Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot

First published: 1943

Type of work: Poetry

The Work

Four Quartets is T. S. Eliot’s last book of nondramatic poetry. Each of the quartets, which were written over a period of eight years and published separately, has the same structure and helps develop cumulatively the same themes. Eliot said that transitions in poetry can be similar to those in a symphony or quartet, and that these quartets are written in a five-movement sonata form.

The personal and historical significance of the place names in the poems’ titles are the points of departure for the themes developed in the first part of each quartet. The theme of “Burnt Norton”—an old Gloucestershire house—is the nature of time and personal memories and experience. “East Coker,” which is the name of the English village from which Eliot’s ancestor left for America in the seventeenth century, is a consideration of the meaning of history and an explanation of the idea of spiritual rebirth. “The Dry Salvages,” a group of rocks off the coast of Massachusetts, which Eliot knew as a boy, continues the meditations on time and history and includes reflections on human endeavor and the nature of experience. These themes are all also present in “Little Gidding,” whose title refers to an Anglican lay community founded by Nicholas Ferrar.

All the themes are present in each quartet with different emphases, and the subsidiary themes are directly related to the major ones. What distinguishes these poems from Eliot’s earlier verse is that, in addition to the elements of surprise and rapid transition that mark his earlier works, these include transitional passages. The same symbols also occur in each of the quartets, and their multiple and shifting meanings are resolved in “Little Gidding.”

In “Burnt Norton,” Eliot writes, “What might have been and what has been / Point to one end which is always present.” Here there is no placing of experience in time (“do not call it fixity”); it is instead a “stillness,” a point beyond experience “into the rose garden.” To reach it requires the negation of flesh and spirit. Eliot repeatedly considers this way of purgation, which requires release from desire and compulsion. Meaningful experience is both in and out of time, but life is too full of distraction for this to be often attained. The description of that distraction is a vivid realization of the contemporary predicament: “Only a flicker / Over the strained, time-ridden faces / Distracted from distraction by distraction.” The passage following these lines presents “the way down” toward the dark night of the soul, “desiccation of the world of sense.” However, there are times in the realm of art when the moment can be prolonged “as a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in its stillness.” A further theme in the quartets, the nature and difficulty of poetic creation, creates a contrast to the image of the jar. The struggle with words that “decay with imprecision” introduces the Word, which is subject always to temptation. “Burnt Norton” ends with a repetition of the vision of hidden children laughing in the rose garden, a motif from the first movement. Such immediacy is contrasted with the usual bleakness of existence.

Time in “East Coker” involves the consideration of human history. This, the most despairing of the quartets, approaches complete and unredeemed bitterness. Eliot stresses the cyclic nature of life and experience. Fields give way to factories that crumble to dust, and the life cycle of humans and the earth is presented as if in a vision after the poet has gone down the dark lane into the somnolent village. The second section begins with a lyric on November, which is followed by a characteristic reversal: “That was a way of putting it . . . / A periphrastic study in a wornout poetical fashion.” The theme of the bitterness and deception of time mentioned in “Burnt Norton” is expanded here; the wisdom of old men is really folly, and “the only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility.” The concrete description, which in these poems always either immediately follows or precedes the abstract thought, is that of the descent into subways that had been used as air-raid shelters during World War II. Thus negation and stillness are combined, and the necessity for “waiting” is introduced.

The fourth movement is a lyric on the Christian paradox of life in death and death in life. The symbols are those of a hospital with a wounded surgeon and a dying nurse, “wherein, if we do well, we shall / Die of the absolute paternal care.” Fire and roses are multiple symbols of destruction and salvation, purgation and resurrection. After the cold fever of death there is purgatory, “of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.” In the fifth section, Eliot despairs of poetic creation, which, at “every attempt / Is a wholly new start” because the difficulties once conquered are no longer those that face the poet. The resolution of this dilemma is similar to that for the soul: “For us there is only the trying.” The conclusion inverts the opening statement—“in my beginning is my end”—to become “in my end is my beginning.”

The superb pictures of the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean in “The Dry Salvages” show an increase in the music of the verse, which is sustained in “Little Gidding.” The river is “a strong brown god” and the sea has “many gods and many voices.” The sea time “is not our time”; “time stops and is never ending.” The lyric in section 2 speaks of the grief of shipwreck and of those things thought “most reliable” that are “therefore the fittest for renunciation.” There is no end to this pain, only the possibility of prayer.

The pattern of the past with its content of meaningful experience is seen here in its historical perspective: “And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning / We can assign to happiness.” This passage connects with the reference to Krishna in section 3, one of the many allusions to and quotations of other authors in Four Quartets. The theory of time is drawn from the philosopher Heraclitus and part of the conclusion of “Little Gidding” from Dame Julian of Norwich. The rose and fire symbolism is reminiscent of Dante, whereas the conception of the dark night of the soul is that of St. John of the Cross. While awareness of these sources adds considerably to the enjoyment of the poems, Eliot integrates them so completely and controls their place in the poetry so perfectly, placing them where they have an exact significance, that the poems can be appreciated and understood without knowledge of source or influence. The poet Krishna is mentioned by name, however, and his words, “fare forward, voyagers” instead of “fare well” are important, as they indicate the essential release from desires and are an exhortation to unselfishness or selflessness.

Section 5 contains the meaning of the explanation of time’s paradoxical aspects: “But to apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / With time, is an occupation for the saint.” The images of flowers, sunlight, and music, which have recurred throughout these poems, symbolize ordinary human experiences that, although fragmentary, nevertheless are “hints of grace”: “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.”

The resolution of themes in “Little Gidding” is accomplished by semirepetitive exposition and further development. The chapel at Little Gidding is a place “where prayer has been valid.” Eliot also explains the many allusions to writers and saints and saints who were writers as “the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.” The death of the four elements in section 2 opens the way to spiritual resurrection. This lyric is followed by the poet’s meeting, after an air raid, with a “familiar compound ghost”—the shade of all his past teachers—who tells him of the grief and failure of old age “unless restored by that refining fire / Where you must move in measure like a dancer.” The historical theme is restated in the relationship of the present and the past as a reconciliation of opposites: “History may be servitude, / History may be freedom,” while “whatever we inherit from the fortunate / We have taken from the defeated.” The solution of the dilemma of the burden of divine care for humanity, so bleakly felt in “East Coker,” is here seen to be love, which binds us in our desires and alone is able to give the essential release from them.

The end of exploration, of the struggle with words and of all human actions “will be to arrive where we started / And to know the place for the first time.” The moments of personal and historical experience are never lost:

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew treeAre of equal duration. A people without historyIs not redeemed from time, for history is a patternOf timeless moments.

The way of purgation, which requires the whole being, has led to “complete simplicity” where “the fire and the rose are one.”

For all its complexity, Four Quartets contains Eliot’s most explicit poetry. The poems are specifically Christian, recording the progress of the soul toward salvation. The way in which the themes are at various levels interwoven to augment and illuminate one another, the control of language and rhythm, and the beauty and precision of the images have led some critics to call these quartets Eliot’s finest achievement.

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