LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

BURNT NORTON (1935) is a place which Eliot visited in the summer of 1934. He was paying a visit to Emily Hale, a friend of his young days. About their relationship little is known. Their letters are safely deposited in some American library, not to be opened, it seems, until the second decade of the third millennium. Could they contain a dazzling revelation? If so, Eliot would certainly have betrayed it in his work as well. But never mind the letters, never mind the unknown halo of Emily Hale. Fact is that, one summer, she took Eliot to see this Burnt Norton, a restored 18th century manor house. It was so called because, centuries before (in 1737), its first owner had set fire to the house and had been burnt up with it. At the time Eliot visited it, the house was empty. In the surroundings, there were wooded hills, lawns, and in the garden there were two dry pools. The author of The Waste Land (with its ‘empty cisterns and exhausted wells’) could hardly have failed to notice that detail. Consequently, the poem bathes in the imaginary water of these dry pools. Eliot quietly retraces his steps into a lost youth. No pain hardens his voice. Or, rather, it is pain transfigured: an exhausted soul, grateful for the remembrance of  things past.

‘Time’ is a word often uttered. In spite of its abstractness, in spite of many high-brow lines, the quartet is sentimental. Its best definition is, indeed, Eliot ‘mis à nu’. All time is reduced to the graspable present. What might have been, what has been, what has never been or will never come to pass, all these are dismissed as ‘abstractions’. ‘All time is eternally present’, Eliot decides. Yet, the poet of wasted happiness and lost youth hastens to add: ‘all time is unredeemable’. The line is whispered without despair, though. A haze of peace veils his eyes, he turns his eyes inside:

‘Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

                     But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves

I do not know’.

Pain transfigured into peace, loss into silent resignation. A whispered carpe diem is the accompanying music. The tragic waste of the hyacinth garden, the young man's dark despair of failing again, the burden of the future are far behind. In these lines Eliot seems to fly, to float, to hover over his own life with a bodiless soul. Had he lost the fear of future pains, because he had lost the very desire for, the very sense of his future? One answer is beyond doubt: all his quartets are futureless poems.

How striking the difference is between the memories of lost youth here, and those in Ash-Wednesday. Eliot paces about this garden of maturity (the same obsessive garden of all his poems, yet how unlike them all), and hears ‘other echoes’. Voices of birds, laughter of children, music of leaves: what a sweetened landscape, for the distonance-loving Eliot. ‘Through the first gate’, he steps into ‘our first world’: his and hers? The autumn heat, the ‘unseen eyebeam crossed’, the roses in full bloom. How far behind he has left the annoying female, who was twisting a lilac stalk in Portrait of a Lady. Far behind, too, La Figlia Che Piange and the hyacinth girl, both drowned in the misery of their fully awakened emotion. A dulled well-being sweeps over this quartet. The dry concrete pool seems filled with water ‘out of the sunlight’. Lotus flowers (flowers of forgetfulness in a forgetful poem) rise slowly to the imaginary surface. No horrors mentioned. No slimy rats, no skeletons in sea-waters, no lidless eyes. Remarkable, this new ‘heart of light’, born out of sun and no water. Light reminiscent of another ‘heart of light, the silence’, which in the hyacinth garden dries the young man's life and thoughts. If anything, then, these soothing Quartets are first and foremost poems of the mind. Emotion mastered, love reconsidered, sensibility dissected by serene thought.

This thought has the upper hand. No emotional turmoil will be allowed to menace the secluded smile of Burnt Norton. A cloud covers the sun, and the pool is a dry pool again, empty of wishes (past or present). A safe distance must be preserved:

‘Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present’.

Could there be any secret behind Eliot's unexpected serenity? The essay on Yeats, of 1940, touches on the matter. Of course, few of Eliot's words (especially critical statements) can be taken for granted. Eliot states there that middle age leaves a writer quite few choices. He can either stop writing (unless he means to repeat what he has already written) or, if he is lucky, he may manage to ‘adapt himself to middle age, and find a different way of working’. Gerontion, and even one of the Quartets, underline the tragedy of old age. Eliot's essay on Yeats reverses the idea, and finds that old age has its own emotions, which can be lived as intensely as those of youth. He consequently finds Yeats to be ‘pre-eminently the poet of middle age’. We can hardly say the same about Eliot himself. It is not middle age that he catches best. At the same time, there is something for and of every age in his work. Exquisitely painful poems of youth; self-contained poise of early maturity; the dark despair of a deteriorating body which, however, is mastered by the deep serenity of an experienced mind. His work is a realm for human spring, summer, autumn and winter. T.S. Eliot is an author for all seasons.

To come back to the late summer of Burnt Norton, the poem goes on with memories of youth silenced by the lullaby of elderly thoughts. There is a ‘trilling wire in the blood’, and this blood still sings below ‘inveterate scars’. But the old wars are ‘long forgotten’, or, in Eliot's words, ‘appeased’. A ‘still’ point is mentioned. It reminds of the prayer to the silent sister in Ash-Wednesday:

‘Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still ...’

We hear several words about a defeated ‘partial horror’, about the chains of a ‘changing body’ (how close to Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium the image comes), about unnamed experiences which ‘flesh cannot endure’. All painful moments are annihilated when they are reconsidered. ‘To be conscious’, Eliot decides, ‘is not to be in time’. The mind empties itself. The trick is not new to Eliot. Only, he uses it here much more openly. Nothing is left to pine for. He disinfects his sore soul when he says:

‘I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where’.

The philosophizing included in these Four Quartets has been (too) amply discussed. It is a major point, certainly, and it is well worth being examined. Yet, because of the same sentimental reasons that made me detect a sentimental Eliot in these poems, I shall leave sophisticated ideas aside, for a while. Words such as time, timeless, eternity and so on, mean nothing to beings who can never experience more than the quick passage of seconds. Besides, the emotional lines are always close at hand to be quoted. ‘Here is a place of disaffection’, one of them goes. The faces are ‘strained time-ridden’. An image of The Waste Land suddenly returns, apparition of old times. ‘Men and bits of paper’, with ‘unhealthy souls’ inhabit this ‘twittering world’,

‘the gloomy hills of London,

Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,

Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate’.

The main space of  Burnt Norton is, however, the ‘still point of the turning world’. Imaginary or not, who cares? Fact is that deep below, at the bottom of the poem, stillness and restlessness coexist. They sadly go hand in hand, with Eliot inertly watching:

‘Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die’.

He repeats, over and over again, that ‘all is always now’. Yet, can he really have managed to forget ‘the loud lament of the disconsolate chimera’? They are all present in a poem which, though vowed to forgetfulness (old ideal of Ash-Wednesday), has not yet forgotten everything. Stubborn memories of old pains and thrills enliven it:

‘Quick now, here, now, always –

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after ...’

It is not only memories that hurt the poet, but also his struggle with the words which should express them. In Burnt Norton, serene as the tone may be, peace of mind is wishful thinking, and the poet's words reveal a restless mind trying its hand at relaxation, but ...

‘Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still’.