Four Quartets

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.

East Coker (1940)

:Village in Somerset, England from which Eliot's ancestors emigrated to Boston in 1660. T.S. Eliot visited the village in 1936-7 and his ashes are buried in the churchyard. A memorial tablet was erected in 1965.

Related Topics:
Somerset - England - Eliot - Boston - 1660

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The starting sentence

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:In my beginning is my end.

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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).

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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:

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: there is a time for building

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:And a time for living and for generation

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:And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane

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:And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots...

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Which is remembered again at the end of the first stanza

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:The time of seasons and the constellations

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:The time of milking and the time of harvest

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:The time of coupling of man and woman

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:And that of beasts.

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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:

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:The only wisdom we can hope to acquire

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:Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

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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:

Related Topics:
Romans - St. John of the Cross

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:To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not

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::You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy

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: the quote goes on for some ten verses

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:And where you are is where you are not.

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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).

Related Topics:
St. John of the Cross - Sweeney Agonistes

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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.

Related Topics:
Christ - Rhimed

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:The wounded surgeon plies the steel

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:That questions the distempered part

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:Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

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:The sharp compassion of the healer's art

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:Resolving the enigma of the fever chart

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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)

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:Love is most nearly itself

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:When here and now cease to matter.

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:

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:We must be still and still moving

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:Into another intensity

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:

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:. In my end is my beginning

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