Poetry: Listening to Eliot's Four Quartets

Four Quartets
By T. S. Eliot
Harvest Books, 1968
(64 pages, $9.00, paperback)

Dove Descending - A Journey Into T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets
By Thomas Howard
Ignatius Press, 2006
(148 pages, $14.95, paperback)

reviewed by S.N.D.

Nearing sixty, marking recently my third year after heart surgery, and knowing more frequently those moments that are, in the poet's words, "a new and shocking valuation" of all I have been, this mere reader is perhaps more ready now than I was thirty years ago to heed the music of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. I am perhaps more ready to hear the intricate, insistent polyphony of Air, Earth, Water, and Fire, singing of inexorable time and inevitable mortality; perhaps more ready to detect and cherish the gracious epiphanies of the Eternal that briefly intersect our time-ridden lives. (These epiphanies, the poet says, "are only hints and guesses." Could we call them inklings?) And perhaps I am more willing now to place my ailing life into the "bleeding hands" of that "wounded healer" Who plies His questioning steel with "sharp compassion;" perhaps more willing to humble myself, at long last if only a little, beneath the relentless ministry of the "dove descending...with flame of incandescent terror" Who seeks to redeem me from the fire of self-love by the fire of divine love. ("The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/Is the wisdom of humility. Humility is endless.") Perhaps I am more ready for this music now. I pray that I am. 
 
Thirty years ago, while living in England, I surveyed most of Eliot's poetry and some of his drama, giving much attention to Four Quartets. (I even journeyed to Little Gidding and sat in the rebuilt chapel "where prayer has been valid.") Chapters of condensed erudition, much of it over my head, in books by Stephen Spender, Hugh Kenner, and Dame Helen Gardiner helped me understand a little of the architecture of these poems, their major themes, and some of the allusions they contain. But listening to their music again, now with Thomas Howard's Dove Descending as concert guide, has been one of the most moving experiences of poetry in my life.
 
Howard takes one persistently into the details of Eliot's music. Passage by passage, phrase by phrase, sometimes almost note by note, he leads the listener through the performances at Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, Little Gidding, and their related venues, explaining meanings where they are clear, suggesting interpretations where they are not, clarifying many of the myriad echoes and overtones. (Eliot's poetry is notoriously allusive.) Howard writes enthusiastic, colorful, and often eloquent commentary that keeps the listener moving along through the score unimpeded by a single footnote.  
 
And though he reminds the reader that Eliot was a poet and not an evangelist, Howard is definitely not bashful in pointing out the numerous clear but subtle Christian messages in these works.

[I]t is the mark of Eliot's identity as a modern poet that in these Quartets, which have no theme other than the unabashed Catholic notion of salvation, the words “God”, “Christ”, “Calvary”, and “Gospel” never once occur. It is not fastidiousness or timorousness that asks this reticence from Eliot: it is, rather, the imperious demand laid upon the modern poet that he contrive to speak of this theme in words that will quietly steal a march on the unbelieving modern reader.

Stephen Spender wrote of Little Gidding that “the whole movement of the poem is toward the acceptance of death.” In some sense he is right. The second movement does speak clearly of the deaths wrought by air, earth, water, and fire. But this mere listener also hears something more than a counsel of resignation. For at the end of East Coker Eliot says:

Old men ought to be explorers…
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion

And in the last two verses of Little Gidding he amplifies these lines with what I take to be a message to all explorers past middle-age, perhaps on prodigal sojourns in far countries, heart-sick for their spiritual home:

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.

To all such explorers who may be enticed by this review to listen to T. S. Eliot’s
Four Quartets with the aid of Thomas Howard’s Dove Descending, I join Eliot in bidding

Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.