T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in Spiritual Perspective

Robert E. Doud

The Four Quartets represent the best of T. S. Eliot's poetry. These poems present four

locations which are important to Eliot, namely, Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry

Salvages, and Little Gidding. They present beauty, mysticism, the spiritual journey

through emptiness, and relief from dry pessimism in the experience of eternity as it

breaks into time. They present an answer to the problem of modernity as presented earlier

by Eliot in "The Wasteland" and "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock." With wistful

irony, and mystical paradox, Eliot’s poems represent the disorientation and dispossession

of the human spirit in modernity, and the mystical destination we reach in spite of it all.

We all have places we have been to at different times of our lives, the visiting of

which has had a deep and lasting effect on our lives. These places may not be at all

important in the grand scheme of things, but awakenings and epiphanies have happened

to us while we were there, and the memories that they leave within us are inspiring and

life changing. Such were the places celebrated in Four Quartets. The study of any of

these poems throws light upon the other three. Read prayerfully these poems may take us

to a deeper place within ourselves.

Burnt Norton is the name of a place in England once visited by Eliot; it is a

seventeenth-century manor house and garden. In The Art of T. S. Eliot, Helen Gardner

points out that the house in “Burnt Norton” is not particularly interesting or beautiful, and

that the garden is conventional, formal, and now deserted. The word burnt suggests the

past insofar as it refers to something that had been eroded or destroyed by the passing of

time. Indeed, the poem is full of images of returning to a place visited in a former time,

which place is now deserted and neglected.

The word Norton in the title sounds like the word naught, meaning zero or nothing, a

term that might also suggest emptiness, poverty, and futility. Of course, from a certain

spiritual perspective, it is precisely and paradoxically in such an empty and therefore

receptive condition that unexpected graces may be infused and that eventual bliss may be

discovered. The nothingness or emptiness contemplated in this poem signifies, quite

ironically, an experience or condition of being that is of ultimate value.

i. Nowheres and Emptiness: Part I of “Burnt Norton”

Gardner says that this poem is about the private world of each one of us, a world in

which what might have been persists in consciousness alongside of what really was and

is. The village of Burnt Norton, Eliot's destination on a particular day, is the first of four

seemingly insignificant places or nowheres, which in spite of being nowheres, stand aptly

for the mystical destination we always carry within ourselves. In “Burnt Norton” eternity

pervades all times and conditions; eternity is Eliot's idea of the world’s original and

ultimate condition. For him, eternity is the power or force behind all events and times,

breathing life into transitory moments and outlasting in principle all the moments it can

ever produce.

As poet, Eliot is fascinated with the interplay of past and present, and about how past

experiences flow together to constitute the present moment. The sound of feet walking

echoes out of the past and is imagined to be heard in the present, moving Down the

passage which we did not take. As in the sacred liturgy or in a time of deep meditation, a

memory from the past can be so poignant as to seem almost to be happening in the

present.

Many actual things have happened, and many other only possible things did not

happen, in order for this present moment to be exactly what it is. The bowl represents, not

just one present moment, but a long sequence of moments that are still somehow present

in the fecund and pregnant stillness of the present moment. The bowl is fragile. It might

have been moved or shattered, but it was not. Many possibilities did not materialize in

order for the bowl still to be here just as it is. There is [old and] unheard music in the

shrubbery, and a bird calls out in response to it.

Like the bird, we ought to be attuned as listeners to the unheard music, that is, to the

silent, expired, yet still present and valid beauty that surrounds us in this particular place.

The poem says that the flowers mentioned in the poem are present as guests. It describes

movement on the part of some visiting parties that are designated by the word we. The

visitors walk: Along the empty alley, into the box circle / To look down into the drained

pool.

The pool is quite dry and has been so for a long time. Nevertheless, the pool has the

illusion of being full. It is filled with water out of sunlight, and a lotus flower seems to

rise quietly out of the middle of it. The lotus gathers and arranges, in its extremely brief

and illusory existence, all the data surrounding it into itself. The sunlight shines like a

sudden and unmerited grace into the receptive pool, and causes the sacred lotus to rise up

at the same time. The poem mixes together a mystical vision with an actual or imagined

experience. The illusion is short-lived: Then a cloud passed and the pool was empty.

The pool is empty again. Is the emptiness here a reference to Buddhism in which

emptiness represents a numinous transparency that reveals the mystical core of all

experience? Let us regard the bowl as a container for dried rose petals and the pool as a

container for some dry rustling leaves. A shaft of sunlight descends upon the pool, and a

lotus flower arises in the poet’s dream or delusion. Might another shaft of dusty sunlight

have descended upon the bowl of roses as well?

The infusion of the sunbeam is necessary for the experience to take shape and to

gather together its influences and elements. There is more unheard music or laughter in

the shrubbery: Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, / Hidden excitedly,

containing laughter.

In Buddhism, laughter is also a symptom of enlightenment. The hidden and higher

meaning of anything is to realize that it is empty, and that emptiness is bliss. The leaves

in their rustling are filled with the voices of children, suggesting the past and the children

who had lived in the house. Perhaps the visiting parties were once among the children

who laughed in that place long ago. The past is somehow still present. The bird’s

message anticipates the leaving of the guests and it decides that the event is completed.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

Moments of epiphany and insight are rare for human beings, perhaps because they are

distractions from the workaday world in which we must live and function. This present

moment of memory and epiphany, answering to the bird’s call, is also a response to tunes

played long before, still hiding in the shrubbery or nestling in the leaves. Insofar as

anything is remembered, it is present. It is remembered as past, but it is gathered into a

present experience.

What might have been and what has been

Points to one end which is always present.

ii. Parts II to V of “Burnt Norton”

Part II of “Burnt Norton” starts with a verse about reconciliation and about some kind

of pattern. Reconciliation is needed for inveterate scars and for forgotten wars.

Reconciliation means healing, forgiveness, and the restoration of injured relationships.

Good patterns need to be repaired and rejuvenated. The movement in the circulation of

the blood is mirrored in the drift of stars. This pattern is repeated macrocosmically,

microcosmically, and in many places in between. There seems to be one well-coordinated

cosmic dance going on, involving stars and constellations.

There is patterned movement afoot, both high above and down below. But there is no

movement at the still point of the turning world. There is an undisturbed axis that threads

through the whirling vortex and welter of activity. The dance begins at the still point, but

here there is neither arrest nor movement, neither ascent nor decline. Except for the still

point, there is no dance, and there is only the dance. The still point is not in time and has

no movement, but it is the mysterious source of the dance and it is the attractive cause of

all movement.

What goes on here is the transformation of the temporal and the transient into the

eternal. Nothing of worth will be lost, but we cannot know this yet. To be conscious is

not to be completely in time; or rather, to be aware of time is to view time from the still

point, that is, from a point that is not in time, yet it is within all times.

The movement in the draughty church at smokefall

Be remembered: involved with past and future.

Only through time time is conquered.

In some draughty church at dusk, something is remembered, and the movement, the

patterned movement, the pattern in the movement of the universe and of our single lives

is understood. We step momentarily into eternity, pause at the still point, and for a

moment understand time without leaving time. It is as if all the gathered rose petals settle

instantaneously into a single fragile rose bowl. Much is remembered, and there are a

myriad more hidden memories buried in the ones we consciously remember.

In this poem, time is a place of disaffection. It is a place of relief, respite, and

disengagement, that comes after the past and before the future. Deep within the present

moment there is a zone of non-temporality which is the still point in the changing world.

Piercing the heart of the present moment is the axis of eternity to which all moments and

all times are equally present. It is empty of all affections, sensations, and distractions. It is

neither daylight nor darkness, neither plentitude nor vacancy.

Even lower, ever lower, we descend into a zone of perpetual solitude, perfect poverty,

the absence of everything, pure emptiness, abstention from any movement, no affection

or appetite, such as the world has. Eternity and emptiness are the same. To the mystic

they are desirable with a desire that is unlike any other desire. Mysticism implies

detachment and asceticism. The poem says that light, which is the fastest moving energy

in the universe, is utterly still at the still point of the turning world.

It is only in time that words move and that music moves. The poem itself is made up

of words, music, movement, and time. The end and the beginning coexist, or, they are

viewed as happening together at the still point. In this poem, words and time approach the

still point, the deepest mystery, even if they do so only approximately and asymptotically.

The goal is incomparable, unreachable, yet it attracts everything, embraces everything,

and suffuses everything. Unable to reach their goal, all things drive toward it and are

already immersed in it.

The second verse of Part V, which is the poem’s final verse, says that love abides at

the still point and in eternity. God is love, although God is not mentioned as such. God

here is also Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover of the universe, who attracts all things to

Godself. Divine love is eternal, and is the source of all time, motion, and music. Ever

still, it moves things by attraction to itself. It is love unmoved and unmoving, love that

pulls all things toward itself as into their own fulfillment. It reveals itself at the end of the

poem, as it does at the poem’s very beginning, in a shaft of sunlight and in the laughter of

children. It does so in a momentary glimpse that provides the origin of the poem and

inspires the music that follows.

The four nowheres that are described in Four Quartets point at length to a still point,

that is, to a deep nowhere within the poet himself, to a gaping emptiness, which, in the

realization of its emptiness, receives as well the promise of a great fullness. Already

tasted, the coming fullness, which is eternal and in that sense is already here, takes away

the taste for finite accomplishments and enjoyments. There is an asceticism that

accompanies mysticism. Eliot tries to secularize a mysticism that can only be made

explicit by religious faith.

iii. Eliot, East Coker

East Coker is a village with family ties to Eliot, a middling kind of village, and hence

also a nowhere of sorts. The middle way Eliot refers to might also be the Dharma, or

teaching of Buddhism, the path midway between abnegation and self-indulgence, a way

discovered by persevering right effort, and yet, a way arrived at under the gentle force of

cosmic beneficence. This middle way is Keats' "negative capability at critical mass." It is

only known by living in uncertainty, by irony and paradox, by surmise, by "hints and

guesses." Here definiteness is the enemy of wisdom, and vagueness itself the only

certitude.

As the poem opens up and seems to compose itself, a seed of poetic creativity draws

into itself all the environmental influences that it needs for its own nourishment. Three

times, in Part I of the poem, an open field is mentioned. The ruminations in the poem

have to do with the passing away and clearing away of the things of the past, and about

whatever replaces them in the present. Among the possibilities for replacing the torn

down structures of the past is an open field. Leaving the field open exposes the bare

earth, and this poem is in ways a celebration of the bare earth. It has been pointed out that

the Four Quartets, one by one, carry the theme of ancient philosophy, that the four basic

elements are earth, air, fire, and water. East Coker is about earth.

Part I culminates in a dance at a wedding feast, a dance of ancient people who repeat

in their dance the patterns of seasons and constellations, and the rhythms of life in every

age. A great companion to the dance scene in “East Coker” is Thomas Merton’s poetic

thoughts on the dance of the Lord in emptiness, which appear in the conclusion of New

Seeds of Contemplation. Merton presents the dance-like rhythms of the cosmos along the

lines of a dancing God, as in Hindu belief about the god Shiva.

The image of an open field in which dancers perform on the bare earth governs “East

Coker.” In East Coker, which is near Stonehenge, the ancient feast and pagan ceremonies

still hang in the air. It is as if a dance of an ancient, or possibly, a medieval people, and as

if during a wedding feast, were still going on. Thus the past is not felt as a heavy and

inescapable burden to be borne, but, the past is rather a barrage of joyful data to be taken

into one’s present self and to be joined with in celebration. The basic emotional tone and

valuation of the poem is one of joy, although thepoem draws in non-joyful data as well

Part II of East Coker is about poetry. Poetry tries to follow the rhythms of the

constellations that whirl in a vortex that will one day bring an end to the world we know

in a destructive fire. In other words, life is fragile and temporary. Whether poetry

succeeds or not in capturing the rhythms and harmonizing with the music of the cosmos

does not matter greatly. The poem implies that the purpose of poetry is the achievement

of wisdom. If poetry aspires to the acquisition of wisdom, then the only wisdom is

humility. Perhaps it is implied that humility means standing in that open field, and

experiencing the wonder and excitement with which poetry always begins again.

When Eliot writes about “Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity,” he discovers

in his own terms that which Martin Heidegger describes in Discourse on Thinking as

Gelassenheit, which translates as calmness, composure, or releasement. Eliot associates

this condition with wisdom, with old age, and with the middle way in the spiritual life,

which implies quiet illumination and moderate asceticism. Humility implies for Eliot the

ability in old age to stand open to receive and accept divine grace, changes in awareness,

spiritual growth, and continuing conversion.

This deliberate openness to change and growth is cast by Eliot in a process

perspective. For the pattern is new in every moment, he says. The process perspective

expects and applauds novelty and creativity as it arrives surprisingly in every new instant.

This perspective also recognizes the condition of perpetual perishing and the moment by

moment sweeping away of the detritus of the past. Eliot writes: And every moment is a

new and shocking / Valuation of all we have been. Each new moment puts values on the

bits of data it receives from the influences coming from its past.

Part III of East Coker is about darkness and emptiness. The basic attitude of the poem

is one of waiting in darkness. O Dark, dark, dark, it begins. This is a special kind of

darkness. It is not the darkness of depression or disaffection. It is the dark knowledge of

spiritual growth and development. Far along the path of spiritual development, one

discovers that it is a way wherein there is no ecstasy, a way which is the way of

ignorance, and one must go by the way of dispossession or poverty. This is the emptiness

at the core of the spiritual journey that is described by spiritual masters in every tradition.

The poet says to his soul: be still, and wait without hope. If he waited with hope, then

the hope, at his lesser degree of spiritual development, would be the wrong hope. And he

must wait without love, because love at this stage would be love of the wrong thing.

There is still faith to rely on; the poem says: But the faith and the love and the hope are

all in the waiting. We are told: Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.

Again, we stand in that open field, ready for the growth that God may give in God’s own

time. We wait.

What we think now is darkness will turn out to be light. It is as if we have not yet

developed the eyes or the ability to see the light that is already there, always was there,

and always will be there. The poem adds: the stillness [is ]the dancing. We must learn

how to be still and composed while participating in the dance. Contemplation and action

must accompany one another. There is a fine quality of mystical light that can only be

found in the darkness. The axis of inner stillness is found while we are active, moving,

and dancing. The stillness is in the dancing.

In the book, Redeeming Time: T. S. Eliots’s Four Quartets, Kenneth Paul Kramer

suggests that the open field talked about by Eliot, and with that, Eliot’s ideas of

emptiness and darkness, have much to do with what the philosopher Martin Heidegger

called releasement. In Discourse on Thinking, Heidegger advocated an open-minded kind

of thinking that he called meditative thinking or poetic thinking. The word releasement

translates the German word Gelassenheit, which also means composure or calmness.

Heidegger derived his idea of Gelassenheit from the medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart.

A powerful image in “East Coker” is that of the wounded surgeon. The surgeon cuts

into the patient and cuts out whatever is diseased. Medical care sometimes causes pain or

discomfort in order to heal or cure the patient. The poet must deal with discomforting or

disturbing matters in order to bring some therapeutic relief, or indeed, just in order to be

honest about the real conditions and afflictions of human existence. Jesus was a suffering

servant and a wounded healed. And each of us, dealing with our own pain and hurts in

life, must extend ourselves toward others who are hurting. Kramer points out that East

Coker is Eliot’s meditation on a certain Good Friday.

In Part V, Eliot reaffirms the process perspective he assumes in “East Coker.” And so

each venture / Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate. In reference to poetry

especially, it is true that each poem tries to express something that is either inexpressible,

or that simply has not yet been well expressed. Each new poem is a venture and an

adventure of ideas and words; each attempt at expression is a raid on the inarticulate

And, in spite of the passing away of all things, there is also the fight to recover what has

been lost, to save the expressions that have been considered successful.

vi. “The Dry Salvages”

The Dry Salvages is the name of a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the north

east coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. The Dry Salvages is probably a corruption of the

French phrase, les trois sauvages, which means the three Indians. The word trois was

corrupted into dry. On the literal level, the phrase dry salvages is ironic, because the

islands are constantly washed by waves of the sea, and there is probably nothing to be

salvaged but a useless bit of memory. On the mystical level, these rocks represent a time

of spiritual aridity when unmerited saving grace washes redemptively over us.

“The Dry Salvages” begins as a poem about the natural music of the sea and about the

tolling of a sea buoy that is also called a groaner. The poem is also about time, and either

owes a debt to, or shares remarkable similarities with the philosophical treatment of time

in The Confessions of St. Augustine. In Four Quartets, time may be considered as a

transcendent principle that generates or radiates the flow of times as we know them—or,

time may be considered as the ceaseless flow of ever perishing finite times For

Augustine, eternity is the timeless condition beyond all times that serves as the source of

ever flowing finite times.

As viewed philosophically by Augustine, time has several dimensions or layers of

meaning. First of all, there is cosmic time, which is the brute movement of natural

elements in rhythmic or regular patterns. The rotation of the earth on its axis gives us day

and night. The revolution of the earth around the sun gives us the solar year. Brute

unmeasured movements serve as the basis for our experience of time.

Secondly, there is chronological or measured time. The minutes of a clock divide the

hours of a day, which are arbitrarily set as divisions of the twenty-four hour duration of a

calendar day. The days of a year are enumerated at 365, as they divide the duration of the

time required for the earth to revolve about the sun. We experience our own lives as a

lapse of time in successive stages and with repeated patterns. It is the human mind that

measures times.

Thirdly, there are functional and cultural uses of time. There is a time to plant and a

time to reap. There are times for work and times for leisure; times for mourning, and

times for jubilation. We celebrate birthdays, weddings, funerals, graduations,

anniversaries, and various festivals that punctuate the year, a person’s lifetime, or the end

of life. Meaningful events are celebrated at different intervals within the cycle of

measured time.

Fourthly, there is time as compared to eternity. Eternity is the timeless co-presence of

all times. From the perspective of eternity, that is, from God’s perspective, all things are

seen together without division into time. The divine perfection neither requires nor

tolerates change, and so, it envisions all things in a single moment of eternal

timelessness. Time might even be considered to be an illusion, given the eternal mutual

co-presence of all times.

In the poem, “The Dry Salvages,” time runs on as if endlessly. The brute sequence of

temporal and disappearing moments, as in the rhythm of the tides, is experienced in its

emptiness and futility. Even so, a glimpse of eternity is caught here and there in the

poem. The poem cannot capture this glimpse or adequately describe it; the poem and the

poet can merely report and record that the glimpse did happen, so that we might be able

and alert to catch it if it should show itself again.

“The Dry Salvages” becomes a prayer in which a statue of Our Lady on a bleak

promontory becomes a cipher for the still point in our relentlessly turning world. She

represents eternity and salvation to a world in which senseless rocks are beaten by

relentless and unforgiving waves. Salvation is here pictured or experienced as a

deliverance from time’s callous brutality to the loving harbor of eternity. The poem is

about the kind of hope that can only be experienced as prayer.

vii. Analysis of “The Dry Salvages”

Eliot spent the first fifteen years of his life in St. Louis, Missouri. Part I of “The Dry

Salvages” starts in its first verse with a description of the silt-carrying Mississippi River

as a strong brown god. This idea resonates with his later interest in Hinduism, for which

religion the river Ganges is really the god Ganga.

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river

Is a strong, brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable

……………………………………………………….

Useful, trustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce.

The river is not viewed poetically; it is viewed as a resource to be exploited or an

obstacle to be surmounted. The dwellers in the cities generally forget about the river as

something natural, organic, and alive; they see it only from their own mechanical and

mercantile point of view. The poem takes the organic view that the rhythm of the river is

the same as the rhythm that beats in the breasts of human beings and in the circulation

that goes on in plants:

His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,

In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard.

The Eliot family in the poet’s youth spent summers near Gloucester, Massachusetts. In

the second verse, which moves from St. Louis to a New England setting, the poet’s and

our relationship with both the river and the sea is recognized:

The river is within us, the sea is all about us;

The sea tosses its organic debris up onto the beaches:

Its hints of earlier and other creation:

The starfish, the hermit crab, the whale’s backbone;

And the sea tosses up cultural artifacts as well:

It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,

The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar

The poem then mentions some of the many sounds or voices of the sea: the sea howl,

the sea yelp, the whine in the rigging. The rigging of the ship, while different from the

sea itself, picks up from the wind and from the ship’s motions the vibrations from the

pounding sea that the creaking rigging translates into sounds that we can hear.

And the wailing warning from the approaching headland

Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner

Rounded homewards, and the sea gull:

The groaner is a kind of buoy that collects into itself the movements of the waves and

translates them into warning sounds for the passing vessels. Like the rigging of the boat

mentioned just above, the groaner is like poetry. Poetry translates the beauties and other

realities of nature into cultural sounds and into language.

The actual entity prehends the realities of its past and translates them into data that can

be prehended by its successor actual entities. Human beings prehend the motions, sounds

and events in nature and translate them into music, poetry, and other artistic expressions.

The actual entity, with its acute memory function fecund imagination, and expressive

capability, is a translator between languages, that is, the actual entity is an atom of

interpretation.

The tolling bell

Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried

Ground swell, a time

Older than the time of chronometers, older

The clang or tolling of the bell represents the purely present moment, uncontaminated

by fringes of the past, nor by intimations of the future:

Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,

The future futureless, before the morning watch

When time stops and time is never ending;

And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning

Clangs

The bell.

viii. Part II of “The Dry Salvages”

Part II of “The Dry Salvages” laments the passing of time, as time brings loss and

destruction to all things. The withering and wailing of Part II share a similar doleful

tonality with the dryness and desiccation of “Burnt Norton.” While the sea as pictured

early in “The Dry Salvages,” has many sounds and voices, the later wailing over death

and decay is silent:

Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,

The silent withering of autumn flowers

Dropping their petals and remaining motionless

Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,

The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable

Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

The calamitous annunciation is the message of the bell that clangs from the buoy near

the savage rocks. It is a tolling that reminds of death and its immediate danger.

The silent listening to the undeniable

Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

The last annunciation is death, and its clamor is undeniable. Death is inevitable; it

must be accepted that life is brief and fleeting. The signs of death are everywhere. The

wreckage of ships and lost lives fills the sea and washes up on beaches. Whitehead deals

with the deaths of all things, that is, the deaths of all actual entities, in his doctrine of

perpetual perishing. Accordingly, all these atomic specks of life pass away as soon as

they come into being. Death is everywhere constant and immediate, yet value is

preserved and passed on.

The bone’s prayer to death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable

Prayer of the one Annunciation.

This is the point in the poem, and indeed in Four Quartets, when poetry becomes

prayer. This time the word Annunciation is spelled with a capital A. It refers here to the

response of the Blessed Mother to the angel Gabriel: “Be it done unto me according to

your word.” We have nothing to do but accept and acquiesce in the face of death. Prayer

has first to do with adoring receptivity toward divine influence, and only secondarily with

making supplications. The poem says that death is the bone’s God. The bone says a

prayer to Death, and therefore must have a hope for something that only death can

supply.

The way that, for Whitehead, value is preserved and passed on, is through the dynamic

of prehension. This happens especially in relation to what he calls the consequent nature

of God. The consequent nature is the aspect of God that absorbs and preserves all the

achieved perfection of the world. It salvages what is still valuable from the debris of our

lives. While actual entities pass away, they register as permanent effects in the all-

embracing and saving divine consequent nature. The consequent nature of God is

Whitehead’s heaven and his version of the Kingdom of God. God’s inner life and

consequent nature salvage all that is worth saving.

A recurring message in Four Quartets is that in the end is the beginning, or even that,

in my end is my beginning. Similarly, for Whitehead, God processes the contents of

God’s consequent nature in such a way as to feed back into the world a hoard of

suggestions and possibilities for the next generation of successor actual entities. While

for Whitehead, past and prehended actual entities lack the subjectivity and mentality that

they formerly possessed, we may choose better to think that, in the ultimate divine

embrace, subjective thought and feeling are restored.

Contemplating the agony of countless persons over the seemingly endless ages, and

having said that agony abides, the poem says:

Time the destroyer is time the preserver.

The sea, like the universe, is a great destroyer of what it first created and nourished.

Although unfathomable and incomprehensible, death is a condition that must be

accepted. The poem invokes the name of the Hindu God Krishna, who is an avatar of

Vishnu. To a Christian, an avatar suggests the idea of incarnation; that is, the god takes

on the aspect of a human being. To a Christian, the idea of incarnation is closely

connected, not only to death, but to resurrection. Krishna is a warrior and savior. Vishnu

is a preserver of live. In the cases of both Christ and of Krishna, death is something we

pass through to new and better life.

ix. Parts II and III of “The Dry Salvages”

In reference to the certain eventual perishing of all things, there are lines in Part II of

“The Dry Salvages” that are quite amenable and helpful to a Whiteheadian perspective.

The doctrine of perpetual perishing is supported by the lines of the poem. In reference to

a journey on a train, the poem reads:

You are not the same people who left that station

Or who will arrive at any terminus,

In a radically process perspective, it is a brand new universe in every new instant. In

important ways, we are new persons in every new moment of our lives. Whitehead’s

principle of creativity reigns supreme, and, creativity is a principle of novelty. Creativity

is not the principle of order and design, for Whitehead; God is the principle of order and

design. For him, creativity plans nothing; it simply serves as the energy by which any and

all events occur. This is why I say that God is anonymously the real ultimate in

Whitehead’s thought.

The poem also says:

And the time of death is every moment

Which shall fructify in the lives of others:

And do not think of the fruit of action.

Fare forward.

When the poem says Fare forward, it honors the anticipation phase of the actual

entity. It also favors the decision phase, as it sets a resolution with determination to face

the future. The future means death, but it also means all that shall happen to us and all

that we shall do before we die.

x. Parts IV and V of “The Dry Salvages”

The poem might now be finished; enough has been said. Even so, the poem continues

as it transforms itself into a prayer. The prayer is offered to Mary, whose statue stands

somewhere on the promontory, looking out to sea and over the rocks called the Salvages.

Those rocks present a grave danger to mariners. Mary is honored as Stella Maris, the star

or the sea. In this poem where sound is so important, we notice a similarity in sound

between the name Mary or Maria and the designation Stella Maris.

To Mary it was announced that she should be the mother of God. This the subject of

the scene often depicted in devotional art that is called the Annunciation. At the moment

of the Annunciation, the Incarnation takes place. Thus the devotional and the mystical

aspects of Christianity are related.

Part V of “The Dry Salvages” deals with the problem of superstition and religion.

People often resort to sortilege, augury, and bizarre speculation as they try to deal with

religious questions and problems. The poem message is that the crux of the matter in

religion is to accept the mystery within and surrounding us. That mystery is the mystery

of the incarnation, a mystery that Eliot experiences, not in devotional, but more in

mystical terms:

………………………….But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint—

The person in whom the incarnation began, that is, the person in whom the eternal

God takes human form in a virginal womb, is Mary. Mary’s mother, so the bible says, is

St. Ann. A statue of Mary stands on the promontory on Cape Ann and looks out toward

the Salvages. Mary is the protector of mariners who must navigate through a very narrow

channel where many have foundered before. Mary is both the object of devotional piety

and the radical beginning of the mystery of incarnation.

The actual entities experienced or prehended while reading “The Dry Salvages” have

within them many enriching contrasts. These contrasts would include: wet and dry,

Mississippi River and Atlantic Ocean, devotional piety and mysticism, silence and

sounds, commercial and poetic perspectives, Krishna and Christ, saints and ordinary

people, human and divine (as in incarnation), danger and protection, elapsing time and

timeless eternity. The balance of these contrasts brings excitement to the poem, and

allows the unity in a highly diverse set of experiences to be felt in a culminating

satisfaction.

In the poem, Mary is honored as the greatest of all saints, because in her body the

incarnation of the divine in the human takes place. The incarnation takes place, not as an

event that transpired many centuries ago, but rather as one that, viewed as from eternity,

takes place right now in the radical present. The incarnation is the point of intersection of

the timeless with time. Through this prayer and this realization, the mariner belongs to

Mary, and so receives the most powerful protection that is anywhere available.

The poems “Burnt Norton” and “The Dry Salvages” complement one another, as they

comprise half of the rich poetic sequence named Four Quartets. These two poems can be

used to help understand and to interpret one another. The shaft of sunlight and the still

point in the turning world that is present in “Burnt Norton” is a key to understanding

“The Dry Salvages,” and, indeed, all Four Quartets. Even so, the ideas of annunciation

and incarnation in “The Dry Salvages” throw beacons of light upon “Burnt Norton” and

upon all Four Quartets.

iv. “Little Gidding”

Historically, Little Gidding is a place associated with the Anglican monk Nicholas

Ferrar, and with King Charles I, who was pursued there by the Puritan army under

Cromwell, captured, and later beheaded. In the Anglican Church, King Charles I is

considered to be a martyr. Large in the motivation of the blood-thirsty Cromwell was the

reform of the Church of England according to Puritan and Calvinist principles. A

community of Anglican monks lived a spiritual life near Little Gidding in an open field

near a pigsty. A renovated version of the chapel they first built near that place exists even

today.

“Little Gidding” stands on it own as an important poem, and it is also the culmination

of Four Quartets. The poem is arranged in five parts or movements, as would occur in a

musical composition. The ending lines of the poem assure us that All shall be well. The

fire of purgation and the heavenly rose shall be made one. Some lines adapted from the

writing of Julianna of Norwich bespeak the goal and purpose of Four Quartets. Indeed,

this poem is about the purpose of life and of all that we do; it is also about the purpose of

poetry, language, and the power of words.

“Little Gidding” is about the Holy Spirit, about the flames above the heads of the

disciples on Pentecost, and about the tongues of fire that came on Pentecost Day. The

poem is about martyrdom, history, and the meaning of suffering in this life. For Eliot, this

life is about learning how to suffer well, how to find meaning in suffering. Four Quartets

is a poetic masterpiece, and it is also an important contribution to theology. Eliot’s

theology is a theology of the cross, although I do not think he mentions the cross in Four

Quartets.

The converging tongues of fire, the fires of purgation and perpetual perishing, will

coalesce into the shape of a rose. It is an eternal mystical fire, representing not

destruction, but everlasting preservation in the bliss of glory. Ultimately these poems are

about spirituality, mysticism, mature faith, authentic death, and the kind of hope a

modern person may have. It is fitting, if not required, that the truth, wisdom, and message

of the gospel and of Pentecost be spread by means of poetry that aspires to the condition

of music.

As a feast of the church, Pentecost is about language, communication, contemplation,

and poetry. It is about the deep connection between the outward mission of the church

and the inward contemplation of the mystery of life in this world. Somehow, the idea of

Pentecostal fire connects the outgoing enthusiasm of the church’s mission with the inner

sorrow that is part of mystical growth and spiritual maturity. For Eliot, poetry has

everything to do with the improvement and purification of language, and Pentecost is the

feast that celebrates language.

There are some interesting lines and thoughts about purpose in Part I of “Little

Gidding.” Some lines read: “. . .Either you had no purpose / Or the purpose is beyond

the end you figured / And is altered in fulfillment.” Having no purpose, I would assume,

means having no purpose other than just going there to see the place out of idle curiosity.

One can never act without having some purpose in mind. Visiting Little Gidding would

entail wanting to see the place, to visit some people there, or to go there on a spiritual

pilgrimage. Of course, one could intend only to drive by it on the way to some other

place, and have one’s can break down, and stay while the car is being fixed. In the last

case we might say we have no purpose in being there.

As we perform any work or work on any project, we may discover that our real

purpose is beyond or different than our purpose as originally conceived. As we complete

any project, we may realize that our purpose in doing it has changed along the way. The

philosopher Whitehead thinks of purpose as an aim given to us in each moment of time,

which aim we then adjust in the moment into an aim of our own. For him, in every new

moment there is a new aim given, and a new adjustment according to our own free

subjectivity. For example, I may go to the kitchen in order to prepare a cup of tea, and

then stay there to wash up the breakfast dishes, forgetting to prepare the tea.

Eliot’s point in discussing purpose here is to ask why anyone would want to go to

Little Gidding at any time or under any circumstances. It is after all a nowhere, a place at

the end of the earth, so to speak. Is there a play on words here? The poem says that Little

Gidding is a place at the world’s end, so then, what aim, end, or purpose would anyone

have in coming here? The purpose one would have in coming here is much unlike the

purpose one would have in going anywhere else. Ironically, there must be a special

reason or purpose for coming to a place that is a nowhere.

Eventually, the poem tells what the purpose of a visit to Little Gidding is. The poem

tells us what its own purpose is, as well as what the purpose of anyone’s visit to Little

Gidding might be. “You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid,” says the poem.

Kneeling implies adoration, and adoration implies focusing one’s attention on God. In

real prayer, the focus is not on the suppliant and his or her wants and needs. The focus is

on God, and the attitude is one of trust in God, to the point of resigning one’s will to

God’s will. Such prayer is always valid, and the prayer of King Charles I, a valid and

saintly prayer, resounds there still in eloquent silence.

In the background of the poem is a question about the essence of history. History is

about the past, but history concerns the present. When one visits a shrine, one communes

with the saint who abides in that sacred place. In the poem the poet meets his own ghost,

and so the present poet takes a walk and has a conversation with his future self, a dead

self, but a dead self who has passed through death to a greater awareness. The poet owes

history his own attempt at success in the effort to improve language and culture, to purify

the dialect of the tribe, so to speak. This effort requires passing through a purifying fire.

Having taught his lesson, the ghost blesses his former self and then leaves.

In Part IV of the poem, the Holy Spirit descends as Pentecostal fire. It is the

inspiration of the Holy Spirit that inspires the poet, purifies his tongue and spirit, so that

the poet may speak and write what is required. Biblical inspiration was once required to

insure that the biblical books were written, and that they were worthy to be interpreted as

works of divinity itself. In the modern world, poets still require pentecostal fire in order

for secular language and culture to be appropriately directed. Pentecostal fire appears first

of all in tongues, establishing its connection to the sacred word and to secular poetry.

Poetry that is true and real may appear as secular, but its origin and inspiration are sacred.

This is Eliot’s theology.

Near the end the poem says: “We shall not cease from exploration.” The journey goes

on, requiring many adaptations, translations, and interpretations. In the end, we return to

our beginning, once again, as if for the very first time. What is new will always be new,

because it always was new. It is eternity, an eternity that is not tired from its embodiment

in time and from time’s endless repetitions, but one that is always amazed at its own

freshness. Burned away with the chaff of futile history and idle time is the delusion that

eternity can be adequately glimpsed by eyes that are timely and secular. We await

eternity’s full manifestation of itself, not yet having the eyes to see it.