It is a collection of
Eliot, “Dante,” (1929), in The Complete Prose of T.S. Feature Image: Leonardo Da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks (London Version), 1506; Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD-Old-100. The Norton Critical Edition of The Waste Land (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 54-5. This concern is clearly evident in Ash Wednesday (1930, hereafter AW). As we will see below, this theme is portrayed in many images and in the voices of many sages from whom Eliot had learned, most importantly for our purposes, those of Kṛṣṇa from the, and then concluding with a longer meditation on the harmonizing of Kṛṣṇa and Mary in, IV. It is surely not incidental to Eliot’s interest in evoking this canto that Bernard beseeches Mary, not for any particular good—no changed outcome, no altered course for Dante’s life—but rather for a particular mode of vision, now transfigured to disclose the only good that truly matters. You can receive this: ‘on whatever sphere of being
In “Dry Salvages” IV, the poem’s interest in Mary, heretofore allusive and the evocative, moves into the foreground, as the speaker beseeches the Virgin for the men set adrift on the sea, the women who anxiously await their return, and the dead swallowed in its depths, who can no longer hear the prayer the sea is ever teaching them, namely the Angelus, with its repeated invocations to Mary to “pray for us sinners, now and in the hour of our death,” and its repeated admonitions to meditate upon the mystery of the Incarnation, which will move to the fore in the fifth section (DS IV.169-183). Here is the same paradox we encountered in Burnt Norton II: desire is a movement which we do not desire, excited by, and aspiring to, the perfectly unmoving rest of love. and Mysticism, Spiritual Masterpiece, Cultivate
[30] Eliot here is no longer a magpie collecting stray twigs from the world’s heritage, but rather, a Christian poet finding the conceptual resources in another’s thought for a distinctively Christian notion: our works bear fruits in the lives of others because we are bound with them in one body, the Church (1 Cor 12:26). It also has the most perfect grammar amongst all the languages of the world; a grammar that has remained unchanged for thousands of years. This survey has brought us, at last, to the heart of this study and of Four Quartets alike, namely Eliot’s arrangement in “Dry Salvages” III of this theme of renunciation as a harmony of Dante’s and Kṛṣṇa’s voices. Of course not, but what is he getting at? Why is she an appropriate model for the kind of renunciation the narrator has just outlined? cultures, past and present, in global and local With critically acclaimed titles in history, science, higher education, consumer health, humanities, classics, and public health, the Books Division publishes 150 new books each year and maintains a backlist in excess of 3,000 titles. diversity, its relations with its hemispheric We turn to the sea, in short, to learn to say Mary’s “Fiat mihi.”. [4] Conrad Aiken, “An Anatomy of Melancholy,” in The Norton Critical Edition of The Waste Land, op. cit., 149. ... TS Eliot set the tone, but Ezra supplied the metre! All Rights Reserved. The spiritual significance of this radicalized notion of reincarnation comes to the fore later in this section, as the speaker—now perhaps Kṛṣṇa himself, as a disembodied “voice descanting (though not to the ear . . . [19] We are surely meant to think here of “the love which moves the son and the other stars” (Paradiso, in La Divina Commedia (Milan: Bietti 1966) 33.145). American Literature Journal, Indian Philosophy
Without [its allusions], twelve books would have been needed.”[5] Eliot’s quotations simply pluck a thread; the reader has to work to see the larger tapestry. Quartets his masterpiece. . The illumined man or woman understands the domain of these modes and is not attached. Moreover, the sea does not keep time by human hopes and fears; like the sleepy, civilizational rhythms of the countryside around East Coker, “keeping time . Waste Land," Eliot himself considered Four