On “Burnt Norton”

By Helen Gardner, Morris Weitz, F. O. Matthiessen, Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, Donald J. Childs and A. David Moody.

The more familiar we become with Four Quartets, however, the more we realize that the analogy with music goes much deeper than a comparison of the sections with the movements of a quartet, or than an identification of the four elements as ‘thematic material’. One is constantly reminded of music by the treatment of images, which recur with constant modifications, from their context, or from their combination with other recurring images, as a phrase recurs with modifications in music. These recurring images, like the basic symbols, are common, obvious and familiar, when we first meet them. As they recur they alter, as a phrase does when we hear it on a different instrument, or in another key, or when it is blended and combined with another phrase, or in some way turned round, or inverted. A simple example is the phrase ‘a shaft of sunlight’ at the close of ‘Burnt Norton’. This image occurs in a rudimentary form in ‘The Hollow Men’, along with a moving tree and voices heard in the wind:
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There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind’s singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star.
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At the close of ‘Burnt Norton’ a ‘moment of happiness’, defined in ‘The Dry Salvages’ as a ‘sudden illumination’ is made concrete by the image of a shaft of sunlight which transfigures the world:
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Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always —

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.
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Read the complete article
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Anyone interested in Thomas Howard’s Dove Descending: A Journey Into T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets may also enjoy viewing his enlightening lecture available on YouTube here: A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”
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Another early reminder that we’ll be reading and discussing T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in our February and March sessions. See the SCHEDULE PAGE for details.  Please bring your own favourite excerpts, interpretations and comments for discussion about these challenging poems.

The Banished Gods

By Derek Mahon

Near the headwaters of the longest river

There is a forest clearing,

A dank, misty place

Where light stands in columns

And birds sing with a noise like paper tearing.

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Far from land, far from the trade routes,

In an unbroken dreamtime

Of penguin and whale,

The seas sigh to themselves

Reliving the days before the days of sail.

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Where wires end the moor seethes in silence,

Scattered with scree, primroses,

Feathers and faeces.

It shelters the hawk and hears

In dreams the forlorn cries of lost species.

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It is here that the banished gods are in hiding,

Here they sit out the centuries

In stone, water

And the hearts of trees,

Lost in a reverie of their own natures —

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Of zero-growth economics and seasonal change

In a world without cars, computers

Or chemical skies,

Where thought is a fondling of stones

And wisdom a five-minute silence at moonrise.

Eliot’s and Beethoven’s Voices Yoked

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

In 1931, while listening to a gramophone recording of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor (Op. 132), T. S. Eliot wrote a letter to his friend Stephen Spender, the English poet and novelist. Eliot found the Beethoven piece “quite inexhaustible to study,” he wrote.
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“There is a sort of heavenly, or at least more than human, gaiety about some of his later things,” Eliot continued, “which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruits of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.”
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Eliot did so in “Four Quartets,” his series of four lengthy, connected poems written over six years and first published together in New York in 1943. Among Eliot scholars, it seems, there is debate about how, precisely, this effort was inspired by the Quartet in A minor, one of Beethoven’s astonishing late works.
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Read the complete article
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Listen to the Borodin Quartet play Beethoven’s string quartet, Opus 132 in A minor – the music that inspired T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
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An early reminder that we’ll be reading and discussing T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in our February and March sessions. See the SCHEDULE PAGE for details.  Please bring your own favourite excerpts, interpretations and comments for discussion about these challenging poems.

The Silent Harp

by Rabindranath Tagore

 

Our Bias

by W.H. Auden

The hour-glass whispers to the lion’s paw,
The clock-towers tell the gardens day and night,
How many errors Time has patience for,
How wrong they are in being always right.
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Yet Time, however loud its chimes or deep,
However fast its falling torrent flows,
Has never put the lion off his leap
Nor shaken the assurance of the rose.
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For they, it seems, care only for success:
While we choose words according to their sound
And judge a problem by its awkwardness;
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And Time with us was always popular.
When have we not preferred some going round
To going straight to where we are?
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Cf. Auden’s “Our Bias” with T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, the pervasive theme of which is “Time.”

T. S. ELIOT’S BURNT NORTON (No. 1 of ‘Four Quartets’)

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

Read the complete poem
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An early reminder that we’ll be reading and discussing T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in our February and March sessions. See the SCHEDULE PAGE for details.  Please bring your own favourite excerpts, interpretations and comments for discussion about these challenging poems. Two suggestions for study: G. Douglas Atkins’ Reading T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets and the Journey Toward Understanding (admittedly, a rambling, tedious read) and Thomas Howard’s Dove Descending: A Journey Into T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (a very readable and enlightening book). Both books are difficult to find in print, but both are available as Kindle downloads.
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There are several excellent audio versions of the Four Quartets, but by far the best, in my opinion, is by Alec Guinness, which is available on YouTube here: Alec Guinness reads Four Quartets by TS Eliot.

W. S. Merwin – his life and what lives in his poetry

Many thanks to Susan Koppersmith for making us aware of this poignant YouTube video about W. S. Merwin; an appropriate hors d’oeuvre for our upcoming Merwin feast this Thursday. Watch it here: W. S. Merwin – his life and what lives in his poetry.
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One more reminder to check the SCHEDULE PAGE for the list of Merwin poems to be read and discussed.

The Nomad Flute

by W.S. Merwin

You that sang to me once sing to me now

let me hear your long lifted note

survive with me

the star is fading

I can think farther than that but I forget

do you hear me
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do you still hear me

does your air

remember you

oh breath of morning

night song morning song

I have with me

all that I do not know

I have lost none of it
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but I know better now

than to ask you

where you learned that music

where any of it came from

once there were lions in China
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I will listen until the flute stops

and the light is old again.
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A final reminder that Bill Ellis and Graeme Hughes will be reading and discussing a selection of poems from W. S. Merwin’s book, The Shadow of Sirius, on January 26, 2017. “The Nomad Flute” will be one of the featured poems.
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See the SCHEDULE PAGE for the complete list.

The Greatest Love

by Anna Swir

Anna Swir

She is sixty. She lives

the greatest love of her life.
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She walks arm-in-arm with her dear one,   

her hair streams in the wind.

Her dear one says:

“You have hair like pearls.”
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Her children say:   

“Old fool.”
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Reprinted from Talking to My Body (1996) by Anna Swir, translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan.

Healing

by D.H. Lawrence

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.

And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly that I am ill.

I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self

and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help

and patience, and a certain difficult repentance

long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and freeing oneself

from the endless repetition of this mistake

which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.