Four Quartets

Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot is a work of four poems: Burnt Norton (1935), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941), and Little Gidding (1942).

Burnt Norton (1935)


Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past.'''
 * '''Time present and time past
 * I

Point to one end, which is always present. 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.
 * '''What might have been and what has been
 * I

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. ''' 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.'''
 * Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
 * II

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement.''' And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. '''Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.'''
 * '''At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
 * II

Allow but a little consciousness.''' To be conscious is not to be in time But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, The moment in the draughty church at smokefall Be remembered; involved with past and future. Only through time time is conquered.
 * '''Time past and time future
 * V

Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence.
 * Words move, music moves
 * V

And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end. And all is always now. '''Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Will not stay still.'''
 * Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
 * V

Not in itself desirable; '''Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement,''' Timeless, and undesiring Except in the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being.
 * Desire itself is movement
 * V

Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick now, here, now, always— Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after.
 * Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
 * V

East Coker (1940)



 * In my beginning is my end.
 * I

At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, For the pattern is new in every moment And every moment is a new and shocking Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
 * There is, it seems to us,
 * II

Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly, Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession, Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God. '''The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.'''
 * Do not let me hear
 * II

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, … And we all go with them, into the silent funeral, Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
 * O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
 * III

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
 * I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
 * III

Something I have said before. I shall say it again. Shall I say it again?''' In order to arrive there, To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. '''In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not. ''' And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not.
 * '''You say I am repeating
 * III

The bloody flesh our only food''': In spite of which we like to think That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood —  Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
 * '''The dripping blood our only drink,
 * IV

Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it.'''
 * '''Trying to use words, and every attempt
 * V

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. 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 —but there is no competition— There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious.''' But perhaps neither gain nor loss. '''For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.'''
 * And so '''each venture
 * V

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living.''' 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.'''
 * Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
 * V

When here and now cease to matter.''' Old men ought to be explorers '''Here or there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion''' Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
 * '''Love is most nearly itself
 * V

The Dry Salvages (1941)


Is a strong brown god''' —sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
 * '''I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
 * I


 * The river is within us, the sea is all about us
 * I

The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men.
 * It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
 * I

Many gods and many voices.'''
 * '''The sea has many voices,
 * I

That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence— Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution, Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
 * It seems, as one becomes older,
 * II

Fruition, fulfilment, security or affecton, Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination — '''We had the experience but missed the meaning, And approach to the meaning restores the experience In a different form, beyond any meaning We can assign to happiness.''' I have said before That '''the past experience revived in the meaning Is not the experience of one life only But of many generations — not forgetting Something that is probably quite ineffable'''
 * The moments of happiness — not the sense of well-being,
 * II

(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding, Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things, Is not in question) '''are likewise permanent With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better In the agony of others, nearly experienced, Involving ourselves, than in our own.''' For our own past is covered by the currents of action, But the torment of others remains an experience Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition. People change, and smile: but the agony abides.
 * Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony
 * II

Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops, The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple. And the ragged rock in the restless waters, Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it; On a halcyon day it is merely a monument, In navigable weather it is always a seamark To lay a course by: but in the sombre season Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.
 * Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
 * II

That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
 * You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
 * III

Into different lives, or into any future; You are not the same people who left that station Or who will arrive at any terminus, While the narrowing rails slide together behind you'''
 * '''Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
 * III

You are not those who saw the harbour Receding, or those who will disembark.''' '''Here between the hither and the farther shore While time is withdrawn, consider the future And the past with an equal mind.'''
 * '''Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
 * III

You can receive this: 'on whatever sphere of being The mind of a man may be intent At the time of death — that is the one action '''(And the time of death is every moment) Which shall fructify in the lives of others: And do not think of the fruit of action. Fare forward.'''
 * '''At the moment which is not of action or inaction
 * III

The point of intersection of the timeless With time, is an occupation for the saint — No occupation either, but something given And taken, in a lifetime's death in love, Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
 * To apprehend
 * V

Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts.'''
 * '''For most of us, there is only the unattended
 * V

Here the impossible union Of spheres of evidence is actual, Here the past and future Are conquered, and reconciled…
 * The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
 * V

From past and future also. For most of us, this is the aim Never here to be realised; Who are only undefeated Because we have gone on trying;''' We, content at the last If our temporal reversion nourish (Not too far from the yew-tree) The life of significant soil.
 * '''Right action is freedom
 * V

Little Gidding (1942)


Taking the route you would be likely to take From the place you would be likely to come from, If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
 * If you came this way,
 * I

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled If at all. '''Either you had no purpose Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured And is altered in fulfilment.''' There are other places Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws, Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city— But this is the nearest, in place and time, Now and in England.
 * And what you thought you came for
 * I

Taking any route, starting from anywhere, At any time or at any season, It would always be the same: you would have to put off Sense and notion. You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity Or carry report. You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more Than an order of words, the conscious occupation Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. '''And what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.'''
 * If you came this way,
 * I

Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
 * Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
 * I

My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten. These things have served their purpose: let them be. So with your own, and pray they be forgiven By others, as '''I pray you to forgive Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eaten And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail. For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.'''
 * I am not eager to rehearse
 * II; "fullfed" has in recent years sometimes been misquoted in print as "fulfilled".

To purify the dialect of the tribe And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight, Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort. First, the cold fricton of expiring sense Without enchantment, offering no promise But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit As body and soul begin to fall asunder. Second, the conscious impotence of rage At human folly, and the laceration Of laughter at what ceases to amuse. '''And last, the rending pain of re-enactment Of all that you have done, and been; the shame Of things ill done and done to others' harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue. Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains. From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'''
 * Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
 * II

History may be freedom. See, now they vanish, The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern. '''Sin is Behovely, but All shall be well, and All manner of thing shall be well.'''
 * History may be servitude,
 * III; "Sin is Behovely, but All shall be well, and All manner of thing shall be well." and similar lines later in the poem, are actually quotations of Julian of Norwich.

We cannot restore old policies Or follow an antique drum.
 * We cannot revive old factions
 * III

We have taken from the defeated What they had to leave us — a symbol: A symbol perfected in death. And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well By the purification of the motive In the ground of our beseeching.'''
 * '''Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
 * III

With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre — To be redeemed from fire by fire.
 * The dove descending breaks the air
 * IV

Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire. '''
 * '''Who then devised the torment? Love.
 * IV

And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
 * What we call the beginning is often the end
 * V

Every poem an epitaph.''' And any action Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start. We die with the dying: See, they depart, and we go with them.
 * '''Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
 * V

See, they return, and bring us with them. The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree Are of equal duration. '''A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments.'''
 * We are born with the dead:
 * V

On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel History is now and England.
 * So, while the light fails
 * V

And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.'''
 * With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling '''We shall not cease from exploration
 * V

When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning;''' At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree '''Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea.'''
 * '''Through the unknown, remembered gate
 * V

A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flames are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.'''
 * '''Quick now, here, now, always —
 * V