What’s Wrong with the World

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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

What We're Reading--"Little Gidding"

I am preparing a literature class for my eldest daughter's upcoming high school year. Planning to call the class "T.S. Eliot and Christian Literature." So we're starting with Eliot, and I have been making notes. I just finished re-reading The Four Quartets today with "Little Gidding," and it seemed to me imperative that I should write a post to say--read this poem. Or re-read it. If you have read it before so many times that you think you have it memorized, go, pick it up, and read it again. And by the way, pick it up and read it from a physical book, not merely on-line. If you have never read it read it for the first time. In fact, read it again and again, until you have it nearly memorized. Then put it away for a while and come back and read it again years later. It will repay you, every single time.

I was nearly overwhelmed this time through by the power of this particular poem, beyond even the power of any of the other three in the group.

Eliot specializes in the way of negation, and in "The Dry Salvages" (for example), itself a very great poem, there is that sense of negation almost to the point of depressing the spirits. In "Little Gidding" he transcends anything remotely akin to depression and turns negation into hope.

If you read this poem repeatedly, certain phrases in it will, like phrases of Shakespeare, become part of the furniture of your mind. Like the liturgy or the Bible (in the King James English, of course), they will be part of you--a gift from the past to the present and, if you teach the poem to others, from the present to the future. "Midwinter spring is its own season." "What the dead had no speech for, when living,/They can tell you, being dead. The communication/Of the dead is tongued with fire..." "...things ill done and done to others' harm//Which once you took for exercise of virtue." "...the purification of the motive in the ground of our beseeching." "We only live, only suspire/Consumeed by either fire or fire."

But the greatest comes at the end. And let me leave you with this, as lovers of your country and, some of you, lovers from afar of the England that once was. And then go, sit somewhere quietly, and read the poem all the way through.

We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Comments (32)

Oh, thank you for posting this, Lydia! I came home this afternoon exhausted from Summit, and thinking that I needed to just read something good that has nothing to do with feminism . . . and now I know what to look for on my shelf. I struggle often with Eliot because his work is so allusion-filled, but I am always moved. My very favorite remains "Journey of the Magi," and I never tire of teaching "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." His longer works are fascinating, and his craftsmanship a delight.

Thank you for a fascinating article. T. S. Eliot has been an avid interest of mine for several years. Like you, I find that the more I commit to memory the more I will appreciate the work. If you or any of your readers have not seen these works, I would recommend them highly for more on Eliot:

Dove Descending, T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.
Thomas Howard.

Redeeming Time, T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.
Kenneth Paul Kramer.

Eliot and His Age. T.S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century.
Russell Kirk.

Words Alone. The Poet T.S. Eliot.
Denis Donoghue

Can I make a confession: I don't think Eliot's work is poetry.

That is, I think that there is some really great lines in there, and he sometimes works wonders with imagery and connections.

But poetry is more than that. Poetry is orchestration of words into music - language-music. And while (regular) music has many forms, many styles, all true forms of music have some basic features to be music, such as melody and rhythm. True poetry orchestrates the letters, syllables, words and phrases, with pauses, together with the meanings, so that the sounds use many facets to enhance the thoughts into a coherent whole.

Lacking BOTH meter and rhyme, what Eliot does with the basic material is similar to what Rex Harrison does to "singing" in My Fair Lady - say for the piece "Why Can't a Woman Be More Like A Man?" . Harris's "singing" refuses to use a song-voice, instead using speaking voice, though with cadence, intonation, and some other elements of song.

"Poetry" that is missing both meter and rhyme is like music that is lacking both song-voice and rhythm - that is, not quite music, properly speaking, and not quite poetry. I would suggest that what Eliot really has done is work in a medium that lies between poetry and prose - and is neither one simply speaking.

What I really wonder is to what extent was the acceptance of this sort of thing as a "development" of the art is due to the degradation of all of the arts in the hands of the modernists? Can someone please explain to me how the LACK of meter actually improves his orchestration of language to improve what he conveys? Can anyone undertake to establish that if Eliot had modified his work to include meter it would be a lesser Eliot?

I'm with the philistine. As a poet (at least when younger and a lyricist for music now), Eliot has never quite caught and kept me. I always try to give him more consideration, new chances to capture me, but it just doesn't happen.

His use of language can flash with brilliance, but it never quite adds up to a movement toward an emotional state of any kind or a climax that satisfies. It neither builds to a profound place nor achieves a stasis of great beauty for me.

For all his descriptive brilliance, it seems bloodless and cold to me. I never sense a man in exquisite pain, pleasure, joy, or ecstasy.

Shakespeare does it for me. John Donne, Will Blake among a few others but not Eliot.

I agree. Eliot is doing philosophy, not poetry. Impeccable philosophy.

Voegelin found no fault with Eliot, and that's a rare distinction.


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...

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden

You can call it whatever you like - poetry, philosophy, or writing. I just call it beautiful.

I'm something of a philistine myself and am not in the abstract a fan of vers libre. Twenty-five years ago, very much under Eliot's spell, I tried to write some poems myself in free verse, and of course they were absolutely awful, though I was never sure of that until quite recently. When I teach literature, in general I teach it as an enthusiast and a fellow appreciator, not as an expert. Eliot's effect on me is like the effect of some great abstract painter upon a grudging curmudgeon. Eliot forces me to acknowledge that he is a poet, and in truth a very great one. His free verse is completely controlled. There is no question that he could have written in rhyme and meter, and a number of sections even of the Four Quartets are rhymed and metered. E.g.,

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

His ability to work with strict rules, if surprising ones, is evident in "The Dry Salvages," part II, in which each line ends with a different rhyme and that same line in each stanza ends with the same rhyme. (No doubt there is a name for this, but I don't know what it is.) So the line ends go, for the first two stanzas,

wailing
flowers
motionless
wreckage
unprayable
annunciation

trailing
hours
emotionless
breakage
reliable
renunciation

This is, in a sense, Eliot's version of the abstract artist's drawing something meticulously realistic to show that he can do it if he wants to. He keeps this difficult rhyme scheme up for six stanzas, which is pretty amazing.

But no, the Four Quartets would not be greater if they were entirely in rhyme and meter. As witness in example the lines I quote above, which certainly would not be improved by being entirely different. :-) I would suggest just reading these few lines _out loud_ to see if they grab you:

So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

But if Eliot's greatest poems continue to seem just too abstract, his practical cats poems are great fun and are entirely rhymed and traditional. It always surprises me to find such a melancholy and "artsy" man writing those poems, which are not highbrow at all and not sad. "Animula" might also appeal, as it is rhymed and metered until the final stanza, which breaks off the meter only for the "pray for us" lines.

In the spirit of abjuring sacred cows everywhere, I offer this wicked satire of Eliot's Four Quartets by Henry Reed:

CHARD WHITLOW

(Mr. Eliot's Sunday Evening Postscript)

As we get older we do not get any younger.
Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five,
And this time last year I was fifty-four,
And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.
And I cannot say I should like (to speak for myself)
To see my time over again—if you can call it time:
Fidgeting uneasily under a draughty stair,
Or counting sleepless nights in the crowded Tube.

There are certain precautions—though none of them very reliable—
Against the blast from bombs and the flying splinter,
But not against the blast from heaven, vento dei venti,
The wind within a wind unable to speak for wind;
And the frigid burnings of purgatory will not be touched
By any emollient.
I think you will find this put,
Better than I could ever hope to express it,
In the words of Kharma: "It is, we believe,
Idle to hope that the simple stirrup-pump
Will extinguish hell."
Oh, listeners,
And you especially who have turned off the wireless,
And sit in Stoke or Basingstoke listening appreciatively to the silence,
(Which is also the silence of hell) pray not for your selves but your souls.
And pray for me also under the draughty stair.
As we get older we do not get any younger.

And pray for Kharma under the holy mountain.

I certainly agree that the Krishna passage in "The Dry Salvages" is not one of the high points of the set of poems.

For Our Lydia, all to show that her sweet affection for the Mohammedans are not completely wasted:

I am the slave of the Koran While I still have life. I am the dust on the path of Muhammad, The Chosen One. If anyone interprets my words In any other way, I deplore that person, And I deplore his words.

Jalalu’ddin Rumi

Eliot's effect on me is like the effect of some great abstract painter upon a grudging curmudgeon. Eliot forces me to acknowledge that he is a poet, and in truth a very great one. His free verse is completely controlled....This is, in a sense, Eliot's version of the abstract artist's drawing something meticulously realistic to show that he can do it if he wants to. He keeps this difficult rhyme scheme up for six stanzas, which is pretty amazing.

But no, the Four Quartets would not be greater if they were entirely in rhyme and meter...

You're doing pretty well for someone who claims to be so dense about poetry. Like Beth, I too appreciated this post. Rhyme and meter were effortless for Eliot (or at least he made it appear that way - he was a tireless reviser) when he chose to use them (see Sweeney Among the Nightingales). He was probably up to something more like what you describe above.

Eliot famously argued that, while Milton was a very great poet, he was a terrible influence on those who followed him.

The same might be said of Eliot himself.

Lines like these:

"A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells..."

or these:

"The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream..."

simply defy criticism. (Well, *my* criticism, anyway!)

To say nothing of stuff like this:

"I have smelt
Corruption in the dish, incense in the latrine, the sewer in the incense, the smell of sweet soap in the woodpath, a hellish sweet scent in the woodpath, while the ground heaved. I have seen
Rings of light coiling downwards, descending
To the hooror of the ape. have I not known, not known
What was coming to be? It was here, in the kitchen, in the passage,
In the mews in the barn in the byre in the market-place
In our veins our bowels our skulls as well
As well as in the plottings of potentates
As well as in the consultations of powers.
What is woven on the loom of fate
What is woven in the councils of princes
Is woven also in our veins, our brains,
Is woven like a pattern of living worms
In the guts of the women of Canterbury..."

Whoah.

But do I want anybody else trying to write verse the way that Eliot tried to write verse?

No.

He was a one-off.

I think there is a lot of truth in that, Steve.

I was struck recently reading _Murder in the Cathedral_ by the way that the chorus of the women of Canterbury (the voice in your last quotation) resembles Eliot's earlier poetry--"The Waste Land" or "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," for example. It's as though he's taking that painfully sensory portrayal of horror (the catalog of beasts is a similar passage by the chorus) and putting it into an explicitly Christian frame or setting which shows it not to be the whole story.

btw - the 8th chorus from The Rock (1934) could serve as this site's official poem. It's a sort of brief summary of the crusades:

"...in spite of all the dishonour,
The broken standards, the broken lives,
The broken faith in one place or another,
There was something left that was more than the tales
Of old men on winter evenings.
Only the faith could have done what was good of it;
Whole faith of a few,
Part faith of many.
Not avarice, lechery, treachery,
Envy, sloth, gluttony, jealousy, pride:
It was not these that made the Crusades,
But these that unmade them.

Remember the faith that took men from home
At the call of a wandering preacher.
Our age is an age of moderate virtue
And of moderate vice
When men will not lay down the Cross
Because they will never assume it..."

I'd entirely forgotten that passage. I didn't re-read Choruses from the Rock this time around. You're right. That's perfect.

Choruses from the Rock is just so strikingly different from anything else Eliot wrote that I can think of. It was written not long before _Murder in the Cathedral_ and produced by the same producer (don't remember his name), and there are similarities, but to me the poetry is very different.

Speaking of the Crusades. Why is there so much wimpy crap from certain Christians, including clerics and Popes of the Catholic Church, regarding Muslims? Is it safe to say that any given Christian, whether layperson or Pope, who is soft on Islam is "corrupted" by "Modernity" while any given Christian, whether layperson or Pope, who is hard on Islam is not?

If not, what else is going on? And how can we fix this so that we can best protect our loved ones from getting maimed and killed by Muslims? Or does that not matter so much to "true Christians" with their eye ever on the "next life"...?

To all ye poetry readers:

My friend Seth Abramson is a poet who just had a collection published. Please consider checking it out:
http://www.amazon.com/Suburban-Ecstasies-Seth-Abramson/dp/0981652530/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247837327&sr=8-1

From "East Coker", part V

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years --
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres --
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate -- but there is no competition --
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps there is neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I just re-read a portion of the Wasteland, which I had read as a young man. I think now I have finally put my finger on what bothers me about Eliot's work in general: The switch from one image or metaphor to another to another line after line requires an extremely intense mental gymnastics.

But the reference points for these images and metaphors lie, the majority of the time, both outside of the poem AND outside of standard English usage or awareness. A great many of these metaphors simply cannot be penetrated without a set of notes on the life of the author and a reading list of his that extends into quite obscure and unknown works. Some of them cannot be penetrated without explicit help from the author: line 46 starts in with a reading of Tarot cards, most of which are actually made up by Eliot. Line 50 refers to the man with three staves; according to Eliot The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.

So the effort to keep up with the author in his image after image requires a parallel effort to seek out notes and assorted by-lines of other information that is extrinsic to the poem. I, unfortunately, only have one mind. It is thus impossible to simply sink into the opus itself and let the words and images do their work upon me.

As a result I find it somewhat incomprehensible that anyone could actually suggest this is great poetry, i.e. poetry that of itself speaks in a broad idiom, of universal experience. It most definitely does not speak in a broad idiom.

I would argue that the Four Quartets are greater poetry than The Wasteland. I realize that The Wasteland is in some ways more famous, but I see a pretty big difference between it and his later poetry. The Wasteland manifests more of a desire to set a puzzle for the reader and to make huge numbers of references that the reader will have to research or read notes in order to get. The Four Quartets requires much less in the way of additional information of this sort, and it also (in my opinion) expresses more genuine feeling and insight and less merely self-conscious cleverness. I picked my recommendation in the main post very deliberately. There was a reason I didn't suggest you sit down and read The Wasteland until you nearly had it memorized. It's true that it helps to know a little bit about the Anglican families at Little Gidding in the early 1600's (a very little bit) and about the English Civil War, as well as about the blitz in London, to understand parts of "Little Gidding," but there are swathes you can get even without these, and these bits of knowledge are not only fairly easy to acquire but also worth having.

I've always rather thought that if a writer were more knowledgeable than I, and used his more extensive knowledge to craft his work, the problem lay with me, not with him. (WFB once said this about vocabulary, and I agree with that, too. We shouldn't condemn any writer because we aren't part of his audience or need to learn more about whatever his subject is to understand it. And yes, I do believe there are evaluative standards; I use and teach them every day. I just don't think use of allusions is one of them.) As for personal idiosyncrasies, well, yes, these are more off-putting, but it doesn't seem to me that these overpower Eliot's work so that it is not understandable without knowing them, and he does have the notes so one can learn them and come back to the work with greater appreciation -- though it's not a strategy I recommend to my budding writers.

My students often complain that they can't understand Shakespeare without reading all the glosses, which is annoying, time-consuming, and not especially enjoyable. But by the time they have read 7 or 8 plays, during the first half of a semester, they find Shakespeare suddenly far more accessible and enjoy his work a great deal more during the second half. It's like learning a new dialect.

I find Eliot like that, and the more I read his work the more I love it.

Of course, some people will never love Eliot for all kinds of reasons. I can't stand Melville. That doesn't make him not a great writer; his style just doesn't resonate with me. And that's okay too. We can't all like the same things, nor can any writer reach every person from every era on the planet, no matter how great he is.

I tend to think that Shakespeare's allusions would have been better known to his original audience than to us so that the need for the glosses is in no small part a result of the gap of time. For a writer to bring in so many obscure allusions that even a contemporary audience can't appreciate what he's writing _at all_ without notes...I tend to think that's more of a fault. Some allusions like that are fine, but the work shouldn't simply be deliberately dense with them. Just my opinion. But I do think one sees that changing in Eliot chronologically, so perhaps, if only tacitly, he agreed with what I've just said. :-)

I tend to think that Shakespeare's allusions *would have been better known to his original audience* than to us so that the need for the glosses is in no small part a result of the *gap of time*. For a writer to bring in so many obscure allusions that even a contemporary audience can't appreciate what he's writing _at all_ without notes...

Hmmmm... I wonder if this can apply to Scripture as well...

For sure. Time, space, and culture in the case of Scripture.

Thanks, Lydia; for a moment there, I thought somebody might pull off some "Death of the Author" stunt.

But I do think one sees that changing in Eliot chronologically, so perhaps, if only tacitly, he agreed with what I've just said. :-)

Lydia, thanks for that. I agree that I was finding Little Gidding less densely packed with self-referential allusions than The Wasteland, and therefore more accessible and enjoyable. I thought that The Wasteland came later and was his more thoroughly representative work, since it seems more famous, but I see that was mere assumption.

If then both the author and many readers thought that the technique used in The Wasteland was a bit much in obscure allusions, this raises a question: why is The Wasteland more famous? And held up as an exemplary piece of 20th century poetry?

For one thing, "The Wasteland" is pre-conversion and has more of the modern angst and hopelessness that the so-called intelligentsia of my discipline like. Eliot's later poems offer hope alongside the modern despair, hope that is explicitly spiritual, and so makes them [my non-Christian colleagues] less comfortable. But also "The Wasteland" was seminal in the experimental poetry of the time and, Eliot being about the only genius creating it, his has become the iconic example. And it certainly does give a compelling image of modern man without God and without hope, "headpiece filled with straw."

I've always rather thought that if a writer were more knowledgeable than I, and used his more extensive knowledge to craft his work, the problem lay with me, not with him. (WFB once said this about vocabulary, and I agree with that, too. We shouldn't condemn any writer because we aren't part of his audience or need to learn more about whatever his subject is to understand it.

Beth, I agree with this too, but I think there are limits to the notion: like using words that are part of the technical vocabulary of a specific sub-field, say cosmetic surgery or or something like that, in a work obviously not intended to be limited to such a sub-field. Or using allusions to events in your own personal life, as if they were general knowledge.

And maybe 200 years ago referencing any serious literature that had been published nationally was reasonable, but that simply does not hold anymore, there is just too much out there. (And the library keeps expanding so the problem grows more acute). There is a difference between making use of a reference to a work that is small and not quoted every day but known to be part of the lexicon of an educated person, and making use of a reference to a book that nobody but you remembers.

I think the need for "author's notes" to fill in the holes is an abomination, frankly. If he couldn't be bothered to come up with a metaphor that pulls from general knowledge and experience, then what is to keep me from saying he is just being lazy (or just being intentionally obscure for the sake of being top dog in the wink wink you and I know what we mean but nobody else does contests of adolescents? He can keep those kinds of pearls for all I care. Oink Oink.)

Or is it maybe that he does not pull his metaphors out of the general experiences of man because it is not there to begin with?

Isn't a metaphor that has to be explained just about like a joke that has to be explained?

A.p.: The Wasteland is more famous for all the wrong reasons - e.g., because of its superficial obscurity, which seemed revolutionary at a time when (some) people seemed to want poetry to be revolutionary, and because of its powerful (& malign) influence on subsequent generations of bad poets.

Eliot's notoriously evasive "notes" on the poem just make things worse.

Yes, it was famous because it seemed like a revolutionary and hip kind of thing to do at the time. To do Eliot justice, I don't think he wrote it that way chiefly _because_ it would be all the rage in literary fashion. But I do think he matures as a poet as time goes on. As far as his early poetry is concerned, one of the only ones I really have a lot of affection for is "Preludes." That is really powerful and shows his genius without pretension.

My favorite abstrusely recondite line is:

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle-tree.

Hesperado,

"My favorite abstrusely recondite line ..."

The first part is probably a Mallarme allusion -- Tonnerre et rubis aux moyeux -- though what garlic is doing in there is beyond me. The second line is an allusion to Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois, though perhaps this just pushes the problem further away.

More reasons to prefer "Little Gidding" to "Burnt Norton."

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