The Four Quartets - Part One

Since the end of classes I've finally had some time to sit down, read T.S. Eliot's The Four Quartets and put some thought into the poem. This blog will be about my own insights into the poem and then a subsequent blog will have the insight of other people...its those darn books in my house that are just begging to be researched and their knowledge shared!

There were a host of words within the poem that I was unfamiliar with so I dutifully looked them up. The results were astounding and have solidified for me that Eliot was a brilliant man, who really knew his stuff! The single words that he used within his poem, encompassed a huge idea that the dictionary could only define in a sentence. That takes both skill and immense knowledge of the language since most of the words stem from Ancient Latin or Latin.

Some of the really good ones are:

hebetude = to be dull or dullness
descanting = to be singing above the voices of the chorus
haruspicate = to foretell the future
ostentatious = to put on a pretentious display, or to be showy
epitaph = in Latin a funeral oration

These word selections, upon discovering their meaning only enhance for me the meaning of the poem. Plus I now have some new words to put into my vocabulary circulation =)

Some motifs that I noticed throughout the poem were: roses, time, the sea, the voice, fire and history. Eliot continually uses these images throughout the poem in various forms and times - metaphors, similes, to work with each other, to be in opposition to each other and to be personified. The roses are used to exemplify the natural beauty of the world and are often put against the idea of fire which can be linked to passion, consumption and rebirth. To Eliot the idea of time is fluid and bendable, and not always our idea of linear time. History goes with the concept of time in the way that it has past us by, but also goes further with the idea that we have learned little from our past or that we could learn from it. The last two motifs are a stark contrast to Eliot's other poem, The Wasteland. The voices within The Four Quartets are often happy ones that are either singing or laughing while in The Wasteland they're often whispered, hushed and melancholy. Finally the sea image signifies the rebirth that had eluded the Wasteland and also the possibility of eternal escape.

I didn't really notice much of a rhyme scheme until I was reading Little Gidding. In parts II and IV of Little Gidding there was such a blatantly obvious rhyme pattern that it was hard for me to miss! In II, the pattern was simple, AABBCCDD, and occurred three times. In IV the pattern was a bit more sophisticated, ABABACC and repeated twice. As I discovered through my research there was other rhyme patterns evident, which I will chat about in the next post.

There was tons of repetition occurring in The Four Quartets! Mostly I noticed this in terms of the same word or phrase being repeated usually within the same quartet but not limited to that rigidity either. Though Eliot utilized repetition, he did not limit himself to carbon copying the exact phrase - since that would be boring and mundane - but would take to inverting the phrase so that the words were flipped. An example of this can be seen with the poem's very first line: " Time present and time past" which is then inverted to become: "Time past and time future". Eliot continually makes use of conventional repetition and what I'm going to call inverted repetition in order to drive home his image and his meaning. Examples of this are abound in the poem...just read East Coker and you'll quickly see this use of repetition.

Also while reading I was transfixed by some of what he was saying and have posted my thoughts on the line snippets and hope that if you've read the poem you'll post your interpretation of those lines.

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. (Burnt Norton, V)

So here is one of those examples of repeation the Eliot exhausts in The Four Quartets. These lines sort of make your head spin with the intensity of the repeation and twist your thoughts. It goes to the idea that life is cyclical or is a circle. We work our way around from the end back to the beginning without ever really pausing or losing our place on the path.

Late roses filled with early snow (East Coker, II)

That line itself haunted me for days! I wanted desperately to incorporate it into the poem that I previously posted but sadly didn't want to plagiarize Eliot and moreover I couldn't find a way to work that image into my poem. Moving along...it is an endearing way of depicting something that has easily occurred in nature but also makes you think about it just a bit. The rose bloomed too late and is now at the mercy of the winter weather. Easily linked to the idea of beauty being touched and decayed by the harshness of reality.

Time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn (The Dry Salvages, I)

Upon reading those lines I thought back to Homer's the Odyssey, since it reminded me of Penelope's weaving. For those who either can't remember the story or haven't had the chance to read it, Penelope is the wife of Odysseus who waits for her husband's return from the Trojan war. It has been many years since the end of the war, so many presume that her husband is dead so she begins to be courted by other suitors. Her way of diverting their pursuit is to say that once she has finished a tapestry for the death of Odysseus she will begin the courting process. So she spends all day at her loam weaving and then all night at the loam undoing her work so that she will never be finished and thus never having to give up hope on Odysseus.

And what you though you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment. (Little Gidding, I)

The first time I read those lines I sat dumbfounded for a few moments. I mean, WOW! It kind of puts you in a place where you think that everything that you've been working towards or striving for was such a shame that you think, why did I bother at all? I think that was the emotion that Eliot was trying to invoke but not for the purpose of discouraging humanity from ever trying again. Rather he wants us to ponder on the greater meaning of what we're doing and questing for. Humans are insane in the way that we go about our daily lives without much care about the other people around us, but when it really gets down to it all of us are intertwined with those people that we don't give a damn about. And that's the beyond purpose that no one considers.

sv