Four Quartets

Four Quartets
By TS Eliot

In this collection of poems T.S. Eliot does a splendid job of putting your mind in a position of nothingness and at the same time a space of everything ness. His balance in word selection allows the reader to define the edge between the two and therefore agreement can only be at hand. This is until one reader conveys to the next reader his or her interpretation of Eliot’s verse; which may give a compelling argument to read this book after you have read “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus”. Hence as in many arguments you likely find fundamental agreement in intent but dispute and discord over method. What for?

Of the four my favorite poem is The Dry Salvages. It may be that simple as my mind works on a rationale train, this is the least abstract of the collection. The message I received from this poem took on a theme of humanity, using the metaphor of water. Water being a river, an ocean, a fog or, the transition of each to the other. My penchant for sailing and a wager with the wind may have had me receptive of this poem, but the particular stanza that captured my attention was that of a shifting perspective found with experience, a code word for age.

I like to quote a book where it appropriately conveys my interpretation. In concert with the author of the book my authorship of a review depicts the intersection of two lines of thought. The following quote captured my mind to the extent that at times and now and again into the future it has me reflecting back. And rethinking deeper and deeper; poetry as a catalyst of thought. Thought where opposition gets to live with itself. Going in to Thanksgiving there is a divine coincidence that I just read it and now share this with you.

“The moments of happiness - not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfillment, security or affection,
Or even a vary 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. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only…”

While one hand washes the other in the present, beginning with ones own ability to tend to his or her own needs, and then to each other; they also reach out towards the past and then to the future. The poem uses characteristics of water, a grounded point in nature as a natural law, as an agent to demonstrate the reality of our human experience. Water shapes our environment in present and over the ages as well. It is the majority of our inner and outer physical composition. Whether you are working against the water or working with or within it, we are all of it, shaping each other. If those hands for and those hands against would reach out to each other in the context of the majority of our physical composition, could we not find peace, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; for sake of each other’s water? Something we should be thankful for.

This book will win the war with your television. With it, you will once again find yourself staring across the room, into the starry night, across the water, or into the mountains; in thought.