Eliot's Four Quartets

Thomas Stearns Eliot · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 25 pages

Twenty-five pages carrying all four of Eliot's Four Quartets complete and in order — *Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding* — each running to five numbered sections. The two Heraclitus fragments Eliot set as epigraphs are printed in Greek with translations footnoted: that although the Law of Reason is common, most people live as though they had an understanding of their own, and that the way up and the way down are one and the same.

A subtitle on the title page states the reading under which the poems are gathered here — the immortal soul in her cyclic pilgrimage down into the abyss of materiality before rising again, onward and upward, to the summit from which she came. The poems themselves turn on time and on what stands outside it. Burnt Norton opens with the proposition that time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, that all time is unredeemable if it is eternally present, and that what might have been is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation — followed by the footfalls echoing down the passage not taken, towards the door never opened into the rose-garden. The later quartets take the same question into place and history rather than memory. Little Gidding closes the set on the passages most often quoted from it: that every phrase and sentence is an end and a beginning and every poem an epitaph; that we die with the dying and are born with the dead; that a people without history is not redeemed from time, because history is a pattern of timeless moments. The last lines say that we shall not cease from exploration, and that the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time — ending on a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything, and on the fire and the rose being one.

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