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Four Quartets is the name given to four related poems by T. S. Eliot, collected and republished in book form in 1943 (ISBN 0156332256). They had been published individually from 1935 to 1942. Their titles are Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding.
Eliot considered Four Quartets to be his masterpiece, as it draws upon his vast knowledge of mysticism and philosophy. Each of its four poems runs to several hundred lines total and is broken into five stanzas. Although they resist easy characterization, they have many things in common: each begins with a rumination of the geographical location of its title, and each meditates on the nature of time in some important respect – theological, historical, physical, and on its relation to the human condition. A reflective early reading suggests an inexact systematicity among them; they approach the same ideas in varying but overlapping ways, although they do not necessarily exhaust their questions.
Christian imagery and symbolism in the poems is abundant: T. S. Eliot had converted to Anglicanism in 1927 and was in fact a devout Christian. There are also numerous references to Hindu symbols and traditions.
Part IV of Little Gidding was set to music by Igor Stravinsky in Anthem: The Dove Descending Breaks the Air (1962). Later Sofia Gubaidulina wrote a Homage à T.S. Eliot (1985) which quotes from three of the poems.
As all the quartets, Burnt Norton is a deep meditation on the meaning of time and its relationship with human beings and the Christian meaning of Redemption.
The first verses are the best summary of the poem:
With plastic images as "the passage which we did not take", "the door we never opened", a "rose garden" full of children who weren't there, the poet sees himself before those things which "might have been" but never were and perceives him as a powerless witness of unreal things.
Then he meditates on the meaning of eternity, using a figure of which Eliot is very fond, "the still point of the turning world" (the center of a turning wheel is not turning) is really the source of movement:
But human beings, still submerged in time and movement, are not able to perceive it, because
and consciousness is required to catch the glimpses of eternity.
The third stanza is a first clear statement on what the poet sees as the way to redeem time and to give a value to our actions in time: to free oneself from worldly attachments,
This is a repetitive idea in Eliot's later (after The Waste Land) poems (and will appear several times in the Four Quartets), and reflects his devotion for the Church's teaching concerning poverty and detachment, together with the parallel doctrines of Nirvana in Buddhism. The imagery in the stanza ("a dim light", "time-ridden faces, [d]istracted from distraction by distraction") was said to be inspired by Eliot's trips on the London Underground.
A quotation from Burnt Norton appears around the water feature The River in Birmingham's Victoria Square - see ]
The starting sentence
which can be understood as a poetical expression of his desire that his ashes be kept there, is also a derivation of Mary Queen of Scots' motto (In my end is my beginning, En ma fin est mon commencement).
The poem starts again with a reflection on the power of time to change things (reflected in the changes happened to the place), the inability of humans to prevent it and hence, the little use of getting anxious, with a clear parallel of Ecclesiastes 3:1-9:
Which is remembered again at the end of the first stanza
The second and third stanzas are a sad and melancholic evocation of those who were before as, which brings to mind our own weakness and nothingness; there is nothing left from them as there will be nothing left from us. There is only one escape, for the poet, and that is humility:
But then, what hope is there? That of hoping against all hope (from Romans 4:18) and hence going through the dark night of the soul; here Eliot quotes almost literally St. John of the Cross' Subida del Monte Carmelo:
This idea, especially the several paradoxes and their oriental imagery (typical of St. John of the Cross) made a deep impression in the poet (who read the Spanish poet's works several times and had quoted him already in the opening page of Sweeney Agonistes).
After the night of the soul, or maybe because of the detachment the soul has achieved, there comes Christ (disguised as a surgeon who has to produce pain in order to cure) to heal us, in one of the few rhimed parts of the whole work.
Finally, returning to the present, the author expresses his awe at all he has seen before and his desire to do as little wrong as possible (this is a persistent idea in Eliot's works), and to find love in being as less active as possible. The poem ends with the aforementioned motto, as if the writer realised that, actually, his end (God, from the Christian perspective) is his beginning (he has been created by God and for God)
Before placing himself at the title's place, Eliot starts describing his feelings towards the river as opposed to the sea. Being born in St. Louis, he had a profound child experience concerning rivers (the Mississippi). He sees the river as a
but which men have been able to deal with in some way, and have come to forget. His feelings towards it are nicely expressed
This familiarity and even comeliness of the river is in deep contrast to the sea's strangeness and ruthlessness (now he is referring to the title)
[...]
This behavious makes the author reflect about the powers above us human beings, and how time, again, is something we cannot understand completly (the tolling bell of buoys and beacons [m]easures time not our time) and far from our control. Destiny is not in our hands.
The second part starts with six nested stanzas of six verses (which rhyme between stanzas, not in them) presenting life at the sea (seamen and their wives specially) as an image of ordinary life and its sufferings. Human beings cannot control time nor fully understand it, as fishermen cannot control the sea:
But there is some hope: Christs' coming to the world,
The second half of this part is a painful description of time and life as seen by a man with an earthly outlook. The meaning of Happiness is not clearer than that of Pain, and both are above our possibilities. And time makes no difference: Time the destroyer is time the preserver.
Then comes (third stanza) another reflection on the future, and a long meditation on human behaviour and attitude towards live, comparing it to a voyage. Here, Eliot makes use of his knowledge of Buddhist myths, specifically, Krishna's words. There is in life, as in any voyage, no point of wishing well, but simply of going on:
and at the end,
Fourth stanza is a prayer (to Our Lady) for seapeople, but in view of the above, it may be seen as a prayer for humanity, also.
The poem ends (fifth stanza) with a description of men's efforts to understand history and divine the future (personal and human) by magic, horoscopes, etc... and stating that
what matters really is eternity and its link with men's history (which is the Incarnation of Jesus Christ).
and other people (we, ordinary people) are unable to do it. At least, maybe our point is to understand its importance and its liberating power, which Eliot tries to explain in the final verses.
A long and intense description of Midwinter spring starts the last quartet, the scenery being Little Gidding. Then, the poet warns the visitor of the place that its meaning is beyond any comprehension, and that even if there was any hint of "purpose" in the visit, it has been overcome by a superior one. Whatever the reason, the meaning of the place (the religious community that was there, the return of Charles I...) is over it:
There are two parts in the second stanza. The first one is a set of three stanzas with a very rhythm which is in contrat with their content (vanity of human efforts and power of death over everything). They start with the famous
Then a long passage, in nested hendecasyllable tercets, mirroring Dante's relates in the Divine Comedy, one of the works which most influenced Eliot's literary education (he usually carried a copy of it, and read it in the Tuscan original). This twenty-five tercets resemble Dante's accounts of his meetings with people in Hell, Purgatory and Paradise: description of the situation, meeting with the person in question (What! are 'you' here?), words of the writer to the other, answer of this one (usually somewhat cryptically) and parting of both.
The conversation deals with the usual topics of eternity and the little objective importance of human acts, and the gifts reserved for age: the expiring sense, the lack of true feelings, the rending pain of re-enactment // Of all that you have done, and been, the discovery of the real motives of one's actions... The parting goes as follows:
The third part is a calling to detachment, especially from self as the developing of one's being in time, to love beyond desire, and so liberation // From the future, as well as from the past.. Another rhythmical stanza recalls the people who used to live at Little Gidding and their differences, and asks not to judge anyone for his party, but to be above any division (citing explicitly the war of the two Roses), because
(the first two verses are from Dame Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, and have appeared already at the beginning of the rhythmical stanza).
Fourth part is a patent homage to the Holy Spirit (The dove descending breaks the air), and an exaltation of his omnipotence and power to redeem. He is also the Love which is the opposite of the fire of passions (or even of Hell) and between which two lie our decisions:
The ending part recalls the beginning of East Coker
The poet meditates on the meaning of our actions, the many instances when we realize that what we called an end was just the beginning of another move, and vice versa (Every poem an epitaph). Birth and dying are moments of equal importance, we are born with the dead... but in God's hands, though we be unconscious, He takes care of us. The "crowned knot of fire" is an image of the Trinity. In the end,
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