LIDIA VIANU

Poets

T.S. ELIOT
 

ELIOT MIS à NU (THE SOOTHING QUARTETS)

The narrative intention, which could be detected in The Waste Land, can just as well be identified in the Quartets. Burnt Norton was the time of the ‘first world’ (first love), the memory of the ‘ridiculous waste sad time’... East Coker sounded like a fortune teller's words: look at the wheel of fate, a beginning never comes without dragging behind it the end of a lifetime. THE DRY SALVAGES (1941) is the moment of mature pain, bravely experienced. In an essay published by Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Influence of Landscape upon the Poet) in 1960, Eliot confessed that his second quartet

‘begins where I began, with the Mississippi; and ends where I and my wife expect to end, at a parish church of a tiny village in Somerset’.

On the wall of his tomb, in East Coker, the following lines were actually carved:

 'in my beginning is my end'

Of your charity

pray for the repose

of the soul of

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Poet

26th September 1888 – 4th January 1965

'in my end is my beginning'.

The pain in the third quartet is lacerating. The poet feels excruciated, and this is the reason why the third is the most humane, the most direct, the most appealing of the Four Quartets. Reticent Eliot comes out of his hiding, giving an account of his mature inner life. The spiritual burden placed upon it is heavier than Sisyphus himself would have been able to push uphill. But the feeling of pain is Eliot's depth; without it, he invariably sounds superficial. The way in which the soul makes visible its tragedy is interesting in this third quartet. The Waste Land and Ash-Wednesday were a frantic carnival of faces contorted by despair. The Dry Salvages is purged from dread. If there is anything as serene suffering, it is here that Eliot best approximates it.

These Dry Salvages, Eliot explains, are a mispronunciation of the French ‘les trois sauvages’. They are a group of rocks with a lighthouse on them – a spot that must have brought about the death of many a ship and many a sailor. They rise near Cape Ann, Massachusetts – a place where Eliot used to spend his summers while a teenager. It is not for the first time that the dreamland of the sea bewitches Eliot's lines. Prufrock wished he would live at the bottom of that mysterious and (he thought) reassuring world; he hated his own world of towns, rooms, aggressive females. The drowned Phoenician sailor in The Waste Land also undergoes the well-known Shakespearian change into a more precious and more enduring substance than life: ‘those are pearls that were his eyes’. Eliot hardly wrote any poem without touching with his fingertips images of water, of the sea. So does The Dry Salvages. It openly states:

‘The river is within us, the sea is all about us’.

The river is likened to a ‘strong brown god’. It is menacing, ‘sullen, untamed and intractable’. Bridges may solve the problem of crossing it in towns, but so much the worse for the city-dwellers if they forget about its hidden powers. One line unpleasantly reminds us of The Rock, when it speaks of townspeople as ‘worshippers of the machine’. Eliot did not have it in him to denigrate urban landscapes. We learn later that water, the river, witnesses all human ages, all seasons of life; the nursery bedroom, the flowers in April, the grapes on the table in autumn, as well as the halo of the gaslight on winter nights. In The Waste Land, the river headed for the sea. We find here the same cruel, yet life-giving sea. The images are picturesque, though marked by a heavy sadness. The sea eats the edge of the land: a feeling of universal solitude hovers about the words. Its beaches are littered with bones of starfish, horseshoe crab, and whales. The sand looks like a ‘torn seine’, which (resourceful assonance) ‘tosses up our losses’: a broken oar, rags of foreign dead men. In short, a gloomy image of the sea echoing lost voices. This is the image of a shipwreck, which Eliot would have liked to squeeze into The Waste Land, if Pound had not advised against it. Fear lurks nearby: yet, somehow we feel sure that, this time, Eliot will manage to hold it at bay.

He hurries to let us know: ‘People change, and smile: but the agony abides’. Old scars are unveiled here and there: ‘the calamitous (or last) annunciation’, ‘the bitter apple and the bite in the apple’ (another interesting assonance, reminiscent of the ‘wrath-bearing tree’ in Gerontion, the ‘withered apple-seed’ in Ash-Wednesday, V), the ‘prayer of the bone on the beach’ (alliteration). The sign of this agony is the fatal group of rocks, The Dry Salvages. They embody the Biblical punishment uttered by God to Adam (Genesis, 3):

‘Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of the wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee saying, Thou shalt not eat of it; cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life (...); In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return’.

Ash-Wednesday is not far behind. One thing, however, is changed, and this change makes all the difference. Eliot is no longer trying to terrify. He shuns away his anger and revolt. He tries to look resigned. He speaks of horrors in a blank voice. We do hear about wailings, withering, wreckage, unprayable prayers, failing powers, wastage, primitive terrors, and ‘sudden fury’. We feel we are drifting together with the poem on the waves of a whimsical sea. Our life, like anybody's, is a ‘drifting boat with a slow leakage’. The future, we are told, like the past, has ‘no destination’.

If the substance of the images is the same, what has changed must be Eliot's poetic manner. Hope has deserted him. Wishful thinking has been replaced in the poems by hopeless thinking. Eliot's intelligence has taken a tamer course. He urges now:

‘Not fare well,

But fare forward, voyagers’.

His tired sensibility means to show he has given up striving to catch a star. He has abandoned his dread of the future, hoping to adapt to another season of his life, a rather futureless age. The change from sickening to soothing is welcome, especially when it so masterfully renders the abstract in concrete terms:

‘... time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.

When the train starts, and the passengers are settled

To fruit, periodicals and business letters

(And those who saw them off have left the platform)

Their faces relax from grief into relief,

To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.

Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past

Into different lives, or into any future;

You are not the same people who left the station

Or who will arrive at any terminus,

While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;

And on the deck of the drumming liner

Watching the furrow that widens behind you,

You shall not think 'the past is finished'

Or 'the future is before us'.

At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,

Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,

The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)

'Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;

You are not those who saw the harbour

Receding, or those who will disembark.

Here between the hither and the farther shore

While time is withdrawn, consider the future

And the past with an equal mind (…)’ ‘.

Eliot the literary critic repeatedly put aside from him ‘flights of abstruse reasoning’. Of course, literary critics will go on dissecting the philosophy of the Quartets. Eliot's wish was that poetry should be felt before it was understood. This is one of the reasons why these quartets should be handled carefully. We must learn to protect the fleeting feelings they delicately outline. Philosophy may have had a part in these poems, but only as a discipline of mind. The main thing is that these Quartets reveal something unique in Eliot's poetry: a warm directness. This evidence of attachment to man and life in Eliot's creation can hardly be stressed enough. Reading these lines, we realize why Eliot hated those critics who called him learned and cold. The more the poet writes about indifference, peace of mind, ‘detachment’ and so on, the more attached he feels to everything. His former ties to the world were grumbling. He kept feeling hurt and howled out. This new attachment is spiteless; it is generous and warm. The warmth of a poet who hides in his poetry a heart for all seasons. In his own words, a

‘music heard so deeply

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

While the music lasts’.

The end of the third quartet, poem of middle-age, in which sadness is cunningly overshadowed, sounds encouraging, in spite of, or just on account of mastered fears. It speaks of us all, we,

‘Who are only undefeated

Because we have gone on trying;

We, content at the last

If our temporal reversion nourish

(Not too far from the yew-tree)

The life of significant soil’.

Whether called humility, or directness, Eliot's mood is here a hymn to man's conquered fragility.