The Four Seasons Experience

What primarily caught my attention reading T.S. Eliot's striking later work, Four Quartets, was its resolution of earlier themes and motifs from his other poetry -- particularly, his transformation of negative elements into positive ones. This process underscores his rather zen message of life in death (while most of his poetry seems to quite obsessively study death in life).

For example, his oceanic and water imagery in "Dry Salvages" seem to convey a far more optimistic meaning than in "Prufrock": instead of faceless sirens luring him into the depths of a disturbed subconscious, Eliot depicts the "river," evoking the Ganges and the Thames, as a "strong brown god." Modernity may ignore these "river gods," but this does not diminish their existence and power. Eliot also seems to reference from his earlier work the "ancient women gathering fuel in vacant lots" with his portrayal of the " anxious worried women / Lying awake, calculating the future,Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel." Instead of remaining the final, controlling image of the poem, Eliot instead chooses to highlight an "older" time and an "older" power, a vague Supreme Entity.

Indeed, I was surprised and delighted to find a more complex, inclusive sense of spirituality than even Eliot himself espouses in his political, critical works. Upon reading the Four Quartets, I did not see a cut-and-paste "royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion," but, say, an elderly monk who envisions a forever-deferred, mysterious Absolute behind the veils of many traditions. It is interesting, however, in the context of many of our (well, maybe my) fixations on the British-Indian imperial connection and its influence on Modernist literature that he chose Christianity and Hinduism to be the main vehicles of this message. Perhaps Eliot is envisioning a dual-sided trade of ideas and values rather than material goods and shady business deals. A particularly intriguing instance of this Hindu influence occurs during his borrowings from the Baghavad Gita's early chapters -- those that describe its hero, Arjuna, on the battlefield surveying the myriad soldiers assembled. Obviously, Eliot would be inspired to write this work during the blitz, which adds another depth of meaning, that of a material battle to be fought, along with the main idea of the spiritual battle. Like Krishna/Vishnu's cyclic operation in the world, periods of destruction pave a way towards a new, purer order: one that Eliot apparently believes he is to forecast.

Uniting this theme of decay and regeneration is the image of burnt roses and ashes: "Ash on an old man's sleeve / Is all the ash the burnt roses leave." Though the rose has dwindled to dust, the otherwise-morose vignette is complicated by the word "leave," as if the roses are springing to life and growing "leaves" on the man's arm. Nevertheless, the word "burnt" signifies unnatural violence that has cut growth short rather than a natural decay. Fires and roses also appear to have a Christian (specifically Catholic) religious significance earlier in the work, as Eliot describes the soul's "dark night": "And quake in frigid purgatorial fires / Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars." The interpretation that the roses represent memory here (an obviously torturing one) is certainly valid, although in the Catholic sensibility Purgatory allows ample room for further hope in salvation, as its suffering is known to be temporary.

Furthermore, the symbol of roses also alludes to Mary, who often is depicted as playing a mediating role in either lifetime or deathtime purgatory, and therefore may depict life in death as well. These contrasting juxtapositions proliferate when Eliot describes his God as a darkness: "be still, and let the dark come upon you / Which shall be the darkness of God." Set in contrast with a "heart of light" earlier on in the poem, the resulting message is an injunction perhaps to lie in wait, in purifying suffering, and in hope.