A Very First Reading of "The Four Quartets" - by T.S. Eliot

Burnt Norton

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

The element of air

I 

Time has two dimensions. It is at once spread out into past, present, and future, and also all three of those exist in one another. One's whole existence is present even when one is an embryo. One's existence is finished at the moment it is started. So too does our past come along with us into the future, making us to be what we are. 

Then we are transported back to a "first world," a past memory of humanity. 

He is visiting an old burnt out manor and sees reflected in its ruins the hayday it once had. 

He says this line again, "What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present." 

II 

A tree which is the axis of the earth and all things which move. 

Then a description of God's eternity: 

"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."

Then he describes man's participation in eternity in Heaven.

We leave time behind but we also leave those memories behind for a present conscious eternity. It is only going through time that the problem of past, present, and future is conquered by eternity.

 

III 

Here he describes the Londoners moving through their day without any of these higher thoughts, but caught solely in the world below. They have neither the light of God nor the puridying darkness of ascestism. They are rather just filled with distraction. "Neither plentitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker over the strained time-ridden faces distracted from distraction by distraction filled with fancies and empty of meaning..."

Then death comes and brings darkness. 

IV

Will there be hope?

V
Our modes of expression like music and words are unstable and only in their highest forms reach a stability. Yet God is perfect stability to all of us, not a dead stability but a living one. One which words fail to reach. 

Love though is unmoving and the eternal among us. 

East Coker

Village of his family ancestry. 

The element of earth 

I 

Every place is at once its present and at once its past which encapsulates the cyclical nature of human life. Birth, marriage, children, death, and again and again. It’s all present in a place. 

II

The earth and heavens and seasons have the same experience. 

Old age brings much experience but experience is always unique and undermining its own pattern. 

Rather wisdom is in men’s follies and fears of commitment and humility. 

III

Death and destruction will take all things into the void. And yet in this darkness God is doing something to the soul. To get to peace one must be stripped of everything and only then can we start to have it. 

IV

The church as nurse reminds us that the divine physician must wound us to save us. In death we can finally be saved. We must be purified in purgatory. We must go through Christ, his death and his Eucharist. 

V

Words fail to properly express these realities and men have time and to again tried to express them but also forgotten them too. We are just called to try. 

We are on the path when we realize that the afterlife is what matters, a deeper reality, not this one. This one is what we all pass through, but it’s what we pass to that’s important. 

The Dry Salvages

 A group of rocks off the coast of Massachusetts. 

The element of water

I 

We forget nature in our machines world, but it waits there powerful, affecting us in the background and reminding us of the past. It is the oldest time keeper. 

II

And time keeps adding to the seas ancient collection of man. Its last collection is mans death. 

A thing so old that it’s just an archetype not any addition to be made to it. There is no evolution. 

A new view of the past can change it. The human agony in the past seems permanent; but can it find new meaning? 

III

To rephrase it, history is cyclical, not progressive. Our lives pass in an instant, what matters is what our minds are set on at death and what we pass on, “fare forward”. 

IV

A prayer to Mary. 

V

We seek by every odd means to grasp these realities but we can’t. Only the saint sees the intersection of time and eternity through their self sacrifice in love. We have glimpses of this but it’s only in the spiritual life that we see, only in the incarnation. In moral living. We try for heaven. 

Little Gidding

"Little Gidding is a village in Cambridgeshire visited by Eliot in 1936. It was the home of a religious community established in 1626."

Element of Fire

I

The time which is part winter still and part Spring. In all places you search but it's not for the purpose you think, but for one that is greater than all of those. You can go to the ends of the earth but this reality is everywhere. and it is accessed only through prayer and in a language that only will make sense after death. 

II

Everything turns to dust. The death of air, of earth, of water and fire. 

He encounters a ghost at the end of it all. They walk together and talk. He asks for forgiveness for his ideas of the past, for it is not enough. It is a judgment of one's soul. There must be a purifying fire.

III

The self, thing, and other people - attachment and detachment. Freedom from past and future. From country and history. 

all have died and the past is gone. But it will be well because we will be purified. 

IV

Which fire will we choose, that of Hell or the purifying fire? Love is behind all suffering. "Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name behind the hands that wove the intolerable shirt of flame which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire consumed by either fire or fire." 

V

In the beginning is the end. In birth our death is determined. Of all of history, it is here in the Lord's calling here and now that redemption lies. And in the end we will get to know our beginnings. And though it cost us our whole lives, all will be well in God and our crowns are mixed with both suffering and love. 

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, remembered 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.