(poems, 1943)
Sometimes music can reflect ideas and feelings that words simply cannot express. And sometimes, when poetry reaches its highest level, it can function almost like music—moving the reader with a transcendent force beyond our comprehension. T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets borrows its title from a musical form, and it offers up poetry that expresses some of the deepest universal human realities with the musicality of poetic expression. These are poems filled with images drawn from deep wells of the remembered and the half-remembered, meditations on the nature of time and memory, and ruminations on human frailty, suffering, and the nature of a living faith. Many readers have found them to be not only resplendent poems but also aids to meditation and prayer, as they seem to find ways to almost say the unsayable and provide glimpses of universal spiritual experiences and moments of enlightenment.
Occasionally an ordinary experience—a sight or sound or smell—can trigger a sense of being swept into a timeless moment, a place where time stands still and the breath of eternity rustles through our hearts and minds. Eliot’s Four Quartets both records and arouses such mystical moments. These are meditative poems that wed the musicality of words with profound spiritual insight to awaken a connection with something—ultimately Someone—who transcends time.
Four Quartets opens with just such an experience in “Burnt Norton,” where the poet’s stroll through a garden triggers memories that open up and alter the nature of how time is experienced. When we consider how time is experienced, perhaps it might be helpful to think in terms of the difference between the two common Greek words for time, as Eliot seems to be making just such a distinction. Chronos is time that unfolds in a linear fashion, moving forward with each tick of the clock, ever new and ever disappearing. Kairos is time as something eternal, lasting, and permanent; it is “the appointed time” when an eternal present manifests itself in the now. In Eliot’s poems we experience this present as a presence, when God meets us in the moment. This is the “still point” to which Eliot points in the poems, the place where past and future are gathered together and where time merges with the timeless—where there is “a lifetime burning in every moment.”
Four Quartets cannot fully be understood without reference to Eliot’s Christian convictions. Throughout the poems there are phrases and ideas that are borrowed from traditional Christian mystical writers such as Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, and the anonymous medieval author of The Cloud of Unknowing. These writers stressed the inadequacy of words and images to help us grasp the spiritual realm. They thought it was necessary to move beyond thoughts, feelings, and experiences and reach out to God in “naked faith,” detaching the soul from the specific and knowable and traveling onward in faith through experiences of darkness, confusion, and unknowing. Only in this way, they believed, can our illusions be stripped away and we become able to open ourselves to the deepest connection with God.
The paradox, as Eliot saw it, is this: words are always inadequate to the task of speaking about the deepest truths, but they are the sole means to communicate what we have experienced. As Eliot reminds us, “Words strain / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place.”1 The problem with language is that it is a prisoner of time (chronos), so we must understand its limitations when it speaks of the sacred moment (kairos).
Eliot puts little trust in human wisdom to help us break the cycles of time. In his earlier poem “The Waste Land,” he offers a dreary, chilling portrait of our collective human frailty. In Four Quartets he asserts that help must come from outside time, as it did in the incarnation and the atoning work of Jesus. Christ is the “wounded surgeon” whose flesh and blood convey the only true healing for the human condition. For our part, we must detach ourselves from our preoccupations with both past and future and embrace the ways that God comes to us in the present—in the moments of revelation, the “hints and guesses” we occasionally experience when that reality from outside time breaks into time.
Since the human condition can only be healed from outside of time, no social or political strategies can cure the disease from which humanity suffers. We must, instead, realize our own weakness, embrace humility, and practice the discipline of faith in order to receive the offered healing. The church, for Eliot, was the community of those who—however imperfectly—witness to the reality of a Time beyond time. He saw the rituals of the devotional life (prayer, meditation, the Eucharist, worship, and service) as a force for personal and societal transformation, vessels through which the living water was poured out; the timeless becoming part of our experience of time. It is in this that we can hope, and what these poems point toward. As Eliot says, quoting Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, to a family who were a sort of Midwestern aristocracy. Their brand of Unitarianism was essentially an ethical humanism that stressed hard work, thrift, and public service; it was a religion of high ideals and sacrificial service with little emphasis on personal piety or supernatural belief. Eliot, though, found an example of more traditional Christianity in the much-loved Irish nursemaid who was hired to look after the Eliot children. She was a devout Catholic who took the young Eliot to mass and engaged in conversations with him about matters of faith.
Eliot’s exceptional intelligence was apparent early on, and his family encouraged it by introducing him to classic literature and supporting his educational endeavors. He attended Harvard, where he excelled in his studies, and before concluding his graduate work he spent the years 1910–11 in Paris. Paris had held a fascination for him ever since he had read a book on the Symbolist movement in literature, a movement that called for poets to abandon traditional realism and embrace a more spiritual and symbolic vocabulary. When he returned from Paris, Eliot finished up at Harvard with studies of philosophy and Eastern religious thought. As an avocation, he immersed himself in a study of the Christian mystics. Though he had little religious conviction of his own at this point, he had a strong sense of human imperfection and a desire to find a way to overcome the limitations of human nature. His early poems from this period show him attracted to ideas such as mortification and asceticism.
In 1914 he moved to England, which would become his permanent home, and settled into a life of working as a bank clerk by day and writing poems and hobnobbing with the literary elite by night. His guide to this new life, and also his poetic mentor, was author Ezra Pound, who helped polish Eliot’s style and did a major surgical edit on his important early poem “The Waste Land” (1922).
Read in retrospect, the ideas and images of “The Waste Land” seem like a natural step in Eliot’s progression toward faith and his growing dissatisfaction with living in a world without God. This poem was widely and enthusiastically embraced as an example of modernism, and made him an overnight literary celebrity. In part a reflection on the fractured state of civilization in post–World War I Europe, it was also a deeply philosophical meditation on a culture that had collapsed in upon itself—a civilization without roots, purpose, meaning, or any of the things that made human beings truly human. It was a Dantean vision of an earthly Inferno, of a culture hopeless and dark and spiritless, characterized by crass materialism, vulgarity, lifelessness, and the desperate search for new sensations to overcome the boredom of life. The poem’s fractured form mirrored its content, and its creative expression of these concerns announced that a major poet had arrived on the scene. Its influence on subsequent modern poetry is almost incalculable.
Eliot joined the Anglican church in 1927. Unfortunately, he left no record of the intellectual and spiritual journey he traveled to reach this conclusion, but we can assume that his perception of original sin and human corruption played a major part. His baptism was performed privately in the presence of a few friends in order not to attract publicity, but in time he saw the need for a public declaration of his decision. He did this not by any autobiographical testimony but by appreciative essays on religious thinkers such as Pascal and Lancelot Andrews, and by poems such as “The Journey of the Magi” (1927), “Ash Wednesday” (1930), and the longer verse drama, The Rock (1934).
Eliot also produced a good deal of literary and cultural criticism, which reached a smaller audience but clearly reflected his Christian convictions. What was missing in much of modern literature, he said, was a sense of sin. Instead of the struggle of the soul with sin and guilt on the part of their characters, most modern novelists relied upon experiences of heightened emotionalism as the motivating force in their books. For this reason, Eliot considered much of modern literature to be “spiritually sick,” trying to exist outside of any tradition and dependent upon various unreliable forms of “inner light.”
T. S. Eliot believed humanity’s best hope was in rediscovering the values and traditions upon which we could construct a truly Christian culture, one that was realistic about the flawed nature of humans and the danger of unchecked individualism, and that embraced the hope that could be found in practicing an intellectually responsible Christianity in community with other believers. However insightful such criticisms might be, though, Eliot will be best remembered for the way he was able to bring spiritual experiences alive in his poems, and his gift for using the imprecision of words to arouse something deep and eternal within the souls of his readers—a Time outside of time.