Since I started rereading Eliot’s Four Quartets, the world has been struck by the coronavirus pandemic.
Remembering that the Quartets were written just before and during World War II, I wondered what, if any, solace we might draw from Eliot’s wilful construction of faith in the face of disbelief and doubt, including his own.
Eliot’s conversion was an intellectual choice that forced him to subdue his emotions and sentiments.
He was attracted by the discipline of Anglo-Catholic practice and the various mortifications expected of the devout, claiming that nothing could be ‘too ascetic’. The renunciation of sensual pleasure is a theme apparent in Burnt Norton where he yearns for ‘inner freedom from practical desire.’ The personal, spiritual struggle is much more evident than the social dimension. Eliot sets carnal temporality against the idea of the still point: ‘Except for the point, the still point,/ There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.’ How far the poem is connected to his own unhappy experiences of love we cannot say, but the outside world is only really seen in the bleak picture of ‘strained time-ridden faces’ where London is ‘a place of disaffection’.
Section III of Burnt Norton demands a stripping away of everything in order to embrace the via negativa towards God.
Internal darkness, deprivation And destitution of all property, Desiccation of the world of sense, Evacuation of the world of fancy, Inoperancy of the world of spirit; Theologically, this is the refusal to identify God with any human concept or knowledge, but for Eliot it seems to become a form of mortification. Whilst we may not feel in tune with the idea, we feel his emotional struggle and share the questioning of a ‘world [which] moves/In appetency, on its metalled ways/Of time past and time future’, particularly at a moment when ‘appetency’ in the form of global capitalism seems to have ground to a halt.
Eliot used the structure of Burnt Norton as a framework for all four quartets, but the last three, written in wartime, much more obviously address an audience. East Coker moves from a presentation of the natural cycle, fastidiously summarised as ‘Dung and death’ to a confrontation of a situation where the natural order has been overturned: ‘What is the late November doing/With the disturbance of the spring?’ and the heavens are engaged in ‘constellated wars’.
Section II of East Coker presents these ideas rhetorically in a way the poet himself rejects as ‘worn out’ and periphrastic’ before asking more plainly:
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to, Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity And the wisdom of age?
Although only 52, he presents himself as shaken from a graceful acceptance of aging by finding himself ‘all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,/On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,/And menaced by monsters’. These lines, written in wartime London, may chime with our own feelings that the known world has turned upside down.
The poem moves to a meditation on death and back to the contemplation of darkness negating the material world:
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God.
Eliot seeks the dark way towards God as if yearning for some kind of dark annunciation. ‘Faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting’, gifts to be conferred by God, not achieved through any act of will. However, he pulls back from what seems to be an abyss of nihilism (or idealism) through a return to the imagery of Burnt Norton: ‘The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy/Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony/Of death and rebirth.’ The commas breaking up these lines seem to me to reflect the effort with which Eliot is forcing himself to confront the necessity for incarnation, the embodiment of spirit in the temporal processes of suffering, sex and death. In a rather overheated devotional reflection for Good Friday the writer exchanges asceticism for flesh and gore:
The dripping blood our only drink, The bloody flesh our only food:
One engaging aspect of Eliot’s poetry is his ear for rhythm and the sounds words make, a clear indication that he too is embodied. Here, the emphasis on the physical suffering of the Crucifixion is expressed through a thumping metre and rhyme scheme as well as the repetition of ‘blood’ or ‘bloody’ three times in the final stanza. Another attraction of his work is his open voicing of doubts about his poetic enterprise, especially ‘under conditions/That seem unpropitious’, a colossal understatement presumably referring to the war. The influence of war can also be seen in his recourse to military imagery: ‘ a raid’ ‘shabby equipment’, ‘undisciplined squads’, ‘conquer’ and ‘fight’, as he considers poetry’s inadequacy to match contemporary reality. Nevertheless, he insists ‘For us, there is only the trying’ and accepts the challenge to continue the struggle: ‘Old men ought to be explorers’.
Dry Salvages, based on the element of water, acknowledges Eliot’s American origins in the imagery of the north-eastern seaboard and the river Mississippi. Memories of a catastrophic flood in his childhood inform the contemplation of suffering and bleak view of history entailed by the Fall:
Time the destroyer is time the preserver, Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops, The bitter apple and the bite in the apple.
However, his acknowledgement that ‘the moments of agony…are likewise permanent/With such permanence as time has’ seem understandable in the context of the war. The two great temporal events for an orthodox Christian are the fall of Adam and his redemption through Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion. Eliot battles with both of these, trying to set human suffering against the ‘hardly, barely prayable/ Prayer of the one Annunciation.’ He sets the endlessness of pain against the fleeting ‘moments of happiness’:
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen…
We, content at the last If our temporal reversion nourish (Not too far from the yew tree) The life of significant soil.
This humility contrasts with the earlier disdain for the city workers encountered on ‘the gloomy hills of London’ or the peasants in East Coker with their ‘heavy feet in clumsy shoes’; perhaps he felt a greater awareness of community in wartime London.
Little Gidding, published in 1942, was delayed by air raids on London and Eliot’s poor health. The element of fire includes the fires of hell, purgatory and Pentecost but was also the fires Eliot witnessed as a fire warden. Walking past the local Anglican church during my statutory exercise session, I noticed that someone had laid a long-stemmed red rose at the base of the life-size statue of the Crucifixion. The symbolism reminded me of the end of Little Gidding – ‘the fire and the rose are one’ – dramatic images, neither of which bear close analysis. Eliot pushes the poem to come out right as he takes on the role of public poet; it leads him to identify the historical moment of England at war with more personal transcendent moments such as the ‘shaft of sunlight’ and the ‘laughter in the garden’: ‘the intersection of the timeless moment/Is England’ . In Section IV we are asked to accept that:
We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire.
Eliot calls this the ‘unfamiliar Name’ of ‘Love’ At the time, the notion of purgatorial fire may have offered consolation that pain would end and ‘All manner of thing shall be well’, even if this resolution seemed more of a metaphor than a possibility. As we hear of the deaths of thousands from the Covid-19 pandemic, we may turn to Eliot’s Quartets as a work written at another time of national stress. However, it will be probably be for the effort to understand and reconcile the beauties and brutalities of the world we live in, the shafts of sunlight and the sea littered with refuse ‘shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar/The gear of foreign dead men’ and the poet’s attempts to find spiritual answers within his chosen rule. It is the stress experienced by an intellectual ascetic writer struggling to accommodate the fleshliness of incarnation and the materiality of history that gives the poems the emotional energy to which we still respond.