In “East Coker” and “Little Gidding” the hymns are accessible, beautiful, and devotionally profound for the Lent and Easter seasons, which is reason enough to give them our attention.

Part IV of each quartet has for some time now commonly been designated a hymn. More than that, I think Christians-Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Greek Orthodox-for whom the liturgical calendar is important to understanding the year will appreciate the Part IV of these two wonderful poems that form part of the larger work. I will not attempt to explain all I found once I did, but I think there are passages in the poem-especially from “East Coker” and “Little Gidding,” the second and fourth quartets-that any Christian reader will understand without recourse to critical apparatus. It was years before I came to the quartets with an earnest desire to understand them. “Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” and “The Waste Land” were more than enough to keep me busy then. Strangely, I don’t remember that “Four Quartets” affected me at all. Was the impression a true one, or was I simply determined to dabble in something I thought avant-garde? I cannot give an honest answer after all these years, but I remember the experience of that first reading, and here memory does not lie: I was hooked. Maybe it was because I felt (even in 1975, a full ten years after his death and fifty-three years after the publication of “The Waste Land”) that I was entering a foreign land, one filled with sights, which, although I didn’t really know their history or fully appreciate their nature, fascinated me at landfall. By and large, only those who persevere, reading and re-reading, will, as we say, get his meaning, and it was, truthfully, many years before I gave myself to the necessary discipline.īut admitting that, I must say that Eliot fascinated me from the start. Like many modern poets, many for whom Eliot was the model, his images can be obscure and his train of thought perplexing. I went to my room, changed into the new trousers and then sat down in a chair beside my bookshelves and started reading Eliot.Īs almost anyone who has wrestled with the work of this great poet will affirm, Eliot’s poetry is not the easiest reading. One was a pair of gray corduroy trousers the other was a book, T. On the day that I turned twenty-four, I received two presents, which, as is often the case with both young and old, I had dropped a few hints that I wanted.

Ts eliot 4 quartets