T. S. Eliot
“You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
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.
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”
While the notes of the mystic St John of the Cross ring out clearly in these lines, his voice is not the only one audible. There is contained within this passage both the mystic’s gnomic wisdom and the fussing of the narrator; the interaction between the two is central to what is going on here. The narrator’s voice is characterised by a parenthetical, self-correcting syntax: ‘You say I am repeating | Something I have said before. I shall say it again. | Shall I say it again?’ The lines are coloured by both heavy caesurae and a hesitant, self-questioning tone. The narrator’s voice contrasts with the mystic’s riddles, which are marked by coincidence of line and sense unit; across two-line units, the adverbial clauses (‘In order to possess what you do not possess’) complete the first line and the main clause the second (‘You must go by the way of dispossession’). The mystic’s voice betrays a studied calm that serves as a counterpoint to the narrator’s befuddlement.
A distance thus opens between St John of the Cross and the poem more broadly. Responding to this difference, Modernism and Religion presents Four Quartets as not a mystical poem in and of itself, but rather a poem that is desperately trying to deploy mystical texts, religious experiences of its own devising, and reflections upon them in contemporary contexts to serve a particular purpose: to speak to a largely secular audience facing the anguish of wartime defeat. Far from acting as a guide, St John of the Cross gestures in a direction otherwise closed off to the poem. His voice, notably distinct from the harried utterances of the speaker, is merely tried out for a moment. Eliot would try a different approach to the mystical in ‘Little Gidding’.
Image: Lady Ottoline Morrell, Thomas Stearns Eliot, 1934, photograph. Image courtesy of a Creative Commons license.
