T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)

I am not an expert in poetry, but I enjoy reading some of it when the poet knows how to use the language. T. S. Eliot does that. Many of these poems were not to my taste, or beyond my understanding. The early poems are full of darkness, bleak and without hope; written in the chaotic way of modern art. The later poems, while still having a dim view of humanity, have a spark of hope in them. Their themes had an underlying order to them and many of the thoughts expressed were profound. It was in the later poems that I found my favorites. One early poem I loved was "The Hollow Men." Haunting. The following are what I discovered in my favorites, you might find other things because as all excellent writing, the reader can discover what it means to them.

"Ash Wednesday VI" A lovely picture of wanting God & coming to the point of accepting Him, and at the same time an ode to Christ and how He might have felt during His ordeal of manhood. I love the last stanza:
"...Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee."

"Journey of the Magi" The first part reminds us that they were actual men on a real journey with all the trials and joy of a long trip. The second reminds us that we are all travelers on a journey of discovery. When we reach our destination we find both life and death.

"Choruses from The Rock" - Damn good sermons. I was afraid that the climax of these poems, which seem to highlight our failures towards God and the world, would end depressing. But the final one is a beautiful praise of thanks unto Light Invisible for the light given.

"Four Quartets" - These seem to be all about time, eternity, past, future, present, the words wrap around one, flow in and out of our mind. For me, they were like quicksilver; lovely, but cannot quite be grasped.
My favorite was Little Gidding. It starts with a faerie place, never-never, midwinter spring. The second part revolves around Air, Earth, Water & Fire; beautiful stanzas of eternity and the littleness of time.
The third, I felt that the beginning described the state of my being, a duality, but the insight with the answer eludes me.
The last might be my favorite lines of all:
"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."

"To Walter de la Mare" is a lovely tribute to a storyteller. Made me search out and buy a couple of his works to find out about him.… (mehr)

This is a remarkable piece, even though the non-Chorus parts are very much of their time; after all, they were seen as largely ephemeral at their time. The choruses long ago became part of Eliot's poetic corpus, excerpted in the Selected Poems and provided in full in the Collected Poems; the dialogue dramatic parts have aged in being very much tied to their time (in particular, views of class and gender which are emphasized because of the essentially comic nature of the pageant). This is significant primarily as the step which led fairly directly to Murder in the Cathedral, which picks up the choric elements, drops the music hall elements (Eliot elsewhere writes of the music-hall as a living source of live theatrical sources; whether for good or ill it has not survived and no longer provides a context for The Rock (or for Sweeney Agonistes), and shifts from a comic to a tragic register. There are also references which most readers will need to dig to understand (Major Douglas gets invoked; even Canadians with some general awareness of Social Credit as a political platform (in Alberta and BC) are now unlikely to remember much of substance about it, and the only other current reason to think of it is for Pound scholars). Nevertheless, when all is said and done, this is accomplished, interesting, significant, and a window into its time.… (mehr)