March 2022 Print

By Dr. Matthew Childs

In Part V of “East Coker,” the second of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets—the earth quartet—the speaker recalls “Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres” during which time “every attempt” at “trying to use words” has been

. . . 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. (128)

We can understand that sense of waste or failure (which is actually a mature valuation of art per se in light of the eternal, rather than a sense of futility) from Four Quartets itself, but we can, as well, assess for ourselves whether or not T.S. Eliot’s efforts between the two great wars of the twentieth century—a period during which the poet became a British citizen and converted to Christianity—were largely wasted. If we can “have the experience” of reading his work and not “miss the meaning” (“Dry Salvages” II. 133), we can both assure Old Possum his time was not wasted and come to understand something about the possibility of hope even for hollow modern men in the waste land of post-modernity. Eliot’s major poems of the period between the world wars, from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Four Quartets along with his first plays, are profoundly thematically of a piece. All of these poems and plays acknowledge and dramatize the emptiness and fragmentation of the post-WWI landscape. The texts are absolutely truthful in their assessment of the modern situation—they are non-sentimentally bleak—but also surprisingly consistent and spiritually hopeful, if read well. Hence Eliot’s poetry not only helps us understand the world of his time, but, more importantly, can help us avoid falling into its despair as we read the signs of our own times “That seem unpropitious” (“East Coker” V. 128). Eliot’s years of “l’entre deux guerres” will not have been wasted on us at least if we can see that his poetry which in itself “does not matter” (“East Coker II. 125) can “fructify in the lives of others” (“Dry Salvages” III. 134) who read it well since it consistently and increasingly insistently “Point[s] to one end, which is always present”—the Word (“Burnt Norton” I. 117).

Eliot’s first major poem, his first big hit, was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), a work we can consider a WW I poem despite the fact he began writing it many years before the war. The dedication in later editions, “For Jean Verdenal, 1889-1915 mort aux Dardanelles,” along with its first lines, evoking the idea of gas warfare and the sickness and death it caused, tie the poem directly to that war. In those beginning lines all hope in the sentimentality of romanticism is broken with the first image in Eliot’s poetry of modern man, physically alive but profoundly sick and only “partly living” (Murder in the Cathedral 180):

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table . . . (3)

Whatever ideals and hope modern man may have taken into the war to end all wars have been dashed and we are left in a state of death within life, an idea that recurs especially through “Prufrock” and the other early major poems The Waste Land (1922) and “The Hollow Men” (1925). These early poems present post-war man living a hell on earth. The epigraph to “Prufrock” is from Dante’s Inferno—a damned soul speaking only because he is certain no one on earth will ever hear what he says; Eliot’s introduction to his poem, his major poetry, is a despairing start. The modern city dwellers in The Waste Land who move mechanically to work in the morning, flowing like the river they cross rather than walking, and returning home as “human engine[s]”(line 216, 43) to eat food from tins and engage in loveless, automatic, physical interaction—prelude to our contemporary “hook-up” culture—are also compared to Dante’s damned: “ . . . so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many” (lines 62-63, 39). The hollow men of that poem can’t even stand or speak, but only “[lean] together” and “whisper”: having denied the eternal, the speaker hollow man describes himself as “Shape without form, shade without colour,/ Paralysed force, gesture without motion” (I. 56). All these poems present a profound loss of meaning and of purpose in living, along with a more pernicious problem: the will to adopt “deliberate disguises” (“The Hollow Men” II. 57), to avoid even asking the “overwhelming question” (“Prufrock” 3) that could lead a pilgrim back from the dark wood of mere temporality into the light of eternal truth. Ironically, herein lies the hope of all these poems: there is an awareness that something has been lost and even a sense, if only fragmentary, of what has been lost and the means of its recovery. Though the stifling drawing room world in “Prufrock,” where “human voices wake us and we drown” (7), holds him back, that poem’s speaker has in fact gotten away from the city enveloped and choked in the ubiquitous fog of modernist malaise. He has been on the seashore—the intersection of land and sea, a symbol of “The point of intersection of the timeless/ With time” (“Dry Salvages V. 136), between time and eternity—and heard the mystical “mermaids singing, each to each.” Though he “do[es] not think that they will sing to [him]” (7), the very fact he has heard the sound of transcendence holds out a kind of hope. That hope only gets stronger in subsequent poems.

Even in The Waste Land, Eliot’s most famous poem, the awareness of loss is strong and, arguably, leads to hope and the possibility of recovery—water/ baptism—rather than despair and death, though many commentators on the poem insist upon its hopelessness. In the same way Prufrock progresses from the city “Streets that follow like a tedious argument/ Of insidious intent” (3) to the beach, the speaker in The Waste Land begins in a desert land where “roots . . . clutch [and] branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish” (I. 19-20, 38), a place of ruin, “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats . . .” and there isn’t even the “sound of water” (I. 22-24, 38) and ends at the sea shore. The poem finishes with the speaker fashioning the “broken images” of seemingly lost poetic tradition, beauty, and meaning into a mosaic of recovery: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” (V. 431, 50).

“The Hollow Men,” Eliot’s last major pre-conversion poem, presents most directly the true nature of transcendent hope only hinted and guessed at by way of mermaids singing or the thunder speaking (The Waste Land)—along with many other images—in the earlier poems. The hollow men, like Prufrock who has “seen the eternal Footman hold [his] coat, and snicker, And in short . . . was afraid” (6), wish to be no nearer to “death’s other kingdom” (“Hollow Men” II. 57). Though they live in the waste land—“This is the dead land/ This is cactus land” (III. 57)—where “There are no eyes,” no “windows of the soul” and apparently no one watching over them; and though they are likened yet again to the shades in Dante’s Divine Comedy at the moment of death, “Gathered on this beach of the tumid river,” (IV. 58) there is the awareness of the possibility of redemption. It is important to know that there are two rivers souls take to the afterlife in The Divine Comedy: one to Hell, Acheron, (referred to in The Waste Land, I “The Burial of the Dead”) and one to Purgatory, the Tiber. The hollow men may be awaiting their angelic guide on the bank of the Tiber, rather than Charon on the shores Acheron:

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men. (IV. 58)

The rose is the image of the saints within the Empyrean of Paradiso; the perpetual star is Our Lady, who prays for Dante the pilgrim and his final vision of God at his journey’s end, and who can still intercede for modern, hollow men if they throw off their deliberate disguise of soul-less “stuffed men” and “dare disturb the universe” ( “Prufrock” 5) by asking and answering “the overwhelming question” (“Prufrock” 3), and by not fearing “death by water,” recognizing it as the only source of life; for “we are buried together with him by baptism into death; that as Christ is risen from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4). Their only hope lies in emptying themselves of their stuffing of mere temporality and opening the way for eternal action which we increasingly see in the later poems that insist repeatedly eternity can and still does intersect and interact with time, even in the waste land.

Eliot’s post-conversion poems and plays become more explicit and sustained reflections upon religious themes—though religious imagery and allusion are present even in the early poems—and the source of hope for modern man is more clearly expressed in the later work. What the earlier poems present “through a glass in a dark manner” the later poems and the plays—especially Four Quartets and Murder in the Cathedral—propose directly, “face to face” (I Cor 13:12). Though the message becomes more explicit, it is not obvious, for Eliot’s poetry is hardly ever obvious, even when appealing, to first time readers, myself included. The poems in their apparent difficulty—the paradoxes, the subjective images, the abstruse language, the many allusions—are manifestations of the fact that while truth is still present to modern man, “even among these rocks” (“Ash Wednesday” VI. 67), it is very difficult to see and to keep, to grasp, without effort in our times. The poems engage readers in the struggle and prove that it is worth the effort to pursue the truth. The eternal within time, only vaguely understood or barely hoped for in the early poems, is named directly in Four Quartets, Eliot’s last great poem and the transition point to his drama. That poem—made up of four poems of five parts each—begins with the problem or question that is resolved throughout its remainder and resolves the overwhelming dilemma of the early poems: “If all time is eternally present/All time is unredeemable” (“Burnt Norton” I. 117). If there is nothing beyond, outside of, or different from time, there can be no redemption of time, no meaning or purpose to life. Each quartet presents a moment “in and out of time” (“The Dry Salvages” V. 136)—a scene that brings together past, present, and future, or the living and the dead in one way or another—demonstrating that we all have an inkling and even some, albeit fleeting, experience of the eternal, just as Prufrock hears the mermaids on the beach, or the hollow men perceive “the eyes” of “death’s dream kingdom” in “Sunlight on a broken column/. . . a tree swinging/ And in the wind singing/ More distant and more solemn/ Than a fading star” (II. 57), or the traveler in Part V The Waste Land who sees a “third who walks always beside” his companion though they two are alone (360-365, 48).

The third quartet, “The Dry Salvages,” names the reality of eternity’s redemptive interaction with time:

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement . . . .(V. 136)

How many people are even aware Eliot, the poet of The Waste Land, wrote these lines? They are extraordinary, but the idea is already in the early work, “Not known, because not looked for” (“Little Gidding” V. 145), not yet named in the earlier poems. Eliot’s poetry is God-haunted from the beginning and God-manifesting toward its end—“Journey of the Magi” (1927) and “Ash Wednesday” (1930) are also explicitly “religious”—and that is the most striking thing about his work as whole aesthetic that grows, develops, and matures, demonstrating how, even in the cultural, intellectual, philosophical, and theological wasteland of the twentieth-century, between two wars that took tens of millions of lives and their companion revolutions that took many untold more, God still works in souls. Eliot’s poetry, as a body, is a profound source of hope because when we read it well, we can see the “unhurried Ground swell” (“Dry Salvages” I. 131) of providence working in it; his corpus is sacramental in the sense that it stands as a sign of the often-hidden transformative work of eternity within time, changing despair to hope, confusion to clarity. His later work in particular might be described as a sign of contradiction: as modernism in art turned to postmodernism after WW II, moving on “In appetency, on its metalled ways/ Of time past and time future” (“Burnt Norton” III. 121) of pure temporality, waiting for Godot rather than looking for God, Eliot’s work turned to eternity as the “still point of the turning world” (“Burnt Norton” II. 119) that had always been there if only as a “fading star” (“Hollow Men” 57), a presence by way of absence or desire, “Before the beginning and after the end” (“Burnt Norton” V. 121). The beginning and end only co-exist fully in the alpha and the omega, so it makes sense that when Eliot’s poetry completes its pilgrimage—“arriv[ing] where [it] started/ And know[ing] the place for the first time” (“Little Gidding V. 145)—it arrives at Incarnation. The Word made flesh is the source first of vague hope, despite its apparent loss, and finally of redemption, giving meaning to our daily lives.

The final movement of Eliot’s work is his transition from poetry to verse drama—his first play Murder in the Cathedral was literally begun with lines cut from Four Quartets—a transition that applies the lesson learned in the poetry: redemption requires incarnation and so the poetry takes life on stage in order better to “fructify in the lives of others” (“Dry Salvages” III. 134), to participate in the action of the Incarnate Word, in a way. It is not an exaggeration to say Eliot’s drama, what I call the “theater of the eternal” in another work, is an attempt to bring true life back to the “dead land” of the anomic and finally suicidal twentieth century:

What I should hope might be achieved, by a generation of dramatists having the benefit of our experience, is that the audience should find, at the moment of awareness that it is hearing poetry, that it is saying to itself: “I could talk in poetry too!” Then we should not be transported into an artificial world; on the contrary, our own sordid, dreary, daily world would be suddenly illuminated and transfigured. (Poetry and Drama 31-32)

The goal is not to make some new myth or deconstruct all myth, as many in the twentieth century seek to do, either making new truths in our own image—the positive, “vital immanence” part of modernism, in St. Pius X’s terms—or rejecting any capacity to find meaning—the negative agnosticism and concomitant phenomenology of modernism—but rather to engage in “the fight to recover what has been lost/ And found and lost again and again” (“East Coker” V. 128). Eliot’s work insists upon the Real Presence, the reality of eternity’s action in time, our “Ridiculous . . . waste sad time” (“Burnt Norton” V. 122).

“East Coker” starts with “In my beginning is my end . . .” (I. 123) and finishes with “in my end is my beginning” (V. 129). This invocation of the eternal present, which is God, is the movement of Eliot’s poetry from beginning to end; his work as a whole, a pattern—by which alone “Can words or music reach/The stillness” (“Burnt Norton” V. 121)—is an image of the pilgrim in the modern world, always moving, most often without a sense of direction yet with a heart that, even in The Waste Land “would have responded/ Gaily, when invited, beating obedient/ To controlling hands” (V lines 421-422. 49-50). By Four Quartets it is more clear whose hands guide the boat, “expert with sail and oar” (V line 420. 49); they are the “bleeding hands” of the “wounded surgeon” (“East Coker” IV. 127) who heals from the cross, that “bedded axle-tree” (“Burnt Norton” II. 118) connecting heaven to earth by way of which, all wars, those “long forgotten” of men and the incessant conflict of, dare I say oppressor and oppressed, “the boarhound and the boar” are “reconciled among the stars” (“Burnt Norton” II. 119). T.S. Eliot’s work and vision in the twenty years of “l’entre deux guerres” are not representative of those times; they rise above those times, offering hope in a world which prefers despair, and proclaiming light to a world of darkness, the very Light presented to us at the end of every Mass:

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word. (“Ash Wednesday” V. 65)

If those twenty years were “largely wasted,” it is not because of what Eliot left behind, but because we receive his poetry in much the same way many readers of Christ’s time, especially the Pharisees who never read beyond the literal, received the culminating object and resolution of His work: “the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (Jn. 1:5). To see the eternal signs within the times, we need to read well with the light of grace and the “direct eyes” of faith fixed upon our true end in “death’s other Kingdom” (“The Hollow Men” I. 56).

Works Cited

Eliot, T.S. The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950.

——. Poetry and Drama. Harvard University Press, 1951.

The Holy Bible, Douay Rheims Version. Bishop Richard Challoner, 1752. Reprinted, TAN Books and Publishers, Inc., 1971.