THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT

T.S. Eliot

 

Born St  Louis, Missouri 26 September 1888 died in London 4 January 1965.

 

T.S.Eliot is not easy, but well worth examining his work.

Possibly well-known as the author of: 'The Waste Land' and 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

On a lighter note: 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'which was made into a wonderful musical.

 

'Four Quartets was published in New York, in 1943, London, 1944. The Four appeared separately; 'Burnt Norton, 1936; East Coker 1940; The Dry Salvages 1941; 'Little Gidding 1942.

 

To Listen to Four Quartets click here it read by Sir Alec Guinness 

 

I will deal with the first part of : 'Burnt Norton'

 

While reading this poem it is helpful to bear in mind T.S. Eliot's words: "A poem has its own existence, wherein author and audience meet in a shared experience, not as an address from author to reader.'

The main thrust of the poem is:' time, eternity, immortality.'

 

Burnt Norton is a manor in Gloucestershire visited by Eliot in 1934. Its rose garden suggested the imagery of the opening section:

                                                              .......

BURNT NORTON:

 

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 a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo.

Thus, in your mind.

                        But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

                           Other echoes

Unhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,

Round the corner. Through the first gate,

 

Into our first world, shall we follow

The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

There they were, dignified, invisible,

Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,

In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,

And the bird called, in response to

The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,

And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses

Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.

So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,

Along the empty alley, into the box circle,

To look down into the drained pool,

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,

And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,

The surface glittered out of heart of light,

And they were behind us, reflected in the pool,

Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

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

Cannot bear much reality.

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

 

(T.S. ELIOT Collected Poems

            1909-1962 Faber and faber  pp. 189-90)

 

I think that the imagery in this poem is wonderful and well-worth the effort. It's all very true, don't you think?

 

                                                         .. . . . . . . . . . .

I present another poem from T.S. Eliot's 'Collected Poems'

 

Burnt Norton

II

 

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle-tree.

The trilling wire in the blood

Sings below inveterate scars

Appeasing long forgotten wars.

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.

 

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.

The inner freedom from the practical desire,

The release from action and suffering, release from the

          inner

And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,

'Eerhebung' without motion, concentration

Without elimination, both a new world

And the old made explicit, understood

In the completion of its patrial ecstasy,

The resolution of its partial horror,

Yet the enchainment of past and future

Woven in the weakness of the changing body,

Protects mankind from heaven and damnation

Which flesh cannot endure.

                                      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 rose-garden,

The moment in the arbour where the  raun beat,

Be remembered; involved with past and future.

Only through time is time conquered.

(ibid pp1912)

 

Note: "Erhebung"  Elevation/exaltation (German)

 

         ..........................................................

 

I was chatting with one of the resident poets at Caroline and Davids' tea party - we were, of course, discussing poetry! The conversation turned to our shared admiration of the poems of T.S.Eliiot, during which the writer told me that it was Eliot's poem: 'Journey of the Magi,' which had inspired him as an undergraduate.      

 

JOURNEY OF THE MAGI

 

 'A cold coming we had ot it,

Just the worse time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.'

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

Lying down in the melting snow.

There were times we regretted

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,

And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty and charging high prices: 

A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

 

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,

Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation,

With a running stream, and a water-mill beating the darkness,

And three trees on the low sky,

And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,

Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.

But there was no information, and so we continued

And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon

Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

 

  All this was along time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Deasth, our death,

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer a ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death. 

 

(SOURCE: IBID P. 109-10)

 

Note: There are many specific references in this poem but I suggest it is read first of all for the ultimate poetic experience.

 

I was brought up on Kipling, Just So Stories, Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies and this is still a favourite poem.

 

The Way through the Woods - from Rewards and Fairies

 

They shut the road through the woods

Seventy years ago.

Weather and rain have undone it again

And now you would never know

There was once a road through the woods.

Before they planted the trees.

 

It is underneath the coppice and heath

And the thin anemones.

Only the keeper sees

That where the ring dove broods

And the badgers roll at ease

There was once a road through the woods.

 

Yet if you enter the woods

Of a summer evening late

When the night air cools on the trout ringed pools,

Where the otter whistles his mate,

(They fear not men in the woods

Because they see so few )

You will hear the beat of a horse's feet

And the swish of a skirt in the dew

Steadily cantering through

The misty solitudes,

As though they perfectly knew

The old lost road through the woods -

But there is no road through the woods.

 

Olive September 2011