Theology Today - Vol 44, No.4 - January 1988 - ARTICLE

462 - Words and the Word

Words and the Word

"If prayer marks the limit of words in search of the Word, then it also marks the beginning of speech's real life.... Through the rightness of a sentence, the worlds of echo and memory and experience enter into relationship. Through the rightness of a poem, all that the poem has set ringing comes into relationship, into meaning, maybe for the first time."

There are experiences which come upon us in which we perceive, if only for a moment, great and sovereign meaning. There are moments, surely quite rare, in which we perceive purpose, relationship, suffering, reason, order, beauty, pain, love, life, death-the immense and impossible contradictions of our experience-reconciled. There are moments in a life, we might say, which open onto eternity; there are words in a life, which open onto the Word. What is a moment that it could hold such a thing? What are words that through them the Word could happen?

The question could be posed as a theologian's question, and we might speak of revelation and means of grace. The question could be posed as a mystic's, and we might speak of prayer and vision. The question could be posed as one of religious experience itself, and we might speak of a phenomenology or psychology of religion. But it may also be asked as a poet's question: a question of experience and feeling and meaning to be explored through the fullest art of language we can manage, drawing upon the deepest resources of expression we can find. That is what T. S. Eliot did in his great cycle of poems, the Four Quartets.

The cycle, completed in 1943, is composed of four poems: "Burnt Norton," "East Coker," "The Dry Salvages" (rhymes with "assuages"), and "Little Gidding." The titles are names of places, places not so much important in themselves, but for the world of associations they inhabit. They are as much a landscape of imagination and language as a landscape of the world. There are connected with each, associations of' experience, memory, history, language, sometimes personal and private to the poet, sometimes public and available to anyone. "Burnt Norton" is a seventeenth century house and garden the poet knew, the setting for the fleeting experience with which it all begins. "East Coker" is Eliot's ancestral home in Somerset, from which the family emigrated to

W. Dow Edgerton is Assistant Professor of Ministry at Chicago Theological Seminary. His article on "The Binding of Isaac" appeared in the July 1987 issue of THEOLOGY TODAY as a part of a symposium on theology and biblical interpretation. An essay by Mr. Edgerton on the poetry of Rilke was published in our January 1987 issue.

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America some three hundred years before. "The Dry Salvages" are a group of rocks off Massachusetts' Cape Ann, known to Eliot in his sailing youth. "Little Gidding" is an Anglican shrine, a chapel ruined and rebuilt, which was home to a seventeenth century religious community and became a sort of pilgrim's goal. Each of these places, charged with their particular age and vocabulary and experience, opens in a special way onto a single landscape of meaning. It is this landscape of meaning which matters.

The style has often been termed "meditative." The voice speaks in the first person. It ponders and wonders and questions, flowing back and forth among places, times, ideas, experiences. Poem by poem the themes grow and change until they arrive finally at a kind of constellated wisdom. The wisdom, however, cannot be abstracted from the unfolding meditation and proposed as if it were an equation's solution. It is, rather, a wisdom the reader may experience through the world of the poems. It is a wisdom, one could say, which can only be expressed by the poems themselves, met only in the poems themselves, and to which one may return only by returning to the poems themselves.

Time and eternity, moment and history, river and sea, movement and stillness, words and the Word: these are the great themes of the poems, themes in the form of a tension or relationship. What do they have in common? Each in its own way approaches the question of meaning. Is there meaning that we may know? If there is, then how may we know it?

Each tension has its own pattern. The relationship of moment to history is both like and unlike the relationship of river to sea, words to Word. Each tension has its own vocabulary, which means that it speaks to the reader in a different way, speaks to a different part of the imagination. Each is necessary, for by their similarities and differences the special qualities of each are revealed. To explore one, therefore, teaches us about the others; from the others we may infer about the one. Together they make a pattern, all these figures which evoke a special aspect of the way between meaning and apprehension.

Here we shall undertake a small exploration of the Quartets through the theme of words and the Word. The poem approaches words and Word through many terms: echo, voice, music, speech, laughter, prayer, epitaph, meaning, and more. Our method here will be to explore the allusions to speech and its purpose, and to meaning and its apprehension, as each poem of the Four Quartets unfolds, asking after their special nuance and where that nuance means to point.

The poems share a common structure which is important for our purposes. Each poem is divided into five movements. These movements generally have a similar function within each poem, but they also relate to their companion movements in the other poems. Thus, for example, the first movement of each poem offers a statement and counterstatement presented in succession. The second movement brings forward a single subject presented in two different ways, one rhyming and

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metaphorical, the other rather direct and personal. The third movement begins a reconciliation of the themes found in the first two; the fourth is a lyrical "interlude." Finally, the fifth movement of each poem may be seen to gather together the themes of the poems, weave and resolve them, or at least set the point of departure for the next stage.¹ To this movement in particular, we shall give special attention, for it is there that the shape of the constellation emerges from the stars.

These reflections are no substitute for reading the poems themselves. They are intended, rather, as a companion to reading, and many references will only make sense if the text of the poem is close at hand.²

"Although the Word is common to all, most people live as if they had a private wisdom of their own." "The way upward and the way downward are one and the same."³ This is the epigraph with which "Burnt Norton," and now the Quartets, begin. Logos and words, truth and private wisdom, order and disorder, and the direction in which what we know points and leads: these are the presenting griefs which find us in the rose garden at Burnt Norton, meditating, let us say, on time and loss, on what never happened but might have, and what it all means.

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 and what has been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation....
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.

The language is abstract, philosophical; the argument, however, is not the point. This language is a place to start, a place for the music to begin, for harmony and contrast and counterpoint to begin. For when the music begins, much else begins as well.⁴ Echoes begin, memory begins, meanings and patterns begin to sound. Deep in the language, movement begins-and the patterns beneath our hearing are as much the poem as

¹Helen Gardiner, The Act of T. S. Eliot (London: The Cresset Press, 1949), pp. 37-42. For study of the poems' overall structure and pattern see also Derek Traversi, T. S. Eliot: The Longer Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).
²All citations of the poems are from "Burnt Norton," "East Coker," "The Dry Salvages," and "Little Gidding" in Four Quartets, copyright 1943 by T.S. Eliot; renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
³The epigraph is printed in Greek in Four Quartets. The translation is provided by George Williamson, A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot (New York: Noonday Press, 1966) p.209.
⁴For a discussion of Eliot's idea of music, see Gardiner, op. cit., p.54.

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the immediate words upon the page or the ear. That is, in part, Eliot's own depiction of the "music" of poetry. It is heard at the point of "intersection" of words spoken together with the language which remains unspoken, but echoing.⁵

What is this rose-garden and what happens there? A dry pool is for a moment filled:

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty....
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

Whatever the rose garden may be, and whatever happens there, it is a garden of echoes: echoes of steps never taken, echoes of words, echoes of unheard music, and the rustle of ghostly guests invisible except in reflection, which is the echo of light. Such echoes are at the heart of the poem's and poetry's purpose:

the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end.⁶

The echoes are as much an event as any other, at least as far as poetry is concerned. As they reverberate, they form an experience which is the real experience founding the poetry, or is the experience the poem seeks to communicate, one which "may only exist, formed out of many personal experiences ordered in some way which may be very different from the way of valuation of practical life."⁷

"Burnt Norton's" first movement leads into the rose garden. Perhaps we never leave: not for East Coker, not for Cape Ann, not for Little Gidding and its chapel. Whatever else they may be, they are echoes, too, all of which can sound within the garden, sound within a moment. They sound within a poet's personal imagination and language. They sound also, but differently, in ours. The ordering of echoes-that is the work of the poet and the reader. The poem lies somewhere between the two.⁸ The poem itself is the experience.

III

In three of the poems, the fifth movement begins with a direct consideration of the problem of words. "The Dry Salvages" does the

⁵T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, edited with an introduction by Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 113. Z
⁶ T. S. Eliot, cited in F.O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 81.
⁷T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, p. 80.

⁸See ibid.

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same, but in a less direct way. "Burnt Norton" poses the problem first in these terms:

Words move, music moves
Only in time: but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness ....

Words happen only in time, in a perishing sort of way; they are said and gone. One must make way for another, one after another. "Dark, dark, dark, they all go into the dark." This later line is as true of words as its own subject, and true in more than one way. They go into the dark in the sense of dying as soon as they are said. They reach into the dark, as well, however. Like a descent into hell, echoing the double descent, heaven to earth, earth to hell, of the soon to be invoked Word, words after speech press past the frontiers, "sinking into the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end," to recall Eliot's phrase.

Meaning lies (for "Burnt Norton," at least) across the border of words, where no word can by its own power go. "The poet is occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings still exist."⁹ Form, pattern: only through these can words reach into stillness and produce meaning instead of chaos. There is no lack of echoes, after all, in and for any of us. Words, however, may echo to any purpose or no purpose. Echo may establish connections or obscure them. Eliot believed that the difference between the poet and the ordinary person was that the poet constantly brought experience, widely differing experience, into pattern, relationship, form.¹⁰ For the ordinary person, experience is broken apart, hints and guesses at best, a code without a key. Poetry, and art in general, orders marks into characters, characters into words, words into meaning.¹¹ These perspectives may be heard as echoes themselves in the poems at hand.

"Only by their form, can words and music reach the stillness of the Chinese jar," Eliot would say.¹² By their form, words could be said to become real, to achieve what sculpture achieves. The final movement of "Little Gidding" returns us to this question, depicting a communion of words-not unlike the Body as St. Paul has it-which "Burnt Norton" here anticipates. By their form, let us say, words take on flesh; words incarnate. Incarnate they may share the life and death of the incarnate Word. We may speak, therefore, of the suffering of words, and even their Passion, for that is what "Burnt Norton" does.

The fifth movement sets us in the desert, where words hunger and thirst, crack, stumble and fall. Desert is chaos, unformed; disembodied

⁹Ibid., p. 111.
¹⁰See ibid., p. 64.
¹¹See ibid., p. 145.
¹²See "Burnt Norton," lines 140-42, in Four Quartets, p. 19.

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voices haunt the embodied. If we want to see what tests the words-become-form must meet, we have only to look to the Word-become-flesh tempted in the wilderness.

In the wilderness, what becomes of the Word? Luke depicts the tempter's approach and the ensuing struggle as a battle in words, even a battle about words. Jesus is alone, and to the tempter's thrusts can parry only with words which have achieved pattern, form enough to become real. He responds with words which are of a "scripture," which have a particular authority precisely to their order, their form. Even more than their particular content, their character as scripture matters. This provides the victory. The victory, however, is only for a time. In the logic of the Passion, victory through victory does not endure. The way upward and the way downward are one and the same. Only through death is death conquered.

"I believe Eliot is saying that the word of a poem may reach the Word," writes Walter Fowlie.¹³ He continues, however, that the poem is often the enemy of the Word, if the Word may be understood as the dream of poetry. By "dream of poetry," he means the aspiration of poetry to Word. The voices of temptation are poems which attack the dream of poetry, the dream to pass beyond poems to Word. But if only the poems will be true, then even in their attack and failure they reflect what they assault. The broken cup tells us about the rock. This is a sharp dialectic Fowlie presents. It shares features with a Logos christology in which the Word comes to its own, but its own receive it not. The Friend is betrayed by friends, Love slain by the beloved, God attacked by the image of God. Yet, the friends will be friends, indeed, the beloved will love, and the death mean life. All shall be well-but only in the end.

If there is a "doctrine" of words initiated in "Burnt Norton," a doctrine which identifies the commission of poetry and the call of the poet, Eliot's concern in a 1933 lecture may serve as a summary. He spoke of a naked poetry, essential and transparent. We see through such poetry as through a lens, so that "we are intent on what the poem points at, and not on the poetry, this seems to me the thing to try for. To get beyond poetry as Beethoven strove to get beyond music."¹⁴

As Balachandra Rajan has it, the task for the poet is to move from the private wisdom of the opening lament "to the final understanding and the shaping stillness." The path into the stillness is, nonetheless, a path of words: "not by relinquishing language, by abandoning words in order to pass beyond words, but by using language with maximum intentness, to discover the presences by which words are irradiated."¹⁵

The dream of poetry to become transparent to the Word--in "Burnt Norton" that is a painful dream, but it is still the dream. In "East

¹³Wallace Fowlie, "Time in Sever Hall and in the Quartets," Southern Review 21 (October, 1985) 4, p. 963.
¹⁴Quoted in Matthiessen, op. cit., p. 90.
¹⁵Balachandra Rajan, The Overwhelming Question (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 97.

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Coker" we shall see what becomes of this dream of a word-become-form and what it can accomplish.

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field ....

In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire ....

We are at East Coker now, Eliot's ancestral village. Although the years have destroyed and built and buried, there may still come a moment when you can bear, faintly at least, the echoes of what once lived there.

If we keep our distance, there is a fragile music to be heard in an open field. There are echoes of another age, echoes in the pipe and drum, in an ancestral dialect (figuratively and literally), echoes of rhythmic feet and rhythmic lives and rhythmic cycles. Here an ancestor's words (a Sir Thomas Elyot, author of a work titled The Governour) actually do echo in one's mind, words themselves. One of "Burnt Norton's" invisible guests speaks through the writer, but to what purpose? There is pattern to this ancient life, music, form, rhythm. Do they reach into the stillness, or only into the grave?

It would seem that there is more to reaching into the stillness than the achieving of form. At the least, if this patterning of a real or imagined lost age was sufficient for its own time, it is not sufficient for ours-for reasons the second movement will indicate. Form cannot be learned from eternal constellations, human or celestial. It is not repetition that achieves the necessary pattern. What is it, then? Now we can only say what it is not. The logic which unfolds explicitly in the third movement, the logic of a via negativa, has already begun implicitly in the empty and echoing field.

Where is the stillness? Only in the hot and sleeping village, and in the bleak dawn.¹⁶

Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides.

Is this the stillness that is so critical? Or is it stillness of a different sort, vast but empty of meaning, even the enemy of meaning? There is the sea, an ominous sea; but what is it? Here it is a haunting presence, a hint at a vast element with which one must reckon. And what are the rhythms of individuals and communities compared to the rhythm of the sea? Is it friend or enemy, meaning or its erasure?

The second movement sharpens further the problem of form and words. How do we find the pattern? It is not in the patterns of seasons or

¹⁶See Gardiner, op. cit., p. 165.

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stars. They cannot be trusted in November's disruption. But November's disruption is more than natural. The season of the year is undone, but so is the season of personal November. "Poetic" language about age and experience or the ways of the universe offers nothing but distraction from truth:

Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter ....
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders ... ?

The experience of a lifetime provides pattern and form enough, but they are false. Experience imposes a pattern which belongs to the past and tells us only of what has been. Even the testimony of the elders, the wisdom of lifetimes of experience can claim little more. They looked into darkness or did not, but their wisdom helped them no more than ours helps us, for whatever the authentic pattern is, it is "new in every moment / And every moment is a new and shocking / Valuation of all we have been." Even if the village rhythms were once enough, return is impossible. The moment judges the age. The new moment calls into question the lifetimes of peering and puzzling and piecing together. The virtue appropriate to November is humility.

The third movement turns to inward speech. It is not so much prayer as speaking to the soul. There is instruction in descent. Because the poetry does not matter, because the wrestle with words and meaning remains (and remains intolerable), because every positive solution is error-even the solutions of the theological virtues of hope and lovewhat alone remains is faith.

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.

This faith, however, is itself of a strange kind. What do we know of a faith without hope or love? It is a faith without content, without direction, with no gaze-faith without preposition.

What do we hear in such a faith? We hear the familiar whispers of the garden pointing, as did the ghostly dancers, to death and birth. But now we do not follow the echoes, we do not piece them together into words, into poems. If we want to come to poetry we must go by a way in which there are no poems.

In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.

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If we want to come to the Word, we must go-how? Now it is tempting to say silence, but "East Coker" does not say it, so perhaps we should be reluctant, too. The affirmation of "Burnt Norton" was that words reach into the silence, so we must speak of words rather than silence. What can we say? The path is not by the ways of words we know, that is the most the third movement affirms. The third movement speaks in negation, not opposition. A "formula" concerning words consistent with the conclusion of the movement would not be, "In order to arrive at the Word you must go by way of silence." Rather, this: "In order to arrive at the Word, you must go by way(s) of words you do not know." In such a construction, the term "way" takes on a double meaning. It means a route in the usual sense, following words we do not know. But also it would mean a "way of words," a speech, a poetry, a pattern we do not know. A transparent poetry? Transparent poetry is still, after all, words.

Clearly, we are entered upon the way of paradox, neo-Platonic or medieval or Spanish or English as the various commentators show. If one purpose of paradox is to bring reason to its limits, then perhaps we should listen once again (and be comforted!) by Helen Gardiner's voice. "It is better in reading poetry of this kind to trouble too little about the 'meaning' than to trouble too much." Whatever the way may be for the subject of the poem, for the reader the way lies through reading, and preferably reading aloud. It is, we recall, at "a point of intersection" of a whole city of language that music and meaning are met.

We must find meaning in the reading, rather than in any key which tells us what the rose or the yew "stands for," or in any summary of systems of thought, whether pre-Socratic or Christian.¹⁷

The poem itself is the meaning. The poem is a poem, not a treatise. Better to ask about effect than doctrine.

In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

The effect of the conclusion of the third movement is complex. Imaginatively, it carries the reader into the mystic's cell, or sends us searching for the philosopher's stone. But is also serves to announce the limit of reason, for the poem, at least. And it surrounds us with a language of rare austerity, preparing the one side of a paradox of style for which the lyric fourth movement provides the other. As austere and solemn and "correct" in tone as is the conclusion of the third movement, so like the entertainment of the jester is the fourth, a rollicking, thumping vaudeville, a rude Passion.

¹⁷Ibid., p. 54.

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The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood--
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

What becomes of these themes in the fifth movement of "East Coker"? What becomes of the midnight dance and traitorous November, the intolerable wrestle, the patterns of one or many lives, the advice to a soul?

Once again the section begins with an explicit meditation on the problem of words, now that of trying to learn their use.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years ...
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.

If the way to Word is by ways of words we do not know, the subject of the poem now confesses that for twenty years that way has failed him, too. Neither the meaning nor the material will stay in place, neither the thing we want to say nor the way we want to say it. But there is no choice. Although the elders, for all their failure, sometimes found and knew, it helps us not at all. We must do the finding for ourselves. No matter how often others have tried and succeeded or tried and failed, we must try. That is our vocation, it would seem. That is the human vocation: knowing we attempt the humanly impossible, yet trying anyway. What is the alternative?

Although the tone is Stoic, the undertone still has a pull. The trying tells us something of the despair. Starting off leads to another failure, but the failure marks a new point of embarkation. Even the failures have taught, as the third movement predicted. If not simplicity of pattern, then the complexity; if not the novel and hitherto unknown, then the ancient but unknown to us; if not the achievement of the great, then at least the achievement of our own lives.

The moment in the rose garden or by the empty field, the moment of grasping the constellated starlight or searching one's own history in the pictures of an album-the moments burn toward each other like back fires to drive a quarry meaning into the open. The moments together matter, not the moment. The poetry matters, but the poem does not. The Word matters, but it is only together in community that words do.

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

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We attend, therefore, but do not dwell. No moment, language, poetry, pattern is home except as the point of departure. "Every home is foreign country, and every foreign country home," as one of the Fathers has it. Voyaging, exploration is the place of a life, and the voice to which the voyager must listen most deeply is the voice of the sea. In the next poem, that is the voice we hear.

On the nautical chart, the Dry Salvages show as three rocks surrounded by shallows, lying a bit less than two miles northeast of Cape Ann. No beacon is shown on the chart now; perhaps there was one in earlier days. A thousand yards further to the northeast is the buoy - with beacon and bell both-marking the limit for safe navigation along the coast (NOS Chart #13279). Passage up-coast or down must be shaped to seaward of the buoy, especially in bad weather, for the Dry Salvages are but the first of the dangers to shipping as one closes upon the land. This, a few minutes study of the chart would show to anyone. So much for chartwork.

The fact that we may consult a chart and learn of the matter at hand, however, is distinctive in "The Dry Salvages." In the other three poems, the illuminating experience evoked is of a momentary, elusive, fragile quality. Humankind cannot bear too much reality, says the bird, and timeless moments usually do not last too long. If there is some central experience discernable in "The Dry Salvages," it is different from the others. It is not a special and private experience. An hour's sail will bring you to the bell, and the bell will ring as it rang for Eliot. It is the common experience of sailors, and is cast as a universal experience rather than personal. Here the emphasis is upon the experience, the problem which all humanity must face-the human condition and not just the condition of the artist. Here the emphasis is upon how long, not how brief, is the experience at hand. Instead of a moment out of time, the moments are in time.

Perhaps from the relationship of river to sea in the first movement, we can learn something of words and the Word. We find a language figured as river to be a lesser deity, alternately contentious and helpful, limiting and freeing, sometimes controlled, sometimes out of control, often forgotten except for buying and selling, but still capable of destruction, and present everywhere and in everyone from birth to death. Language as words, the language we have met in the preceding poems has been depicted in this way.

The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beach where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation ....
The sea has many voices ....

The sea seems scarcely the same element as the river. In some ways, it is not: salty and undrinkable. "The ocean is a desert," goes the saying;

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the drifting sailor dies of thirst. The sea of this poem has voices which testify of creation and time and world quite beyond us, but the testimony is never really spoken. Its saying is of no particular words to any particular person. It is heard chiefly in its pressure and friction upon the world we inhabit and the small ships we launch to venture out.

If this is the Word, it is an ominous one. We may voyage upon it, but it promises nothing except that it will be what it will be. We may seek out a deeper communion, but what we will find cannot be said. The patterns of human life, the claims of it, the comforting calculation are received indifferently, and tossed back with equal indifference. The sea/Word has the power to drown good sailors and set bad ones gently on the beach, so what does life or death at its hands prove? Only that it is the sea/Word. It is easy to hear the God of Job, "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations?" speaking in the voice of the sea.

The first movement closes with the clanging of the bell put forward as a crucial sea-voice.

The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers ...
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.

The bell is not the sea, but it announces the sea's rhythm; the bell is not the sea, but it helps the sailor find the way upon the sea; the bell is not the sea, but the sea rings it and sometimes thereby saves the sailor from the sea itself. The Word announces judgment and salvation both.

The problem Eliot must solve in "The Dry Salvages" is indicated by William Burke, in a recent article, to be a reconciliation of the modestly hopeful consolations of the first two poems with the "strong case for meaninglessness" which the first two movements of this poem present.¹⁸ He sees "Burnt Norton" as holding out the hope that a religious discipline or a gracious gift may lead us into the timeless moment. Humility and exploration in "East Coker" offer possibility, albeit in severe terms. But in "The Dry Salvages,"

the case for meaninglessness and despair is made. The essence of time is change, and viewed on a sufficiently large scale it appears time carries us not only to destruction but also to a confusion of who we are and where we have been. The only permanence is that reflected by the sea, a permanence of loss and waste.¹⁹

The reading here takes a different approach, and focuses upon the sea testifying not to meaninglessness, but to the overwhelming and incomprehensible character of the meaning.

¹⁸William Burke, "Faith and T. S. Eliot's 'Dry Salvages'," Thought 60 (March, 1985) 236,pp.51-52.
¹⁹Ibid., p. 53.

474 - Words and the Word

It is one thing to go voyaging after meaning as if we should be able to encompass it should we succeed in its discovery. It is another thing entirely to meet what we seek and realize that it is far stranger than the most complex pattern of a life had led us to believe. Similarly, to discover that the goal of the search is an illusion sends us back sadder but wiser; to discover that the goal of the search is beyond our wildest conception and remains irresolvably outside our grasp sends us back mad and haunted. Gardiner's more positive reading is closer.

Yet through the apparently incoherent restlessness of the sea, there is carried to our ears the rhythm of the groundswell, different from the rhythm of the river, which we hear in our heart-beats, coming from the very depth of the ocean itself.... The reminiscence of the doxology gives us the implication of the symbol of the groundswell, which makes itself felt in our hearts by the bell.²⁰

The solution of the problem (in classical theological fashion) will have to come from the side of the sea: from eternity, not time, from the Word itself, not from words.

VII

We sail out onto the Word in small boats of words, work and return or sometimes wreck. The use of words is not to make sense of the sea. How could they order anything so vast and sovereign? The use of words is to pray, to speak of ourselves and for ourselves. If not to speak about the Word, then to speak to the Word. But what shall we pray? If prayer is fundamentally petition for what we need, how can we pray for something we cannot understand, much less put into words? Perhaps that is why the prayer of the second movement is only hardly, barely prayable. If it is prayable at all, is it because of the river within us which knows, if not the language, then at least the direction of the sea (Romans 8)? If it is prayable in words at all, it is only barely, nakedly-not as poetry. As scarcely possible as it may be, and as indifferent as the sea may be, the sea does have a recurring message for us, as the fourth movement declares. The bell-voice of the sea calls us to prayer.

What is there to do but pray and fare forward?

Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus ....
"Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark...

... Not fare well,

But fare forward, voyagers.

We voyage because there is no choice. We voyage even when we stay still, because we ourselves change. But the voyage has no destination

²⁰Gardiner, op. cit., p. 171.

475 - Words and the Word

except itself, and even if it did it is not we who embarked who arrive, although our faces are the same.

The final movement of "The Dry Salvages" does indeed begin with a discussion of the possibility of words, but not so directly as the other poems. The launch is into the esoteric languages to which we turn, through which we both seek and avoid the Word.

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behavior of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry ...

... all these are

usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press ....

... But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint--
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

Never mind the saints. Whatever it is makes them saints comes from outside them anyway. Their occupation is not theirs to choose; it is thrust upon them. Our common lot is to search through obscurities rather than mystery and be taken by surprise by the unattended moment.

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union ....

The moments are not themselves the thing. They drive us toward prayer and discipline, though they are not the thing either. The solution is not one at which induction could arrive, for it trades with the impossible. What is impossible can only be overcome by the impossible. From the other side, therefore, from the absolutely opposite angle (but which has been almost guessed) comes the answer: Incarnation.

VIII

"'Little Gidding', a poem of paradox, metamorphosis, and climax."²¹ In "The Dry Salvages," the speech that moved forward as the language of sea-voyagers, the language appropriate to those who launch out upon the Word, was discovered to be prayer. As this final poem begins, the theme of prayer has come to the center. Prayer is the speech at hand, a

²¹Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet (New York: Citadel Press, 1964), p. 317.

476 - Words and the Word

pilgrim's prayer in the chapel of Little Gidding:

... And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment.

Here is simply said what was implied in the character of the sea as superabundance of meaning rather than absence; here the love and hope in the wrong thing return, the partiality and dimness of even our best self.

... There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city-
But this is the nearest, in place and time ....

As on the promontory or in the small boats of "The Dry Salvages," prayer takes place at the end of the world. The end of the world may be found at every hand: sea jaw, dark lake, desert, or city. Perhaps it is not the end of the world which makes prayer possible, but the reverse: it is prayer which makes a place the end of the world. Prayer has become the language beyond poetry which marks the farthest possible reach of words. Here they are their most authentic, because here they have abandoned self-consciousness and dreaming alike. Here words know what they can and cannot do, and that what they search cannot be discovered but only given.

Prayer in "Little Gidding" is "more than an order of words" or attitude; it is a community of speech in a cloud of witness. Whatever prayer is, we finally can hear in it the pure and burning speech of the elders whose words have both haunted and misguided. Whatever prayer is, in it we meet a human testimony which, at last, is true-for this is a speech "tongued with fire beyond that of the living." Nevertheless, the past offers no salvation, no way through,

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.

Purification of our own speech cannot be evaded by adopting the speech of another time. It is our own speech which must be purified if it is to be our speech.

All shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

What can restore words? Purgatorial fire. Purification of motive, purification of speech, purification of the motive to speak, purification of the motive for silence, purification of memory, of love, of caring and not caring: if it is possible in a life, it is possible for "Little Gidding" in the

477 - Words and the Word

ground of beseeching, the place of prayer. It is possible at the world's end, word's end, by fire. It is possible there, but only there.

The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre--
To be redeemed from fire by fire....

We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

The end is where we start from.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,...
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning ....

The end is where we start from. If prayer marks the limit of words in search of the Word, then it also marks the beginning of speech's real life. At the end of the world, words are Body, and their vocation is the vocation of the members of the Body (I Corinthians 12), to be one. The sentence that is right is the sentence that has become community. The rightness is more than the rightness of the ordered surface. It is a rightness of music, which means a consort of history and experience and language. Through the rightness of a sentence, the worlds of echo and memory and experience enter into relationship. Through the rightness of a poem, all that the poem has set ringing comes into relationship, into meaning, maybe for the first time. Perhaps we did have the experience and missed the meaning, as in "The Dry Salvages":

The moments of happiness--not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination-
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness.

The grace of given meaning restores our experience to us, only in a different way. Experience did not yield its meaning, and therefore we did not discover even what we had lived. We lost our own experience. In the giving of meaning, however, our true life, our true experience is restored to us. By the giving of meaning, we see our own life at last. We see in the light falling from a new direction the lifetime which burned in the moment ("East Coker").

... for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now ....

478 - Words and the Word

As words come to form, become solid and real in the Body, so the moments together become history. As history, the moments become a community, and the moment is our entrance into the community of history, just as the right sentence is our entrance into the community of language. In being drawn into this community by the voice and call of meaning, we receive history and eternity. We receive all of human community and, therefore, and at last, our own singular life.

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.

Now, at the end, after the long wrestle with speech and meaning, words and the Word, and all the rest-having come to the farthest frontier of speaking and gazed at the impassable boundary, what is the place of words for Four Quartets? The place of words, finally, is not to save, not to wrestle meaning out of chaos; that they cannot do. The place of words is to celebrate the impossible union, the Bridegroom and the Bride, and at their wedding ... to dance.