Four Quartets: Simulacrum of Being
Abstract: Four Quartets is about not only the “central” Christian dogma of the Incarnation but also the difficulty of understanding it and the difficulty of getting it down right in words that inevitably slip, slide, and refuse to stay still, their meaning by no means guaranteed. As the poem fulfills, and thus completes, the partial understanding in Eliot’s pre-conversion poems, it calls the reader to participate in “forward” movement. Completion occurs only in time, a point that mirrors the Incarnational understanding that the timeless intersects with time, in time, that is.
Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot and the Fulfillment of Christian Poetics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137466259.0003.
The verses in “East Coker” are both mundane and metapoetic, the speaker commenting, in straightforward and prosaic language, on his own just-preceding words: “That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory,” for, he says, it was “A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion” that leaves you “still with the intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings.”1 The following half-verse is especially striking, raising a question or two perhaps never intended: “The poetry does not matter.” We have, of course, long been taught that it does, that what is said is simply inseparable from how it is said.
The enigmatic remark may, though, be more positive than it at first seems: it forces Eliot’s puzzled reader to explore that puzzlement, indeed to consider reliability of speaking voice and validity of declaration. In what sense(s) does the poetry not matter? Or does it make all the difference in the world? Old Possum imposes the questions, requiring that the reader, in the words of Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, “Be mindful” (“Sovegna vos” are his words, indirect as often, the words a quotation in ProvenÇal from the medieval poet Arnaut Daniel, of whom Eliot’s friend Pound thought highly).2
The issue touches on, if it does revolve around, what the conjunction brings together in the subtitle of Eliot’s major volume For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (1928). In his first collection, eight years earlier, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, Eliot had pointed a union of differences and argued the necessity of turning to cultural criticism only after engaging fully in the basic and primary work of reading texts closely and doing literary commentary. The foundation thus being laid in his pre-conversion essays—he formally embraced Anglo-Catholic Christianity with his baptism into the Church of England in 1927, a move that he announced in the preface to the 1928 collection of essays—Eliot brings together in his new book, strategically organized, eight essays on a range of figures, some barely recognizable even 80 years ago, and having a range of historical significance. They begin with two on seventeenth-century Anglican churchmen (Andrewes and John Bramhall) and proceed with a discussion of political and philosophical essayists and of writers of drama and poetry: in order, Machiavelli, F.H. Bradley (the subject of Eliot’s Harvard doctoral dissertation, written but never defended though eventually published), Baudelaire, Thomas Middleton, Richard Crashaw, and Irving Babbitt (the Harvard Orientalist and another of Eliot’s teachers). It appears, at first, to be no more than a random collection, belying the claim of deliberateness made in the preface and perhaps hinted at in the subtitle.
Of course, the “order” Eliot refers to in his subtitle is that both apparent in the writing itself of the eight men chosen for discussion (and elucidation) and figuring critically in their thinking. Thus, in the titular and lead essay, Eliot employs what he has earlier called “the tools of criticism”—comparison and analysis3—to reveal Bishop Andrewes’s poetics of both writing and reading: “squeezing and squeezing a word until it yields a full juice of meaning which we should never have supposed any word to possess,” juxtaposing a word or phrase in its “nearer and more remote contexts,” and adhering to “ordonnance,” that is, structure, form, and order, the whole charged with “intensity.”4
Style, thus, reveals order. More: the two are not only inseparable, but a way also appears in their conjunction (“and”)—their “concord”—that affirms and confirms the argument of The Sacred Wood. That is, the way toward “order” lies in, through, and by means of “style.” A writer’s manner of saying—his or her style—reflects, indeed embodies, an understanding of inner and outer reality represented in his words, their “rhyming,” and their “ordonnance.” It is by means a new or unfamiliar idea; in Eliot it both plays a central role and participates as a crucial part of a whole.
Style would, therefore, appear to be more than Alexander Pope termed “dress” of thought in An Essay on Criticism (1711).5 In other words, the poetry does matter. We are thus back to the contrary assertion in Four Quartets, with elucidation still needed.
And yet—the passage in question in “East Coker”—and especially the bold declaration that “the poetry does not matter”—is like so many others in Four Quartets. It does not, apparently, require analysis, being straightforward and clear. It does require meditation. And that means slowing down, considering, weighing—being mindful (as Ash-Wednesday urges). Indeed, therein may lie Old Possum’s purpose. If we think of “poetry” as signifying the words, then of course it matters. But if, differently, by “poetry” we mean the accoutrements, or “dress,” “style” as ornamentation, then no. Eliot’s concern lies, properly, with “the ancient rhyme”: the word “rhyme” brilliantly captures the entailed paradox, an apparent ornament that is the “dogma” (as the decorative angel atop the Christmas tree is, for the child, an Angel, in the later Ariel poem), “rhyme” itself referring to relations, union, and the play of sameness and difference. That the “ancient rhyme” can appear in “new verse” means liberation from the past mindlessly embraced made possible by submission to the universal and timeless, which time, along with entailed difference, requires that we convey “in new verse.”
The burden on the reader of Four Quartets is not just considerable; it is massive, and exhausting, confronting the inexhaustible poem.
Taking the indirect way that Eliot endorsed, and described as a characteristic of modern “difficult” poetry,6 I turn, with prospects ahead of further understanding, to the critical discussion of the path toward belief of the “intelligent” pilgrim in the essay introducing Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (1931). The following passage from it is rife with autobiographical ramifications. “To understand the method which Pascal employs,” begins Eliot, the word “method” rhyming with the word “process,”
the reader must be prepared to follow the process of the mind of the intelligent believer. The Christian thinker—and I mean the man who is trying consciously and conscientiously to explain to himself the sequence which culminates in faith, rather than the public apologist—proceeds by rejection and elimination. He finds the world to be so and so; he finds its character inexplicable by any non-religious theory: among religions he finds Christianity, and Catholic Christianity, to account most satisfactorily for the world and especially for the moral order within; and thus, by what [Cardinal] Newman calls “powerful and concurrent” reasons, he finds himself inexorably committed to the dogma of the Incarnation.7
Eliot’s words bear greater relevance to his own journey toward belief than is, I believe, often recognized. That “process” is, indeed, intellectual, rather than emotional (or, perhaps, spiritual), and it is fundamentally empirical, exploratory, analytical, and comparative. “To the unbeliever,” he then continues,
this method seems disingenuous and perverse: for the unbeliever is, as a rule, not so greatly troubled to explain the world to himself, nor so greatly distressed by its disorder; nor is he generally concerned (in modern terms) to “preserve values”. He does not consider that if certain emotional states, certain developments of character, and what in the highest sense can be called “saintliness” are inherently and by inspection known to be good, then the satisfactory explanation of the world must be an explanation which will admit the “reality” of these values. Nor does he consider such reasoning admissible; he would, so to speak, trim his values according to his cloth, because to him such values are of no value. The unbeliever starts from the other end, and as likely as not with the question: Is a case of human parthenogenesis credible? and this he would call going straight to the heart of the matter. Now Pascal’s method is, on the whole, the method natural and right for the Christian. ... 8
Described is the method Eliot himself followed on the way to Anglo-Catholicism. In this process, as the words above attest, order—and “disorder”—figure prominently. Just as he said it was for Lancelot Andrewes, the Incarnation was for Eliot “an essential dogma.”9
Because Eliot refers not to the Incarnation but to “Incarnation“ in Four Quartets (“The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation” [“The Dry Salvages”]), the essay-poem may recall the minor tradition of seventeenth-century “layman’s faith” works, whose focus is things that really matter.10 These works include, most notably, Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1642), Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s De religione laici (1647), and the essay-poem Religio Laici or A Layman’s Faith (1682) by John Dryden, whom Eliot much admired and about whom he often wrote, Religio Laici specifically in his 1932 BBC radio casts published as John Dryden, the Poet, the Dramatist, the Critic. While sharing the desire of the layman’s faiths to direct attention to only the “essential” matters of faith, in hopes of avoiding needless bickering and, ultimately, ecclesiastical controversy quickly spreading to civil unrest, Four Quartets does not amount—or reduce—to a layman’s faith. That Eliot writes as a layman is a fact, though not one that he exploits as do the seventeenth-century writers, who share a clear and definite anti-clericalism. Eliot is, however, even less sectarian, as the reference to “Incarnation” indicates, for It stands as the pattern of which the Incarnation exists as the paradigmatic instance in human history. Another way of putting it: the Incarnation is the fulfillment of Incarnation (as the New Testament is of the Old).
The Incarnational pattern—the way of indirectness and of the “impossible union” of differences, as of divine and human, transcendence and immanence, but one-half of which we all too frequently grasp—constitutes for Eliot, as it does for Lancelot Andrewes behind him, the essential order in and of the world. It is the heart and soul of what Eliot believed; to understand the character of that “union,” to define the essential relation entailed, is the ongoing drama of Eliot’s writing. The other half of the story of his post-conversion work concerns how he represented the dogma that mattered so much to him. The latter constitutes his “style.”
Elsewhere, I have treated Eliot’s poetics and practice, post-1927: from Journey of the Magi in that year, to the other Ariel poems (including The Cultivation of Christmas Trees [1954]), and Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems (1930).11 I did not, in T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian, consider Four Quartets in any detail or depth. There, I was concerned to show differences and similarities between poems written after Eliot’s formal embrace of Anglo-Catholic Christianity in 1927 and poems written before that year, which often suggest a mind and a sensibility philosophically compatible with if it not fully attuned to key matters and perspectives that Christianity explains “most satisfactorily,” including the relation of time and the timeless, and other critical instances of binary relations, differences, and apparent oppositions. Here, too, the issue is one, not of destruction or (even) transcendence of previous points of view or understanding but, rather, of their fulfillment. As has often been noted, Eliot’s poems frequently refer to his earlier work, and I suggest that he deliberately invokes a question about the relation of post- and pre-1927 poems, the latter work mirroring the relation of Christianity to Old Testament points of view. Eliot is, in Four Quartets, fulfilling (the promise of) his pre-conversion work, as “Little Gidding” fulfills that of the earlier parts of the essay-poem.
It would not be amiss to associate Eliot with Alexander Pope, as I have already hinted, for he is another “Catholic” poet for whom parts-whole figures as a central thematic, rhetorical, and poetic concern.12 In 1921 in one of his most famous and influential essays, “The Metaphysical Poets,” later included in his Homage to John Dryden, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1924 at the Hogarth Press, Eliot reveals the “dissociation of sensibility” that set in during the course of the seventeenth century and that effectively separated thinking and feeling. Via the work of John Donne, on the one hand, and on the other, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, Eliot illustrates “the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet”: “A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.”13 Eliot goes on to these elucidations regarding the relation of part to part and part to whole:
When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.14
You are invited here to recall The Waste Land (1922), which highlights the failures to connect, left with only “fragments” to “shore against [one’s] ruins.”15 The truth is, moreover, that “the ordinary man” and the poet are not so different; for each man, and woman, confront the separation of apparently disparate experience, facing the prospect, and the necessity, of amalgamating. The poet needs to be seen as forming new wholes.
And Eliot himself, as poet? Wholeness, cohesion, integrity, along with entailed questions of the relation and the necessity of parts and their order (or “sequence”) is an implied, and plaguing question in Eliot’s poetry and prose alike, both before and after conversion to Christianity (with its insistence on, and defining characteristic of, “impossible union”). Single essays, most notably “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” included in The Sacred Wood, may not explicitly raise the question that we have seen Eliot himself point in his trenchant comment on the “unity” of the collection For Lancelot Andrewes, but as a “collocation” of previously published reviews (for it appears seamless), it does signal a familiar characteristic of his work. “The Hollow Men” (1925) is a composite of three separately published poems brought together, not in order of publication, along with two new parts. Similarly with Ash-Wednesday, the first three of the six poems appearing separately. And finally, Four Quartets consists of (longer) poems that begins with the publication of “Burnt Norton” in 1936 and reaches completion—that is, fulfillment—in 1943 with the addition of “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding,” all of them published separately as well (the first British edition of Four Quartets followed the American true First on Halloween 1944).
Eliot addressed directly the issue of poetic coherence and order in the preface to his translation of St.-John Perse’s great Modernist prose poem Anabase, within a month of the publication of Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems. There, he acknowledges the charges of incoherence that had greeted Perse’s challenging work. In defense, as I noted elsewhere, he proposes a distinction between a “logic of concepts,” which readers all too frequently bring to the reading of Modernist poems, and a very different “logic of the imagination,” apparent in the organization and movement of Perse’s paragraphs.16 Eliot’s words regarding Perse’s poetry apply, with some modification, to his own.
The implication in Eliot’s words is that a burden thus devolves upon Perse’s reader, and by extension him or her trying to come to terms with any “difficult” Modernist work of art. In brief, the reader bears the burden of responsibility for adjusting to a “logic of the imagination,” which, itself, requires somewhat more of the whole sensibility than a (mere) logic, which involves the active participation of only one, separate faculty. Another way of putting it may approach closer to at least Eliot’s interests, procedure, and intent, for no force is involved, the poet, instead, allowing his reader to apprehend meaning and significance, an act of complete freedom: Eliot writes that “The reader has to allow the images to fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that, at the end, a total effect is produced”—a kind of emotional fulfillment, in other words. Although he may over-emphasize emotional import, Eliot goes on to make clear the reader’s intellectual responsibility, his subject “imaginative order”:
... [I]f, as I suggest, such an arrangement of imagery [as Perse’s Anabase] requires just as much “fundamental brain-work” as the arrangement of an argument, it is to be expected that the reader of a poem should take at least as much trouble as a barrister reading an important decision on a complicated case.17
The very idea of a “logic of the imagination” is, itself, a union, even an association of sensibility.
The reader’s burden of responsibility consists in relating parts. It is an ability, a capacity, alien to the wastelanders, who, as noted, can connect “Nothing with nothing,” laden with “fragments” that they cannot bring together or unite. It is both a historical condition and a personal disability, which Eliot works hard to remedy.
In Four Quartets, the so-called invisible poet,18 so often said to be impersonal to the point of asceticism and detachment, even unfeeling, shows perhaps surprising interest in his reader and her or his apprehension. Thus, he frequently enters the poem as “I,” sometimes directly addressing the reader and expressing concern hardly gratuitous, for example in “East Coker”: “You say I am repeating / Something I have said before. I shall say it again. / Shall I say it again?” Accordingly, the first-person plural dots the poem, as does the second-person, which Eliot’s reader is, I suspect, inclined to think of as singular. Perhaps nowhere is Eliot’s interest greater in his reader’s avoiding the misunderstanding that plagues Prufrock and threatens to upset his (placid and “settled”) world than in “Little Gidding,” where, near the beginning, Eliot goes out of his way to insure correct apprehension. Picking up on a charged phrase in Ash-Wednesday, he refers to “may time” as an illustration, if not exemplification, of the imagined or the other-dimensional. That he clearly has his reader in mind is manifest in the repetition-with-difference in the very next verse: “If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges / White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.”
The matter concerns way: the way you choose, the way you come, the way you read. And the way that Eliot recommends is temporal and linear, so that, as he put it, reading the text “again and again,” “the reader has to allow the images to fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment, so that, at the end, a total effect is produced.” Attention needs be focused on the whole, which is made up of parts that should be read in sequence.
The way you come, may well strike as unexpected—in keeping with a major theme of “Little Gidding.” There is, for example, the unlikely, perhaps surprising allusion early on to the Birth in a lowly stable by way of the description of the “ruins” remaining at Little Gidding. The point is, the reader must not only distinguish, drawing out differences, but also determine the positive relation, thus in the end also uniting: “may” and “May” are no more to be separated than the decorative angel and a real Angel (in The Cultivation of Christmas Trees), no more than immanence and transcendence, the divine and the human. In Four Quartets, the focal issue is, of course, the nature of time and, in particular, the relation of timelessness with time.
In a sense not to be over-dramatized, Four Quartets is (also) about how to read (it). It is not, that is, about itself, for the poem lacks vestiges of the egomaniacal and the narcissistic. Rather, it is about awareness of its own complexity and its own difficulty in being understood, thus the questions posed to the reader offering to repeat points, thus perhaps as well the apparent dismissal of “the poetry” as a matter of no real matter.
The matter of what might clumsily be labeled as auto-reading is broached by Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, a work of difficulty approaching that of Four Quartets. Struggling anew every time I turn to it, I face the temptation to try to pin it down and force it to yield up its secrets. One of the speaker’s final prayers, after all, concerns the desire not to be mocked by falsehood, and indeed, Eliot sets about to disabuse us of one false presumption and half-truth after another (asceticism, for instance, immersion in the senses another), much as Four Quartets works to de-mythologize notions and assumptions regarding time, including the cyclical and the linear. But in the final analysis, we have to say that the later poem works differently from the earlier, although both are thoroughly Christian in basis.
Rather like Perse’s Anabase, Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems requires that the reader figure out how to read it. Eliot clearly offers many, various, and helpful clues and hints, including the gratuitous number of pages to be turned in order finally to reach the text of the first poem; the similarities-with-difference (as in “the Lady” and the “Lady of silences,” the “Because” that begins the first poem and the “Although” that marks the otherwise identical opening of the sixth poem); and in the fifth poem, the juxtaposition of a philosophico-theological excursus on the Word with the bathetic poetic practice of a would-be poet that directly follows. The reader of Four Quartets, on the other hand, is less engaged in drawing distinctions than in discovering relations, “rhymes” in other words, the attend-ance of one word, phrase, or idea with a corresponding one: in short, the way in which parts “dance” together, forming “A complete consort.” Indeed, how to read Four Quartets becomes a theme as well as a rhetorical strategy. That it is (also) about its reading—again: not itself—is incarnate in the description of words and their “right” “ordonnance” toward the end of “Little Gidding,” a passage with clear internal, or intra-textual, reference to the scene in “East Coker” featuring Elizabethan rustics dancing. Both references rhyme with the account of necessary “pattern” in the fifth section of “Burnt Norton.” That the first word in the corresponding section of “Little Gidding” is the coordinate conjunction itself echoes as well as embodies the work of “necessarye coniunction” differently dramatized in “East Coker”: “And every phrase / And sentence that is right ... / ... / Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, / Every poem an epitaph.” Indicated by my ellipses, the straightforward words are interrupted by a long, meandering parenthesis that extends six-and-a-half lines. Rightness is here explained as “every word [being] at home, / Taking its place to support the others” and then exemplified by “The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,” in fact “An easy commerce of the old and the new,” with “The common word exact without vulgarity, / The formal word precise but not pedantic.” Thus, directly invoking the earlier passage in “East Coker,” there is “The complete consort dancing together.”
These verses in “Little Gidding” recall those I have alluded to in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems that amount to a defense of the Word and Its work pointedly within and for the world. That important passage may at first appear to be at worst gobbledygook, at best meaningless word-play—“If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent / If the unheard, unspoken / Word is unspoken, unheard; / Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard ...”—but in fact the words tell, the poet squeezing and squeezing words repeated and weighed. That the coordinate conjunction both begins and ends the penultimate verse in the passage signifies and matters: “And the light shone in darkness and. ... ” The reader does not make meaning here, but rather discovers it. That effort participates in the discovery of meaning beyond this poem, reflecting the way “the light” shines in darkness, the Word “within / The world and for the world,” awaiting recognition and discovery by each of us.
Four Quartets never tells or shows us directly and exactly how it is to be read—no more than does James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). It does, though, like that novel, offer “hints” and prompt “guesses.” You may read Stephen Dedalus as (still) Joyce’s “hero,” in the event abiding in falsehood. Joyce allows you free will and freedom of choice. But even if you end up, in my ironic reading of the novel, satirized alongside Stephen (and so many others), Joyce does not judge, let alone condemn, you.
Eliot well recognizes the difficulties that understanding entails, precisely what J. Alfred Prufrock dreads, fears, and allows to disable him. For one thing, Eliot emphasizes, in “Burnt Norton,” the problems inherent in language, the instability of words themselves often used and abused by the ruthless and the undiscriminating alike. The passage, opening the final section, returns us to Ash-Wednesday and the condition of words represented in dramatic fashion, via competing presentations of words in action. What may at first appear as verbalism and gibberish emerges as truth, juxtaposed with words improperly used and beset by noise, darkness, and both inevitable and willful misunderstanding. The problem is not “style”; it is the word vapid, imprecise, and disabled.
Just before announcing “Incarnation” as “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood,” “The Dry Salvages” offers an extended account of both failures in communication and the extreme difficulty in the “getting right” that worried and eluded Prufrock. The issue is said to be “apprehension”—the object generally of the reader of Four Quartets. Here, the poetry is beautiful, although the theme be sad tending to the pathetic: “When there is distress of nations and perplexity / Whether on the shores of Asia or the Edgware Road,” we embrace “usual / Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press,” and indulge in various forms of divination and fortune-telling. Eliot then moves to trenchant analysis, which focuses on our part-iality, separating past and future from the present moment. The true mystery lies, he suggests, in the present as intersected by “another dimension.” That other “dimension” derives from “The point of intersection of the timeless / With time,” whereas “Men’s curiosity searches past and future / And clings to that dimension.” Apprehension, though, is inordinately difficult, “something given / And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love, / Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.” For those of us this side of sainthood, “there is only the unattended / Moment, the moment in and out of time” (italics added).
The object is to remain in time, having submitted to it,19 while understanding that, because of the Incarnation, the moment is (forever and always) attended, in other words, not just “itself” but (also) another. With Incarnation—that is, the pattern, of which the Incarnation stands as fulfillment and paradigmatic instance—occurs the “impossible union” where “the past and future / Are conquered and reconciled.” Incarnation is thus paradox: union that is impossible (but nevertheless occurs), figured in God’s becoming man, that man thus both fully human and fully divine.
The critical line, the line describing Incarnation, asks to be squeezed and squeezed some more. The repetition of “half” draws attention to grammatical parallelism as well as the expected definite article before the key word “Incarnation.” “Hint” has, of course, just appeared, in the plural, twice, a couple of verses above, paired with “guesses.” Eliot has thus moved from “hints” dropped and “guesses” made to a strong and assured declaration, with “gift” replacing “guesses” and literalizing the becoming-one. Furthermore, there is a positive sense to “half,” for it means that we both partially get it and partially get it.
The Incarnation is, of course, the gift given to us, surprisingly, in the lowly stable, the Divine giving Himself, miraculously, mysteriously, as His Son in the person of Jesus, the fully human man thus become the Christ. We get, though, but one-half of that “impossible union” of God and man, of transcendence and immanence, of timelessness and time. It is the union that gives us fits, that whole made of parts that, separately, we can grasp. That union occurs as intersection.
Pointedly, Eliot does not refer to the historical event of the Incarnation, but rather to the pattern of which that event represents the fulfillment, as the New Testament does of the Old. The importance, and the implications, of Eliot’s distinction in “The Dry Salvages” emerge only in time, as we read on in Four Quartets. Strategy thus mirrors theme and dogma.
It is clearly the Incarnational pattern that, for Eliot, most satisfactorily accounts for the relations between differences. From his earliest work, the philosopher-poet was centrally concerned with such relations: in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with the relation between the pedestrian and “settled” social world to which the speaker is drawn and the other, quite different world he has glimpsed in journeying about; in the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” with the relation of the important titular ideas, which leads to an undeveloped discussion regarding time and the timeless.
“East Coker” offers a striking dramatization of Incarnational pattern. The passage in question, at which I glanced earlier, comes in the first section of the poem, and rhymes with the account of words and their “rightness” in the fifth section of “Little Gidding,” the repetition of critical terms keying the reader’s attention (and attend-ance). The speaker here places the scene in an “open field,” and says and repeats that “if you do not come too close,” you can hear the music on “a summer midnight.” You can also see the men and women dancing around a bonfire. Terms used in the representation include Elizabethan orthography, an earlier, simpler time mirroring the rural setting with its joyful rustics. The terms practically leap off the page: “The association of men and women,” “daunsinge, signifying matrimonie— / A dignified and commodious sacrament.” Here, in this over-wrought account, we witness “Two and two, necessarye coniunction, / Holding eche other by the hand or the arm / Which betokeneth concorde.” Man and woman thus engage in what the passage I alluded to in “Little Gidding” defines as (mutual) “support.”
Description continues, generalization and meaning now yielding to particular details. Appropriately, given the Incarnation’s effectual democratization of every moment in every place, the focus falls on the commonplace and the quotidian. Eliot chose the Elizabethan period because it is his intellectual home, the time period to which he returned time and again, and the period during which lived and wrote his ancestor Sir Thomas Elyot, author of the renowned The Boke named the Gouvernour. The dance occupies center-stage in the account, men and women “Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles”; they are “Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter,” further described as “Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes, / Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth / Mirth of those long since under earth, / Nourishing the corn.” The words rhyme with those Eliot used in The Waste Land, describing a very different kind of people, who are mirth-less, separated from one another, making-do in indifferent fashion, and having no sense of continuing on after death. The Elizabethan rustics, though, are engaged precisely in “Keeping time, / Keeping the rhythm in their dancing / As in their living in the living seasons / The time of the seasons and the constellations.” Separated from the natural order, as well as from one another, the wastelanders lack all sense of rhythm (and of rhyme). Their forebears, poor and perhaps simple, respect difference: “The time of milking and the time of harvest / The time of the coupling of man and woman / And that of beasts.” Oddly perhaps, the “coupling” of the rustics makes them, if anything, less bestial, not more, than the wastelanders, in part because the word “coupling” is at least partially cleansed by its rhymes with all those terms earlier of “association” and “concorde.”
And yet—the ending of the passage strikes a different note: “Feet rising and falling. / Eating and drinking. Dung and death.” The immediate rhyme here is with the earlier description of the dancing. The passage has led at least one astute commentator to think of the whole as essentially negative and satirical.20 There is, though, simply too much of the positive to be discounted altogether. Still, “Dung and death” cannot but link this rusticity with the end of mortal men and women, “Eating and drinking” with bodily elimination alone, the rising and falling of the dancing feet with cyclical patterns being de-mythologized throughout “East Coker.”
Given these realizations, we may be inclined to look back at the “daunsinge” itself, “signifying matrimonie.” Suddenly, the panoply of ideas and their perhaps over-wrought terms takes on another coloration. The dancing (only) signifies matrimony, said to be a “dignified and commodious sacrament” (italics added). There is no matrimony, merely the sign of it. In a similar fashion, the “Holding eche other by the hand or the arm” is said (merely) to “betokeneth concorde.” It is not, I reckon, that Eliot simply has in mind difference between appearance and reality.
Recall that we have been warned not to “come too close” to this scene, a warning that is repeated. The warning applies only to our perception of it in that “open field,” for, perhaps ironically, as readers of the verses, we must come close indeed. The words “signifying” and “betokeneth” take the description out of the purely observational and place them in the sphere of meaning-making: it is the observer, in other words, not the poet, who imagines the symbolization. What is being seen does not, in and of itself, mean, for example, that this dancing participates in a “dignified and commodious sacrament.” What is represented is, in other words, the opposite of that in The Cultivation of Christmas Trees where, for the child, the decorative angel atop the tree is an angel.
The account of the Elizabethan rustics dancing is promising, it is true, but it is not completely satisfactory. Something is missing, something preventing fulfillment of the promise. The dancing points to matrimony, and sacrament, but it is, finally, only dancing.
It is all a matter of the way you read. And in reading Four Quartets, “the poetry” very much matters.
It is no accident that way figures prominently in Four Quartets. A verse paragraph in “East Coker” sharply focuses and accentuates it. It begins with the speaker inquiring of the reader, imagining him or her as charging the poet with repetitiousness, whether he should, nevertheless and in any case, “say it again.” The opening verses of the passage establish the tenor and tone: “In order to arrive there, / To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.” These lines rhyme with those from the fifth poem of Ash-Wednesday: they smack, that is, of verbal indulgence and mere word-play. Nine more verses follow, in the same vein.
A reader likely is reminded of Heraclitus’s famous words, which Eliot uses, as a matter of fact, as an epigraph for “Burnt Norton”: “the way up is the way down.” In “East Coker,” the words also appear. Eliot does not, however, despite our expectation, endorse them. The reason is that, pace the Greek, Eliot does not subscribe to an identity; instead, he focuses on the way. Three times, he thus writes here that “You must go by a way. ... ” and a fourth time, he says, “You must go through the way. ... ” “Way” is means, in other words.
One further point regarding the passage in “East Coker,” and that concerns the (re)appearance of the “necessarye coniunction” beginning each of the last three verses and uniting knowing and not-knowing, being and not-being, possessing and not-possessing. Although the way up is not the way down, “where you are is where you are not” (italics added). We have to “Be mindful,” attend, read carefully, detect the difference in what appears to be the same. Moreover, parts must be associated, brought together in true concord, in accord with understanding in a certain way.
While it is true that the New Testament fulfills the Old, the Bible is made up of both of them. There is no transcendence of the “earlier” when the “later,” and “fulfilled,” is reached. It is, and remains, a matter of both/and.
In parallel fashion, Eliot does not wish us to let go of or forsake the Elizabethan rustics, “Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes, / Earth feet, loam feet,” those feet also falling, following a pattern that may signify “matrimonie” but also surely signifies a time for one and another for its apparent opposite. He suggests no judgment, or criticism, of these simple(r) folks, whose understanding is evidently limited, falling well short of that of the “intelligent believer” who is likely Eliot’s reader.
In like manner, to move for the moment from the intra-textual to the inter-textual, Eliot does not want us to forsake The Waste Land in embracing Four Quartets. The idea of “fire” perhaps holds the key to the right way of reading the relation of the works surely deserving to be called his greatest. Being what they need, rather than what they want, fire centers issues that the wastelanders face, or, often, deny. Some, like the “young man carbuncular” who visits the typist home “at tea-time,” and like Augustine before Carthage, burn with lust. The Buddha offers a “fire sermon” that, rather like the water the wastelanders seek (despite the death that comes by it), squelches desire, leading to attempted transcendence and escape. The other side of fire is focused in Four Quartets, where it provides purification (not the pagan idea of purgation), and so the poem ends, conclusively, “And the fire and the rose are one.” Together, these contrary perspectives on fire represent fulfillment in the later of the promise latent in the earlier. They are no more to be separated, according to Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, than caring and not-caring, the Word and the world, immanence and transcendence.
Eliot asks a lot of the reader, who must be always alert and attentive. It is not so much elasticity that is required, but patience and humility, perhaps above all a willingness to submit to the almost dizzying movement of thought and feeling represented in the great work. The reader may, indeed, feel herself or himself on “the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold, / And menaced by monsters, fancy lights, / Risking enchantment.” As soon as you reach a place of seeming safety, there comes more enigma, challenging where you are, offering another point of view, sometimes suggesting correction, possibly, at some point, fulfillment, about which possibility, as of all possibilities, you must be wary. The greatest temptation—that represented in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems—requires the greatest wariness and scrupulosity: that to stop, to come to rest, effectually to transcend time (and place). Eliot would have us “fare forward,” keep on exploring and keep on essaying. The necessity of the conjunction points to the pattern whose details are precisely such movement.
1 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).
2 Ibid.
3 T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 33.
4 T.S. Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 347–48.
5 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, line 318 (Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Aubrey Williams [Boston, MA: Riverside-Houghton-Mifflin, 1969]).
6 T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 289.
7 T.S. Eliot, “The Pensées of Pascal,” Selected Essays, 408.
8 Ibid.
9 Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes,” Selected Essays, 347.
10 On the layman’s faith tradition, see, for example, my Literary Paths to Religious Understanding: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and E.B. White (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
11 See my T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word: Intersections of Literature and Christianity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
12 See my Alexander Pope’s “Catholic” Vision: “Slave to no sect” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
13 Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 287.
14 Ibid.
15 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922).
16 T.S. Eliot, preface, Anabasis, by St.-John Perse, trans. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), 10.
17 Ibid.
18 See Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959).
19 See Vincent Miller, “Eliot’s Submission to Time,” Sewanee Review, Summer 1976 (448–64), reprinted in A Packet for Vincent Miller, ed. Donald Greiner and John Lane (Spartanburg, SC: Holocene, 2002). Note especially: “Thinking of time as real and important, and not merely the stage on which some already written play is acted out, perhaps over and over in cyclical fashion, [Eliot] realized that change had to be really change (what [he] was to call ‘a new and shocking / Valuation of all we have been’). This meant that only a God out of time, for whom all time is eternally present, can know the pattern time makes. Immersed in this temporal world at a point where its meaning is only emerging, man lives of necessity in a state of inescapable frustration, caught between his sense of meaning and his sense of meaninglessness, between being and nonbeing, between what is dying and what is not yet alive. ... As Etienne Gilson has pointed out in The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine (1960), in Augustine ‘not a single idea is defined with thorough metaphysical strictness.’ Trying to determine beyond doubt what Augustine meant therefore involves one at every point in attempts to reason carefully from statements of his that neither hold still nor jell” (15).
20 Kenner, esp. 309–12.