Ending with Eliot

Again, Eliot’s work leaves me at a loss for words as I grapple for meaning—as I attempt to connect his four pieces to make a whole—as I attempt to peel back the layers of meaning. I believe to really understand Eliot’s poem, I need to better understand his Anglican perspective, the meaning behind Eastern religion (Hinduism and Buddhism), and his personal involvements with certain others (Emily Hale, Vivien Leigh, and Jean Verdenal). It is also necessary to know Dante’s works as Eliot strives to create a masterpiece that could possible live up to the standards of the one he so greatly admired throughout his life. All of these philosophies and people found their way into Eliot’s prior works, so how is this one different? He incorporated Hale into nearly all of the works we’ve discussed in this course. He has woven Dante’s words into “Prufrock” and “The Wasteland”—and countless others, I’m sure. Eliot has taken everything he has learned and everything he has come to know and not know and carefully crafted his timeless piece. I just wish that I could truly derive ultimate meaning. At this point, I cannot. Through reading the required materials to accompany Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, excerpts from Lyndall Gordon’s biography on Eliot and Peter Middleton’s essay, I have only come to better understand bits and pieces and themes that seem to run consistently throughout the poem.

In “Burnt Norton” the reader is taken into “time past” where “Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose-garden” (lines 11-14). Here, Eliot seems to be recalling an unexplored relationship with Emily Hale—as she is often incorporated in his garden images within his poems. This brings me back to something that I posted on several weeks ago regarding his futile wave imagery in connection with Hale in “Prufrock” as it seemed to connect to an image in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. This same connection could be made in Eliot’s first of “Four Quartets” when considering Shakespeare’s “…pale primroses, / That die unmarried” (lines 122-3). A floral setting is placed around Shakespeare’s character, Perdita, just as Hale is in Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”. There is also a reference to garlic and kissing in Shakespeare’s play, which makes me wonder about Eliot’s first line in part two of BN: “Garlic and sapphires in the mud.” I can only extract meaning by reflecting on Middleton’s essay when he “suggests that the ‘garlic and sapphires in the mud’ of Burnt Norton might be allusions to Verdenal (the association of sapphire with hope and garlic with both exorcism and lust adds to the force of this connection” (84). When taking the Shakespeare reference into consideration (as it really seems to have uncanny connections at times—to East Coker as well) and combining the notion of “hope” and “lust,” I can’t help but attach this memory to Emily Hale. Eliot’s reflection recognizes a hope and a lust that is past—“empty” even “[b]ut reconciled in the stars” (BN ii line 15). I do realize that Eliot is incorporating more than just a memory of his past. He also incorporates his other layers of history, philosophy and religion.

Although Harold Brooks “clarif[ies]” the major religious thread that is woven throughout the four pieces, I think it would be unfair to assess the poem as simply religious as a whole. I do believe he incorporates past elements that we saw in “The Wasteland”—only, this time, a little more clearly. “The Wasteland” fit into the Christian myth and parabola, and I see “The Four Quartets” performing a similar operation. Brook asserts, “The Quartets represent four ways of experiencing reality, or God, in three different kinds of time, and in a timeless dimension” (140). “Reality” and “God” are both important elements to consider, and they seem to be interchangeable as Brooke states. This concept of merging reality and God is further confirmed as Dr. Sparks noted, “Ib [is] a vision, lyrical,, often Edenic—always marked by a kind of merger of self with the surrounding environment” (Freewrite 1).

Another element, which I have often envisioned Eliot and Woolf discussing, is the meaning of time in this poem. I felt as though the end result of Eliot’s “Quartets” were similar to Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.” There’s the common element of memory and what one chooses to do with it. There is also the question of how one will choose to move forward in his/her given situation. In the character Lily Briscoe’s case, she seems to come to terms with her present and accepts herself regardless of what the future holds as she will be unable to determine exactly what it will hold—that’s up to future generations to determine. Similarly, Eliot, in his final “Quartet,” “resonates into a future beyond the poem which is our future as much as the poet’s” (Gordon 386).

I am unsure if I will ever “come to terms with the quartets,” but I will continue to try, for I have found an appreciation for Eliot that I never thought I would. With this poem, I believe he found a peace that he hadn’t discovered within his other pieces. With “Prufrock,” there seemed to be this underlying torment because of his sexual conflict and general disturbance with a disjointed environment. With “The Wasteland,” he seemed to suffer despair because of a failing relationship compounded by a lack of overall control (over himself and his environment). He was only broaching his Christian conversion but had not wholly arrived (as discussed in class). He seems to revisit all of this in “The Four Quartets” but is accepting of it and relinquishes control because of his religious foundation.