It seems that much of T. S. Eliot’s poetry and plays were spiritual autobiography, and description of the slow painful transformation of a flawed self – what Eliot called the way down. This was as distinct from bliss – the way up.

According to one biographer, Lyndall Gordon, Eliot saw ‘the way up’ as a life directed by a visionary moment – an epiphany – where in an instant the mind perceives a timeless ‘reality’. Long before his move to live in England and the writing of ‘Burnt Norton’, Eliot, aged 21, had an experience which he said, many have once or twice in their lives and are unable to put into words: ‘You may call it communion with the Divine or you may call it temporary crystallization of the mind’ he later said. It took place while he was walking one day in Boston, where he plunged into a strange silence like a parting of the sea. He wrote a poem called ‘Silence’ about this experience which he never published.

This attempt to put an epiphany into words is from the last line of the first verse and the second verse of ‘Silence’:

This is the hour for which we waited –

This is the ultimate hour

When life is justified.

The seas of experience

That were so broad and deep

So immediate and steep,

Are suddenly still.

You may say what you will,

At such peace I am terrified.

                    There is nothing else beside.

The memory was to remain as a tantalizing reminder of an experience beyond his grasp. Twenty-four years later Eliot had a further epiphany when walking with Emily Hale through the rose garden at Burnt Norton, when he felt momentarily awakened to ‘the heart of light’ (see previous post).

Following this, it seems Eliot perceived that rather than a striving for ‘the way up’ there was an alternative course through which we can transcend our imperfect existence – this is ‘the way down’. Eliot believed that ‘the otherness of the divine spirit’ means that the person seeking has to divest themselves of all the attributes that are most precious to them so that there’s a chance to know what lies beyond. ‘The idea is that if divinity is unutterably other, remote, and hidden beneath a cloud of unknowing, it is necessary to strip oneself of everything one knows in order to encounter it’.

For Eliot the way down is like ‘the dark night of the soul; a conscious stripping away of what props us up – even our very identity. This comes through in the next two of ‘The Four Quarters’ where the poet tries to answer how do we live in time so as to conquer time. ‘In my beginning is my end’ … but for the Christian this is more than just our lifespan where death is the beginning of eternal life: ‘In my end is my beginning’ and a longing for a fullness of being that lies outside the round of the seasons, outside time’s scheme.

 

‘I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God …

So the darkness shall be the light …

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

… In my end is my beginning.’