Eliot’s Edifice
Dove Descending: A Journey into T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets
by Thomas Howard
Sapientia Classics, Ignatius Press, 2006
(148 pages, $14.95, paperback)
reviewed by Franklin Freeman
Calling T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets his “valedictory to the modern world,” Thomas Howard writes in the preface to his new book that “I myself would place it, along with Chartres Cathedral, the Divine Comedy, van Eyck’s ‘Adoration of the Mystic Lamb’, and the Mozart Requiem, as a major edifice in the history of the Christian West.”
Taxing Eliot
Dove Descending is not traditional scholarly literary criticism, but a “reading” of the poem, an attempt to explain it to those who might “run aground” without such help. We might run aground on Eliot’s poems (his criticism and drama are comparatively clear sailing) because Eliot “maintained that modern poetry had to be ‘difficult’ since traditional poetic language has, alas, slipped almost wholly into cliché” and that it is the poet’s duty to “‘purify the dialect of the tribe.’”
In other words, the poet cannot reach the modern world using worn-out poetical words or sentiments; he must use modern words in strange and startling ways. “Eliot will have no commerce,” Howard writes, “with sentimentalism. His poetry is ‘dry’. Modern poetry must be thus . . . since the poetry of sentiment does nothing but cater to self-indulgence, and Eliot has something more taxing in mind.”
Howard, who taught English in both colleges and seminaries, is eminently qualified to explain what this more taxing thing is. Four Quartets is a meditative poem divided into four parts, each consisting of five movements. (A musical quartet, Howard notes, “is a piece scored for four instruments, not necessarily a quartet in four movements.”)
The poet’s “instruments” in this poem are probably meant to be Air, Earth, Water, and Fire, “the Four Elements that were assumed to be the major constituents of the material universe before the advent of modern science.” Howard warns against “too rigorous” an identification of one element with each quartet, but the imagery of one does predominate in each.
He does not expressly say why Eliot chose these four elements, but the following quote, I think, suggests an answer: “Eliot, being a Christian and a sacramentalist, believes that the physical is the very mode under which we make our way along to our destiny ( telos) and that the effort to shuffle off the physical, or to deplore it, is both misbegotten and disastrous.” Eliot’s instruments are the rudimentary elements of that physical mode.
Purified Idiom
In each quartet, the predominating element “points to” (Eliot’s words) the nature of time. “If we can venture, at mortal risk, to attempt a theme for it all,” Howard argues, “we might say that it all has something to do with the odd business of being mortal, that is, intelligent creatures existing here and in time, when all the while we are profoundly dissatisfied with this dismal sequence of past, present, and future.”
Franklin Freeman is a freelance writer living in Saco, Maine, with his wife and four children.
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