Four Quartets

The plan of five movements in four poems makes the subtractive test unusually sharp, since every movement answers to its counterparts in three other poems. Remove the rose garden of Burnt Norton I and the close of Little Gidding, which returns to it, has no source; remove the turn of East Coker II, “That was a way of putting it”, and the poem loses its argument that every form is provisional. Most of the work resists. What holds the axis is real and locatable: The Dry Salvages repeats in its long lyric and its meditations what Burnt Norton said more tightly, its fifth movement opens on a catalogue, and “O dark dark dark” in East Coker III runs on past its effect. A tenth of the whole could go with loss of pattern but little loss of matter.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: that the moments in which a life is real are few and given, not achieved, “the moment in and out of time” (The Dry Salvages V); that the rest is attention, discipline and return; that “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality” (Burnt Norton I); that every attempt to say what matters is “a raid on the inarticulate” (East Coker V); and that an old man’s knowledge is of failure, “the rending pain of re-enactment / Of all that you have done, and been” (Little Gidding II). These hold without the faith, and the ghost’s account of the gifts reserved for age is an exact disclosure of late life. Held below the top because the last turn, to the Incarnation and to Julian of Norwich’s “all shall be well”, is given as doctrine more than shown.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Height is reached often and in more than one register. The warm: the rose garden, where “the leaves were full of children, / Hidden excitedly, containing laughter” (Burnt Norton I). The still: “At the still point of the turning world”. The dreadful: the dawn street of Little Gidding II, “After the dark dove with the flickering tongue / Had passed below the horizon of his homing”, where the bomber and the Holy Spirit share a line, and the dove of IV, descending in “incandescent terror”. The cold grandeur of the river as “a strong brown god” and the sea’s “many gods and many voices”. The close, “And the fire and the rose are one”. Held off the very top because the flat passages, which the design requires, lower the frequency: elevation is the rule in two poems and the exception in The Dry Salvages.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Myth built, and built out of places a reader can visit. The rose garden is an Eden entered by a door “we never opened” (Burnt Norton I); the four elements, air, earth, water and fire, order the four poems; the descent into darkness is made on the London Underground; the river god and the sea run under The Dry Salvages, where Krishna’s counsel to Arjuna on the field of battle is turned on passengers in a train. The load-bearing construction is Little Gidding: the dove is Pentecost and a bomber at once; the “familiar compound ghost” is Dante’s Brunetto Latini and the dead masters of English poetry in one figure; and the king who came to the community in the Civil War joins the Blitz in one history. Held below 9.0 because the archetype sometimes arrives as reference, Heraclitus, St John of the Cross, the Gita, Julian, laid beside the poem more than grown from it.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The inheritance is large and the poem names it: Dante, the English devotional poets of the seventeenth century, Wordsworth’s meditative blank verse, the mystics. The turn is in two places. First, a musical form borrowed for verse, five movements recurring with variation across four poems, so that statement, recapitulation and development carry the thought where narrative or argument carries it in a long poem. Second, failure let in on purpose: discursive passages that criticise the lyric just sung, and the open admission that “The poetry does not matter” (East Coker II). The stake was real: after The Waste Land had made fragmentation the modern long poem, Eliot staked his standing on a continuous, abstract, devotional one, and some contemporaries charged him with retreat. Held at the bar because the turn runs from his own earlier manner back toward the meditative tradition, and lies in the structure more than in a language the tradition already had.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Here the form is the knowledge. The poem’s claim is that time is redeemed only by return, “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning” (Little Gidding V), and the form performs it: East Coker opens with “In my beginning is my end” and closes on the inversion, each poem comes back to its opening, and the whole ends at the gate of the rose garden where it began, to “know the place for the first time”. Recast as an essay, the argument survives and the knowledge does not: what the reader learns is the recognition of a phrase, an image, a movement on its second and third coming. The flat passages are formal too, enacting the “intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings” they describe. Held below the top because one plan four times sets a template that The Dry Salvages fills more than it needs.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Eighty years of reading have not exhausted it, and the evidence is the range of what is still found in it: the philosophical reading of time; the mystical reading through St John of the Cross; the musical reading of the form; the historical reading of a wartime poem written by an American who had become an Englishman, about both his ancestral villages; and the textual history set out in Helen Gardner’s The Composition of Four Quartets. Lines change on return: “Old men ought to be explorers” (East Coker V) reads differently to a reader at twenty and at sixty, which is part of what the poem says about time. Held at 9.0 because a portion of the doctrine, once grasped, does not deepen, and readers commonly find the poem yielding most in two of its four parts.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The field is poetry in English in the twentieth century. The intrinsic force is plain: the poem showed that a modernist could write a long philosophical and religious poem without narrative and without fragment, that abstraction and plain statement could stand in verse beside the most intense lyric, and it made the meditative sequence in movements available to English poetry again. The reach is narrower than the force: the main line of poetry after 1945, in Britain and still more in America, moved away from Eliot’s late manner rather than through it, and much of the influence is on readers rather than on the form of later poems. The Waste Land moved the field more; this poem consolidated, and was resisted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is among the most quoted poems of the century in English, its closing lines have passed into public and liturgical use, and later meditative and religious poets wrote under it.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over eighty-three years from the collected publication of 1943 and ninety from Burnt Norton. Form: the text is whole and stable, with nothing lost and no contested version. Presence: continuous since publication, taught, anthologised and recited, read at funerals and in churches, translated into the main European languages, and quoted in public life more than almost any poem of its decades. Its surface is tied to a moment only in the war of Little Gidding, a setting the poem turns into history rather than a dependence. It stops short of the widest presence its span could show: its audience, large as it is, is a literary and devotional one, and its standing among poets and critics fell for a time after the 1960s.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Eliot’s English, with no translation between. Command of the medium is load-bearing, and the measure is the range of verse forms inside one voice: the accentual meditative line, slowed to the pace of thought; the octosyllabic couplets of East Coker II; the five rhymed stanzas of the wounded surgeon, “The wounded surgeon plies the steel”; the six-line stanzas of The Dry Salvages II, keeping their rhyme sounds throughout; and above all the unrhymed terza rima of Little Gidding II, with its alternating masculine and feminine endings, carrying a whole Dantean encounter in plain modern diction, “the ash on an old man’s sleeve”. The sound is exact: “Quick now, here, now, always” (Burnt Norton V). Held off the top because some flatness exceeds its formal use, in the abstract chains of The Dry Salvages and the phrasing of “the moment” repeated across poems, and a few lines are prose the design permits but does not require.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the catalogue of fortune-tellers in The Dry Salvages V and the dark dove of the Blitz; or the country dancers of East Coker, “Keeping time, / Keeping the rhythm in their dancing”, and the given moment of illumination. One law holds them: everything in time is either the movement that turns or the still point it turns on, and the poem places each thing by that. The range is wide, country dance and theology, the London Tube and the North Atlantic, a ghost of Dante and a household’s dead, and it is held. The cost is in tone, not law: The Dry Salvages, in an American landscape, wavers between the grand and the slack as the other three do not, and the move from a peacetime first poem to three wartime poems shows a little at the joint.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged at its scale, a sequence of four poems. The orders held: consciousness, as the attention that makes the poem; time and eternity; the sacred, Christian above all, with the Hindu and the Greek beside it; history, from the English Civil War and the seventeenth-century emigrant to the Blitz; the nation; the family across generations, the ancestors of East Coker and “Old stones that cannot be deciphered”; the natural order of seasons, river and sea; the craft of language; age and death. They are integrated by one law, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that there are almost no persons: love between people, labour, the social life of the city and the state appear as glimpses, the dancers, the fishermen, the faces on the Tube, seen from a distance. The poem encompasses history from inside one meditating mind, and the human order thinly.

Score: 8.2 / 10