The first section considers two contrasting but related ideas which establish the theme of the poem: in this case, the relation between the present moment and the past or future. The third section then explores — with a twist — the ideas presented in the first two movements. This section explores an alternate reality, focusing on things which might have been but never were the passage not taken, the door never opened — it may be that Eliot was drawing on his relationship-that-never-was with Emily Hale who would later express a desire to marry Eliot, though Eliot declined.
But then the very bird that had lured Eliot into the garden commands him to leave, as humans cannot bear much reality. The second section contains those two different approaches to a linked theme. This prefigures the unity with which Four Quartets as a whole will end, with the fire and the rose being joined as one.
Indeed, travelling in the elevator offered a different kind of Erhebung , we might say. It is also a modern-day version of the Dark Night of the Soul, descending into the darkness.
How can poetry address these paradoxes and problems of time, lived experience, and spiritual meaning? A number of opposites — movement and stillness, being and not-being — are here presented. Eliot , cannot be adequately paraphrased. Nor can one arrive at a neat, simplistic analysis of its themes and paradoxes. It is best viewed, perhaps, as a meditation on time and religious devotion, on the difference between materialist experience of the world and a deeper, spiritual existence.
But even this raises further questions — questions which we are probably not meant to be able to answer. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. Pingback: A Short Analysis of T. His meditations on time and being are stated fairly explicitly and can be easily traced in the poem. The first of these surrounds the garden in which the first section is set.
Yet the garden is also a part of the ruined estate from which this quartet takes its name; it bears the marks of human presence and abandonment—empty pools and formal hedges gone wild. This famous line juxtaposes a series of random things, but the effect is not the atmosphere of belatedness and melancholy characteristic of The Waste Land.
Again fragments and ruins stand in defiance of human aspirations, only this poem does not lament that things once made sense and have now ceased to do so; rather, it declares that coherence never existed at all—that meaning and human experience are necessarily mutually exclusive. The second center of interest in this quartet is constructed around the Chinese vase and the ruminations on poetry in the fifth section. The Chinese jar represents the capacity of art to transcend the limitations of the moment, to achieve a kind of victory over, or perspective upon, time.
In its form and pattern, in its physical existence, the jar is able to overcome the usual imprecision of human expression. By emphasizing form and pattern, Eliot suggests that poetry, which takes advantage of the linguistic versions of these, may also be able to achieve transcendence. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook.
Themes Motifs Symbols. Further Reading Suggested Essay Topics. Form Eliot is much less experimental with rhyme and meter here than he is in his earlier works. Commentary The Four Quartets were written over a period of eight years, from to Take a Study Break.
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