T.S. Eliot's Four Quartrets

FIVE MOVEMENTS OF MUSIC IN T. S. ELIOT’S FOUR QUARTETS

Prof. (Dr.) Mahendra Madhav Kamat,

Four Quartets (1943) can be included in the list of the most mature and most advanced poetry by T. S. Eliot. Eliot is appreciated for establishing a new tradition of poetry in English literature with this poem. Helen Gardener is one of them, who appreciate Eliot for the same. In her words:

“Four Quartets is the mature achievement of a poet who has in a long period of experiment effected a modification and enrichment of the whole English poetic tradition.” (Gardener, p.2)

Gardener further considers this poem as a masterpiece of Eliot as the poem contains more poetic solution of his peculiar problems as a poet than any other work of Eliot. Four Quartets is actually a product of Eliot’s post-Waste Land Period. Between the time and publication of the Quartets Eliot made a protracted visit to the United States and he took a long break from lyric poetry during the years when he concerned himself mainly with dramatic devices.  During the interval, he published five brief poems jointly called Landscapes in which he experimented with the new forms and new ideas fully developed in the Quartets.

Like some other poems of Eliot this poem too contains enormous complexity and it becomes a main characteristic of the poem. Eliot composed this poem in symphonic structure in which each represents a sonata form with specific movement. Sonata form or sonata-allegro form is a musical form that has been used widely since the early Classical period. While it is typically used in the first movement of multi-movement pieces, it is sometimes employed in subsequent movements as well. (Princeton)

Each of the voices in the poem represents an orchestral instrument. The general music is the music of speech, but also one can find a discovery by the poet to vary music of speech so that range from colloquial to the formal in terms of diction is broader than ever attempted by him before. Another remarkable feature of those poems is its use of musical bridges between the instrumental passages. Here the techniques consist of a passage of exposition of theme, a passage of recapitulation, a bridge and then a repetition of the pattern. Further, the contrapuntal arrangement of subject matter is corresponding with the contrast between real and ideal, between human and spiritual in his earlier poetry.

Eliot focuses the structure of the poem in its title itself. Each section has poetic equivalence of the classical symphony or quartet of sonata as distinct from suite. The subtitles or names of the sections show the music of Eliot’s own life, that they had personal significance for Eliot. Burnt Norton is country house in Gloucestershire, where Eliot stayed in the summer of 1934.  East Coker is a village in Somersetshire from which the Eliot family originated. Dry Salvages are a group of rocks of Cape May which Eliot remembered from his childhood, and Little Giddings the original location of an Anglican Community established in 1625, which Eliot visited in 1936.

Besides this personal or rather subjective touch to the poem, the poem mostly remembered for its unique feature. The major contributory part of the poem is its musical quality. The music of the poem goes beyond denoting speech alone; it implies the sound and rhythm of spoken words, but it also signifies the structure of interrelationships among different kinds of speech and other poetic devices.  Each of the poem and auditory imagination contains five movements, of course each with its own necessary structure. Among the five movements in each poem there is a suggestion of musical analogy in the first movement. Each poem contains a statement and counter statement of the ‘river and sea’ images in the Dry Salvages. It is a symbol for two different kinds of time: the time, we become aware and through air imagination. As poet writes here:

“The river is within us, the sea is all about us;

The sea is the land's edge also, the granite,

Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses

Its hints of earlier and other creation:”

Whereas, in Burnt Norton the poet presents a division between abstract speculation and an experience of a meditation on consciousness as well as a presentation of consciousness. He says:

“What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation”

In East Coker, Eliot changes the tune, where the first movement can be divided into four parts. The first theme of the time of years and the seasons, the rhythms of birth, growth and death resumes in the third paragraph and the second theme i.e. the experience of being outside the time or time having stopped briefly restates at the close. But in Little Giddings the third paragraph is a development of the first two, weaving together phrases taken-up from both in a kind of counter pointing. Thus one can say that the first movement is developed on contradictions, which the poem is to reconcile.

The second movement works with Eliot’s skill of presenting a single in two different or bodily contradictory ways. This becomes a major characteristic of his poem and gives it a Jazz like effect of hearing the same melody played on a different group of instrument, or differently harmonized, or hearing it syncopated, or elaborated in variations. The movement opens with a highly lyrical passage in a traditional metrical form with irregular rhyming, octosyllabic in Burnt Norton and East Cocker. For instance in Burn Norton, Eliot Writes:

“In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars.”

Another example can be found in simplified sesting in the second paragraph of Dry Salvages. This is followed by an extremely colloquial passage. Here the ideas which had been treated in metaphor and symbolic in the first half of the movement are expanded and developed in a conversational manner. In Little Giddings Eliot has employed a modification of terza rima with the rhyme scheme – aab bcc dd.

In Burn Norton, the poet presents the rich symbolic presentation of the ‘Flux of Life’ perceived as a unity of consciousness that turns to be philosophic language of the relation of stillness and movement. This feature can specifically found in the third paragraph of the section. Poet presents time: past, present and future at the close and there is a return to imagery, when after the abstract discussion three concrete movements are mentioned:

“To be conscious is not to be in time

But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,

The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,

The moment in the draughty church at smokefall

Be remembered; involved with past and future.

Only through time time is conquered.”

In East Coker poet expresses confusion in the seasons and the constellations. This is in fact the expression of flat statement of the same confusion in the lives of individual men where the selected wisdom is dismissed as a deception.

In The Dry Salvages, the beautiful lament for the anonymous, the endless sum of whose lives adds up to no figure we can name. It also leaves little trace but finally wrecks on time’s ocean. The meaning can be found in the final paragraph where there is a direct development of the hint. He begins with little metaphor but ends by returning to his original images of the river and the sea. Perhaps the poetic expression of meaning of the Dry Salvages is expressed in the following lines:

“We had the experience but missed the meaning,

And approach to the meaning restores the experience

In a different form, beyond any meaning

We can assign to happiness.” 

The efforts to find meaning restore the original imaginative vision of the river and sea. Thus the first part of the movement is traditional in its metre, symbolic, romantic in imagery and also lyrical but in the second part of it, turns to be discursive, colloquial and meditative.

The third movement is the core of each poem out of which reconcilement grows. It is an exploration of twist of the ideas of the first two movements. The third movement, therefore, one can say is less conscious of musical analogies, for example, in East Coker the poet begins with:

“In my beginning is my end. In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.

Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,

Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth… …”

Poet presents here the succession period of life and its rhythm and comes to “You say I am repeating / Something I have said before. I shall say it again.”  The poet here generalizes his personal experiences, for instance, the we of East Coker when he says, “We must be still and still moving/ Into another intensity.”  The plural pronoun is used to generalize the personal experiences. At the same time you as “if you do not come too close,” is singular here, a person is a person individual, listener and reader. Perhaps Dry Salvages seems more general from opening when poet expresses, “I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river/ Is a strong brown god—sullen,” then he comes to “we have to think of them as forever bailing,” This shows a rapid shift in tune and tone. 

One of the prominent features of the poem is suspense which denotes the music of the poetry. The repetitive circling passage in East Coker where one seems to be standing still, waiting for something to happen for a rhythm to break out. Here Helen Gardener compares Eliot with Beethoven’s genius, especially Beethoven’s love for the bridge passages and leasing passage between two movements. But this organization is not fixed and identical in every part divided by a change of mind without any change in metre. In East Coker, the change of feeling is not represented by break but it comes upon the mind. The change of mind is without any change in metre. In the lines, “The darkness shall be the light, and the stillness is dancing.” Poet changes rhythm from six-stress line to the four-stress line. In Little Giddings there is a very definite break as the poet changes form the personal to the historic. The poet here turns to beautiful stressed line, which before this was reserved for the close of the movement. 

The final movement of the poetry is recapitulation of the themes of the two poems with personal and topical application. This makes a resolution and contradiction of the first. It falls into two parts in each poem, but the change is slighter than in the second movement, and it is reserved. Here colloquial passage comes first and then, without a feeling of sharp break, for the metre remains fundamentally the same. The base of the line contrasts, and images return in quick succession. In various ways the last lines echo the beginning of the whole poem. The musical treatment to the image brings varied significance, for example, the images of sea holds different meaning in East Coker than that of The Dry Salvages. 

Movement in music is defined by Benward and Saker as such:

 “…a unit of a larger work that may stand by itself as a complete composition. Such divisions are usually self-contained. Most often the sequence of movements is arranged fast-slow-fast or in some other order that provides contrast.”  (Benward and Saker, 2009, p.358) 

Eliot’s poem Four Quartets is a composition which is complete in giving the musical impact. The poetry is contained and gives impact and effect as whole. It also gives successions of rhythms and tunes. One can realize that the poem is not only the mature work but it is also a unique and essentially inimitable. Eliot might have given to other poets a form they can use for their own purposes and simultaneously he tries here to rediscover the value of metrics. The twentieth century has been marked by a vast variety of experiments in metrical form but most probably none have been marked by a variety of experiments in metrical form, at the same time, none might have been so widely accepted as Eliot. Eliot has been the poet of the century who has the widest audience, both academic and popular which gave a wide-spread influence to others. Four Quartets made the use of recurrent theme which can be described as natural to poetry as music. 

References:

1.      Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets, http://www.davidgorman.com/FourQuartets/index.htm, Tristan Fecit, June 2000.

2.      Gardener, Helen. The Art of T.S. Eliot. London: Cresset Press, 1949.

3.      Benward, Bruce and Saker, Marilyn Nadine. Music in Theory and Practice Vol. II (8th edition). Boston: McGraw-Hill.

4.      Princeton. http://www.princeton.edu/ ~achaney/