At the Still Point

FOUR QUARTETS -- T. S. Eliot -- Harcourt, Brace ($2).

In a little short of 900 lines, these subtle, magnificent religious poems contain more beauty and sense than any book within recent memory. They are capable of charming, and teaching, many thousands among the great general reading audience.

T. S. Eliot has never been an artist likely to please the bulk of that great audience. Simply as a rather solemn American-turned-Englishman, he is personally unsympathetic to many. His work lacks commonness in the good sense of that word as well as the bad. It requires a patience of ear and of intellect which many readers lack; patience not merely in one reading but in many. For a long time, too, it was easy to misjudge Eliot, thanks to certain of his admirers, as the mere precious laureate of a Harvardian coterie. But that time, fortunately, is well past. So levelheaded a man as Somerset Maugham has recently (in his Introduction to Modern English & American Literature--anthology; TIME, May 24) done both poetry and plain readers a notable service by introducing Eliot to a large audience, without talking down and without so much as mentioning his "obscurity," as "the greatest poet of our time."

Eliot is, to be sure, not a poet in the grand antique sense of spontaneous and unprecedented song. But as a devoted artificer of words and as a distiller of experience, he has always been a poet, and a particularly fine one. Unlike many greater and lesser poets, moreover, he has constantly grown and changed. In his youth he was most notably a satirist; then a mosaic artist of exquisite sensibility, a man who used the perfected expression of past artists as frankly as he used his own, to arrange, fragment by fragment, edge by edge, an image of the desolation of his time (The Waste Land).

In 1928, with considerable hauteur, Eliot professed himself an Anglo-Catholic, a royalist and a classicist, and the chaplet of lyrics (Ash Wednesday) which celebrated his conversion remains the most richly beautiful of his poems. In the '30s, taking hints in diction from his brilliant junior W.H. Auden, he wrote the poetic dramas Murder in the Cathedral and Family Reunion. Now, at an age (54) when the talent of many good poets is dead and buried, he publishes the harvest of his last seven years, these four "quartets." Of all his poems they are the most stripped, the least obviously allusive,* the least ingratiating in image and in diction, the most direct. They are set in a matrix of subtly intensified, conversational style. To many readers they will look, and remain, flat and forbidding. But those who will give them the care they require will find, here, the finest work of a distinguished lifetime.

Beethoven and Eliot. Readers familiar with the great "last quartets" of Beethoven will suspect that Eliot derived from them his title, much of his form, elements of his tone and content. They will almost certainly be right, for no other works in chamber music fit the parallel. Both Beethoven and Eliot are working with the most difficult and quintessential of all materials for art: the substance of mystical experience. Both, in the effort to translate it into art, have strained traditional forms and created new ones. Both use motif, refrain, counterpoint, contrasts both violent and subtle, the normal coinage of both arts, for purposes more profound and more intense than their normal coinage, for purposes more profound and more intense than their normal transactions.

Beethoven was a man of colossal genius, originality and definitiveness; Eliot is not. That might make all the difference in the world; it makes a good deal less than might be supposed. For Eliot, if he lacks major genius, is nevertheless a man of fine intellect, of profound spiritual intelligence, and of poetic talents which, if "minor," are nevertheless unmatched in his generation. And his subject is of a dignity which, if approached with these abilities, makes excellent poetry unavoidable and great poetry possible.

There is poetry of both kinds in Four Quartets.

"Time Past and Time Future." The heart of Eliot's meditation is Time. Not time as that hypnosis of clocks and of history which holds all human existence captive--though this sort of time gets his attention too--but time as the mystic apprehends it, "at the still point of the turning world." Time beats in these poems like the seabell which, in one of them,

Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried

Ground swell, a time

Older than the time of chronometers. . .

The first quartet opens with a quiet statement which could as easily have been J. W. Dunne's, in his An Experiment with Time, as a religious poet's:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in the world of speculation.

But the religious implications of that statement are clear:

Men's curiosity searches past and future

And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint--

No occupation either, but something given

And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,

Ardor and Selflessness and self-surrender.

For those of us who are not saints ("human kind cannot bear very much reality")

. . . there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

The hint half guessed, half understood, is Incarnation.

Here the impossible union

Of spheres of existence is actual . . .

And here all opposites are canceled, become one:

The dance along the artery

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

Ascend to summer in the tree

We move above the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars.

For we are here

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

Time Conquers Time. There is an opposite pole to this stillness. It may be discerned behind "the strained time-ridden faces, distracted from distraction by distraction," of any great city, any "place of disaffection":

Descend lower, descend only

Into the world of perpetual solitude,

World not world, but that which is not world,

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.

a darkening of the soul whose opposite and whose one cure is "the darkness of God":

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Time, moreover, is our savior as well as our destroyer. It is the air we must breathe, the lens through which we perceive timelessness, through which we become conscious:

Time past and time future

Allow but a little consciousness.

To be conscious is not to be in time

But only in time can the moment in the rosegarden . . .

[The moments of mystical illumination]

Be remembered; involved with past and future.

Only through time time is conquered.

Theme & Variations. Upon this theme, in poetry rich in paradox and reward, in mystery, in symbol, in despair and, ultimately, in hope. Eliot develops his great variations. The sere, cryptic titles of the four quartets are the names of places intimately associated with his experience. Burnt Norton was a Gloucestershire man or near which he lived for a while. East Coker is a Somerset village which was the home of his ancestors. The Dry Salvages (accented like assuages) is a group of rocks off Cape Ann, Mass. Little Gidding was a lyth-Century religious community established by Nicholas Ferrar. Each of the poems has not only its earthly-mystical locals but its season of the year and its Aristotelian element as well -- which for which is not in every case clear. Of the first, the season seems to be spring, and the element air. Of the second: summer and earth. Of the third: fall and water. Of the fourth: "Winter spring" and fire.

Throughout the poems, in constant undertone and, more often than not, by indirection, Eliot writes of the timebound society he lives in, and of the war:

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre--

To be redeemed from fire by fire.

The dove may be either Spitfire or Messerschmitt, or the Holy Ghost, or both. The redemption from fire by fire may be either the crucial moral dilemma of war--kill or be killed--or the redemption from hellfire through heaven-sent fire, or both. That the fire is heaven-sent, literally as well as through the mere figurative agents, doves and bombers, Eliot has no doubt. For the lyric continues:

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.

The Author. Of these quartets their author has said, "each represents the maximum length of a poem which I have been able to get continuous time to do under these [wartime] conditions." Getting much continuous time can have been no easy job. When, in 1939, Eliot ended his 16-year-old Criterion, the most distinguished literary quarterly in the language, he was tired. Today he is 1) a director of Faber & Faber, publishers; 2) advisory editor of The Christian Newsletter; 3) commentator in the New English Weekly (Eliot's latest contribution is an essay, Notes Towards a Definition of Culture); 4) church warden of Anglo-Catholic St. Stephen's, in London's respectable Kensington; 5) British Council lecturer; 6) fire watcher in quiet Bloomsbury.

* E.g. In one quartet, East Coker, there are disguised quotes from the 16th-Century Sir Thomas Elyot and from St. John of the Cross; but each is linked by appropiate transitions with what goes before and after, so that readers unacquainted with these not-widely-read authors will not be conscious of missing anything.

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