“The End of All Our Exploring”: The Gift Half Understood and Four Quartets
Abstract: Understanding the meaning and significance of Incarnation—the universal pattern of which the Incarnation of God in human flesh stands as paradigmatic instance—sheds valuable new light on The Waste Land. Reading the earlier poem not so much through the perspective of Four Quartets as with the later work as an other, critical, eye confirms the wastelanders’ mistake in seeking water to relieve their plight (instead of fire). At the same time, our new awareness of the satirical character of the earlier poem alerts us to problems with some of the speakers in Four Quartets, especially the lyrical voices in the fourth sections and thus enables a fresh understanding of the thematic and rhetorical uses of writing as subject in the fifth and final sections.
Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot and the Failure to Connect: Satire and Modern Misunderstandings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137364692.
Incarnation is a form of paradox, and at the same time so much more. Eliot defines it simply, eloquently, succinctly in “The Dry Salvages,” third of Four Quartets: “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.”1 Pointedly omitting the expected definite article before “Incarnation,” he deconfines that paradox, making it a timeless, universal pattern of which the historical event—of the “impossible union” of God and man, transcendence and immanence—stands as the paradigmatic instance. By insisting on our “half” guessing correctly and only “half” understanding, Eliot returns us, with difference, to such two-ness as marks The Waste Land, some twenty years before.
In Four Quartets, “fire” wins out, the necessary refining or purifying force, which is not to be confused, although it often is, with the pagan notion of purgation. The dead speak with “flames of fire,” and the last line of the poem reads, “And the fire and the rose are one.” In that vein, the “familiar compound ghost,” in “Little Gidding,” makes clear that we must be “restored by that refining fire / Where you must move in measure, like a dancer”—every word here charged with meaning.
The clearest depiction of fire—as well as the most surprising, in a part built around the unexpected—is the fourth, lyrical section of “Little Gidding.” The “dove” familiarly symbolizes the Holy Ghost, but here represents the German Nazi Luffwaffe in its horrible nightly descents upon London, whose streets the poet patrolled as fire warden: “incandescent terror.” Yet the speaker declares it the “one discharge from sin and error,” adding that our only hope—otherwise we face despair—is to “be redeemed from fire by fire.” Thus faced with far greater—physical, material—horror than that existential sort immediately enveloping the wastelanders, including the speaker of The Waste Land, the speaker here engages in neither hand-wringing nor lament, but instead accepts—without resignation—fire as that through which we must proceed. We all have a “choice.” This poem goes further, connecting fire with “rose”: it is “Love” that “devised the torment.” Rather than relief, cessation, or transcendence, the speaker here, the virtual opposite of him in The Waste Land, looks not for metaphorical “water” but for perspective. His is faith that “Love” in an incident of supreme paradox provided the “fire” as the medium in, through, and by means of which we may come to salvation. In this sense, here at least, Four Quartets appears to play positive to the negative that is The Waste Land.
In connecting with the other passage, the lyrical section of “East Coker” expands on the implications of this embrace of “fire” and figures a whole set of issues with which we need be concerned. The pattern observed above is repeated as the speaker avers that, if he is “to be warmed,” then he has to freeze “And quake in frigid purgatorial fires.” The lyric of which this stanza is a part is an unexpected allegory apparently “straight,” perhaps intended to accentuate the paradoxes being described. That the warmth mentioned comes indirectly, from having proceeded through its opposite, rather than straight through fire, is but one of the paradoxes on which the lyric is built. These verses constitute the most straightforward rendition we can find of the essential theme and structure: a “wounded surgeon” is represented at work, and, beneath “bleeding hands” there can be observed “The sharp compassion of the healer’s art.” This is as close as Four Quartets comes to mentioning the Person of the paradigmatic paradox. The lyric continues with a perhaps surprising reference to the Church as a nurse who is “dying,” while twice repeated is the essential pattern by which the disease appears as our “only health” and our “sickness” as the medium for our restoration. The anti-latitudinarian focus of this position rings loud and clear, a God of Thunder working to make things difficult for us. We can then see the connection with the representation in “Little Gidding” of “Love” as devising “the torment,” even unto the strafing by the “dark dove.” Everything here, all of the earth, is seen as “our hospital,” itself said to be “endowed by the ruined millionaire” (presumably Adam). If, in any case, “we do well,” then we will (still) die, yet we will be in the hands of “absolute paternal care,” and it will “not leave us” in “[preventing] us everywhere.” The lyric moves to conclusion with verses only somewhat easier for the human heart to feel and the flesh to endure: “The dripping blood our only drink, / The bloody flesh our only food.”
What ultimately matters, in such representations throughout Four Quartets, is the structure that governs, the pattern that gives them meaning. Indeed, “Burnt Norton” establishes definitively that “Only by the form, the pattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness,” the “detail of the pattern” being “movement.” In the concluding section of “The Dry Salvages,” the governing pattern in our world is revealed in especially clear fashion—which, incidentally, mirrors the events being described: the universal and timeless pattern, by definition, has always been available to humankind, though it took the appearance of God in human form, flesh and blood, for that pattern to be seen with absolute clarity, to be available for full understanding. The critical statement is the first below, the simple, declarative statement resplendent with meaning, including the repetition of “half” and the (surprising) omission of the definite article before the defining term “Incarnation,” itself now revealed as pattern, the pattern identified as Incarnational: “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.” Here is “the impossible union” of past and future, time and timelessness. Philosophy (or theology) and poetry meet, intersect here.
Despite the almost extreme clarity of these definitive words, the idea of “Incarnation” proves extraordinarily difficult to grasp—at least if my students, graduate and undergraduate alike, are at all representative of readers struggling (another paradox: for Eliot seems to make things clear, at least to attentive, sympathetic, and responsible reading). Such difficulty Eliot expected, for he spends several verses approaching the poem’s climactic statement, acknowledging our burden to understand and suggesting that no direct apprehension is possible. After verses detailing the wastelander-like wish to “haruspicate or scry,” themselves “Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press,” he says, “Men’s curiosity searches past and future / And clings to that dimension.” Necessary is something different, involving the meeting of the two: the “intersection of the timeless / With time,” which is said to be “an occupation for the saint,” although it is really no “occupation” but “something given” and that in a “lifetime’s death in love / Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.” We are, hardly any of us, saint-like (“Sin is Behovely,” says “Little Gidding”), assuming with the (satirized) first speaker in Ash-Wednesday that “time is always time / And place is always and only place / And what is actual is actual only for one time / And only for one place.”2 But with Incarnation, each moment is “attended” (and “burning with meaning”), timelessness within time—thus a whole new and fresh interpretation of the relation of two: most of us experience only “unattended” moments, those “in and out of time.” But the poem also suggests incorporation, with no (absolute) separation, such that music becomes not something “heard,” for you and it are absorbed into one another, disparate things fused, amalgamated, you become it. Still, says Eliot, not at all with resignation, “These are only hints and guesses,” indeed “Hints followed by guesses.” The rest requires great effort, namely “prayer, observance, discipline and action.” Repeated then is the line regarding the character of Incarnation. “Half” guessed, “half” understood, is precise; it does not mean “partly” or “partially”: we understand one of the two involved, not their “concorde,” their “necessarye coniunction,” their “impossible union.”
Four Quartets is also about writing, the explicit subject of each of the fifth and final sections. In fact, the poem seems to be, in addition, about the writing of Four Quartets itself.
When it comes to writing about “the gift half understood,” the problems we have observed regarding comprehension become severely magnified. The problems begin with, but are by no means limited to, the nature of language. “Burnt Norton” says, after declaring that only by means of pattern can words “reach / The stillness,” that they “strain,” “crack,” “sometimes break”; they also “slip, slide,” decay, do not “stay in place” or stay still. If this were not enough, there is the fact of their liability before “Shrieking voices / Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,” thus “assail[ing]” them. Furthermore come “voices of temptation.”
In this situation, Eliot does not hide his own difficulties in writing here. Indeed, on occasion, the poem becomes self-conscious. In “East Coker,” for instance, he acknowledges in the first verse paragraph of the second section, “That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory”; it was a “periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,” and it leaves us to wrestle, intolerably, with words and their meanings. As to “the poetry,” it “does not matter,” not being what we expected. The dismissal of “the poetry” here not just surprises but causes the reader to have a second thought or two about the veracity and reliability of the voices being heard in this poem too. The voice in “East Coker,” in any case, writes a bit further on, “You say I am repeating / Something I have said before. I shall say it again. / Shall I say it again?” At the beginning of this poem’s fifth section, this speaker—whom we take to be Eliot—directly addresses the matter of words, writing autobiographically and acknowledging his particular struggle with words—he certainly sounds like Old Possum: in “the middle way,” having lived through twenty years between two wars, years “largely wasted,” as he tried to “learn to use words.” Every effort was, though, both a new beginning and “a different kind of failure,” for “one has only learnt to get the better of words / For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which / One is no longer disposed to say it.” Later, in “Little Gidding,” the encounter with the “familiar compound ghost” produces the humbling “gifts reserved for age / To set a crown upon your lifetime’s efforts”; in Eliot’s case, “our concern was speech, and speech impelled us / To purify the dialect of the tribe / And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight.”
Attentive to the poet’s difficulties, and the nature and condition of words with which we work, we can hardly neglect to think again of the difficulties that Eliot says attach to understanding “the gift half understood.” While no reason appears to doubt or even to question the representation of Incarnation in “The Dry Salvages,” we cannot be sure about the treatment elsewhere in Four Quartets of its implications and “applicability.”
It is clear that despite respective similarities, neither the epigraphs to “Burnt Norton” from Heraclitus, repeated in the verses themselves, nor the long excursus from Krishna in “The Dry Salvages” matches up with Incarnational understanding. As a specific case in point concerning intended attempts to represent Incarnation, return to the lyrical section of “East Coker” and in particular the speaker’s claim there that “If to be warmed, then I must freeze / And quake in frigid purgatorial fires.” I have said, though, that purgation is a pagan notion, which makes of it a simple transcendence and which is therefore distinct from the Christian idea of purification or refinement.
Alerted to a possible misreading or misunderstanding of Incarnation by the speaker, I take a harder look at this entire lyric, indeed each of the lyrical sections in Four Quartets. Hints—evidently reliable—throughout the poems confirm the necessity of so doing. The poem is replete with the closest distinctions, deriving from the felt urgency to get it right in the face of nearly overwhelming difficulties, threatening to abuse our understanding. “We are only undeceived,” says “East Coker,” “Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.” Furthermore, “There is, it seems to us, / At best, only a limited value / In the knowledge derived from experience” (but, to complicate matters even more, does the phrase “it seems to us” point to at best a partial understanding by “us” that puts the conclusion in serious question?). So prone are we to error, so likely are deception and misapprehension, that the speaker said to his soul, “be still, and wait without hope,” for he would be hoping for the wrong thing, just as he would be loving the wrong thing. Wait, too, he says, without thought, “for you are not ready for thought.” So, he concludes, “the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” Does this last verse speak truth?
It begins to appear that, like The Waste Land, Four Quartets is at least at times a negative instrument. As well, there is, among other questionable matters, the compound ghost’s insistence on “motives late revealed, and the awareness / Of things ill done and done to others’ harm,” the result being that “From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit / Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire / Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’” With so many difficulties, so many obstacles to understanding, so much likelihood that we must produce the very opposite of what we intend, it is essential that, as Ash-Wednesday puts it, we “be mindful” (“Sovegna vos”). Indeed, Four Quartets follows from, and expands upon, the prayer at the end of that earlier poem: “Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood.”
And so I return to the lyrical allegory in “East Coker”—with trepidation and scepticism. To me, frankly, something has never seemed quite right about it, its extreme ease surely being part of my dis-ease. Like the pathetic, bathetic lines in the fifth poem of Ash-Wednesday concerning the noise that virtually drowns out both words and the Word, these lines evince no great skill or poetic craft. The metaphors, and thus the allegorical architecture, are trite at best: Christ as “the wounded surgeon,” the earth as “our hospital,” Adam as “the ruined millionaire.” “Loaded” takes the place of “charged” in the references to “the bleeding hands” and “the enigma of the fever chart.” There is, in the same vein, the bland, general, and emotionally sanguine and smug assurance that, “if we do well, we shall / Die of the absolute paternal care / That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.”
Admittedly, some of the observations—better, “reflections”—seem spot-on, among them the paradox of “sharp compassion.” But I have to wonder whether simplification is not being shown as well, Incarnation in the process reduced to a neat one-to-one equivalency: is “Our only health . . . the disease”? Is that what Incarnation means? Is that what Eliot is saying? It is far different to say, pace Heraclitus, who believes that “the way up is the way down,” that the way up cannot be separated from the way down and that it is, in fact, in, through, and by means of the way down that you proceed upward.
Inevitably, we come to the last stanza of this lyric, part of which I quoted earlier: again, a reductive equivalency appears, along with a certain gratuitously gory representation. The first two verses, read as uttered, appear reductive, claiming that “The dripping blood [is] our only drink, / The bloody flesh our only food.” And yet we persist in thinking ourselves “sound, substantial flesh and blood,” and even so, “we call this Friday good.” “This Friday”? There has been no such mention, let alone identification. The repetitions are clumsy at best, “sound” is general and vague, and the claim that we assume we are “substantial flesh and blood” feels odd coming after the first two verses in the stanza, leading me to think that we are being made into self-devourers, cannibals, in fact.
From this lyric, I go to that we have already looked at in “Little Gidding.” With the dove “breaking the air” and engaging in discharge, a reader is inclined to think of the flesh-and-blood human breaking wind and moving his bowels. That is extreme, I realize, . . . and yet . . . . Still, I will not press the matter. But how about the first verse of the second stanza, with its odd syntax and shape—“Who then devised the torment? Love.” Surely, though, the preceding line, at least, gets it right, yes? Have I not been affirming that we choose our “pyre,” “redeemed from fire by fire”? That is, redeemed from the fire of lust “By the purification of the motive / In the ground of our beseeching”? And yet—the last verses of the second stanza appear to say something other, different: “We only live, only suspire / Consumed by either fire or fire.” Is “consumed” the right word for what happens with the “expanding / Of love beyond desire”?
And finally, can that “dark dove” bringing fire and destruction really be said to offer, indirectly of course, as a mediator, our redemption? If “Love” devises “the torment,” is that an instance of God “prevent[ing]” us everywhere? Possibly. But necessarily? Has the speaker here, whoever he is, surrendered to the extreme, thereby simplifying Incarnation—much as the later Ariel Poem The Cultivation of Christmas Trees rebukes “the piety of the convert”?
Delicacy is surely required of the reader-interpreter here. Bad things, even horrific ones, can and do provide opportunities to learn particularly about oneself and to change. To that content, the lyric is right. The problem is one of tone; for this speaker, response seems too pat, with precisely no acknowledgment of the extreme horror being daily and indiscriminately visited upon innocent children, women, and men. Delicacy on his part would make a great difference. In a way, the causative horror has been transcended, disconnected from an alleged positive effect.
It would appear to matter that a section on writing immediately follows these lyrics. We are asked as readers, I believe, to compare the two sections, in fact to consider that one on writing as commentary on and judgment of the lyrical outburst. Consider the fifth section of “East Coker,” which begins, as we have seen, with a lament from the poet—whose voice is different from that in IV—concerning twenty years wasted, each of his attempts to write “a different kind of failure.” He acknowledges then the “shabby equipment always deteriorating / In the general mess of feeling, / Undisciplined squads of emotion.” Despite the felt differences in voice, these words appear designed as a critique of the preceding lyric.
There follows a concluding verse paragraph in “East Coker” that represents recovery of essential understanding: the speaker had said, a few lines above, that “There is only the fight to recover what has been lost / And found and lost again and again.” Thus different from the lyric poet, the poet here says, speaking from Incarnational understanding, that as we age, we find the world less familiar, “the pattern more complicated / Of dead and living.” Instead of an isolated, perhaps epiphantic, and certainly “unattended” moment, we realize, possibly, and quite differently, “a lifetime burning in every moment.” An “attended” moment is Incarnational. Differently, the lyric poet has said, not that disease “attends” health, and health disease, but that “Our only health is the disease” (italics now added). The “burning” referred to just above, moreover, is the refining fire that differs from the purgatorial.
In like manner, the fifth section of “Little Gidding” helps to render the lyrical fourth problematical. The fourth section might be seen as a test of the reader’s understanding. Here, in “Little Gidding,” in verses that clearly echo the (Incarnational) scene of the Elizabethan rustics engaged in “necessarye coniunction’ (“East Coker” II), we read that every “right” phrase—and Eliot is scrupulous in treating the common word and the formal—and every “right” sentence, defined as one where “every word is at home,” that is, “Taking its place to support the others,” is “an end and a beginning.” He wants “An easy commerce of the old and the new,” with, significantly, allusively “The complete consort dancing together.” Every poem, finally and accordingly, is “an epitaph.” We start from there. But, as I suggested earlier, the opening of the lyric seems precisely to verge (at least) on the vulgar, and I fail to see in its morass of words “The complete consort dancing together.” In fact, rather than “association” or “concorde” there is separation and difference: “pyre or pyre,” “fire or fire” (italics added). Moreover, the last three verses of the first stanza by no means “support” the first four; instead, they constitute an unwarranted inference or unnecessary application. Finally, in the second stanza, the rhymes alone point to the blighting rhyming (in the larger metaphorical sense): “Love,” “wove,” “remove.”
A new Four Quartets, supple and elastic and forever unbreakable, perhaps begins to emerge, poem and reader being “Too strange to each other for misunderstanding.”
The poem owes a great deal to The Waste Land, not least the subtle shades of difference in represented voices. At the same time, The Waste Land owes a great deal to Four Quartets, certainly including the evolving understanding of two that allows the reader to return to the earlier work with fresh capacity for understanding what is (ultimately) involved.
Incarnation names that capacity, central to Four Quartets, central to human being and living in this world (which includes that “other dimension” opened up). Dramatically, Eliot shows that Incarnation is not identity, or equivalency. With binaries, we learn from Incarnation, you always go to one by means of the other. The relation between binaries is thus a matter of extreme subtlety, requiring the most scrupulous attention and precise and exact expression of entailed ideas. Failure to get it right abounds.
A line stretches all the way from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1915 to Four Quartets, published in 1943. Along the hardly rambling but by no means straight way, Eliot never really leaves behind—or transcends—Prufrock’s insightful lament: “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” No doubt rightly, if obsessively, Prufrock fears being misunderstood. Perhaps the most devastating words he can imagine hearing are these, which he repeats: “‘That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.’” Intention and received meaning prove to be another two whose separation very nearly drowns Prufrock.
If it is shockingly hard trying to understand, it is surely at least as much so trying to get it down right in language, which is inevitably slippery and forever subject to manipulation, misuse, and abuse. “Prufrock” focuses on the burden that comes with knowing, Four Quartets with the additional burden that comes with trying—or having—to express in language that vision.
We may thus be able to approach, perhaps for the first time, an understanding why Four Quartets includes a final section in each of the poems having to do with writing and understanding. The poem is about Incarnation, but also about understanding that “gift” and being able to translate the subtle differences it entails into written language where “every phrase / And sentence . . . is right (where every word is at home).” That “home” is where you start from, from, that is, the end.
1 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).
2 T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1930).