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Music, meaning and poetry in “four quartets” by T.S. Eliot
Lingua 16 (1966) 279-29 1, Q North-Holland Pzrblishing Co., A mstevdam Not to bs raproducadby photoprint or microfilm without written permission from the publisher
MUSIC, N “FOUR
MEANING
AND POETRY
QUARTETS”
BY T. S. ELICIT
K. VERHEUL
Poetry borders on one side on prose, cn she other on music. Whereas poets usually are afraid of turning out prose, when they compose a poem, the connection with music is felt to be less embarrassing. Especially after VtA..he’~ requirement of “de la musique avant toute chose” many poets have considered music as a kind of ideal, which poets should approach. But usually no attention is paid to that aspect in which poetry necessarily differs from music: words have meanings, and music has not. The poet T. S. Eliot grouped four of his poems together under the title Four Qzcartetsand at about the same time published a lecture on “The Music of Poetry’?) For a responsible analysis and appreciation of the poems the essay has some relevance. Let us see what Eliot himself has to say on the connection between poetry and music. Although he is aware that the main difficulty in comparing the two lies in the semantic aspect of poetry which music lacks, he never faces a H the implications of this problem in the essay. What he proposes is an application of the possibilities of music, not only to the sound features of a poem, but also to the arrangement of its “‘meanings”: “A musical poem is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meanings of th? words which compose it and these patterns are indissoluble and one?) One of Eliot’s main preoccupations both in Four Qzlartets and of language and in “The Music of Poetry” is the relationship meaning and the insufficiency of this relationship even in poetry. In “Burnt Norton” we read: 1) Re@hxl
in T. S. Eliot: On Poetry and PoetA.,London
2) On Poetry and Poe@, p. , 33. 279
1957,
p. X-38.
280
K. VERHEUL
Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, w2l not stay still a theme repeated in section V of “East Coke?
:
And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion. In “The Music of Poetry” the elusiveness of the meaning expressed in the words of a poem is explained by the fact that “the poet is occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings sf 1il exist”,3 ) and the ambiguities of our interpretation of the meamng of a poem Eliot ascribes to “the fact that the poem means more, not less, than ordinary speech can communicate” .4) It is this peculiar semantic quality of verse that the poet describes as “music” : “The music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context; and from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that context to all the other meanings which it has had in other contexts, to its greater or less wealth of association”. An interesting parallel to some ideas propoundedi in Eliot’s essay and a possible basis for a further discussion of the problems involved may be found in the chapter on the aesthetic function of language in the Introductioti to General Liqyistics by the Dutch linguist A. W. De Groot.5) The main principle in De Groot’s discussion of poetry is the application of some aspects of GestaZt psychology fcr a definition of the aesthetic IFunction that language 30. 31. 8, A. MJ. De Groat: Meiding 1962.
8) Op. cit. p. 4) Op. cit. p.
tot de Algemene Taalwetenscha~,
Groningen
"FOUR
QUARTETS"
BY
T,S.ELIOT
281
has in poetry, and which distinguishes poetry from the ordinary use of language. By a Gestalt De Groot understands “the totality of the perceptions, which is more than and different from the sum of the constitutive elements”.*) Three dots on a piece of paper may be interpreted as the Gestalt of a triangle. In the same way the G&u& of a musical ‘phrase is something di rent from the mere sequence of its individual notes; one can hear the notes without perceiving the Gestalt and the same Gestalt may be realised with different notes, in a different key. “In the same way one could say 4---t +kLAlL itlciividual lines do not make the poem, but that it is the poem that makes the lines”‘) and “what happens when we hear a poem may be compared with what. happens in the perception of three dots as a triangle or a number of lines as a cube”!) A poem, then, consists of 1) its worcls and sentences, and 2) “the poem as such, i.e. that by which the poem differs from the lines of whic3 lt consists? ) Within the Gestdt of the poem De Groot distinguishes between the aspects of form and the aspects of content, the auditive and the semantic Gestalt. He only mentions the lat?:er in passing and devotes the rest of the chapter to a thorough analysis of the first aspect, that which is traditionally called “prosody”. For the present purpose, however, a discussion and analysis of the Gestalt principe will be icdispensible on the semantic level also, an? by applying the results of our abstract hypothesis to the poetry or “Four Quavtets” we may be able to contribute something to a further definition of poetic “meaning”. The existence of a semantic Gestalt in a poem would imply that I
6) As Prof. De Groot’s book has not yet been translated into English, I translate the quotations I want to make from it in my text; the Dutch original is given in the notes. The first quotation occurs on p. 3 15: “hzt geheel van waarnemingen dat meer en anders is dan de som van de constitue, tinde elementen”. 7) Op. cit. p. 315: “op analoge wijze kan men zeggen dat niet de versregels het gedicht maken, maar het gedicht de versregel s”. s) Op. cit. p. 317-318: “wat er gebeurt bij het horen van een gedicht laat zich vergelijken met wat er gebeurt bij het waarnemen van drie stippen als een driehoek, of van een aantal strepen als een kubus”. 9) OP tit P. 320 : “bet gedicht als zodanig, &VJ.Z. datgene waardoor het gedicht van de zinnen waaruit het bestaat verschilt”; a=<.Eliot: “the music of verse is not a line by line matter, but a question of the whole poem”. Ch Poe&y and Poets p. 36.
282
K.VERHEUL
the meanings of the words and sentences that make up the poem combine in a pattern which is more than a mere sequence of the meanings of the constituent parts, and that this pattern, in its turn, gives an added meaning to its members. In order to see how such a thing could work out in practice, a few further comments must be made on the “meaning of meaning”. The meaning of a word - or a word-group, or a sentence - extends from a central core of reference to a particular person, thing or situation to a surrounding aura of associations. In ordinary language this aura is usually present as an irrelevant background. But in poetry these haloes of meaning are disciplined into a meaningful Gestalt in such a way that the Gestalt delimits the associa+ive meanings of the parts of which it consists. That part in de Groot’s _htro&ctiort where he illustrates the -workings of thz Gestalt principle in poetry through an analogy with music throws an unexpected light on our problems. NOW that we have at least a definite view of how both poetry and music operate, we may be in a better position to examine their connection. What happens in the perception of a musical phrase? ‘We hear the notes one after the other in a linear sequence of time. But we can never perceive the significance of the first note in the Gestalt right from the start. After the last note we have to go back in time to the first to see its full function; and at a certain stage we move into the future and more or less anticipate what is coming in order to establish the function of the present and previous notes. The same psychological process takes place when we interpret a sentence that we hear or read. If it is true that a poem is a semantic Gestalt in the way proposed, that would implv that, as we read or listen to a poem, we become gradually aware of a pattern in the meanings and we try to reconstruct the pattern continually as we proceed through the poem by re-arranging _- in our memsry -w-h& 1~ gone before, until, in the silence after the last line, everything has taken its proper place in the Gestalt, the ultimate “meaning” of the poem. As I will try to show, this is what happens in the Four Qwrtets. Thus we may say that the main thing poetry - and especially the poetry of Few Quartets - may have in common with music is the way it moves and is perceived in time.
“FOUR
QUARTETS"BY
283
T. S, ELIOT
Words move, and music moves Only in time (“Burnt
Norton”
V) 10)
Both music and poetry move in a linear way, and for both an interaction of present, past and future is essential. The psychological perception of both a musical and a poetical Gestalt is, then, a suspirllsion of time in the progress of time. Now it happens that ihe main theme of Few Quartets is also the mrzning c;f time both as an irreversible line;ar* process and as a pattern. So in order to understand both wat the poem says and how this is expressed we might pay special attention to words and. images in two fields of meaning, that of “movement” and that of “pattern”. What I will try do in the next section of this paper is to analyse such words and images and see if and how each gradually takes its place in the final Gestalt of the poem until we find The complete
consort dancing together (“Little
Gidding”
V).
The only reference to movement in the first section of “Burnt Norton” does not strike the reader as sirmething particularly meaningful when it comes :!\ong: in the rose garden, “our first would” to which we return in a moment of illumination, it is said that So we moved, and they, in a forma It is only iallcr on, when the Gestalt of the meaning takes shape in the reader’s mind, that this passage acquires, in retrospect, a further significance. Section two is a development on the theme of movement in a kind of semantic counterpoint. In the first, lyrical passage mover;‘, nt is reconciled with pattern in a circular dance round what Philip Wheelwright - in his essay on “The Philosophical Themes pure point”. The of T. S. Eliot”11 ) - has called a “mathematically 10) All quotaticns of Eliot’s poetry are made from: T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems rgog-1962, London 1963. 11) In: T. S. Eliot: A Study of his Writings
B. Kajan, London 1947.
by Several
Hands,
ed. by
K.
284
VERHEUL
abstract discourse that fotiows develops the dialectic of movement vs. stillness. We have three ingredients now: movement, its suspension “the still point”, and the “dance”, a perception of the pattern in movement, growing out of the awareness of the still
point. In all the Qzcartets except “Little Gidding” travelling is used in t&e third section to convey patternless and purely linear movement. “Burnt Norton” is no exceptior, to this. Two kinds of darkness are contrasted in its third section: the darkness of the Lonc’on tube - which is an image for the lack of spiritual illumination in modern life - and the dark night of the soul which is part of the spiritual discipline of the great mystics. The latter is only one of the Heraclitean Hodoi from the epigraph of the poem; to follow the other would, I take it, lead to the ecstasy in the rose garden, and, paradoxically, it would lead us there not in movement But abstention
from movement.
The poet applies the insights he has developed in the course of the Qzcartet to the use of words in the last part of the poem, as is also done in the other Quartets. Again we find the basic dialectical development of movement - stillness - pattern. The pattern !s cyclic here, too : . say
that the end preceCzs the beginning,
words that serve to connect this poem with the next, and that will turn out to have more mean& and carry greater function in retrospect. Let me say again that the main structural principle of Four Quartets is a continual rearrangement of what has gone before through what comes after, as the complete Gestalt of the meaning of the poems gradually unfolds itself in the words. I have shown before in what way this principle is “musical”. In 4e final summing up of “Burnt Norton” the contrasts and distinctions that have been built up around the concept of movement are given a metaphysical application when they are used to define the difference ‘between desire and love: Desire itself is movement and love, like Aristotle’s
Prime Mover, is
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itself unmoving Only the cause and end of movement. In music we call a piece in which a theme from the first movement recurs in the others “cyclic”. The same principle of construction also holds the Four Quartets together, This cyclic principle itself - one form of pattern in movement - is the subject of “East Coker”P) Th e f’lrs t and last lines of the poem already form a circle owing to the subtle inversion of their terms. In the first paragraph of the poem the cycle is in the rhythms of physical existence. What follows forms a rather close parallel with the corresponding section in “Burnt Norton” ; again there is a bird that leads us to a place where there is a dance. The crux of “East Coker”, however, is that the poem uses a method that is radically different from that used in the other poems. In ihis Qwa~tetsuch basic concepts as “dance” and “pattern” are developed in a negative way : a po&bly yu~lcive experience or insight is explored and finally qualified or rejecterj. It is only gradually that we become aware that there is something wrong with the dance f hat we had learned to regard as the positive counterpart of movement in “Burnt Norton”. A few misgivings are already suggested by the description of the dance itself. In the ;ilsL yiace the setting of the scene is rather omir~~s with its hypnotising “electric heat” Tad “the sultry light . . . absorbed . . . by grey stone”. And we are invited this time by a kind of bird that usually gives unpleasant associations. The “daunsinge” itself - an expression this time of the rhythms of nature and physical life - is described with the dignified Tudor English of Thomas Elyot, but the whole scene is summed up with: “dung and death”. Moreover, we remember that in Sweeney _4gonistes, for instance’ Mr. Eliot described the physical development of human life with scorn and horror: Birth, and copulation and death. That’s all, that’s all, that’s all, that’s all, Birth, and copulation, and death?) 12) For my reading of “East Coker” I am much. indebted to James Johnson Sweeney’s analysis of this poem in the Southern Rev&u, Vol. VT No. 4, pp. 771-791, reprinted in T. S. Elio& A Se:ecled Critique ed. by L. Unger. 13) ColEs&d Poems, p. 131.
286
K, VERHEUL
The ambiguity of attitude we have found in the description of the is developed in more discursive terms in section II: “daunsinge” what may have had a positive value for the sixteenth century cannot be a basis for OMY lives; the living have to develop their own approach to a new situation. The same process of defining something by elimination of what it should not be is applied to “pattern”: The knowledge
imposes a pattern,
and falsifies.
We again find the image of the underground in the third section, and again the section ends with a presentation of spiritual discipline by using quotations from the work of St. John of the Cross, this time with paradoxes of movement: In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
etc.
At the end of the poem another sort of wisdom is developed as a contrast to the secular wisdom of the old men in section II. The new wisdom, as opposed to the rigidity of the imposed pattern of section II, consists in an acceptance of further movement, rentred in stillness : Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity . . . . Two primitive symbols, river and kinds of movement, are contrast& Salvages”. The river is the flux of pulse of our own life-blood, and the individual consciousness :
sea, representing two different in the next ($&et, “The Dry time as it is perceived in the sea isbendless time beyond the
The river is within us, the sea is all about us. Movement on the surface of a sea without reference to a coast can only be a directionless drifting. And the only movement of the sea independent of our sense of direction is its “ground swell”. Those aif? *he basic rhythms and movements in which the meanings 04 t!& poem take shape. The lyric of the second section develops the awareness of the
“FOUR
QUARTETS”
287
BY T. S. ELIOT
eternity of time as an endless addition of suffering without sense: the surface movement of the sea. (Notice how often the word “drifting” *occurs and its effects in the last words of each fourth line in the stanzasj. The idea of an unbearable and endless drifting is finally expressed by an image of movement: . . . the
movement
of pain that is painless and motionless
only relieved by the one Annunciation that had already been announced by the bzll, rung by the ground swell, and that in the next, discursive passage on the same theme points to “another pattern” in time. The public transport in “The Dry Salvages” i.~ no longer the infernal underground as in the two preceiimg Quartets. Hertz travelling is an interruption of the chain of movement from past to future, a movement in time, but momentarily free of the movement of time itself. It is only from this kind of freedom that right action, with no care for the morrow, can arise. The theme of “exploration” and the requirement that We must be still and still moving is taken up again in the advice &.~vI to the travellers
:
Not fare well, But fare forward, voyagers. Moreover, we had already been made to rtlalisc, in a variation on Heraclitus, that “the way forward is the way back” (i.e. to the original vision in a suspension of time). The theme of right action, grouncM in The pqint of intersection Witn 29e
of the timeless
is recapitulated
in the last part of the poem. In this section the iclwa nf i:; tidy aPIJ:icd to gl\‘--z an Aristotelian definition of hbU_ vs. r~3cnisr: action that is subject to time: the positive \ 2~ described in the first four lines - the intersection of the timeless with time- is given further precision by a contrast with what it is not: Here the impossible union Of spheres of existence is actual,
208
K. VERHEUL
Here the past Are conquered, Where action Of that which And has in it
and the future and reconciled, were otherwise movement is only moved no source of movement.
Just as the sea imagery at the end of “East Coker” served to h the next J there is a new theme, announced connect this poem wit,& parenthetically, in the next to last line of “The Dry Salvages” link with - the theme of the “yew tree” - which serves as a “cyclic” “Little Gidding”. The function of this tree is not completely clear at this stage of the poem, because its semantic function in the Gest& of Four Quartets will only appear when we have read the final poem. The progress of Folur Qzcartets is one of a growing awareness of a reality outside the individual consciousness. “Burnt Norton” was a reflection on the Fersonal experience of a particular moment, with the conclusion : Ridiculous Stretching
the waste sad time before and after.
“East Coker” is a negative restatement in more particular terms, with an extension of awareness. The “pattern” becomes more compiicated; it is Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. “The Dry Salvages” presents time and eternity as an experience of the whole human race - htince the age-old symbolism of the sea and the river. . . I have said before That the past experience ieiived in the meaning Is not the experience of one life only But of many generations - not forgetting Something that is probably quite ineffable:
“FOUR
QUARTETS”
BY
T. S. ELIOT
289
The backward look behind the assurance Of recorded history, the backward half-look Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror. The basic contrast implied in the sea-symbolism of “The Dry Salvages’ ’ - history as endless time, “addition” of human lives and suffering, that can only acquire meaning through the intersection with the timeless or in the inner pattern of the hidden movement of its “ground swell” - is further developed in “Little Gidding”, the last Quartet, e&hich is about history as a meaningful pattern of thought and action that transcends the individual. Its symbol is the yew-tree that, by its association with tombstones stands, not for death only, but for the death of those who have played a part in the experiment of human history. The impersonal level of consciousness that has now been reached and that was, I think, impiied in the second epigraph from IIeraciitus: “Though the Word is one, people live as if each had a wisdom of his own” finds its expression in the first part of “Little Gidding” . If you came this way, Taking any route, starting from anywhere, At any time or at any season, It would always be the same and, of course, in the second section meeting with the compound poet:
it is dramatized
in Eliot’s
So I assumed a double part, a And heard another’s voice cry : “What ! are you here?” Although we were not. I was still the same, Knowing myself yet being someone other. It is not until the last movement of “Little Gidding” that the words and images we are looking for are used to any extent. In the earlier parts there is only a new appearance of the dance in the third section; a new meaning is added to the “dance” here, in accordance with the subject of “Little Gidding”: From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire Where you must move in measure, like a danc?r.
K. VERWEUL
The measure in which we must move here is, of course, that of the purification to which we must surrender our individual selves, The whole phrase is reminiscent of the “foco the gli affina” from Z%e Waste Landid) or rather from its source, the Arnaut Daniel episode in Dante’s and thus it also serves to add the ProvenGal poet as an ingredient to the “compound ghost”. Section V of “Little Gidding” brings together the themes explored in Few Quartets. Ilt does this in the manner peculiar to these poems; by assembling all the important words and images with all the meanings they have acquired in the course of what has gone before. And by this juxtaposition new relations and meanings are real&d. First the basic movement of “East Coker” - from beginning to em?, and from nd to beginning - gets a new application, not as an image of the r’rythms of physical life this time, but rather as a pattern that 130th underlies and transcends it. This spiritual movement, apprehended both in the life of the individual and in history’ pervades the section. I do not think it will be necessary to analyse the details, because they are obvious enough, but I will draw attention to the way in which this pattern in history is both expressed and real&d in the words: h@wioJ
We die with the dying: See, they depart, and we go with them. We are born with the dead: See, they return, and bring us with them. As a last demonstration of how meaning operates in the poetry of FRY Quadets I will take the dance that is used here 15) in a definition of the proper state of poetry while retaining all the extra meanings it has developed from “Burnt Norton” down to the last instance I mentioned. The word “dancing” carries much more meaning here than it would even in the same sentence outside Few Quartets, which again goes to show that in a poem the words derive s.t least part of their meaning from the semantic Gestalt of the whole poem. What I have tried to do in this essay is to analyse how Gestalt operates on the semantic level of the poetry of Fozcr Quartets. For 14) Collected Poems p. 79. 16) in line 10 of section V.
“FOUR
QUARTETS”
BY T. S. ELIOT
291
a description of the complete Gestalt ot the poem - of which the sub-Gestalts of sound and meaning are only two different aspects it would, of course, be necessary to analyse the auditive Gestdt, and, finally, the way the two levels co-operate and interact.16) Utrecht
16) As a thorough analysis of the auditive Ckstal$and its relation to the semantic aspect of the poem is outside the scope of this essay, I will only indicate briefly a few interesting parallels. Thus the contrast between highly formal verse and more loosely constructed passages seems to be one of the main auditive principles of organization in Four Quar&#s, corresponding to the contrasts in meaning which, as we have seen, are characteristic of the semantic development of the poem. Another formal principle, the parallel construction of the different Quarieets,seems to be the auditive counterpart of the development of the related motifs in each of the four poems. We have seen that “Little Gidding” is the most impersonal of the Quartets. It is in&resting to notice that in the same poem more tratditional verse forms are used than in the corresponding sections of the other Quartets. Thus the second part of suction 1,T has the metrica! forit of tersa rima, and section IV only lacks the music to be a pefiect church hymn.
MUSIC, N “FOUR
MEANING
AND POETRY
QUARTETS”
BY T. S. ELICIT
K. VERHEUL
Poetry borders on one side on prose, cn she other on music. Whereas poets usually are afraid of turning out prose, when they compose a poem, the connection with music is felt to be less embarrassing. Especially after VtA..he’~ requirement of “de la musique avant toute chose” many poets have considered music as a kind of ideal, which poets should approach. But usually no attention is paid to that aspect in which poetry necessarily differs from music: words have meanings, and music has not. The poet T. S. Eliot grouped four of his poems together under the title Four Qzcartetsand at about the same time published a lecture on “The Music of Poetry’?) For a responsible analysis and appreciation of the poems the essay has some relevance. Let us see what Eliot himself has to say on the connection between poetry and music. Although he is aware that the main difficulty in comparing the two lies in the semantic aspect of poetry which music lacks, he never faces a H the implications of this problem in the essay. What he proposes is an application of the possibilities of music, not only to the sound features of a poem, but also to the arrangement of its “‘meanings”: “A musical poem is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meanings of th? words which compose it and these patterns are indissoluble and one?) One of Eliot’s main preoccupations both in Four Qzlartets and of language and in “The Music of Poetry” is the relationship meaning and the insufficiency of this relationship even in poetry. In “Burnt Norton” we read: 1) Re@hxl
in T. S. Eliot: On Poetry and PoetA.,London
2) On Poetry and Poe@, p. , 33. 279
1957,
p. X-38.
280
K. VERHEUL
Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, w2l not stay still a theme repeated in section V of “East Coke?
:
And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion. In “The Music of Poetry” the elusiveness of the meaning expressed in the words of a poem is explained by the fact that “the poet is occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings sf 1il exist”,3 ) and the ambiguities of our interpretation of the meamng of a poem Eliot ascribes to “the fact that the poem means more, not less, than ordinary speech can communicate” .4) It is this peculiar semantic quality of verse that the poet describes as “music” : “The music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context; and from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that context to all the other meanings which it has had in other contexts, to its greater or less wealth of association”. An interesting parallel to some ideas propoundedi in Eliot’s essay and a possible basis for a further discussion of the problems involved may be found in the chapter on the aesthetic function of language in the Introductioti to General Liqyistics by the Dutch linguist A. W. De Groot.5) The main principle in De Groot’s discussion of poetry is the application of some aspects of GestaZt psychology fcr a definition of the aesthetic IFunction that language 30. 31. 8, A. MJ. De Groat: Meiding 1962.
8) Op. cit. p. 4) Op. cit. p.
tot de Algemene Taalwetenscha~,
Groningen
"FOUR
QUARTETS"
BY
T,S.ELIOT
281
has in poetry, and which distinguishes poetry from the ordinary use of language. By a Gestalt De Groot understands “the totality of the perceptions, which is more than and different from the sum of the constitutive elements”.*) Three dots on a piece of paper may be interpreted as the Gestalt of a triangle. In the same way the G&u& of a musical ‘phrase is something di rent from the mere sequence of its individual notes; one can hear the notes without perceiving the Gestalt and the same Gestalt may be realised with different notes, in a different key. “In the same way one could say 4---t +kLAlL itlciividual lines do not make the poem, but that it is the poem that makes the lines”‘) and “what happens when we hear a poem may be compared with what. happens in the perception of three dots as a triangle or a number of lines as a cube”!) A poem, then, consists of 1) its worcls and sentences, and 2) “the poem as such, i.e. that by which the poem differs from the lines of whic3 lt consists? ) Within the Gestdt of the poem De Groot distinguishes between the aspects of form and the aspects of content, the auditive and the semantic Gestalt. He only mentions the lat?:er in passing and devotes the rest of the chapter to a thorough analysis of the first aspect, that which is traditionally called “prosody”. For the present purpose, however, a discussion and analysis of the Gestalt principe will be icdispensible on the semantic level also, an? by applying the results of our abstract hypothesis to the poetry or “Four Quavtets” we may be able to contribute something to a further definition of poetic “meaning”. The existence of a semantic Gestalt in a poem would imply that I
6) As Prof. De Groot’s book has not yet been translated into English, I translate the quotations I want to make from it in my text; the Dutch original is given in the notes. The first quotation occurs on p. 3 15: “hzt geheel van waarnemingen dat meer en anders is dan de som van de constitue, tinde elementen”. 7) Op. cit. p. 315: “op analoge wijze kan men zeggen dat niet de versregels het gedicht maken, maar het gedicht de versregel s”. s) Op. cit. p. 317-318: “wat er gebeurt bij het horen van een gedicht laat zich vergelijken met wat er gebeurt bij het waarnemen van drie stippen als een driehoek, of van een aantal strepen als een kubus”. 9) OP tit P. 320 : “bet gedicht als zodanig, &VJ.Z. datgene waardoor het gedicht van de zinnen waaruit het bestaat verschilt”; a=<.Eliot: “the music of verse is not a line by line matter, but a question of the whole poem”. Ch Poe&y and Poets p. 36.
282
K.VERHEUL
the meanings of the words and sentences that make up the poem combine in a pattern which is more than a mere sequence of the meanings of the constituent parts, and that this pattern, in its turn, gives an added meaning to its members. In order to see how such a thing could work out in practice, a few further comments must be made on the “meaning of meaning”. The meaning of a word - or a word-group, or a sentence - extends from a central core of reference to a particular person, thing or situation to a surrounding aura of associations. In ordinary language this aura is usually present as an irrelevant background. But in poetry these haloes of meaning are disciplined into a meaningful Gestalt in such a way that the Gestalt delimits the associa+ive meanings of the parts of which it consists. That part in de Groot’s _htro&ctiort where he illustrates the -workings of thz Gestalt principle in poetry through an analogy with music throws an unexpected light on our problems. NOW that we have at least a definite view of how both poetry and music operate, we may be in a better position to examine their connection. What happens in the perception of a musical phrase? ‘We hear the notes one after the other in a linear sequence of time. But we can never perceive the significance of the first note in the Gestalt right from the start. After the last note we have to go back in time to the first to see its full function; and at a certain stage we move into the future and more or less anticipate what is coming in order to establish the function of the present and previous notes. The same psychological process takes place when we interpret a sentence that we hear or read. If it is true that a poem is a semantic Gestalt in the way proposed, that would implv that, as we read or listen to a poem, we become gradually aware of a pattern in the meanings and we try to reconstruct the pattern continually as we proceed through the poem by re-arranging _- in our memsry -w-h& 1~ gone before, until, in the silence after the last line, everything has taken its proper place in the Gestalt, the ultimate “meaning” of the poem. As I will try to show, this is what happens in the Four Qwrtets. Thus we may say that the main thing poetry - and especially the poetry of Few Quartets - may have in common with music is the way it moves and is perceived in time.
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T. S, ELIOT
Words move, and music moves Only in time (“Burnt
Norton”
V) 10)
Both music and poetry move in a linear way, and for both an interaction of present, past and future is essential. The psychological perception of both a musical and a poetical Gestalt is, then, a suspirllsion of time in the progress of time. Now it happens that ihe main theme of Few Quartets is also the mrzning c;f time both as an irreversible line;ar* process and as a pattern. So in order to understand both wat the poem says and how this is expressed we might pay special attention to words and. images in two fields of meaning, that of “movement” and that of “pattern”. What I will try do in the next section of this paper is to analyse such words and images and see if and how each gradually takes its place in the final Gestalt of the poem until we find The complete
consort dancing together (“Little
Gidding”
V).
The only reference to movement in the first section of “Burnt Norton” does not strike the reader as sirmething particularly meaningful when it comes :!\ong: in the rose garden, “our first would” to which we return in a moment of illumination, it is said that So we moved, and they, in a forma It is only iallcr on, when the Gestalt of the meaning takes shape in the reader’s mind, that this passage acquires, in retrospect, a further significance. Section two is a development on the theme of movement in a kind of semantic counterpoint. In the first, lyrical passage mover;‘, nt is reconciled with pattern in a circular dance round what Philip Wheelwright - in his essay on “The Philosophical Themes pure point”. The of T. S. Eliot”11 ) - has called a “mathematically 10) All quotaticns of Eliot’s poetry are made from: T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems rgog-1962, London 1963. 11) In: T. S. Eliot: A Study of his Writings
B. Kajan, London 1947.
by Several
Hands,
ed. by
K.
284
VERHEUL
abstract discourse that fotiows develops the dialectic of movement vs. stillness. We have three ingredients now: movement, its suspension “the still point”, and the “dance”, a perception of the pattern in movement, growing out of the awareness of the still
point. In all the Qzcartets except “Little Gidding” travelling is used in t&e third section to convey patternless and purely linear movement. “Burnt Norton” is no exceptior, to this. Two kinds of darkness are contrasted in its third section: the darkness of the Lonc’on tube - which is an image for the lack of spiritual illumination in modern life - and the dark night of the soul which is part of the spiritual discipline of the great mystics. The latter is only one of the Heraclitean Hodoi from the epigraph of the poem; to follow the other would, I take it, lead to the ecstasy in the rose garden, and, paradoxically, it would lead us there not in movement But abstention
from movement.
The poet applies the insights he has developed in the course of the Qzcartet to the use of words in the last part of the poem, as is also done in the other Quartets. Again we find the basic dialectical development of movement - stillness - pattern. The pattern !s cyclic here, too : . say
that the end preceCzs the beginning,
words that serve to connect this poem with the next, and that will turn out to have more mean& and carry greater function in retrospect. Let me say again that the main structural principle of Four Quartets is a continual rearrangement of what has gone before through what comes after, as the complete Gestalt of the meaning of the poems gradually unfolds itself in the words. I have shown before in what way this principle is “musical”. In 4e final summing up of “Burnt Norton” the contrasts and distinctions that have been built up around the concept of movement are given a metaphysical application when they are used to define the difference ‘between desire and love: Desire itself is movement and love, like Aristotle’s
Prime Mover, is
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295
itself unmoving Only the cause and end of movement. In music we call a piece in which a theme from the first movement recurs in the others “cyclic”. The same principle of construction also holds the Four Quartets together, This cyclic principle itself - one form of pattern in movement - is the subject of “East Coker”P) Th e f’lrs t and last lines of the poem already form a circle owing to the subtle inversion of their terms. In the first paragraph of the poem the cycle is in the rhythms of physical existence. What follows forms a rather close parallel with the corresponding section in “Burnt Norton” ; again there is a bird that leads us to a place where there is a dance. The crux of “East Coker”, however, is that the poem uses a method that is radically different from that used in the other poems. In ihis Qwa~tetsuch basic concepts as “dance” and “pattern” are developed in a negative way : a po&bly yu~lcive experience or insight is explored and finally qualified or rejecterj. It is only gradually that we become aware that there is something wrong with the dance f hat we had learned to regard as the positive counterpart of movement in “Burnt Norton”. A few misgivings are already suggested by the description of the dance itself. In the ;ilsL yiace the setting of the scene is rather omir~~s with its hypnotising “electric heat” Tad “the sultry light . . . absorbed . . . by grey stone”. And we are invited this time by a kind of bird that usually gives unpleasant associations. The “daunsinge” itself - an expression this time of the rhythms of nature and physical life - is described with the dignified Tudor English of Thomas Elyot, but the whole scene is summed up with: “dung and death”. Moreover, we remember that in Sweeney _4gonistes, for instance’ Mr. Eliot described the physical development of human life with scorn and horror: Birth, and copulation and death. That’s all, that’s all, that’s all, that’s all, Birth, and copulation, and death?) 12) For my reading of “East Coker” I am much. indebted to James Johnson Sweeney’s analysis of this poem in the Southern Rev&u, Vol. VT No. 4, pp. 771-791, reprinted in T. S. Elio& A Se:ecled Critique ed. by L. Unger. 13) ColEs&d Poems, p. 131.
286
K, VERHEUL
The ambiguity of attitude we have found in the description of the is developed in more discursive terms in section II: “daunsinge” what may have had a positive value for the sixteenth century cannot be a basis for OMY lives; the living have to develop their own approach to a new situation. The same process of defining something by elimination of what it should not be is applied to “pattern”: The knowledge
imposes a pattern,
and falsifies.
We again find the image of the underground in the third section, and again the section ends with a presentation of spiritual discipline by using quotations from the work of St. John of the Cross, this time with paradoxes of movement: In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
etc.
At the end of the poem another sort of wisdom is developed as a contrast to the secular wisdom of the old men in section II. The new wisdom, as opposed to the rigidity of the imposed pattern of section II, consists in an acceptance of further movement, rentred in stillness : Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity . . . . Two primitive symbols, river and kinds of movement, are contrast& Salvages”. The river is the flux of pulse of our own life-blood, and the individual consciousness :
sea, representing two different in the next ($&et, “The Dry time as it is perceived in the sea isbendless time beyond the
The river is within us, the sea is all about us. Movement on the surface of a sea without reference to a coast can only be a directionless drifting. And the only movement of the sea independent of our sense of direction is its “ground swell”. Those aif? *he basic rhythms and movements in which the meanings 04 t!& poem take shape. The lyric of the second section develops the awareness of the
“FOUR
QUARTETS”
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BY T. S. ELIOT
eternity of time as an endless addition of suffering without sense: the surface movement of the sea. (Notice how often the word “drifting” *occurs and its effects in the last words of each fourth line in the stanzasj. The idea of an unbearable and endless drifting is finally expressed by an image of movement: . . . the
movement
of pain that is painless and motionless
only relieved by the one Annunciation that had already been announced by the bzll, rung by the ground swell, and that in the next, discursive passage on the same theme points to “another pattern” in time. The public transport in “The Dry Salvages” i.~ no longer the infernal underground as in the two preceiimg Quartets. Hertz travelling is an interruption of the chain of movement from past to future, a movement in time, but momentarily free of the movement of time itself. It is only from this kind of freedom that right action, with no care for the morrow, can arise. The theme of “exploration” and the requirement that We must be still and still moving is taken up again in the advice &.~vI to the travellers
:
Not fare well, But fare forward, voyagers. Moreover, we had already been made to rtlalisc, in a variation on Heraclitus, that “the way forward is the way back” (i.e. to the original vision in a suspension of time). The theme of right action, grouncM in The pqint of intersection Witn 29e
of the timeless
is recapitulated
in the last part of the poem. In this section the iclwa nf i:; tidy aPIJ:icd to gl\‘--z an Aristotelian definition of hbU_ vs. r~3cnisr: action that is subject to time: the positive \ 2~ described in the first four lines - the intersection of the timeless with time- is given further precision by a contrast with what it is not: Here the impossible union Of spheres of existence is actual,
208
K. VERHEUL
Here the past Are conquered, Where action Of that which And has in it
and the future and reconciled, were otherwise movement is only moved no source of movement.
Just as the sea imagery at the end of “East Coker” served to h the next J there is a new theme, announced connect this poem wit,& parenthetically, in the next to last line of “The Dry Salvages” link with - the theme of the “yew tree” - which serves as a “cyclic” “Little Gidding”. The function of this tree is not completely clear at this stage of the poem, because its semantic function in the Gest& of Four Quartets will only appear when we have read the final poem. The progress of Folur Qzcartets is one of a growing awareness of a reality outside the individual consciousness. “Burnt Norton” was a reflection on the Fersonal experience of a particular moment, with the conclusion : Ridiculous Stretching
the waste sad time before and after.
“East Coker” is a negative restatement in more particular terms, with an extension of awareness. The “pattern” becomes more compiicated; it is Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. “The Dry Salvages” presents time and eternity as an experience of the whole human race - htince the age-old symbolism of the sea and the river. . . I have said before That the past experience ieiived in the meaning Is not the experience of one life only But of many generations - not forgetting Something that is probably quite ineffable:
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QUARTETS”
BY
T. S. ELIOT
289
The backward look behind the assurance Of recorded history, the backward half-look Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror. The basic contrast implied in the sea-symbolism of “The Dry Salvages’ ’ - history as endless time, “addition” of human lives and suffering, that can only acquire meaning through the intersection with the timeless or in the inner pattern of the hidden movement of its “ground swell” - is further developed in “Little Gidding”, the last Quartet, e&hich is about history as a meaningful pattern of thought and action that transcends the individual. Its symbol is the yew-tree that, by its association with tombstones stands, not for death only, but for the death of those who have played a part in the experiment of human history. The impersonal level of consciousness that has now been reached and that was, I think, impiied in the second epigraph from IIeraciitus: “Though the Word is one, people live as if each had a wisdom of his own” finds its expression in the first part of “Little Gidding” . If you came this way, Taking any route, starting from anywhere, At any time or at any season, It would always be the same and, of course, in the second section meeting with the compound poet:
it is dramatized
in Eliot’s
So I assumed a double part, a And heard another’s voice cry : “What ! are you here?” Although we were not. I was still the same, Knowing myself yet being someone other. It is not until the last movement of “Little Gidding” that the words and images we are looking for are used to any extent. In the earlier parts there is only a new appearance of the dance in the third section; a new meaning is added to the “dance” here, in accordance with the subject of “Little Gidding”: From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire Where you must move in measure, like a danc?r.
K. VERWEUL
The measure in which we must move here is, of course, that of the purification to which we must surrender our individual selves, The whole phrase is reminiscent of the “foco the gli affina” from Z%e Waste Landid) or rather from its source, the Arnaut Daniel episode in Dante’s and thus it also serves to add the ProvenGal poet as an ingredient to the “compound ghost”. Section V of “Little Gidding” brings together the themes explored in Few Quartets. Ilt does this in the manner peculiar to these poems; by assembling all the important words and images with all the meanings they have acquired in the course of what has gone before. And by this juxtaposition new relations and meanings are real&d. First the basic movement of “East Coker” - from beginning to em?, and from nd to beginning - gets a new application, not as an image of the r’rythms of physical life this time, but rather as a pattern that 130th underlies and transcends it. This spiritual movement, apprehended both in the life of the individual and in history’ pervades the section. I do not think it will be necessary to analyse the details, because they are obvious enough, but I will draw attention to the way in which this pattern in history is both expressed and real&d in the words: h@wioJ
We die with the dying: See, they depart, and we go with them. We are born with the dead: See, they return, and bring us with them. As a last demonstration of how meaning operates in the poetry of FRY Quadets I will take the dance that is used here 15) in a definition of the proper state of poetry while retaining all the extra meanings it has developed from “Burnt Norton” down to the last instance I mentioned. The word “dancing” carries much more meaning here than it would even in the same sentence outside Few Quartets, which again goes to show that in a poem the words derive s.t least part of their meaning from the semantic Gestalt of the whole poem. What I have tried to do in this essay is to analyse how Gestalt operates on the semantic level of the poetry of Fozcr Quartets. For 14) Collected Poems p. 79. 16) in line 10 of section V.
“FOUR
QUARTETS”
BY T. S. ELIOT
291
a description of the complete Gestalt ot the poem - of which the sub-Gestalts of sound and meaning are only two different aspects it would, of course, be necessary to analyse the auditive Gestdt, and, finally, the way the two levels co-operate and interact.16) Utrecht
16) As a thorough analysis of the auditive Ckstal$and its relation to the semantic aspect of the poem is outside the scope of this essay, I will only indicate briefly a few interesting parallels. Thus the contrast between highly formal verse and more loosely constructed passages seems to be one of the main auditive principles of organization in Four Quar&#s, corresponding to the contrasts in meaning which, as we have seen, are characteristic of the semantic development of the poem. Another formal principle, the parallel construction of the different Quarieets,seems to be the auditive counterpart of the development of the related motifs in each of the four poems. We have seen that “Little Gidding” is the most impersonal of the Quartets. It is in&resting to notice that in the same poem more tratditional verse forms are used than in the corresponding sections of the other Quartets. Thus the second part of suction 1,T has the metrica! forit of tersa rima, and section IV only lacks the music to be a pefiect church hymn.