The End and The Beginng

(Hi, sorry this is a little late-- late but not least!)

When I read T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and “The Four Quartets” for our class, I did so after walking through a city that was just emerging from the gray shadow of winter into the light of springtime. I found that the change in seasons (especially as the end of Daylight Savings Time and Passover approaches!) helped set the mood for me as I paged through Eliot’s depiction of an “unreal city”. However, when I read both poems, I was struck by the sweeping scope of the language used within them, as well as the questions that seemed to underlie Eliot’s elegant diction

In the last section of “The Wasteland”, titled “What the Thunder Said”, Eliot writes, “Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together/But when I look ahead up the white road/There is always another one walking beside you” (Eliot lines 360-364). In this final section of Eliot’s tour through a broken, fallen world, he tries to identify an unknown, unseen presence always present throughout his journey, an allusion to Jesus. However, this question suggests that at the end of his exploration of humanity’s darkest moments, he is now aware that there is a path out of the morass, guided by an unseen presence. Eliot now knows that his path to a better, more enlightened road is via “the white road”, but still questions how to get there.

In a later stanza in “What The Thunder Said”, Eliot describes this path, by stating, “My friend, blood shaking my heart/The awful daring of a moment’s surrender/Which an age of prudence can never retract. By this, and this only, we have existed… We think of the key, each in his prison/Thinking of a key, each confirms a prison” (Eliot lines 402-405, 413). When Eliot talks about a “prison” he is referring to the dark, unenlightened world in which the human spirit is forced to be in, which he can only escape via achieving “the awful daring of a moment’s surrender”, by which he means the complete and total unity with G-d that one can only attain by submitting oneself to Him. “The Wasteland” concludes on this note, with Eliot sitting “upon the shore… with the arid plain behind me” (423-24). Clearly, Eliot now feels that he can put his lonely, dark existence in the mundane world behind him. Indeed, when he asks, “Shall I at least set my lands in order?”, he is actually asking himself whether he is ready to put his own inner turmoil to rest and completely submit himself to G-d in order to leave the cold, dead world behind.

This is why he begins “The Four Quartets” on a note of spiritual exaltation, reveling in complete unity with the Divine. In the first section of the poem, he exults, “Below, the boarhound and the boar/Pursue their pattern as before/But reconciled among the stars… Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,/But neither arrest nor movement… Where past and future are gathered” (Eliot, lines 59-60, 61-64). Eliot describes the union of two mortal opposites, the boarhound and the boar, when they leave the bounds of temporal existence and enter into complete unity with the divinity within the cosmos.

Furthermore, Eliot’s emphasis on using words like “reconciled”, and “gathered” provide a sense that elements of reality are coming together and healing, which lends “The Four Quartets” a sense of continuation from “The Wasteland”. By doing so, this phrasing enables “Quartets” to pick up the broken pieces of spirituality from “Wasteland”, and bring them into a state of spiritual bliss, unencumbered by the concerns brought on by temporal existence.