On Reading T.S. Eliot

I caught a fragment of T.S. Eliot poetry, printed in the order of service of the recent public obsequies, and moved by it, crossed the road to the bookshop opposite my office (I have been allocated an office from which I can actually see the university bookshop, the equivalent to giving an alcoholic a room above a pub). It still has a good poetry collection and, stepping over a student sprawled on the floor reading the stock, I found what I wanted and headed to the cash desk where I traded in some of my, too ample, supply of loyalty points.

The fragment was from 'Four Quartets' and I bought the elegantly printed Faber & Faber edition. The poem was, I confess, new to me. I was very familiar with 'The Waste Land', which I have read and reread many times over the years. Most recently, I bought the app that provides texts, commentary and readings, as well as a tour-de-force performance by Fiona Shaw.

The Quartets: Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding, are startling in the depths of the ideas expressed. I grasp themes that relate to mortality and an elegaic evocation of England, I half grasp a cyclical motif, but know I am missing more. The striking imagery adds beauty  ("the still point of the turning world", "the trilling wire in the blood", "ash on an old man's sleeve", amongst the most well known) but so does the shifting play of different rhythms. Eliot muses on time but reflects those musings in the shape of the poem itself. It is rare for text to be able to evoke emotion as immediately as music is capable of doing, to reach out and grasp you. Somehow Eliot succeeds in this with a precision and sharpness, an exactitude, that is beyond the reach of music.

Strangely, the nearer you are to the poem, the more elusive the ways by which the effect is achieved becomes. The ingredients are discernible but the means by which they are combined to give shape to the whole seem to recede. This is, I guess, the essence of artistic genius, perhaps scientific genius too. The closer you get, the more breathtaking the achievement, the greater the unscalable heights.