t. s. eliot’s ‘ash-wednesday’

7/30/2019 T. S. ELIOTS ASH-WEDNESDAY

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Literature & Theology 17/1# Oxford University Press 2003; all rights reserved.

T. S. E L I O T S A S H - W E D N E S D A Y

A N D F O U R Q U A R T E T S :

P O E T I C C O N F E S S I O N A S

P S Y C H O T H E R A P Y

Dennis Brown

Abstract

The article considers T.S. Eliots Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets as

confessional poetry in a double sense as interpersonal communication

before God, and to the reader. It is thus akin to the relationship between

therapist and client in a counselling situation. Ash-Wednesday constitutes

a Lenten preparation in which understanding is sought by means of an

articulation of failure, loss and repentance. Four Quartets uses a similar con-

fessional technique, evoking peak moments (both primal scene and the site

of mourning) out of which religious philosophising emerges as proposed

interpretation. It is suggested that the poems resemble a confidential

talking cure.

In T.S. Eliots The Cocktail Party (1949),1 Edward Chamberlayne, who fears

he is about to have a nervous breakdown, confides: I have realised/That mine

is a very unusual case (402). His psychiatrist, Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly,

replies coolly: All cases are unique, and very similar to others. From at least

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) onwards, Eliots poetry typically

consists in psychological questing and self-questioning, frequently dramatising

protestations of frustrated expressivityIt is impossible to say just what I

mean!:2

and, in this, it is both unique and representatively similar to ahuman norm. The poets early masterpiece, The Waste Land (1922)which

readers felt expressed the disillusionment of a generation3 but which the later

Eliot saw as a rather personal grumble4was self-confessedly written out of

a state of psychic desperation, with key sections written while the poet

was undertaking psychotherapy,5 either by Margate Sands or the waters

of Leman.6 The most powerfully traumatic interchange comes in A Game

of Chess, where a neurotic woman and a heavily depressed man implicate

the reader in a treacherous folie a deux: Do you remember/Nothing?/I

remember/Those are pearls which were his eyes (65).

Literature & Theology, Vol. 17. No. 1, March 2003

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That depressive male voice will continue, solipsistically, throughout The

Hollow Men (1925) and into The Journey of the Magi (1927). And, indeed,for all that there has been a strong critical tendency to address the poetry as a

species of philosophy,7 the psychological implications of Eliots work have

scarcely been ignored. For instance, Lyndall Gordons two-volume bio-

graphical critique8 has suggested a specific outworking of sexual fear and

relational guilt, while James V. Fishers recent psychoanalytic study, The

Uninvited Guest,9 has examined The Cocktail Party, in particular, in terms of

marital therapy. However, the aim here is to keep the poets psychological

quest largely separate from ad hominem biographical speculation. Eliots rep-

resented states of anxiety may be unusual but they are also very similar

to others. And, quite unusually, the author

far from concealing his pre-occupationsseems to invite the reader to share their exploration: Let us

go then, you and I_

10

By the time of Ash-Wednesday (1930), there can be no clear categorical

distinction between Eliots psychotherapeutic questioning and his spiritual

pilgrimage. Michel Foucault had a point in suggesting a source for the talking

cure in the Catholic institution of confession.11Yet the main point for critical

attention is that Eliots poetic, by the time of The Journey of the Magi, works

through trauma with the reader as the Christian works out his or her salvation

before God. And, in this, however apparently solitary the poetic voice, it con-

stitutes a voicing for, or with, some Other. To remain upon the secular plane,

the poetry intends, or interpellates, a human secret sharer, much as the talking

cure can only take place in the presence of a trained listener. This, indeed, may

help explain some of Eliots mature statements about the readers roleoften

exalting the position of reader reception over that of the authors intention.

In the first place, Eliot has written that the problem of what a poem

means is a good deal more difficult than it appears since: The poems

existence is somewhere between the writer and the reader.12 Yet he also

stresses, in almost countertransferential terms, that a valid interpretation, I

believe, must be at the same time an interpretation of my feelings when I read

[a poem].13

His main emphasis, in fact, is on the intensity of encounter

between reader and aesthetic artefact:

The experience of a poem is the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime.

It is very like our intenser experiences of other human beings. There is a first, or

an early terror (Ego dominus tuus); a moment which can never be forgotten, but

which is never repeated integrally; and yet which would become destitute of

significance if it did not survive in a larger whole of experience; which survives

inside a deeper and calmer feeling.14

This, I suggest, is very much like the descriptions of contemporary psy-

choanalysts discussing important moments in the course of treating patients.

2 T . S. E LI O T A N D PO E T I C CO N F E S SI O N



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Elsewhere, the poet makes the interesting point that in the course of time a

poet may become merely a reader in respect to his own works, forgettinghis original meaningor without forgetting, merely changing.15 All these

suggestions seem to lead up to a quite revolutionary affirmationone as

damaging to source scholarship as it is conducive to psychoanalytic reading:

A poem may appear to mean very different things to different readers, and all of

these meanings may be different from what the author thought he meant_

The

readers interpretation may differ from the authors and be equally validit may

even be better. There may be more in a poem than the author was aware of. The

different interpretations may be due to the fact that the poem means more, not

less, than ordinary speech can communicate.16

Overall, Eliots stress on the reader as sharer, even arbiter of meaning, is unique

among poet-critics.

After the emotive exhaustion of The Hollow Men and the emotional puzzle-

ment of The Journey of the Magi, Ash-Wednesday strikes the psycho-

analytically-oriented reader as elaborately purposive: it concerns a strenuous,

and painful, process of turning, developing in a spiralling fashion between

the defensive terms because and although. Instead of monological, proph-

etic declaration (Son of man,/You cannot say_

) we find the voice of a

dialogical confidante: Because I do not hope to turn again.17 Gordon provides

a biographical context in commenting on the poets maturing need for a

communion of saints and suggesting that the plunge came with his first

confession in 1928.18 Ash-Wednesday is also a form of confession. Yet

while the super-addressee is God, and a spiritual father and Lady are

invoked, the confessional discourse, as poetry, inevitably co-opts the reader, if

only as the ideal, unseen blank screen of early Freudian practice.

Ash-Wednesday, overall, thus endorses Mary Jacobuss recent discussion

of a scene of reading which involves assumptions about_

unconscious

phantasies of inner and outer, absence and boundaries, and the transmission of

thoughts and feelings between one self_

and another.19 In it, such post-

Freudian intimations are conjoined both with a much older tradition of inter-personal Christian solidarity (fellowship) and with a recent tendency in ethical

philosophy to stress I^Thou relations, as in the work of Martin Buber and

Emmanuel Levinas. At the same time, Jacques Derrida has suggested that the

Good no longer be_

a relation between objective things, but the relation to

the other.20 Ash-Wednesday enacts this kind of human inter-relationship on

the plane of reader^writer dynamics. And, as will be seen, the poem operates

as a form of bereavement-therapy for writer and reader alikewhich has its

larger religious implication in Derridas thought-provoking hypothesis: as if

conversion amounted to a process of mourning loss_

that whose death one

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must endure.21 Eliots Christian conversion is here represented in much these

terms.Ash-Wednesday, in fact, constitutes an appealingly desperate confession. It

shares an ongoing mourning process for the lost heart which also seeks

something/Upon which to rejoice as a proto-Lenten journey into a cloud

of unknowingand unbeing. It appears as a deliberately willed project to

relinquish the Will-to-Power:

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly

But merely vans to beat the air_

/

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still. (90)

However, it is, importantly, a renunciation of selfhood in relationship with

others: the reader, as well as God and invoked spiritual helpers, but also literary

forerunnersmost obviously the theologian Lancelot Andrewes,22 whose Ash

Wednesday sermon (1619) situated turning within the seasonal cycle. As is

evident in Tennysons In Memoriam, a sense of season may be vital for affective

poetry: and this represents an emotional reality enshrined in religious practice,

if scarcely yet acknowledged in psychoanalytic theory as generally recognised.

The attempted process of self-healing is represented in the poem as a holistic23

psychosomatic endeavour within an inherently cyclical environmentbut one

where an enchanted May can be distracting rather than renewing (93).

The poem is divided into six sectionsapproximating, perhaps, to the

weeks of Lent. The first is structured by heavily reiterative parallelism: the

word because is repeated eleven times, always at the beginning of the line,

to set up a pattern of confessed inabilities. The effect is deeply depressive,

even if, on the psychological plane, the lines are construed as a combination

of defensive rationalisation and attempted interpretation. The confession

concerns impotence, frustration and mounting desperation, culminating in a

dream-like image of frantic stasiswings threshing unsustaining air, like the

nightmare of running away without being able to move. A fear of flying is

rooted in the inability to take off at all. Almost throughout, a deliberateddeployment of abstract terms is permeated by equally considered suggestive

imageseagle, flowering trees, flowing springs, face, voice, small and dry air.

Such details commend themselves to reader response at a deeper level than the

development of an argument, to reach conclusion in the culminating prayer.

They remain in the mind, unresolved through explanation: why the eagle?

what springs? whose voice? And other lines in the poem also invite imaginative

completion: what did the hour of glory consist in, or what kind of guilt is

involved in what has been done never to be repeated? For most of the section

the confession seems to be given directly to the reader, seeking understanding,




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evoking emotions, inviting countertransference. However, towards the end the

direction of address undergoes a shift. The need for other-directed prayer turnsslowly into the form of prayer itselfasking for leniency, the gift of patience

and the intercession of Mary the Mother. It will not do to psychoanalyse away

this turn as some surrender to phantasy. Eliot is exploring a talking cure

where the reader is not the only listener.

The second section confirms the switch of address abruptlyLady,_

According to Stephen Spender, when an Oxford undergraduate enquired as

to the meaning of the first line, the poet merely repeated it.24 Probably the

question concerned the symbolism of white leopards and juniper tree, yet it

might also encompass a query as to why the lady is first addressed and then

referred to in the third person (later, again, to be petitioned directly). At anyrate, in the presence of the Mother (as she becomes) a proto-Kleinian scenario

of the inner self being devoured is outlined. This surely operates at a more

profound level than biographical speculation can reach. And the dry bones

sequel works from the marrow itself. Under Gods gaze, Death Instinct

becomes elaborated as abandonment, the Lady withdrawn and bones

themselves, as in Ezekiel, responding to divine command. What follows is

not prophecy but a prayer which evokes resonant symbols (which will recur in

Four Quartets)Rose, Journey and Garden. Love is here rendered a torment

which leads only to its own cessationmuch as Lacan would render Desire.

And here, surely, the reader is not so much confidante as co-opted participant

in both exposition and prayer. That participation lingers on in the somewhat

more prophetic conclusion to the section: in a sense, the poets collective

readership become yet more bones in the imaginary zone that Eliot calls the

land. Hence we are included in the last wry sentence: We have our

inheritance. Part of that might include what the analyst Robert Young has

described as the madness that we share with the patient25but for patient

read poet, for madness, spiritual devastation.

Section III operates mainly in terms of third person allegory. The reader

is made, again, the attentive sharer. However, the reader of Eliot is also

frequently a student of the poetcritically predisposed to look for allusions.

Hence the chief figure here of the turning staircase is commonly seen asthe saints stair26related to the step-by-step stages of the mystical ladder

outlined in The Dark Night of the Soul by St John of the Cross27 (although

the alert reader might also recall Dantes purgatorial ascent or even Freuds

interpretations of climbing dreams as sexual phantasies). However, only three

turnings and two stairs are described here, and in each case an arresting image

most commands attention: firstly, the wrestling (and twisted) shape, between

hope and despair; secondly, the staircase darkness, itself, rendered in terms that

suggest male sexual fear and loathing (a damp vagina dentata); thirdly, the

slotted window bellied like the figs fruit which evokes a contradictorily




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wholesome appreciation of female fecundity. Stephen Spender likens such

images to monkish illuminations painted on parchment,28 yet what gets leftout in such comparisons is the way Eliots images can evoke powerfully

wayward associations in the readers personal imagination. The broadbacked,

magic flautist seen through the window refers us to an antique mythology, but

there should be no bucking the sensuous appeal of: Brown hair is sweet,

brown hair over the mouth blown (93). Here the personal becomes the inter-

personal and the scene of reading is rendered a psychoanalytic site as much

as a theological stage. Hence there is, surely, an over-hasty defensiveness in the

dismissive word distractionif a compensatory honesty in the succeeding

effort to achieve the culminating plea. It is interesting that the entreaty

is not for the Centurion of Matthew VIII, himself, but for his servantin absentia.29

In the fourth section the poet makes full use of the mythic (and doubtless

archetypal) topos of the dream-garden. The first line commences with the

ambiguous word who: it is repeated later, but since no question mark is

offered it seems to govern qualifying clauses somehow in medias res. The syntax

heightens a sense of mystery and wonder, as the sequence moves through

incantation towards intense idealisation:

One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing

White light folded, sheathed about her, folded. (94)

In literary terms, the Lady both looks back to Arnaut Daniel and Dante,

forward, as it were, to similar evocations in H.D.s Trilogy or the poetry of

David Jones or Geoffrey Hill; in psychoanalytic terms, she anticipates

descriptions of the infants experienced mother in the writing of Donald

Meltzer and Meg Harris Williams:

Proto-aesthetic experience can well be imagined to have commenced in utero:

rocked in the cradle of the deep of his mothers graceful walk; lulled by the

music of her voice set against the syncopation of his own heart-beat and

hers_

30

Since internal objects at their best represent ideas, in the sense of forms, such as

beauty, truth, goodness, justice, generosity, forgiveness, charity, wisdom, their

essence is spiritual and bound in the innate preoccupations of the race and its

millennial experience. (Ibid., 63)

Eliots lines not only express his own primal experience but also activate the

readers too. In this lies the possibility of redemptionsomewhere between

psychotherapeutic re-connection and religious adoration. And it leads,

intellectually, beyond exile to the prayer for Messianic renewalshow

unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.




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The opening lines of Section V elaborate a paradoxical and highly abstract

meditation on the relationship between verbal art and the incarnate Logos,with reference to the prolegomena to St Johns Gospel. How can the ever-

lasting Word be revealed in transient poetic words? Critical reactions to the

passage vary between a neo-Poundian view that the poet should go in fear of

abstractions31 and a scholarly attempt to unpack Eliots subtle meanings through

the resources of theology and philosophy. However, a psychoanalytic approach

might, quite as fruitfully, pay fuller attention to the insistent word-playthe

repetition-compulsion centred on the term Word, the playing with difference

(e.g. word, world, whirled) and, throughout the section, the surrender to

somewhat facile rhyme-jingles (grace/face, chose/oppose, away/pray, offend

her/surrender) (96^

7). Eliot, we might say, is exploring higher meanings byrevisiting the childhood realm where meaning-creation is learnt as the slow

mastery of minute sound-changes (only an l between word and world). The

site is that described by Julia Kristeva in her suggestive distinction between

the Semiotic and Symbolic.32 Eliot enacts the Semiotic as word-play where the

mother tongue is first exercised. He is, in a sense, joining the children at the

gate to implicate the reader in the shared memory of language-acquisitiona

realm of magic and illumination, always close to nursery-rhyme nonsense:

the unstilled world still whirled. Where the section succeeds (despite Pounds

stricture) is in its use of primary melopoeia33 set against the ritualisation of

Scripture as Catholic formula: O my people_

Section VI attempts a sense of ending, although as John Kwan-Terry rightly

points out, the poem insists that all truths are incomplete, always in process.34

There will, after all, always be another Ash Wednesday and Lenta further

occasion for turning. Successful therapy provides a renewal of living not its

closure. The word although suggests a modest advance on the poems open-

ing position. Yet, seen in psychotherapeutic terms, the sixth section surfaces

the most powerful rebellion back to lost peak experience: And the lost

heart stiffens and rejoices_

Drawing on his own youthful memories of the

American East Coast, the poet creates a valent imagism of flowers, seascape

and wild birds which becomes epiphanic for the reader too (in adolescence, this

was the first passage of difficult Eliot which really spoke to me). Of course, theactivation of this core-scene may suggest a stronger therapeutic revival, a more

profound redemption. So when the garden imagery returns (with Leonardo-

like rocks and an evoked fountain) the sitting still of contemplation (seen as a

good in itself by Eliots mentor, Pascal)35 becomes more fully achieved. The Lady

returns as intercessor and comforter (a restored internal mother too). Perhaps

just as importantly, the last line incorporates the individual striving soul within

a shared ritemore akin here to group therapy. The ministry of healing

allows my cry to become communal: healing, itself, has a communitarian

quality where individuals can affirm, liturgically, that we are one body.




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Four Quartets, spanning the 1930s and 1940s in terms of writing and

publication,36 was finally brought out as an overall poetic sequence in 1943.As Lyndall Gordon has shown, Eliots Landscapes were forms of rehearsal for

the poem and his play The Family Reunion (1939) casts light on certain motifs.37

However, from the start (Burnt Norton, 1935), the address in the Quartets is

quite distinctive: My words echo/Thus, in your mind (171). Even more than

the penitential Ash-Wednesday, the sequence presupposes, and constructs,

an intimate scene of reading. In the main free-verse sections the poet is a man

speaking to men and women: You say I am repeating_

(181); We have to

think of them_

(186); If you came this way_

(192). The contrast with,

say, the neo-Parnassian quatrains of his early career (with their Lewisian, satiric

externality)38

could hardly be more marked. Eliot is now pioneering an inter-personal, conversational poetry where the reader becomes almost the familiar

compound ghost of the writer. The effect is highly flattering yet, at times,

almost unbearably demanding.

However, the poem makes use of different forms of address or register in

different sections. My own feeling is that the most powerful passages are those

which engage the reader in an epiphanic experience which creates a

transitional area.39 For it is in these passages that rational categories of past,

present and future are transcended on the psychotherapeutic plane. Elsewhere,

the verse can vary from the philosophical sublime to the figural banal.

Arguably, the very musical formality of the sectional variations becomes, in

fact, formulaic. However, it is a measure of Eliots genius that Four Quartets

remains compelling overall. My emphasis will be on the seminal passages out of

which the poets own interpretations seem to arise, and where the relationship

with the reader seems closest. In short, rather than attempting to do justice to

the overall achievement of the poetic sequence, the main aim here will be

to address certain represented moments of being,40 and a few representative

extrapolations.

Burnt Norton opens with philosophical paradoxes which rapidly condense

into a resonant garden scene: Shall we follow? (171). Of course, we doand

find ourselves in an autumnal trance, walking with the poet through a dream of

leaves, birdsong, flowers and box circle which somehow becomes our ownimagined world too. Whatever the personal origin of the details,41 the poetry

creates the conditions to fulfil its own inter-personal invitation. And so to the

drained pool:

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,

And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,

The surface glittered out of heart of light. (172)

The moment is hushed, strangely out of time, mystical. Yet it is also associ-

atively suggestive. A merely intertextual reading might identify here a turning




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upside-down of The Waste Lands desiccated scenario of dried-up cisterns and

toppled towers. The words filled, rose and glittered intimate measuredprocess, some organic becoming which has psychic resonance. In some sense

the garden constitutes a symbolic containerultimately the maternal body,

even if we discount the prefatory passage and door. The poem is at pains to

indicate that we are not in achieved reality but within hypothetical phantasy.

The rose-garden, in short, is an arena where free associations are played out

in free verse measure. We are in our first world (repeated) where they move

over dead leaves, without friction, in autumnal heat to an unheard tune.

Flowers appear to be aware and to mediate exchanged glances. They accept

as they are accepted, as guests to hostand all is patterned, rhythmical,

purposive. At the end of the epiphany, when the weather darkens and the birdis dismissive, there are children in the leaves, laughing excitedly. What the

reader seems to have shared here are the reparative traces of a Primal Scene.

The containing construction has permitted a phantasy of how, in fleshly

sensuousness, living children become engendered from a mystery beyond

them: the past has given birth to the present and points to the future in terms

of fruition. One cannot, of course, merely subsume the elaborate meditations

of the whole of Burnt Norton into just this passage. Yet without it, they

would lack a grounding in the psychotherapeutic work which, in itself, gives

a unique depth to the poetic reflection.

East Coker provides a similar, yet wonderfully contrastive, scene of magical

strangeness. Again, the reader is companionably interpellated into the devel-

oping paysage interieur,42 but here not by the word we but the reiterated you

(e.g. if you do not some too close_

(177)). The guided journey takes us

along a deep lane which leads to a village in summertime (as the title indicates,

East Coker in Somerset constitutes the topographical signified). A period of

silent waiting mediates between the villages grey stone and the open field of

midnight where we experience a type of midsummer nights dream, prompted

by music which seems to initiate dancing. The specifically literary twist here

is that the simple revelry of the imagined rustic men and women is largely

rendered in the words and spelling of a probable ancestor of the poetSir

Thomas Elyot.43

However, this is not necessarily evident to the plain reader;the device has an immediately arresting and enhancing effect which initially

requires no explanation:

In daunsing, signifying matrimonie

A dignified and commodious sacrament. (178)

Psychoanalytically, this must be again a phantasy of the Primal SceneDesire

here symbolised by both music and bonfire, drum and pipe allegorising male

and female as they hold hands circling the flames, earnestly or in sheer fun.

However, a Jungian understanding must be added to that of Freud in that the




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individual phantasy takes on a mythic dimension. For if these are parental

figures, they have been dead a long time. So too, the scene is as much fora communal readership as of the phantasising persona. And human experi-

ence is as aesthetically realised as in, say, a painting by Breughel: Earth feet,

loam feet, lifted in country mirth. A particular time-sequence structures the

experienceearly owl through midnight to an evoked dawn. This reinforces

the dreamlike feeling of the representation. Yet a degree of generalising inter-

pretation is also involved: the epiphanic night is discursively abstracted into a

formula of seasonal change, transhistorical intercourse and animal affinity where

consumption and copulation lead finally to dung and death. Phantasy, in

short, is placed within an overall context of the Reality principle. Yet, once

more, the poets later philosophical extrapolations would be immeasurablythe poorer as poetry of experience44 without the shared psychotherapeutic

passage.

The Dry Salvages offers no comparable evoked visit; instead, the first

section entices the reader into a state of interior reverie on the theme of

water: The river is within us, the sea is all about us (184). An explicitly liminal

space between ocean and land is conjured upan interim zone where the

beach is littered with sea-traces. The somewhat random nature of these

starfish, whale-bone, fishing net, oar etc.suggests as much a dream-scenario

as a directed meditation. However, reverie seems the more accurate term

since, toward the end, the comparison is with sleepless women, worrying over

the past and future between midnight and dawn. The mind-moments seem

to slip in and out of half-sleep, where the sounds of the seayelps, groans,

whining, bell-tollings etc.impinge on the restless consciousness. This, too, is

an uncanny passage, the images suggesting a profounder presence than can be

fully named. The effect is somewhat like a phantasy summoned under hypnosis,

which a prolonged, hesitant sentence (twenty-three lines in extension) brings

to a close, with a bell-clang. The affective power of the passage is intense

because it stirs up the readers own Oceanic feelings, as well as unpleasant

memories of sleeplessnessa kind of dark night of the mind. Counter-

transference tends to bring to bear memories and associations which are not

contained within the mental scenario as given. In this, there is a telling ambi-guity in the phrase the sea is all about us. The world of water, night-time and

eerie sounds is all about both poetic speaker and engaged reader. The aesthetic

realm, here, is markedly a transitional area between speaker and listener, the

symbolic and the actual, sleep and disturbed wakefulness.

In Little Gidding there is a final scene of visitation. This also represents a

liminal zonemidwinter spring ((191) a phrase of intertextual resonance with

relation to the poets friend James Joyce, now dead).45 The reader is drawn into

the key scene on a note of invitational hypothesis: If_

The evoked moment

here is that of an end (a repeated word)the direction and nature of the

10 T . S. E LI O T A N D PO E T IC C O N F ES S I O N



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journey are dissolved into irrelevance: It would always be the same (192).

Hence, too, the specifics of place

even England as site

are not of theessence. What matters is the validity of the experience in relation to others

past experiences. In this space there is a further encounter with ancestors.

But we do not have a confirming primal phantasy, for this is the scene of

bereavement. It is, however, a restorative mourning-moment, a recognition

of the inter-psychic communion of the dead with the living: They can tell

you_

(ibid.). The moment is one of prayer, yet it is just here, surely, that our

modern categories break down; we are simultaneously involved in a profound

religious and psychotherapeutic transaction. Like the questor in The Waste

Land, the reader has been led to a deserted chapel for a strange encounter. The

encounter, however, is not so much with the divine as with the worthy dead,a religious experience as pagan as Christian.46 And while it would be wrong

to dismiss the theological dimension, in more widely cultural terms this is

an experience whose main force is psychological. Once more, it is through

the highly intimate relations established between speaker and hearer that

the aesthetic encounter is validated. Whatever we make of its meaning, we

have shared the experience.

In all four Quartets, then, there are moments when the confessional mode is

intensely heightened by the inter-psychic sharing of uncanny encounters. It is

these moments which ground the philosophical complexity of the entire poetic

sequence in psychotherapeutic felt experience. Emanating from such passages,

the meditative endeavours to abstract, generalise, interpret, and generally to

translate psycho-spiritual reality into public discourse appear as a necessary, if

finally fallible, project. After all, psychotherapy and religious experience

themselves cannot do without some theoretical concepts and strategies of

interpretation. However, the green of experience remains primarygrey

theory secondary.47 In this regard, the familiar critical accountswith their

scholarly grounding in Dante, St John of the Cross, Aristotle or even Eliot the

essayistare not especially helpful to the reading and assimilation of the poem

itself. They tend to erect a barrier of explanatory rationalisation between the

poetry and the reader. My further remarks here will, then, be intended to

demonstrate how the more philosophical parts of the sequence are dependenton peak passages, and are best regarded as attempts by the persona to share the

struggle of interpretationwith the reader again.

This is best done by calling attention to a few representative examples

inevitably one from each Quartet. In the first place, then, we might consider

part of the last section of Burnt Norton:

Words move, music moves

Only in time_

/

Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern_

(175)




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It is surely evident that Eliot is here replicating and intensifying his strategy in

the fifth section of Ash-Wednesday. What is being fore-grounded is not thestructure of an argument, and unfolding of Truth, but the very condition of

verbal communication itselfits temporality, urge toward self-transcendence,

horizon of silence and hypnotic dance of difference (speech, reach). There

is an intensification of what R.W. Flint finds in the Quartets as a whole:

Eliot_

by a process of exclusion and concentration has developed a taste for

essentials, so much so that he plays on a few key words, rearranging them

endlessly in new combinations like a child with his first handful of phrases.48

Eliot appears, as it were, to be a poststructuralist: all the main terms are

represented as under erasure. However, this tendency is given an added

dimension by associating word-scepticism with the musical motif of thewhole sequence. Musical notes, as the Chinese jar, are outside the order of

Grammatology, yet both are somehow humanly meaningful. Just as in the

talking cure it is less truth-content than progressive human interchange which

is therapeutic, so here, even in the admission of verbal inadequacy, the

hypnotic interchange with the reader enhances cultural health.

The second section of East Coker investigates meaning on a philosophical

rather than an aesthetic plane. Yet what is queried here (in true Socratic vein)

is whether we can deduce a knowledge out of the flux of living:

The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,

For the pattern is new in every moment

And every moment is a new and shocking

Valuation of all we have been. (179)

The scepticism expressed here has its origins in the poets PhD work on

the philosophy of F.H. Bradley, eventually published under the title Knowledge

and Experience.49 The first chapter, especially, addresses Bradleys concept of

immediate experience50 which underlies and transcends all epistemological

attempts to organise it into meaningful categories. For Bradley, that required an

Absolute as the agency to put Humpty Dumpty together againbut Eliot did

not accept this. The whole issue, in fact, may suggest the philosophical reasonwhy Eliot eventually chose the life of poetry over that of academic ideas. For

immediate experience can best be conveyed by the poet or novelist rather

than in conceptual discourse. And such knowledge as may be deduced from

experience we now tend to ascribe to psychoanalytic theory. At any rate, here

we are pointed beyond Reason, as such, toward a wisdom which is equated

with humility. And a key sign of wisdom is, surely, the humility which opens

up self hood to the other in the confessional transaction.

In The Dry Salvages wisdom is also exercised through the humility

of inter-faith dialogue. The figure of Krishna is introduced into this




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predominantly Christian poem to authenticate a mode of being which shall

fructify in the lives of others (188). As the section points out, time is no healer:the patient is no longer here: so those who travel have become changed on

arrival. An equal mind must keep facing the shock of the new as well as the

memory of the pastas in the ideal psychotherapeutic situation where the

present encounter, with all its transferred resonances, is the site where past,

present and future may be negotiated. In Krishnas admonition and Eliots Four

Quartets, as in psychoanalysis as an art of healing, the object is less to attain some

knowledge than to become ready, again, for ordinary human misery: Not

fare well,/But fare forward, voyagers.

At the conclusion of Little Gidding, it is a Christian Love, immanent in a

secluded chapel, which utters this/Calling (197). This appears to be the leastself-hesitant section of the entire sequencean affirmation rather than a

repetition-compulsion of hints and guesses: but it can be so only through a kind

of paradoxicality:

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. (Ibid.)

What becomes somehow known here is, in effect, a rhetorical bringing

together of major motifs or symbols from the poem as a wholegate, river,

tree, waves, fire and rose. The poetic voice is summing up, for and with the

reader, some of the main moments in the shared psychic journey and threading

them together. The psychoanalytic series of encounters is consolidated (before

an inevitable parting of the ways) in terms of positive reparation and

unification. The religious element has prepared us for this consummation

in important ways, yet the affective quality at the conclusion represents an

essentially psychotherapeutic coming-through: the fire and the rose are

one (198).

Overall, Eliots confessional verse strikes one as a mature alternative to the

angry, self-pitying or self-consciously crazy expressionism of the later

Confessional poets.51

In this, it represents a genuine talking cure as opposedto a phantasised acting out. In both Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets the

address is confidential, deliberative, cautioussometimes sermonic, occasion-

ally playful (Shall I say it again? (181)). In both poems, the verse draws readers

into the implications of the words, allowing them to make connections with

their own experiences and reflections while rendering the poems world their

own. That this is, in fact, what happens is evident both from the way critics

write about the sequence, or poets (e.g. David Jones, Theodore Roethke,

R.S. Thomas or John Ashbery) have assimilated aspects of it into their own

work. And it is the constant inter-relational interiority of the poetry which




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intensifies the I^Thou nature of poetic discourse in general. Even when the

poet philosophises or preaches, it is to draw out the readers own responses,to appeal to the whole of a life. For as Helen Gardner has written: The subject

of Four Quartets is the truth which is inseparable from the way and the

life in which we find it.52 However, the primary address is to the realm of

feelingsand feelings are the chief business of poetry, as more recently of

psychoanalysis. So Eliots lines work to bring our experience into reconciliation

with itself in a world of past, present and futureto enable ongoing openness

based on acceptance. As Reilly says in The Cocktail Party: You will have to live

with these memories and make them/ Into something new (Act 111, 439).

That is what Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets attemptfor both poet and

reader:

Quick now, here, now, always (198)

Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Education, University of Hertfordshire,

Aldenham, Watford WD2 8AT

[email protected]

R E F E R E N C E S

1

All references to Eliots poetry and playswill be found in The Complete Poems andPlays of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber andFaber, 1969).

2From Prufrock, p. 16.

3 See, e.g. Thoughts After Lambeth,

T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faberand Faber, 1958), p. 368.

4For a consideration of some of the issues

see James Olneys Where is the real T.S.

Eliot? Or, the Life of the Poet in

A.D. Moody (ed.), The Cambridge Compan-ion to T.S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge

UP, 1994), pp. 1^

13.5

See P. Ackroyd, T.S. Eliot (London:

Hamish Hamilton, 1984), pp. 109^30.6

See The Waste Land, Poems and Plays, pp. 70

and 67. Eliot went to a clinic in Switzerland

after a rest cure at Margate.7

The tendency receives scholarly justifica-

tion in terms of Eliots early academic

career and, especially, his PhD thesis on

F.H. Bradley. See T.S. Eliot, Knowledge andExperience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley

(London: Faber and Faber, 1964).

However, I have previously argued thatThe Waste Land, in particular, out-

lines something more like dreamwork:

see These Fragments I Have Shored,

D. Brown, The Modernist Self in Twentieth-

Century English Literature: A Study in Self-Fragmentation (London: Macmillan/New

York: St Martins Press, 1989), pp. 91^9.8

L. Gordon, Eliots Early Years (Oxford:Oxford UP, 1977): Eliots New Life

(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988).9

J.V. Fisher, The Uninvited Guest: Emergingfrom Narcissism towards Marriage (London:

Karnac Books, 1999). According to Fisher,someone who knew W.R. Bion said of

T.S. Eliots Reilly, Bion at his worst,

p. 169.10

Opening line of Prufrock, Complete

Poems and Plays, p. 13.11

See M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality,vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley

(London: Allen Lane, 1979), passim.12

T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1964),

p. 30.




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13 T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London:

Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 114.14 T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, pp. 250^1.15 The Use of Poetry

_, p. 130.

16 On Poetry and Poets, p. 113.17

Quotations from The Waste Land andAsh-Wednesday, The Complete Poemsand Plays, pp. 61 and 89.

18 Eliots Early Years, pp. 120 and 138.19

M. Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of

Reading (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), p. 9.20

J. Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans.

D. Willis (Chicago/London: Chicago

UP, 1995/French version, 1992), p. 50.21

Ibid., p. 9.22According to Lyndall Gordon, Eliot was

reading Andrewes Sermons as early as

1923, Early Years, p. 125.23

See, for instance, P. Pietroni, Holistic

Living: A Guide to Self-Care (London:

Dent, 1986), passim.24

S. Spender, Eliot (Glasgow: Fontana/

Collins, 1975), p. 129.25

R.M. Young, The Vicissitudes of

Transference and Countertransference:

The Work of Harold Searles, 5(2) FreeAssociations, Number 34, p. 192.

26

See J. Kwan-Terry, Ash-Wednesday: APoetry of Verification in The Cambridge

Companion to T.S. Eliot, p. 140.27 The Dark Night of the Soul, by St John

of the Cross (Cambridge: James Clarke,

1973), pp. 163^76.28 Eliot, p. 124.29

Which, in Lyndall Gordons terms, might

suggest that his first wife Vivienne was in

the poets mind.30

D. Meltzer and M.H. Williams, TheApprehension of Beauty: The Role of

Aesthetic Conflict in Development, Violence

and Art (Strath Tay: Clunie Press, 1988),p. 17.

31E. Pound, A Retrospect, Literary Essays ofEzra Pound, edited with An Introduction

by T.S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber,

1968).32

See, especially, J. Kristeva, Revolution in

Poetic Language, p. 5, The Kristeva Reader,

T. Moi (ed.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,

1986), pp. 89^136.33

E. Pound, How to Read, Literary Essays,p. 25: melopoeia, wherein the words are

charged, over and above their plain

meaning, with some musical property,which directs the bearing or trend of that

meaning.34 See The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot,

p. 140.35 I have often said that the sole cause of

mans unhappiness is that he does not

know how to stay quietly in his room.

B. Pascal, Pensees, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 67.

36See H. Gardner, The Composition of

Four Quartets (London: Faber and

Faber, 1978) and L. Gordon, Eliots

New Life.37 Ibid., pp. 79^93.38

For my view that Wyndham Lewiss early

theory of satire influenced Eliots quatrains

see D. Brown, Intertextual Dynamics within

the Literary Group: Joyce, Lewis, Pound andEliotThe Men of 1914 (Basingstoke:Macmillan, 1990), pp. 73^8.

39A borrowing of D.W. Winnicotts phrase

for the place where all culture belongs.

See M. Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene

of Reading, p. 3, including n. 4.40

See V. Woolf, Moments of Being:

Unpublished Autobiographical Writings,J. Schulkind (ed.) (London: Triad/

Granada, 1978). Parts of Four Quartets aresimilar to scenes in Mrs Dalloway and The

Waves.41

See Gordons account in Eliots New Life.42

Marshall McLuhans description in

Symbolic Landscape, T.S. Eliot: Four

Quartets, A Casebook, B. Bergonzi (ed.)(London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 239.

43See J.J. Sweeney, East Coker: A

Reading, ibid., pp. 36^40.44

I am borrowing (and psychologising) this

phrase from R. Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in

Modern Literary Tradition (New York:Norton, 1957).

45I have argued elsewhere that midwinter

spring alludes intertextually to Joyces

Midwinter_

was in the offing and

Premver a promise of a pril (Finnegans

Wake) which itself alluded to the openingofThe Waste Land(a pril). See D. Brown,Intertextual Dynamics within the LiteraryGroup, pp. 125^6 and 168.




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46 See, for instance, W.H.R. Rivers

Melanesian informant Njirus importantrole as mediator between the living and

the dead in P. Barker, The Ghost Road

(London: Viking, 1995).47

Sigmund Freuds quotation is used as

epigraph to M. Jacobuss Psychoanalysisand the Scene of Reading: a profitablereturn from grey theory to the perpetual

green of experience.48 R.W. Flint, The Four Quartets

Reconsidered, T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets,

p. 117.

49 T.S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience

in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley. SeeNote 7.

50Especially as outlined in F.H. Bradleys

Essays on Truth and Reality. See also

H. Bergsons Essai sur les Donnees

Immediates de la Conscience, whose ideas

also influenced Eliot.51 I have in mind, e.g. Robert Lowell, John

Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Anne

Sexton and Sylvia Plath.52

H. Gardner, The Music of Four

Quartets, T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets, p. 135.




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t. s. eliot’s ‘ash-wednesday’

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