Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2

T. S. Eliot: “Four Quartets"

IN these latest poems of his, Eliot has become outright a poet of the Dark Night of the Soul. The beginnings of the new avatar were already there certainly at the very beginning. The Waste Land is a good preparation and passage into the Night. Only, the negative element in it was stronger – the cynicism, the bleakness, the sereness of it all was almost overwhelming. The next stage was "The Hollow Men": it took us right up to the threshold, into the very entrance. It was gloomy and fore-boding enough, grim and serious – no glint or hint of the silver lining yet within reach. Now as we find ourselves into the very heart of the Night, things appear somewhat changed: we look at the past indeed, but can often turn to the future, feel the pressure of the Night yet sense the Light beyond overarching and embracing us. This is how the poet begins:

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God.¹

and continues

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

but what he adds is characteristic of the new outlook

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

¹ "East Coker"

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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.

Yes, by the force of this secret knowledge he has discovered, this supreme skill i:r:t action, as it is termed in the Eastern lore, I that the poet at last comes out into the open, into the light and happiness of the Dawn and the Day:

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.

The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,

The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy

Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony

Of death and birth.

It is the song of redemption, of salvation achieved, of Paradise regained. The full story of the purgatory, of man's calvary is beautifully hymned in these exquisite lines of a haunting poetic beauty married to a real mystic sense:

The dove descending breaks the air

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.¹

The Divine Love is a greater fire than the low smouldering fire that our secular unregenerate life is. One has to choose and declare his adhesion. Indeed, the stage of conversion, the crucial turn from the ordinary life to the spiritual life Eliot has characterised in a very striking manner. We usually say, sometimes in an outburst of grief, sometimes in a spirit of sudden disgust and renunciation that the world is dark and dismal and lonesome, the only thing to do here is to be done

¹"Little Gidding"

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with it. The true renunciation, that which is deep and abiding, is not, however, so simple a thing, such a short cut. So our poet says, but the world is not dark enough, it is not lonesome enough: the world lives and moves in a superficial half-light, it is neither real death nor real life, it is death in life. It is this miserable mediocrity, the shallow uncertainty of consciousness that spells danger and ruin for the soul. Hence the poet exclaims:

. . . .Not here

Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only

Into the world of perpetual solitude,. . . .

Internal darkness, deprivation

And destitution of all property,

Desiccation of the world of sense,

Evacuation of the world of fancy,

Inoperancy of the world of spirit;¹

Yes, that is the condition demanded, an entire vacuity in which nothing moves. That is the real Dark Night of the Soul. It is then only that the Grace leans down and descends, then only beams in the sweet Light of lights. Eliot has expressed the experience in these lines of rare beauty and sincerity :

Time and the bell have buried the day,

The black cloud carries the sun away.

Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis

Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray Clutch and cling?

Chill

Fingers of yew be curled

Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing

Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still

At the still point of the turning world.²

¹ "Burnt Norton"

² Ibid.

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Eliot's is a very Christian soul, but we must remember at the same time that he is nothing if not modern. And this modernism gives all the warp and woof woven upon that inner core. How is it characterised? First of all, an intellectualism that requires a reasoned and rational synthesis of all experiences. Another poet, a great poet of the soul's Dark Night was, as we all know, Francis Thompson: it was in his case not merely the soul's night, darkness extended even to life, he lived the Dark Night actually and physically. His haunting, weird lines, seize within their grip our brain and mind and very flesh –

My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,¹

or,

Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour

The night's slow-wheel'd car.. . .

But Thompson was not an intellectual, his doubts and despondencies were not of the mental order, he was a boiling, swelling life-surge, a geyser, a volcano. He, too, crossed the Night and saw the light of Day, but in a different way. Well, I he did not march into the day, it was the Day that marched I into him! Yes, the Divine Grace came and seized him from behind with violence. A modern, a modernist consciousness cannot expect that indulgence. God meets him only halfway, he has to work up himself the other half. He has laid so many demands and conditions: the knots in his case are not cut asunder but slowly disengaged.

The modern temper is especially partial to harmony: it cannot assert and reject unilaterally and categorically, it wishes to go round an object and view all its sides; it asks for a synthesis and reconciliation of differences and contraries. Two major chords of life-experience that demand accord are Life and Death, Time and Eternity. Indeed, the problem of Time hangs heavy on the human consciousness. It has touched to the quick philosophers and sages in all ages and climes; it is the great question that confronts the spiritual seeker, the riddle that the Sphinx of life puts to the journeying soul for solution.

¹"The Hound of Heaven"

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A modern Neo-Brahmin, Aldous Huxley, has given a solution of the problem in his now famous Shakespearean apothegm, "Time must have a stop". That is an old-world solution rediscovered by the modern mind in and through the ravages of Time's storm and stress. It means, salvation lies, after all, beyond the flow of Time, one must free oneself from the vicious and unending circle of mortal and mundane life. As the Rajayogi controls and holds his breath, stills all life-movement and realises a dead-stop of consciousness (Samadhi), even so one must control and stop all secular movements in oneself and attain a timeless stillness and vacancy in which alone the true spiritual light and life can descend and manifest. That is the age-long and ancient solution to which the Neo-Brahmin as well the Neo-Christian adheres.

Eliot seems to demur, however, and does not go to that extreme length. He wishes to go beyond, but to find out the source and matrix of the here below. As I said, he seeks a synthesis and not a mere transcendence: the transcendence is indeed a part of the synthesis, the other part is furnished by an immanence. He does not cut away altogether from Time, but reaches its outermost limit, its rim, its summit, where it stops, not altogether annihilated, but held in suspended animation. That is the "still point" to which he refers in the following lines:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

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.¹

He aims at the neutral point between the positive and the

¹ "Burnt Norton"

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negative poles, which is neither, yet holding the two together – at the crossing of Yes and No, the known and the unknown, the local and the eternal. That is what he means when he says:

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere. Never and always.¹

First, the movement towards transcendence, that is the journey in the Night which you do throwing away one by one all your possessions and burdens till you make yourself bare and naked, you die – but you are reborn a new babe:

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. ²

There must be a beginning, an affirmation. The other side of nature is not merely transcended and excluded, it must be taken up too, given some place, its proper place in the totality, in the higher synthesis:

So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna

On the field of battle.

Not fare wel1,

But fare forward, voyagers.³

That is the lesson that our poet has learnt from the Gita and that is the motto he too would prescribe to the seekers.

Now, a modern poet is modern, because he is doubly attracted and attached to things of this world and this mundane life, in spite of all his need and urge to go beyond for the larger truth and the higher reality. Apart from the natural link with which we are born, there is this other fascination

¹ "Little Gidding"

² "East Coker"

³ "The Dry Salvages"

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which the poor miserable things, all the little superficialities, trivialities especially have for the modern mind in view of their possible sense and significance and right of existence. These too have a magic of their own, not merely a black magic:

..... our losses, the torn seine,

The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar

And the gear of foreign dead men. . . .¹

or even these local names and habitations:

Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,

Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate.² ...

It is true the movement towards transcendence is stronger and apparent in our poet, but the other kindred point-of home and time-is not forgotten. So he says:

History may be servitude,

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. ³

Nothing can be clearer with regard to the ultimate end the poet has in view. Listen once more to the hymn of the higher reconciliation:

The dance along the artery

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

Ascend to summer in the tree

We move above the moving tree

¹ "The Dry Salvages"

²"Burnt Norton"

³ "Little Gidding"

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In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars.¹

The Word was made flesh and the Word was made Poetry. To express the supreme Word in life, that is the work of the sage, the Rishi. To express the Word in speech, that is the labour of the Poet. Eliot undertook this double function of the poet and the sage and he found the task difficult. The poet has to utter the unutterable, if he is to clothe in words the mystic experience of the sage in him. That is Eliot's ambition:

.... Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness. ²

But, alas!

.... Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,...³

And a lower and more facile inspiration tempts the poet and he often speaks with a raucous voice, even as the Arch-tempter sought to lure the Divine Word Jl1ade flesh:

... Shrieking voices

Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,

Always assail them. The Word in the desert

Is most attacked by voices of temptation,4

Our poet is too self-conscious, he himself feels that he has not the perfect voice. A Homer, even a Milton possesses a

unity of tone and a wholeness of perception which are denied

¹ "Burnt Norton"

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

4 Ibid.

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to the modern. To the modern, however, the old masters are not subtle enough, broad enough, psychological enough, let us say the word, spiritual enough. And yet the poetic inspiration, more than the religious urge, needs the injunction not to be busy with too many things, but to be centred upon the one thing needful, viz., to create poetically and not to discourse philosophically or preach prophetically. Not that it is impossible for the poet to swallow the philosopher and the prophet, metabolising them into the substance of his bone and marrow, of "the trilling wire in his blood", as Eliot graphically expresses. That perhaps is the consummation towards which poetry is tending. But at present, in Eliot, at least, the strands remain distinct, each with its own temper and rhythm, not fused and moulded into a single streamlined form of beauty. Our poet flies high, very high indeed at times, often or oftner he flies low, not disdaining the perilous limit of bathos. Perhaps it is all wilful, it is a mannerism which he cherishes. The mannerism may explain his psychology and enshrine his philosophy. But the poet, the magician is to be looked for elsewhere. In the present collection of poems it is the philosophical, exegetical, discursive Eliot who dominates: although the high lights of the subject-matter may be its justification. Still even if we have here doldrums. like

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.¹

we have also high flights like the lines I have already quoted:

Time and the bell have buried the day,

The black cloud carries the sun away.. . .

which make one wish to have more of the kind. Perhaps his previous works contained lines more memorable, for example, those justly famous

¹ "The Dry Salvages"

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Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death's dream kingdom

These do not appear:

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column. . . .¹

Here the poet is almost grimly tense, concentrated and has not allowed himself to be dissipated by thinkings and arguments, has confined himself wholly to a living experience. That is because the poet has since then moved up and sought a more rarefied air, a more even and smooth temper. The utter and absolute poetic ring of the Inferno is difficult to maintain in the Paradiso, unless and until the poet transforms himself wholly into the Rishi, like the poet of the Gita or the Upanishads.

¹“The Hollow Men”

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