T. S. Eliot
Four Quartets
 
From “Burnt Norton,” V
 
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.
 
 
We’re back for another year of poems, and this fall, we’re trying something new. For the first four months of the year, we’ll read passages from the same poem—T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
 
T. S. Eliot’s poetry is notoriously difficult. He could write very simple, approachable lyrics and delightful comic verse like Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats—but he could also write poems that require a real commitment on the part of the reader. The Waste Land is so densely allusive that Eliot included footnotes to illuminate some aspects of the poems – but, many of the footnotes are in French, Italian, Latin, and German, which he did not provide translations for.
 
Eliot entered the Church of England in 1927, and his Christian faith was deeply important to him. Four Quartets is his late masterpiece, his exploration of the life of faith. As the title suggests, it consists of four main parts, which were published as separate poems over a period of years.
 
As we begin to look at Four Quartets, I have a few small pieces of advice for approaching these poems. I think it’s important to note that Eliot’s poetry is very allusive, and we’re not going to know the context for each allusion. So if there are parts that are obscure, that goes with the territory. But don’t let the obscurity scare you off! It doesn’t mean we can’t get a lot out of these poems!
 
Another piece of advice comes from a critic who has said that there are “no symbols in Eliot—only cases-in-point.” I’m not sure that is completely true, but I do think there’s a tendency to try to read poems symbolically, or even allegorically, which is not helpful when it comes to Eliot. Eliot himself coined the term “objective correlative” – which means "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of [a] particular emotion," in a work of art. In other words, certain images are used to capture a particular emotion—a feeling, a sensibility, not an idea. I think that’s how some of the images of Four Quartets work. They keep cropping up: the rose garden, the London underground, the river. They don’t stand for an idea; they evoke an emotion. So as you read, pay attention to the emotion that is evoked.
 
With that said, let’s jump in to “Burnt Norton,” the first poem in Four Quartets. Burnt Norton is the name of an English manor house, which Eliot visited in the 1930s. The house was uninhabited at the time, and Eliot draws on that visit, and especially the images of the rose garden and the empty pool, to reflect on the passage of time, on stillness, and memory.
 
I think of “Burnt Norton” as Eliot’s version of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament, and Qoheleth, the teacher who knows that “there is a time for everything under the heavens” but also senses that “all is vanity.” In the section Scott read, Eliot is talking about the arts, about words, about poetry. Art unfolds in time. Poetry is read and music is played in time; and yet there is also something timeless about it. Words linger, they “reach / into the silence.” The word spoken, the note played is somehow both still and in motion. Eliot uses the image of a patterned Chinese jar which is somehow both still and moving at the same time. In art, somehow, “the end and the beginning were always there / Before the beginning and after the end. And all is always now.” Finite words can give us a glimpse of what is eternal.
 
But words are not reliable. They are faulty instruments. You can hear the poet’s struggle to find the right word: “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,” the burden of expression, the burden of existing at that point between movement and stillness. Words are always under assault – scolded, mocked, or simply surrounded by meaningless “chatter.”
 
How is this a Christian poem? At the end of this passage, Eliot speaks of “the Word in the desert”—the capital “W” points us towards Christ, the Word made flesh. That Word, too, was surrounded by other voices—voices of temptation, voices of death. And yet, the Word-made-flesh is the fulcrum, “the still point of the turning world”—the way that leads us beyond the tyranny of time.  In the Incarnation of Christ, “all is always now.”
 
Read the whole of “Burnt Norton” (and Four Quartets) here.  http://www.davidgorman.com/4quartets/1-norton.htm
 
Listen to T. S. Eliot read “Burnt Norton.”  https://youtu.be/3BKUfk1amb4?si=YZEBXWVU-NtXEfxk
 
Listen to Alec Guinness read “Burnt Norton.”
https://youtu.be/UWPeQOZMNok?si=hmRn_O3iDkxSEtOp

Corinna Laughlin