This last week I read 220 pages of T.S. Eliot. It was an experience and a half. After finishing the Four Quartets, I felt that he had taught me something, somehow, that I had always wanted to know but never knew how to express. But I also had the impression that if someone asked me what I thought it was he had taught me, I could only tell them that it was what he had said, and refer them to the poem. That's unfortunate, but may be a drawback in my own experience of the truth. Poetry aims at communicating truths that otherwise we could never fully appreciate.

I love the Romantic Poets, and so I have studied them more fairly extensively. His commentary on their ideas, very present in the Quartets, especially, helped me understand them better than anything else I have ever read. I'll try and put some of the parrallels down here, show where he and Wordsworth have intersected. (I need a break from good ol' Richard II - a play that I realized yesterday has commentary on salvific theology. Whoa.)

From The Dry Salvages:

The moments of happiness - not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination -
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness...

This can be taken as a commentary on Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. It is the story of a man who is coming back to a place that he was years ago. When he arrives, he reflects on his prior experiences, and his intermediate experiences of the first experience that he had had in his memory.

Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur...

Though absent long,
These forms of beauty have not been to me,
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration...

This is much longer than Eliot's little section, but Eliot's section is parasitic, in my view, on Wordsworth, and so that makes sense. This is not even the sum of it, it's just showing that there is a similarity. Wordsworth goes on to say that, it's not just a matter of feeling, but a matter of understanding. Revisiting the experiences is when we:

...are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

I take sight for an image of understanding (uncontroversially, I think). See, as Eliot says, we have moved through the feeling of an experience to accessing the being of that experience, the truth of it. If you go back up and check the order, you'll see it flows in the order of Wordsworth's poem. So, that's so far.

Eliot's not done yet, though.

I have said before that
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations - not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

It's hard not to keep going, but this has helped me to understand something that used to puzzle me in Wordsworth. What did he mean, I always wondered, when he said in returning to the silvan Wye, he came with knew knowledge. (this is still progressing chronologically through Tintern)

...For I have learned to
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.

The connections here should be fairly plain. The backward glance is what has possessed Wordsworth with this "still sad music of humanity." A little context (which, Eliot, who was very familiar with William Wordsworth knew plainly) is that here Wordsworth is approaching the Wye (the river flowing above Tintern Abbey) with the knowledge imparted to him through the terrible experiences he had gone through five years before. He was visiting the Wye after the French Revolution and the Terror (ah ha! "the silent Terror" Eliot's line gains a new meaning!) had disillusioned him from his radical political mindset and faith in humanity's ability to progress, and he had lost his fiancee to the political rift between France and England that prohibited travel. He didn't see the daughter that she was pregnant with at the time for years after the poem was written. It's no surprise that he prefaces the above quotes with these lines:

...And so I dare to hope
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was, when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature fled; more like a man
Flying from something he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.

Well, this post has gotten long again. I hope that anyEliot fans unfamiliar with Wordsworth find it somewhat useful.

The Dry Salvages is a poem that really caught me up in the Incarnation. Which is just a good thing for a poem to do. Little Gidding also hits on the theme of memory and its proper use in the well-lived life. These lines struck me as excellent. I will end with them.

III
There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attatchment to self and to things and to persons, detatchment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them,
indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lifes - unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation - not less of love but expanding of love beyond desire, and so
liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.