Excerpts from “The Four Quartets”
Excerpts from “The Four Quartets”
by T.S. Elliot
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope 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
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.
•
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always-
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
•
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
•
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.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
•
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
T.S. Eliot composed the Quartets across the war years — East Coker during the fall of France, Little Gidding during the Blitz — and the work is shaped by the question of how to live as a contemplative in a time when the world is burning. As someone drawn to the Zen tradition in a time of war, climate crisis, rapid technological change, all driving massive societal changes, I find his work so beautifully relevant. As someone who is generally quite poor at waiting, I will sometimes roll around, “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope for hope” in my mind.
He drew on the Dark Night of John of the Cross, on Julian of Norwich's all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well (one of the great consolations in English mysticism, written by a fourteenth-century anchoress in the wake of the Black Death), on the Bhagavad Gita, on Heraclitus. (I also want to note that T.S. Eliot is super complicated — while I’ve loved his poetry, he was also known for antisemitic writing and politics, and it feels important to me to note that.)
Some notes on how to locate each of these within T.S. Eliot’s wider work:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope — East Coker III. The famous via negativa passage, drawing directly on St. John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul. In order to arrive at what you do not know / You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
We shall not cease from exploration — Little Gidding V. The closing movement of the entire Quartets. And all shall be well is Julian of Norwich (fourteenth-century English mystic). The fire and the rose are one is the work's final line — fire of purgation, rose of love, made one in the consummation of the contemplative arc.
Go, go, go, said the bird — Burnt Norton I. The bird in the rose garden, refusing the speaker's wish to dwell in what-might-have-been.
At the still point of the turning world — Burnt Norton II. One of the most famous passages in twentieth-century poetry, articulating the contemplative paradox that the still point is what makes the dance possible.
The inner freedom from the practical desire — Burnt Norton II, continuing from the still point passage. The release into the moment of grace.
