Holy Spirit, having fulfilled their purpose, are
infolded in their source, into a crowned knot symbolising the Trinity.
1 Stephen
Spender.
2
Helen Gardner.
3 We
are publishing only one of the Quartets–‘Little Gidding’–as paraphrased by
Prof. Hoskot.
–Editor,
‘Triveni’.
4
“When the fire and strength of our soul are sprinkled with the blood of the Lamb,
then its fire becomes a fire of light and its strength is changed into a
strength of triumphing love.”
5 “The apprehension of love and the apprehension of
death are of equal validity, both being an apprehension of life.”
–H. Gardner