T.S. Eliot’s "Four Quartets"

The interrelation between T.S. Eliot and music seems substantial. His first major poem was entitled “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” his Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats was adapted into the hit Broadway musical, Cats, and his poetic works, as a whole, seem to be influenced by both musical structure and content. In addition, as an American-born poet in England, he embodies several unique transatlantic sensibilities, such as the combined influence of both classical and jazz music. Indeed, Ralph Ellison, in Shadow and Act, asserts of “The Waste Land,” “Somehow its rhythms were closer to those of jazz than were those of the Negro poets, and even though I could not understand then, its range of allusions was as mixed and varied as that of Louis Armstrong” (160). If, then, in “The Waste Land,” Eliot employs a jazz aesthetic, he returns to a much more classical one in Four Quartets.

As the title unambiguously suggests, the poem(s) are inextricably tied with chamber music, explicitly the string quartet. This is reflected in the structure, as well. Each “Quartet” is divided into five parts, or movements. Although written years apart, there are parallels between the movements of each respective “Quartet.” The first movement deals with one of the most overt themes throughout: the paradoxical nature of time. For instance, the opening lines of “Burnt Norton,” the first of the four poems, are: “Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in the future,/And time present contained in time past” (1-3). In addition to playing on the duality of meanings of the word present, Eliot appears to be suggesting that, in terms of time, both past and future are nonentities and only the present exists. This is accentuated in the next two lines: “If all time eternally present/All time is unredeemable” (4-5). Such is the case with music, also. When listening to a piece of music, it is inevitably sequential, with each note/chord following those that preceded it and precluding those to follow, ceaselessly and irrevocably approaching its impending end. The first movement in each of Eliot’s “Four Quartets” establishes this dynamic.

While the first movement is concerned with the metaphysical (time, memory, etc.), the second one in each makes a stark return to the corporeal, with an attenuation of nature, especially the natural elements and flowers. The second movements are especially interesting for their form. Each one begins with a specific, patterned rhyme scheme, and then abandons it for lengthy free verse. The rhymed sections, however, are quite complex and differ in each quartet. In the first instance, it is A-B-A-C-C-B-E-B-B-B-D-D-D-C. In the second, it is A-A-B-B-C-D-E-F-F-F-G-H-C-I-A-J-I. The third is perhaps the most impressive; there are six six-line stanzas, and each of the respective lines rhyme (all the first lines, second lines, etc. of each stanza). In the second movement of the final quartet, Eliot returns to a much more conventional rhyme scheme – three eight-line stanzas in rhyming-couplets. In returning to “nature” with the most contrived of structures in these sections, and then abandoning (somewhat) the rigidity of the rhyme scheme, it seems Eliot is calling forth the patterns in nature before burying them in the seeming “chaos.”

Somewhat ironically, the middle section seems to be the most preoccupied with death. However, it is not so ironical once one realizes that it is central to the piece, just as silence is essential to sound. In addition to death, though, movement three also has a strong sense of in-between-ness. For instance, in “East Coker” (#2), Eliot employs the metaphor of the theatre: “As, in a theatre,/The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed” (13-14). While this highlights movement three as a transition between the beginning and the end, it also reflects Eliot’s heightened sense of religious conviction from his earlier poems.

Like the second movements, the fourth ones are quite interesting, though much shorter. Consistently the briefest movement, the fourth also has complex rhyme schemes which differ in each. In “Burnt Norton,” the first, par example, movement IV is broken into two five-line stanzas with an overlapping rhyme scheme (A-A-B-A-C; D-E-C-D-E). “East Coker,” the longest of the fourth movements, has a more conventional pattern of A-B-A-B-B-B, C-D-C-D-D, etc., repeated through the five stanzas. The fourth movement of “The Dry Savages,” however, is the most anomalous. It sticks to the established pattern of five-line stanzas (three of them), but they are entirely unrhymed. Eliot returns to a more rigidly structured movement, though, in “Little Gidding” while diverging from all earlier ones as well. He has a mere two stanzas, but instead of five lines each, they are seven, with a rhyming couplet added to the end of the initial five lines to give the final pattern: A-B-A-B-A-C-C; D-E-D-E-D-C-C. In terms of structure, this nearly mirrors its opening equivalent, save for the rhyming couplets. This gives the quartets a sense of near-circularity, but not quite; it has grown slightly. These movements also possess an overt sense of religiosity, centering on themes of prayer, communion, doves, and (Pentecostal) fire.

The fifth, and final, movements return to the inevitability of time. The final movement to “Burnt Norton” begins with the statement that “Words move, music moves/Only in time; but that which is living/Can only die. Words, after speech, reach/Into the silence” (1-4). Like the opening movement, this reestablishes the parallel between the temporality of both words and music (and life) all approaching inescapable silence. He does, however, introduce a new theme to the final movements: the difficulty of creating a unique piece of art (and, by extension, living a unique life) with any sort of meaning. This is perhaps best expressed in the final movement to “East Coker”: “And what there is to conquer/By strength and submission, has already been discovered/Once or twice, or several times by men whom one cannot hope/To emulate” (11-14). While bleak, though, the quartets do not end at all pessimistically. Rather, Eliot returns to his religious bearings and the notion that the end is merely the beginning: We must be still and still moving/Into another intensity/For a further union, a deeper communion/Through the dark cold and empty desolation,/The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast water/Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning” (“East Coker” V 33-38).