I won’t often devote this column to poetry. Since much of the best poetry is written in shorter forms, it doesn’t really fall within the scope of a “great books” column. (Though, even as I write this, it occurs to me that I may have to write about handfuls of poems by Stevens, Wilbur, and others, someday.) But, I could not long put off writing about T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, for me the best long poem of the English language of the 20th century.

Though I first studied the poem in college — emphasis on “studied”, which doesn’t always mean “experience” or “appreciate” — my first encounter with Four Quartets took place while being chased by fierce thunderstorms across Interstate 70 in Kansas in the early evening. (I learned the next day that I had been surrounded by tornados!) I had put in a cassette recording I’d made off an LP of Four Quartets being read by Sir Alec Guinness.

No, the incredible impression the poem made on me at the time had nothing to do with Obi Wan Kenobi. Guinness’ delivery, though, seems the perfect voice for this poem, much more earnest and spiritually aware than Eliot’s own weary, almost defeated delivery. (The recording is hard to find, but well worth the search. Highly recommended.)

From the beginning, I was captivated by the cadence, the imagery, and the playful, seeking nature of the words. It’s impossible to quote anything less than the whole of the first section:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

                              But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

                        Other echoes

Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,

Round the corner. Through the first gate,

Into our first world, shall we follow

The deception of the thrush Into our first world.

There they were, dignified, invisible,

Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,

In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,

And the bird called, in response to

The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,

And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses

Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.

So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,

Along the empty alley, into the box circle,

To look down into the drained pool.

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,

And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,

The surface glittered out of heart of light,

And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.

Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Hamlet is the play, they say, with the greatest number of memorable lines. For me, there’s not a single unmemorable line in what you’ve just read (more than once, and out loud, is recommended).

Perhaps the greatest conundrum of human existence is time, its evanescence balanced by its relentlessness. We can only understand it in the presence of things, such as the “drained pool,” itself a metaphor for time; and we can only understand things in the context of time, their creation, existence, and passing. And, beyond that, most crucially, is what we cannot see or hear or experience as duration, what those of a spiritual bent, “the unseen eyebeam”, perpetually seek: “for the roses/Had the look of flowers that are looked at”. For Eliot, as he says later in Burnt Norton, we can only find that “at the still point of the turning world”, where time and being eternally intersect.

Eliot wrote Burnt Norton in the relative serenity of the mid-30’s. The three remaining long poems that make up Four Quartets — East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding — were written during World War II and with the air-bombardment of London in the background.

In my beginning is my end. In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass,

Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,

Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth

Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,

Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

Here, a description of what would appear to be the natural cycle of creation and destruction, only hints at the larger context. This is not a poem about the war, as such, but clearly the war is at the heart of lines such as this.

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,

The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,

Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,

And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha

And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,

And cold the sense and lost the motive of action,

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,

Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.

Such moments of lucid despair are soon followed by a return to the spiritual seeking which is the great theme of Four Quartets.

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise.  In my end is my beginning.

At the heart of the third poem, The Dry Salvages, Eliot confronts the existential notion of “right action” in a world whose contradictions we can never fully understand. He draws upon the Hindu teachings of Krishna.

“Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;

You are not those who saw the harbour

Receding, or those who will disembark.

Here between the hither and the farther shore

While time is withdrawn, consider the future

And the past with an equal mind.

At the moment which is not of action or inaction

You can receive this: ‘on whatever sphere of being

The mind of a man may be intent

At the time of death’ – that is the one action

(And the time of death is every moment)

Which shall fructify in the lives of others:

And do not think of the fruit of action.

Fare forward,                       

O voyagers, O seamen,

You who came to port, and you whose bodies

Will suffer the trial and judgment of the sea,

Or whatever event, this is your real destination.”

So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna

On the field of battle,                                       

Not fare well,

But fare forward, voyagers.

But, though it is essential for us not to despair, and to “fare forward,” Eliot brings some light and hope into the equation — assuming that we remain committed to the challenge.

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is

Incarnation. Here the impossible union

Of spheres of evidence is actual,

Here the past and future

Are conquered, and reconciled,

Where action were otherwise movement

Of that which is only moved

And has in it no source of movement-

Driven by daemonic, chthonic

Powers. And 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.

In the final poem, Little Gidding, after describing death by air, fire, and water, Eliot meets “some dead master”, who may be Christ or some other spiritual guide from the past. What follows is a brief sermon, which leads the entire poem back to lines reminiscent of the beginning of Burnt Norton.

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.

Only there is a new tone, one of comfort and reasurrance. The children of the rose garden have returned, accompanied by the redemptive image of Pentecostal fire.

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.

Published in 1944, Four Quartets — four poems in five sections each — is less than 50 pages long. I’ve quoted enough of it here, I hope, to convince you to read the entire work. While written by a devoted Christian, it is spiritual without being preachy, its language deeply influenced by Eastern religions. No poem has given me greater solace or hope in the face of what is unknown and unknowable.

Other recommend works: The Waste Land and other Poems.

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Christopher Guerin

Christopher Guerin is the author of two books each of poetry and short fiction, a novel, and more than a dozen children’s books. If he hadn’t spent 26 years as an arts administrator, including 20 years as President of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, perhaps he’d have worked a little harder getting them published. His consolation resides in his fiction and poems having been published in numerous small magazines, including Rosebud, AURA, Williams and Mary Review, Midwest Quarterly, Wittenberg Review, RE: Artes Liberales, DEROS, Wind, and Wind less Orchard. His blog, Zealotry of Guerin, features his fiction and poetry, including his sonnet sequence of poems after paintings, “Brushwork." He is the V.P. of Corporate Communications at Sweetwater Sound, Inc., the national music instrument retailer.

Latest posts by Christopher Guerin (Posts)

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