“the voice of the hidden waterfall”
Eliot’s Four Quartets
By Miranda Hickman
Often said about T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is that it belongs among the major contributions to “civilian war poetry” emerging from the Second World War. It’s also the last major poem of Eliot’s oeuvre, often read as a capstone to both his career and to a period of personal and spiritual seeking after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in the late 1920s.
By the time of its composition, Eliot was positioned as an elder statesman figure, an eminent poet and cultural authority of his generation – a giant of the world of letters. Eliot wrote Four Quartets during the 1930s and early 1940s: some of the sequence was kindled by a memory of travel with a friend of his youth, Emily Hale; some composed the Second World War, when Eliot was experiencing the bombing of London, serving as an air-raid warden, standing guard on the rooftops as a fire-watcher as the city was under siege. Yet as David Moody notes, Four Quartets offers “a most peculiar engagement with war,” in that it almost never directly addresses the experience of wartime. Four Quartets instead comes across as a poem of spiritual quest spurred both by the apocalyptic circumstances of external war and by Eliot’s own internal war, during the years after separation from his spouse Vivienne, and what the poem marks as “agony” involved in Eliot’s personal and spiritual transformation between 1933 and 1943.
I’d like to draw attention to how the poetry, especially the experience of the poetry’s sounds and images as we ride through the poem, both charts the stages of that quest; and then also often suggests moments that, in haunting ways, read as byways—or what I’ll call “secrets”—unaccounted for and around the edges of the path of the poem’s main spiritual journey. My reading is inspired by both Ronald Bush’s recent work on Eliot’s allusions and Christine Froula’s “Eliot’s Grail Quest,” a memorable reading of The Waste Land, Eliot’s magnum opus written roughly two decades before The Four Quartets.
Out of the turbulence that characterizes what Four Quartets calls the “turning world,” the poem often imagines what it calls “the still point” of that “turning world,” which suggests a state removed from ordinary time, out of time, a kind of reprieve from ordinary action and living:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
The poem often suggests that achieving such a state, one of heightened “consciousness,” involves searching for, and discerning, a sense of “pattern” in experience. Scrolling through the poem for keywords, one often finds the word “pattern”—designating patterns formed by the human body in motion, as when it’s dancing; formed by the stars; and formed by seasons, cycles in time:
“So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern”; “below, the boarhound and the boar/ Pursue their pattern as before”; “It seems, as one becomes older,/ That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence”; “history is a pattern/ of timeless moments.”
In the poem, such moments of achieved “pattern” are looked to by the speaker as portals to an elsewhere, to other states of consciousness – and as ways to freedom from the lived experience of ordinary time. The pressure felt by the speaker to reach for such freedom seems to come from a sense of being within a Dantean “dark wood,” as the poem has it, in the middle of life, “the middle way” of life, “having had twenty years--/ Twenty years largely wasted,” needing release, a way out, a way forward. And the poem’s speaker also seems to turn to the moment out of time for access to “wisdom,” another word and concept on which the poem lingers, from its epigraph from Heraclitus onward.
As in Eliot’s early poetry, which so often ruminates on time – as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” has it, “And indeed there will be time”—Four Quartets also clearly revolves around the concept of time. The first poem of Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton” opens with
Time present and time past
Are perhaps both present in time future
And time future contained in time past
In The Four Quartets, the effort is to “redeem” the time through achievement of the still point, the moment out of time.
The way the poem begins reflects the fact that before Eliot became one of Anglo-American culture’s most fabled poets, he trained as a philosopher at Harvard. The four poems of Four Quartets, each featuring different places significant to Eliot at different moments in his life, play out what feel like the phases of a philosophical meditation. In Eliot’s reading, the four poems, as movements in a sequence, build gradually toward greater intensity and clarity. His speaker invites us to consider how moments of time fold into and inform one another; and moreover, how a “design” often seems to present itself in the unfolding of life and experience, such that what comes later is often anticipated by what comes earlier, as though it was always all part of an invisible plan.
This is the view of how time unfurls—into a pattern whose lines become faintly legible as one rides it out—that the poem asks us to entertain through lines that repeat with variations such as “in my beginning is my end.”
These ways in which the poem invites us to attend to pattern or design prepare us to read the poem for its form, attend to what it feels like to experience the poem at the level of design –much as we would listen to, ride out the shapes and stages of, a piece of music. Eliot of course cues the connection to music with the title, “Four Quartets,” and he was inspired by the late Beethoven in writing the poem. Joel Peters’ accompaniment of the poem with the music of Phillip Glass responds to, and strengthens, this way of entering the poem, in a musical approach attuned to the poem’s felt patterns.
And yet I’d like to explore the possibility that something else is going on as well. If one part of the poem seeks to convince us that finding the “design” that drives the unfolding of life—accepting it, and riding it—affords the spiritual “answer” to this quest, there’s also much else that unfolds in the poem beyond of that main vector of preoccupation with “pattern” and staged effort come to peace and grace through such discovery of design. I find myself searching for the poem’s hidden spaces and moments—what I would call, after Frank Kermode, its “secrets.”
To give a few instances: apart from what seems to be its main line or project, the poem also often reckons with after-reverberations from its opening sequence in the “rose-garden.” This opening section takes us into a haunting space of the garden (by way of a “bird” that bids us to “follow”), where the poem invokes ghostly presences:
There they were, dignified, invisible
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves
. . . . . . . . . .
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting
. . . . . . . . . .
The delicate images in this opening section (of roses, light, “The surface glittered out of the heart of light”) prepare the way for, and seem fashioned of much the same stuff as, what sometimes comes afterward in the poem, in sudden bursts of vivid sensory awareness – such as a “shaft of sunlight,” the “whisper of running streams,” and “winter lightning,” the fragrance of “wild thyme,” or the “voice of the hidden waterfall.”
Such piercing moments of intense imagist awareness, keenly sensory in visual, olfactory, auditory and kinetic terms, initially seem to have little or no place in the poem’s main journey. They’re apparently out of place. Yet I would suggest that, in part because of this, they conjure a kind of magic (the verb “glittered” that Eliot uses connotes magic in the poetry of Coleridge, whose work influenced Eliot). They also come across as carrying a kind of wisdom different from what’s offered by the poem’s main vector: an alternative wisdom suggested through glimpses and sensory awareness, via small moments of experienced beauty.
These are the moments of delicate play that don’t quite follow the poems’ main scheme; and for me, these are the poem’s “secrets.” The way they draw, tease, tantalize, reveals a way of reading that helps us remain on the alert for, what’s off the main path or pattern. What mode of attention do we achieve if we try for such alertness, if we read against what feels like the poem’s main grain?
Through such moments, I’d suggest, we move to responses to the questions initially posed by the poem alternative to those the poem emphasizes on its primary path. Through such moments, I’d suggest, we experience what feel like repeated invitations into the rose-garden, to moments of quicksilver and “hidden laughter,” rather than what the end of the poem suggests – the need for transcendence of the garden by philosophical sublation.
Such cues, effected through luminous images, return us intermittently in the course of the poem to those early moments in the rose-garden, as though when the speaker in command of the poem isn’t quite looking or listening. I’d even suggest that this line of imagistic work of the poem forms a kind of descant to the poem’s main line that exhorts us to believe that “in my beginning is my end” and that steers us toward an ending that feels like the inevitable realization of a predetermined design: “All shall be well, and/ All manner of thing shall be well.”
Ultimately, I’d suggest that there are at least two voices to discern in Eliot’s poem (as in The Waste Land, Eliot does this poem in “different voices”) – voices that can form a dynamic interplay in our awareness, both of them part of the experience of the poem and the ways it invites us to know, learn, grow spiritually, and move toward wisdom. For me, one voice, the “voice of the hidden waterfall,” feels as though it’s behind or underneath the other tolling philosophical voice—this “hidden” voice is the wild voice of sunlight, water, laughter, fragrance of strawberry and rose. This second voice is one like that of the bird beckoning us to “follow,” emerging when the philosopher has stopped talking and paying attention, has looked away, before the main line resumes.
Essay by Miranda Hickman
Miranda Hickman specializes in early twentieth-century modernist literature at McGill University, where she is Associate Professor of English and current director of Poetry Matters (http://www.mcgill.ca/poetrymatters). She is author of The Geometry of Modernism (2006), editor of The Letters of Ezra Pound and Stanley Nott (2011); and co-editor of Rereading the New Criticism (2012). Recent essays engage pioneering film critic Iris Barry and modernist poet H.D.’s translations of Euripides; “The Classics in Modernist Translation,” co-edited with Lynn Kozak, appeared through Bloomsbury in 2019. Current research addresses the problem of “culture” in interwar Britain.