Light and Fire in Eliot's "Four Quartets"

T.S. Eliot’s early poetry is full of natural symbolism. There is the fog in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, the wind in “Gerontion”, and of course the water, fire, and thunder in The Waste Land. The same is true of the Four Quartets, with rivers, oceans, roses, and yew-trees all playing significant roles in the development of the poems. The most important symbols, though, are those of light and fire. In the Quartets, sunlight is used to show the danger of worldly illusion, whilst also leading us on the path to God. Fire is used similarly: whilst it can be a source of distraction or even of destruction, it also stands for the idea of purgatorial or cleansing fire, a fire that is teleologically good. It is through these symbols of light and fire that Eliot guides us on our poetical journey from the Dantesque ‘place of disaffection’ of “Burnt Norton” to the ‘condition of complete simplicity’ reached in the poem’s finale, the fifth movement of “Little Gidding”.

The image of sunlight is first used in Eliot’s description of the dream-like ‘rose-garden’, which we come upon by walking through ‘the door we never opened.’ We are immediately in the world of the unreal, the realm of ‘What might have been’, creating an instant sense of unease reinforced by Eliot’s question: ‘shall we follow / The deception of the thrush?’ As we enter this ‘first world’ (words which suggest ignorance and naivety, whilst also indicating an Eden-like idyll) we are on guard, aware of an immanent sense of uncertainty – who are ‘they’, and what is the ‘unheard music’ hidden from our ears? The uneasiness of this description is increased when Eliot refers to the roses which have ‘the look of flowers that are looked at,’ implying a sort of superficial masked performance or false pretence. Then we stumble upon the dry pool which is suddenly ‘filled with water out of sunlight’ so that ‘The surface glittered’. Out of this water grows a ‘lotos’, recalling the drug-induced escapism of Odysseus’s men in Homer’s epic, implying that this rose-garden reverie could hinder us on our journey to God. We then learn that this water is no more than an illusory trick of vision, a desert mirage deceiving the mind. So here, the sunlight misleads the mind into imagining that the pool is full of water. Just as the symbol of water is a symbol of hope and growth in The Waste Land, so too is it in “Burnt Norton”, the lack of water suggestive of a bleak reality. Perhaps this is why Denis Donoghue describes the rose-garden as ‘man’s fantasy-refuge’. And yet, the bird (perhaps, as Morris Weitz argues, not the deceptive bird of before but a bird of truth) then says ‘human kind / Cannot bear very much reality’ which may suggest that what we have just witnessed, the ray of sunlight creating an illusion of water, was a glimpse of actuality which we can only experience for a brief moment. And so, whilst the sunlight creates an apparent illusion, that illusion may be a glimpse of the reality that we, as temporal beings, struggle to reach. Perhaps the light in the rose-garden shows, in the words of F.R. Leavis, ‘a reality that, though apprehended in time, is not of it.’

In movement three of “Burnt Norton” sunlight plays a similar role. The ‘place of disaffection’ is dominated by a ‘dim light’ rather than the ‘daylight’ we saw before, daylight which turns ‘shadow into transient beauty / With slow rotation suggesting permanence’. Again there is a sense of uncertainty here created by the oxymoronic words ‘transient’ and ‘permanence’, possibly implying the duality of the light’s effect. Whilst the symbol of light shows a ‘transient beauty’, it also ‘hints’ or ‘guesses’ at some other reality, some extemporal ‘permanence’. In order to get beyond these ‘hints and guesses’ (which, we learn, hint at ‘Incarnation’) we must either live by ‘prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action,’ or we must ‘Descend lower’ into the ‘Internal darkness, deprivation / And destitution of all property…’ In order to reach what the light is only glimpsing at, perhaps we must completely escape the light, engulfing ourselves in a dark and destitute world of ‘Desiccation’, ‘Evacuation’ and ‘Inoperancy’, the death of one aspect of the self. As Constance De Masirevich argues, ‘The key to the thought of T.S. Eliot is the idea of sacrifice as a means of becoming, of birth through death’ – hence, ‘In my end is my beginning’ and the fusion of birth and death in “Journey of the Magi”. Only through suffering a rigorous ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ will we ever experience the reality beyond this tired existence, the reality loosely revealed by the light. So, the path we walk down has ‘no secure foothold’ and is menaced by both ‘monsters’ and ‘fancy lights’ which risk enchanting us. The symbol of light, then, can both deceive us and guide us. It can create illusions, but if we escape certain aspects of selfhood and the various hindrances of temporal reality, it can also act as the ‘grace of sense, a white light still and moving’ – another oxymoron to show the inexpressibility of this timelessness.

The symbol of fire plays a similar role in the Four Quartets. Just as the sunlight in the rose-garden seems to create an illusion, so too can fire play an entrancing and almost deceptive role in the poems. In “East Coker”, we are captivated by the description of the ghostly dancing ‘Round and round the fire’ and we vividly imagine figures ‘Leaping through the flames’. The reference to ‘rustic laughter’ also recalls the image of the children in the rose-garden, suggesting again those ‘hints and guesses’ of the sunlight. And yet, the language of this description seems almost mocking – it is, apparently, ‘A dignified and commodious sacrament’ which ‘betokeneth concorde’. This, as Masirevich argues, is ‘human-kind held in the circle of time, striving to bring dignity to its animal joys and ecstasies.’ Just as the ‘hollow men’ dance ‘round the prickly pear’, so in “East Coker” these figures are ‘joined in circles’ and dance ‘round and round’ in endless futility. They are ‘Keeping time’, trapped in the temporal bounds of the average human existence. Their dance around the fire descends into no more than ‘Dung and death’. And so, here there are no hints and guesses, there is no permanence or timeless reality – there is only a dark dance of animalistic urges, temptingly mirthful and yet inevitably transient. Even the language is deceptive, drawing us back into the past of Eliot’s ancestors and imitating Thomas Elyot’s work The Boke named The Governour.

As well as being a symbol of enticement, fire also acts as a force of destruction. At the start of “East Coker” the speaker describes the role of fire in the destruction and regeneration of life in the human world. Eliot writes: “Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, / Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth…’ Just as in The Waste Land, fire is a symbol of the human world’s dangerous depravities, so in the Quartets it is a source of apocalypse, a ‘destructive fire’ which shall burn the world. However, fire is also a positive motif. In the fourth movement of “East Coker”, Eliot describes how ‘The whole earth is our hospital’, possibly a reference to the hospitals and infirmaries of WWII, waged whilst Eliot was writing this poem. But the hospital of “East Coker” is also religiously symbolic, with Christ as our ‘wounded surgeon’, wounded by the stigmata of the cross. It is only through Christ and through the ‘dying nurse’ (which Curtis Bradford says represents the Church) that we can escape this hospital. Eliot explains that ‘to be restored, our sickness must grow worse’, which suggests that pain and destruction can indeed have a positive aspect to them – the hospital is the ‘vale of soul-making’ (Keats) described in Irenaean theodicies. The destructive fires of the first movement, then, become ‘frigid purgatorial fires / Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.’ The rose has now become a symbol of God’s love, manifested in Christ’s death on the cross and the Eucharistic ceremony – ‘The dripping blood our only drink, / The bloody flesh our only food…’ This idea of a painful purging is recalled later on in the description of ‘The dove descending breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror’ (arguably a reference to the Blitz) which can discharge us from ‘sin and error’ through fire. The torment and terror of the ‘intolerable shirt of flame’ which we must wear has been devised by ‘Love’, Eliot explains – we must either be consumed by the fire of the human world, or cleansed by God’s loving flames, again showing the duality of this symbol.

Fire, then, has become a positive image, one of cleansing and hope. This is clear in the description of ‘midwinter spring’ at the opening of “Little Gidding”, which combines the symbols of both light and fire. The difference between this description and the rose-garden description, though, is that, as David Perkins suggests, whilst in the rose-garden description we were only looking at the ‘heart of light’, in the latter description we are in the centre of it – the fire, the sunlight, the glow and the glare are all around us. We are confronted by a ‘glow more intense than blaze’ which ‘Stirs the dumb spirit,’ recalling those pious lines from Hopkins’s “The Windhover” – ‘My heart in hiding stirred for a bird.’ This is not just a ‘transient beauty’, it is ‘pentecostal fire’ which flames out both within time (‘the dark time of the year’) and without time (‘not in time’s covenant’). And so, this is clearly a more powerful image than that of the rose-garden, and yet it is arguably still only a ‘glimpse’ of the true reality – the hedgerow only has a ‘transitory blossom’ and the bloom is ‘sudden’. Though it is a development from the rose-garden mirage created by sunlight, it is still not ‘the unimaginable / Zero summer…’

It is often said that each one of the Four Quartets is associated with one of the elements, and there is surely no doubt that the final quartet, “Little Gidding”, is associated with the fire of God. It is in Little Gidding, the small Cambridgeshire town which represents ‘the world’s end’, that Eliot has found ‘the intersection of the timeless moment’ both in and out of time – ‘Never and always.’ The eternal and the temporal have finally met. Perhaps Eliot’s hope is that we can escape the view of time as a linear construct and instead live in the ‘Now’ so that we can see history not as ‘time past’ but as ‘a pattern / Of timeless moments’. Only then can we reach the ‘condition of complete simplicity’ which costs ‘not less than everything’ (in that we have given up our selves). Thus, it is in Little Gidding that ‘All manner of thing shall be well.’ In Little Gidding, where Nicholas Ferrar established his religious community, ‘the tongues of flames are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one.’ Though it might only be possible in Heaven, this is what Eliot has been searching for. After overcoming the ‘Tumid apathy with no concentration’, after accepting the death of the old self in the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ and after suffering the pains of purgatorial fires, the symbols of God’s authority (fire) and God’s love (rose) have finally been combined. 

The Poetic Style of Edward Thomas

Ted Hughes once described the poet Edward Thomas as ‘the father of us all’. Due to the overwhelming emphasis placed on the role of ‘modernism’ in twentieth century poetry, this claim may seem surprising. When we think of the most influential ‘modern’ texts we are perhaps more likely to think of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s Cantosthan of Thomas’s pastoral English lyrics. And yet, there really are few poets who have influenced contemporary poetry more than Thomas has – Auden, Larkin, Hughes and many others have admitted to his influence. In fact, he is so influential that various collections of poetry have been put together by poets wishing to celebrate Thomas’s impact on their verse. The aspect of Thomas’s poetry that these writers refer to most frequently is his conversational style and loose rhythm, both of which were relatively innovative in the early twentieth century but are commonplace now. The meditative colloquialism of Thomas’s verse lends itself to the exploration of uncertainties and ambiguities, a recurring theme in his poems and indeed in modern literature in general. But this colloquial style does not hamper the musical cadences of Thomas’s verse, often overlooked by critics stressing his speech-like intonations. It is perhaps in this sense that Thomas is most influential: in combining a conversational and meditative style with a richly rhythmical musicality.

Edward Thomas and Robert Frost spent about a year together over 1913-14. During that time, Frost encouraged Thomas to start writing his own verse and arguably influenced Thomas’s views on poetic style. Frost’s mantra that ‘a poet needs to capture the spoken word’ is clear not just in Thomas’s verse but also in his prose: he once said he wanted to ‘wring all the necks of my rhetoric’ and purge his prose writing of all mannerisms. In his famous poem ‘Adlestrop’, this colloquialism and ambition towards the ‘spoken word’ is clear. The poem opens with the words ‘Yes. I remember Adlestrop –’ as if Thomas is in the middle of a conversation or answering a question. In the poem, there are very few ‘poetic’ terms (apart from the word ‘whit’) and obscurities, reflecting Thomas’s Wordsworthian commitment to poetry for the common man. Similarly, the poem ‘But these things also’, opening as it does with a conjunction, suggests it is some sort of response to an unidentified interlocutor, again adding to the sense of a relaxed, conversational style which draws us into the poem. This poetic intimacy felt by the reader is enhanced by Thomas’s use of relatively loose metres – ‘Adlestop’ is written in iambic tetrameter, but the first line begins with a trochaic foot (‘Yes. I…’) and the third line has nine syllables. These are just two example of the numerous metrical variations in Thomas’s verse. His rhymes vary, too – in ‘Gone, Gone Again’ his rhyme scheme flits from ABCB to AABC to ABCA. Moreover, his rhymes are often, in the words of Walter De La Mare, the ‘faintest of echoes’ – in the aforementioned poem, he rhymes ‘dead’ with ‘interested’ and ‘sun’ with ‘one’. This loose formality not only shows how innovative Thomas was in his time, but it also augments the colloquial style of his verse, drawing the reader in with its speech-like appearance. As Edgell Rickword wrote in the Daily Herald, ‘To read him is like listening to a friend in the completest intimacy…’

Directly connected to this aspect of Thomas’s style is the reflective nature of his verse. ‘The Sun Used to Shine’ is a good example of this. Through the repeated use of enjambment (‘we two walked / Slowly’, ‘started / Again’, and ‘parted / Each night’), we get the sense of a fluidity of thought. It is as if Thomas is letting his thoughts run over the lines in speech-like cadences as he walks with his companion, his words reflecting what Newlyn calls ‘the momentary lulls that are part of companionable walking and talking.’ This may also be clear in Thomas’s use of repetition. In ‘Old Man’, for example, certain words are repeated, perhaps to suggest an intensifying rumination. Thomas writes:

the names

Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is:

At least, what that is clings not to the names

In spite of time. And yet I like the names.

The repetition of the word ‘names’ seems unnecessary here, possibly suggesting that Thomas is coming to terms with his own mind and organizing his thoughts. Perhaps, too, as J.P. Ward argues, these repeats imply the limitations of thought and of the human mind. Thomas also asks various questions in his verse, demonstrating the uncertainty of his contemplations. For example, in ‘The Unknown Bird’ Thomas asks ‘Was it but four years / Ago? or five?’ He goes on to say: ‘But I cannot tell / If truly never anything but fair / The days were when he sang, as now they seem.’ This questioning and sense of ambiguity clearly influenced Philip Larkin who, in his poem ‘Dockery and Son’, asks questions like ‘… did he get his son / At nineteen, twenty?’ In Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’ a similar uncertainty manifests itself in the poem’s final words ‘I don’t know.’ Wells is right, then, when he suggests that Thomas has a ‘scrupulous inability… to conceal uncertainty.’ (65) It runs throughout his poetry, demonstrating how his verse stems ‘from contemplation rather than from sheer energy of insight.’ (De La Mare) So what effect does this colloquial and contemplative style have on our reading of Thomas’s verse? Well, to some extent it brings the poet down to our level – he is not preaching to us in aloof terms or handing us fully-formed theories on life or the mind. He draws us in with his lack of posturing. As Motion argues, through his ‘sympathetic quiet-speaking’ and his emphasis on uncertainty, he creates ‘poems which appear to think aloud rather than be a means of delivering finished thoughts’. We feel directly the personality of the poet – his questionings, his anxieties, the very movement of his thoughts.

But this relaxed and ‘quiet-speaking’ style does not necessarily mean that Thomas’s verse is somehow ‘unpoetic’. True, his poetry is very different from that of Tennyson, for example, but it is still beautifully lyrical and musical. As Newlyn argues, ‘Thomas had a natural, un-taught musicality, which came from his love of ballads, folk songs, and English poetry.’ In fact, he was so infatuated by folk tradition and ballads that, in 1907, he compiled The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air, a collection of ballads, folk-songs, and contemporary poetry. This infatuation clearly fed into his verse: ‘Will You Come?’, for example, is ballad-like in its repetitions and quick rhythms, and his poems are full of harmonious lines, like the ending of ‘November’ (‘Renounce all brightness to the skies’) with its perfect metre and echoing assonance and sibilance. Given the influence of song on Thomas’s poetry, it’s no wonder that 19 of his poems were set to music by Gloucestershire composer Ivor Gurney (his rendition of ‘Snow’ is particularly poignant). A quick look at Thomas’s prose supports this view of his melodic writing style. In The Woodland Life (1897), Thomas describes how the ‘robins rustle gently and fly a yard or two, or a blackbird blusters out’. The alliteration, along with the trochaic rhythm of ‘robins rustle gently’, is prophetic of Thomas’s conversion into a poet.

The ending of ‘Adlestrop’ is similarly rhythmic. As John Bayley explains, the third and fourth stanzas abandon ‘the short choppy sentence structure of the first two’ developing into more flowing, effortless lines of iambic tetrameter. This fluidity is most obvious in the line ‘No whit less still and lonely fair’, which with its repeated ‘l’ and ‘o’ sounds seems to roll off the tongue with ease. In the final stanza, Thomas describes how ‘for that minute a blackbird sang / Close by,’ and then the poem cinematically zooms out to take in ‘all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.’ This echoing final line, referring to specific places Thomas knew well, carries with it a subtle sense of nostalgia. The whole stanza does, in fact, particularly with the phrase ‘for that minute’, immediately suggesting the transiency of human experience. Perhaps, too, the words ‘mistier’ and ‘farther’ suggest not only a physical distance but also a temporal distance. This uneventful train journey took place about a month before the First World War began, but Thomas only started writing poetry about five months later, once the war had begun, so possibly this sense of nostalgia is one of anxiety that ‘This England’ may be destroyed by the war. After all, when he was asked why he had become a soldier, he is said to have picked up a handful of English soil and said ‘Literally, for this’. Just as Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ expresses a fear that there may not be ‘Beauty yet to find’ and there may not be ‘honey still for tea’ in the village of his childhood, so ‘Adlestrop’ captures a single moment of quietness and of calm before the ‘Guns of August’ wrought havoc across Europe. Like Larkin, Thomas worried that there would be ‘Never such innocence again’. As Andrew Motion argues, ‘Behind every line [of Thomas’s poetry], whether mentioned or not, lies imminent danger and disruption.’

Though Thomas did employ the occasional Georgian inversion in his poetry (‘Women he liked, did shovel-bearded Bob…’ or ‘Fast beat / My heart’), it would be hard to argue that he was not innovative for his time. As David Gervais put it, he should be read as a modern poet rather than as a revisionist Georgian. His style is perhaps the most distinctly modern aspect of his work – his reconciling of the speaking voice with traditional forms, whilst also allowing for bursts of lyrical vitality. But it’s also important to note his modern sensibility – throughout his poetry, Thomas emphasizes his sense of solitude and loneliness, so much so that J.P. Ward has referred to him as an early existentialist. In fact, various comparisons could be drawn between Thomas the poet and J. Alfred Prufrock, the bundle of inhibitions in Eliot’s eponymous poem. Likewise, the words ‘I should be glad of another death’ (Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’) could really have come from either poet’s pen, which goes to show how modern Thomas really was, in content as well as style. But it’s not as if Thomas was trying to break down barriers, to ‘Make it new’. His close friend and fellow poet Walter De La Mare summarized Thomas’s poetry best when he said: ‘His chief desire was to express himself and his own truth – and therefore life and humanity…’ Thomas, with his thorough knowledge of contemporary poetry and poetic criticism, with his history of depression and anxieties about his turbulent marriage, and most importantly, with his love of nature and his fear of its war-time destruction, was bound to write great poetry. Perhaps if he had not died in Arras, and if he had kept writing years after, we would now see Thomas as the greatest of all the twentieth century poets.