Eliot Written in a Country Churchyard: The Elegy and Four Quartets

Author(s): George T. Wright

Source: ELH , Summer, 1976, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Summer, 1976), pp. 227-243
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2872473

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ELIOT WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD:
THE ELEGY AND FOUR QUARTETS

BY GEORGE T. WRIGHT

Gray and Wordsworth are frequently discussed together, Gray

and Eliot never. There is scarcely a mention of Gray in writing
about Eliot, none at all of Eliot in any writing about Gray, and Eliot
himself makes only casual, condescending reference to Gray or his
Elegy: "The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in the Country
Churchyard (to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder
than that in the Coy Mistress."1 Yet the two poets have much in
common: both were modest, courteous, aloof, disdainful men; they
both possessed an erudition unusual among the poets of their age,
an erudition which exhibits itself in abundant, and deliberate,
echoes of ancient and modern writers; both produced a small
number of dense poems, which happily include a few complex and
ambitious masterpieces; both wrote comic, whimsical verses-on
cats! Their most celebrated works, the Elegy and The Waste Land,
set a standard for a certain kind of poetry for at least a generation.
Yet both, in later years, wrote almost no poems at all, Eliot devoting
himself to plays and criticism, Gray to the strenuous annotation of
his Linnaeus. Exuberance was in neither a leading virtue; both
have been scorned as prim, fearful of sex, fearful of life. Gray was a
lifelong bachelor; Eliot had a miserable first marriage; the poems
and biographies of both give a sense of a man to whom the normal
joys of love, family, and children were inaccessible, a condition
which both men met as they could with Anglican consolations. Both
mourned in youth the death of a valued companion; grown old,
each "gained from Heaven ('twas all he wished) a friend."
We know that it was natural for Eliot, when preparing to write a
poem or play of his own, to use an older work on related themes as a
structural framework. His way of doing this, however, was so far
from obvious that he had sometimes to point out the connection
himself. The resemblance of The Family Reunion to Aeschylus'
Eumenides is clear enough to any reader; but it was Eliot himself
who, after critics had left it unobserved for several years, revealed
that The Cocktail Party was based on Euripides' Alcestis.2 Among

George T. Wright 227

ELH 43 227-243 (1976)

Copyright c 1976 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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his poems, the indebtedness of "Gerontion" to Tennyson's " Ulys-
ses," of "Coriolan" to Shakespeare's play, of The Waste Land to
medieval legends of the Fisher King, and the use of Biblical and
Shakespearean stories as the basis for three of the Ariel poems,
suggest that, original as the form of Eliot's poems almost always is,
like Shakespeare he characteristically developed his major works
from a base provided by an older writer. There is considerable
internal evidence to suggest that a possible base from which Eliot
evolved Four Quartets is the Elegy Written in a Country Church-
yard.
I do not mean to imply that Eliot secretly admired Gray's verse.
His strictures against eighteenth-century poetry and its lack of
"4amplitude" and "Ccatholicity" (OPP, p. 61) easily apply to Gray;
and when, in the same essay "What Is a Classic?" (1944), written
shortly after Four Quartets, he condemns unnecessary complexity,
he may have Milton mainly in mind, but his words describe Gray's
work also:

But complexity for its own sake is not a proper goal: its purpose
must be, first, the precise expression of finer shades of feeling
and thought; second, the introduction of greater refinement and
variety of music. When an author appears, in his love of the
elaborate structure, to have lost the ability to say anything sim-
ply; when his addiction to pattern becomes such that he says
things elaborately which should properly be said simply, and
thus limits his range of expression, the process of complexity
ceases to be quite healthy, and the writer is losing touch with the
spoken language. (OPP, p. 59)

There is good reason to believe that Eliot took just this view of
Gray's elaborate diction and syntax. "In the eighteenth century,"
he goes on, "we are oppressed by the limited range of sensibility,
and especially in the scale of religious feeling" (OPP, p. 61). But
just as "Gerontion" explores dimensions of religious feeling absent
in Tennyson's "Ulysses,"' the Quartets seem almost to be going
over the same ground as the Elegy but with an infinitely more
refined instrument for sounding metaphysical and religious sub-
tleties.
The ground is indeed similar. Both the Elegy and Four Quartets
are quiet, elegiac poems, set in country places whose landscapes
and remoteness from the pressures of urban life encourage in the
meagerly characterized speaker-poet a train of melancholy reflec-
tions on the relation of the dead to the living, of the past (and other

228 Eliot Written in a Country Churchyard

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temporal dimensions) to the present, of time to eternity, and of
himself to his world. Gray's hamlet and Eliot's villages are alike
masterfully evoked for us by generalizing tableaux, and they serve
as places of refuge from an urban world inhabited by people who
have lost sight of their purposes and whose pursuits are empty and
vain. The country churchyard, as we know and Eliot knew, is not far
in time but very distant in feeling from the madding crowd of Lon-
don. Eliot's quiet places are, by modern conveyances, about
equally near to, and in spirit remote from,

the gloomy hills of London,

Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate.3

In both poems the important measurements are not of distance

but of time, for the signs by which we mark the passage of time
measure our mortality. Both poems make much of twilight and
gathering darkness and of the sounds that signal the beginning or
end of day: crowing cock, foxhunter's horn, bell, angelus, curfew.
The moment in the churchyard at nightfall is a moment of intersec-
tion, to use Eliot's term, like "The moment in the draughty church
at smokefall" (BN, II). Gray's "pealing anthem'> is echoed by Eliot's
"antique drum" (LG, III), his "long-drawn aisle and fretted vault"
by Eliot's "<sanctuary and choir" (LG, II), his "uncouth rhymes and
shapeless sculpture" by Eliot's "dull facade and the tombstone"
(LG, I), and his "unlettered muse" by Eliot's "illegible stone" (LG,
V).
Indeed, much of the imagery of Eliot's poem echoes that of
Gray's-enough to make us begin to hear the Elegy as prominently
in the musical background of the Quartets. (Unconscious perhaps,
but it is hard to believe that, as alert as he was to literary echoes,
Eliot would, from 1934 to 1942, have remained unaware of his debt
to one of the most famous poems in English-one which had, inci-
dentally, taken about the same length of time, off and on, to com-
pose.) The yew figures in both poems; it occurs to both poets to use
the not too usual word "twittering.' Burnt Norton, like the Elegy,
presents a vision of what might have been, and of "the madding
crowd" of London; East Coker offers a retrospective picture of vil-
lage life, which includes such details, familiar to readers of the
Elegy, as a blazing fire, "Mirth of those long since under earth"
(EC, I), and attention to chores and harvests; The Dry Salvages,
though mainly concerned with river and sea, deals also with pro-

George T. Wright 229

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jections into the future (as does the Elegy in its prevision of the
poet's death and epitaph) and returns at last to the yew and "The
life of significant soil" (DS, V); Little Gidding, more strongly than
any of the others, presents a sacred setting, a "neglected spot" in
which the speaker meditates on the dead, animadverts on the Eng-
lish Civil War, and comes thoughtfully to terms with his own world.
To be sure, Eliot seems more directly conscious of many other
writers than Gray, but, as we shall see, the issues confronting both
writers are much the same. And beyond the general similarities
cited above, we can detect verbal echoes, of which perhaps the
accompanying chart gives the most impressive examples, examples
which ought at least to permit us to surmise that the words of the
Elegy were reverberating somewhere in the back of Eliot's mind as
he wrote the Quartets.4

Gray Eliot

The curfew tolls the knell of 1) Time and the bell have buried
parting day the day. (BN, IV)
2) The tolling bell
Measures time not our time .
(DS, I)

Now fades the glimmering Now the light falls ...

landscape on the sight And the deep lane insists on the
And all the air a solemn stillness direction
holds Into the village ....
In a warm haze the sultry light
Save that from yonder... tower Is absorbed, not refracted, by
The moping owl ... gray stone.
The rude forefathers of the The dahlias sleep in the empty
hamlet sleep. silence.
Wait for the early owl. (EC, I)

rude forefathers quiet-voiced elders (EC, II)

Or busy housewife ply her . time counted by anxious

evening care . . . worried women
Lying awake, calculating the
future,
Trying to unweave, unwind,
unravel
And piece together the past and
the future . . . (DS, I)

230 Eliot Written in a Country Churchyard

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 Gray Eliot
Can storied urn or animated bust 1) Dust in the air suspended
Back to its mansion call the Marks the place where a story
fleeting breath? ended.
Can Honour's voice provoke the Dust inbreathed was a house
silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull cold (LG, I I)
ear of Death? 2) But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl
of rose-leaves .. . (BN, I)
3) Then fools' approval stings,
and honour stains. (LG, II)
4) All time is unredeemable.
(BN, I)

neglected spot the world's end (LG, I)

... the genial current of the soul The river is within us ... (DS, I)

Full many aflower is born to And the unseen eyebeam crossed,

blush unseen for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are
looked at. (BN, I)

Some mute inglorious Milton And a few who died forgotten,

here may rest In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and
quiet
(LG, III)

. . . Left the warm precincts of . left my body on a distant

the cheerful day ( = died) shore ( = died) (LG, II)

If chance, by lonely If you came this way,

Contemplation led Taking the route you would be
likely to take ... (LG, I)

'Oft have we seen him at the I met one walking, loitering and
peep of dawn hurried
Brushing with hasty steps the As if blown towards me like the
dews away metal leaves
To meet the sun upon the upland Before the urban dawn wind
lawn.' unresisting.
(LG, II)

'Approach and read (for thou . old stones that cannot be

can'st read) the lay, deciphered ... (EC, V)
Graved on the stone beneath yon
aged thorn.'

George T. Wright 231

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 The most remarkable verbal parallel has to do with words denot-
ing absence of sound and motion, and especially "stillness" and its
double meanings. That the word is central for Gray I have argued
elsewhere.5 For Eliot, too, it is crucial, and he plays on its meanings
in several of the most memorable passages:

Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts
(BN, V)

Words, he tells us in a moment,, "will not stay in place, / Will not

stay still." Earlier, he has written: "At the still point, there the
dance is." In East Coker, too: "I said to my soul, be still, and let the
dark come upon you"-exactly Gray's situation in the Elegy. After
the turn which the Epitaph makes at the end, Gray might echo
Eliot's later line also: "So the darkness shall be the light, and the
stillness the dancing" (EC, III). "We must be still and still mov-
ing," East Coker concludes, and so might Gray.6
The importance of stillness to both poems is not merely adven-
titious, for both are wrestling with essentially the same problems.
In both, the settings, and the poet's reflections on his own personal
situation and, to some degree, on the history of England, serve to
focus his central subject: the position of man as a creature of time
and place, finally subject to God's will, whose anxieties are re-
solved by God's love. Both Gray and Eliot work through a sensibil-
ity intensely aware of man's mortality and of the rural and urban
life-patterns with which their contemporaries, and earlier people
too, have tried to hold off death. Above all, the speakers are aware of
time as the medium of life, and the central problem that emerges
from both poems' reflections is that of redeeming time. That is,
each speaker works hard to discern in the human position some
value or system of values that he can oppose to the apparently
disastrous fact of linear time. Both poems try to cope with the ques-
tion, "What is a life?" and are haunted by the terrible answer,
"CNothing-in the long run, every human life comes down to noth-
ing." Against that answer, the evidence for which they both ac-
knowledge to be fearfully strong,7 these two somber and lonely
men, two centuries apart, struggle to make a more consoling one
carry conviction.
It is clear to both poets that the linear process of time, whatever

232 Eliot Written in a Country Churchyard

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its fleeting pleasures and consolations, kills us all and withholds,
corrupts, or destroys what we value. What both Gray and Eliot
attempt in these poems is to brood more deeply than usual about
time to see if they cannot make out some extenuating considera-
tions. Each places himself in what Mircea Eliade calls a "Center,"8
a sacred place (Eliot in several of them successively), a still place
where the conditions are right for the dead to speak to the living-
that is, for the ordinary limitations of mortality to be transcended. In
the Elegy everything else withdraws and "leaves the world to dark-
ness"' and to Gray-that is, to a mode of perception which is not that
of ordinary vision. Similarly, though life in Eliot is ordinarily a
"form of limitation / Between un-being and being" (BN, V), the key
to the problem of time is to be found in moments of "intersection,"
when linear time intersects with other dimensions of experience.
The search for such moments, which alone constitute reality, is
likely to be more successful in some places than others: a place like
Little Gidding is "Cthe world's end," a sacred Center, but
There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city-
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.
(LG, I)

In such a place, or in Gray's churchyard, meditation-which is to

say, communication with the dead, with spirits, "the impossible
union / Of spheres of existence" (DS, V)-may occur: "The com-
munication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language
of the living" (LG, I). What each speaker does, in effect, is from this
sacred Center to send his soul "through the invisible" (in Edward
Fitzgerald's phrase) to explore other dimensions of time and possi-
bility, for the speaker cannot fully determine his own position until
he has not merely described his physical whereabouts but also
searched the radial connections of the present moment with
courses of thought and feeling that are past, future, possible, per-
manent, or eternal. It is only at the points of juncture between any
two such dimensions-at what we should today call their
interfaces-that we can experience reality, even if we "Cannot bear
very much" of it (BN, I).

II

The connection between the Elegy and the Quartets should be-

George T. Wright 233

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come clearer as we speak of them in these terms. The debt here is
that of a great later poem to a great earlier poem in the same tradi-
tion. Whatever name we give to it, the kind of poem at issue here
brings together the basic elements of a familiar modern predica-
ment: the perceiving, anxious speaker in a definite and quiet place,
at a holy hour, musing upon his temporal situation in a profoundly
shadowed world. Although there are earlier prototypes in the litera-
ture of gardens, from Chaucer to Marvell, Gray's is the first major
poem in which the isolated spot is continuous with the world
around it: the stones are near, the tower beyond, and the madding
crowd in the ultimate distance. To use the terms of Sir Kenneth
Clark's Landscape into Art,9 the churchyard may be somewhat
idealized, but it is no mere symbolic garden. On the contrary, it is
part of our familiar world, and Gray helps us see it with something
of what Clark calls "<the natural vision,"' common among the great
painters of the nineteenth century. Poets also continued the tradi-
tion of the personal landscape poem, as we may term it; among
perhaps hundreds of examples, the most telling are probably
Wordsworth's "Composed on Westminster Bridge," Coleridge's
"Dejection: An Ode," Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," and, much
later, Yeats's "The Wild Swans at Coole."
In all these poems, which can only be touched on here, the prob-
lem for the poet is to convey his sense of the natural place and the
passing moment as constituting an occasion for dimensions of real-
ity to intersect. No one quite puts it this way until Four Quartets;
Eliot, here as elsewhere, goes to the heart of the subject. The latent
ambiguity of stillness in Gray's poem (death is still, but so is the
peace of God, which the quiet evening prefigures) is raised in
Eliot's work to a profound paradox (it is only by going through the
stillness of death, of form, that we reach the life beyond).
The movement of all the good poems in this tradition is away
from any rational philosophy which presumes to formulate life and,
in so doing, presides over the disappearance of religious feeling. In
the struggle of Romantic and modem literature to show how expe-
rience eludes our logical categories, the personal landscape poem has
a central position; and one significant feature of this genre, as later
with the novel, is that the precise location of the speaker-poet in
space permits him to wander in time. Discursive lyric poems, from
Renaissance sonnets to Thomson's The Seasons, cannot violate a
time-scheme they never establish, and none is established when
the speaker's whereabouts are not given. Under such conditions the

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time of verbs is only logical and abstract, not flexible, not mischiev-
ous. But once a consciousness is placed in a setting, his tenses and
times can vary greatly, and in nineteenth-century poetry the simple
public time-scheme of past, present, and future that had charac-
terized earlier English lyrics grows richer. In comparison, Roman-
tic poetry moves much more freely from one time to another; its
verb-sequences reflect much more faithfully the complex sense that
all of us have of many time-levels co-existing within us and relating
to each other in subtle and elusive ways. Progressives, conditionals,
perfects, futures, passives, and pasts now appear in quick succes-
sion, as in this stanza and a half of the "Ode to a Nightingale":
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain-
To thy high requiem become a sod.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown.. 10

Among eighteenth-century poems the Elegy is unusually deft in

weaving together temporal dimensions in a complex pattern of con-
tinual cross-reference. The "forefathers of the hamlet" may be laid
"for ever" in their graves, but a moment later they are passing
before us in all their energetic occupations. Later the uncertainty
about what the villagers may or might have done rouses them again
to our vision. It is because the tenses change continually in the first
ninety-two lines that Gray's reflections seem authentic, like
thoughts really passing through a man's mind; the device is a par-
ticularly happy one in a poem that makes so much of the fact that
memorials reach from one time-level to another, from past to
present, from present to future, and from temporary to eternal. Un-
fortunately, what the structure of interlocking temporal perspec-
tives requires at the end to validate the Epitaph's position is some
version, some vision, of transfiguration that Gray, the only poet of
his time for whom the problem even arises, is unable to provide.
Heaven is permitted to make everything simple, and the powerful,

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almost mythical opposition between stillness and energy gives way
to a feeble moral division between "merits" and "frailties." The
Epitaph seems to dissolve: in a curious turn on Berkeley's thought,
it tells us not only that we may trust to God to guarantee our percep-
tions but that we may leave to Him all perception whatever.
Yet the very uselessness which is the Epitaph's verdict on itself
(the poem is an epitaph for epitaphs) becomes the means by which
it achieves a different, an aesthetic status. Geoffrey Hartman has
shown how Wordsworth's poetry springs, in large part, from
tombstone inscriptions, the essential feature of which is that Nature
speaks to the living, and speaks in settings of special significance.'
Wordsworth himself, in one of his three essays on epitaphs, speaks
of a parish-church as "a visible centre of a community of the living
and the dead"'2 and acknowledges the power of that style of
epitaph in which the dead address the living (pp. 140-41). Epitaphs
constitute, in effect, the language of the dead, "The communication
/ Of the dead'" (LG, I) conveyed by the poet on their behalf into
English words that are "tongued with fire beyond the language of
the living" (LG, I). But every poem is in this sense an epitaph: the
voice of a man speaking to men, speaking in advance (at first) from
his own grave, and Nature, life, the wind speaking through him.
From the flow of time, from the flow of speech (which, especially in
modern poems, and notably in Four Quartets, becomes a symbol of
the flow of human time), nothing remains but the poem to speak of
motion and sound gone still.
Gray, to be sure, never got so far; it was hardly possible for a man
of his time to see the realm of art as (like Heaven) an autonomous
region not merely reflecting and dependent upon the ordinary
linear world but in some sense superior to it. Quite the contrary, he
tells us finally: all memorials, though we want and "<require" them,
are ultimately useless. In effect, the Epitaph is barred from becom-
ing a symbol, and Earl Wasserman's diagnosis of eighteenth-
century poetry explains why:
The unresolved dualism of the poets and aestheticians results in
a dualistic poetry: the scene is perceived and then felt or as-
sociated or thought, but seldom, if ever, apprehended in the
perception. It is therefore a poetry of hobbling simile, rather than
symbol. And it is a poetry that never fulfills itself to allow the
poet to withdraw from a self-supporting creation; rather, it ends
only when the poet has spent himself, the poem being sustained
as long as he continues to annotate his sensory data with signifi-
cances.13

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 Romantic poetry has deeper resources. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. speaks
of meaning "summoned out of the very surface of nature itself' by
Romantic poets,14 and recently J. Hillis Miller, studying the form of
one major poem in the same tradition, Wordsworth's on Westmins-
ter Bridge, has stressed both the opposition between stillness and
motion and the function of the poem's negations (and of its figures
of speech, especially personification) in "rippling the representa-
tional surface."15 There remains much to say about the related ways
in which stillness and its opposites function as formal metaphoric
centers in other poems in this tradition, from "the still stream" over
which the song of Keats's nightingale fades, to the "still sky" and
"'still water" about which, nineteen years after his first sight of
them, Yeats's swans still wheel and drift. But Four Quartets is the
most extended deliberate attempt to give artistic form to virtually
all the philosophic and poetic implications of the personal land-
scape poem.
Where the temporal complexity of Gray's poem, sustained so ex-
pertly for many stanzas, goes slack toward the end, especially in the
Epitaph, the sections of Four Quartets constantly shift grammatical
tense and mood, tone and feeling. Throughout the poem Eliot
maintains our sense that human experience is always multi-
dimensional, the present constantly crossed by past, future, and
might-have-been. For some readers, some of the colloquial shifts by
which he effects changes in point of view or tone are unconvincing
("That was a way of putting it-not very satisfactory"-EC, II), but
whether or not they are always managed quite right, the devices he
uses have the effect of ushering us from scene to scene, or from
perspective to perspective. "Look at this," he keeps saying, or
"Look at it this way," like a guide to a museum of archaeological
exhibits from different historical eras.16 Above all, he wants us to
avoid the conventional ways of thinking about time, not only the
"superficial notions of evolution" (DS, II) encouraged by
nineteenth-century progressive and Darwinian thought, but also
the banalities which often seem true but really falsify our experi-
ence of time:

1) that experience makes us wiser-it is more likely to make us

complacent; the "knowledge derived from experience .
imposes a pattern, and falsifies" (EC, II);
2) that time makes anguish easier to bear-it doesn't: "People
change, and smile: but the agony abides" (DS, II);

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 3) that time heals the sufferer-it can't, because the sufferer is
no longer the same person (DS, III);
4) that with age we grow more used to the ways of the world-
we don't: "As we grow older / The world becomes stranger,
the pattern more complicated I Of dead and living." (EC, V);
5) that age brings serenity-absolutely false:
What was to be the value' of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only a knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. (EC, II);
6) that age brings wisdom-nonsense, as the foregoing passage
indicates, and it continues:
Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

This point is made again and again, in "'Old men ought to be ex-
plorers" (EC, V) and in Little Gidding's ghastly disclosure of

the gifts reserved for age

To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
(LG, II)

It is in the nature of time that it enforces these constant revalua-

tions, deteriorations, extrusions of past into present, new scars from
old wounds.
Here as in all his poetry Eliot is at pains to establish time as

238 Eliot Written in a Country Churchyard

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non-linear, to attack the conventional notion that time merely "runs
on, runs on."17 If it were merely linear, it would merely destroy.
But "Time the destroyer is [also] Time the preserver" (DS, IL). The
temporal art of music, or of poetry, moves in time but "Only by the
form, the pattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness" (BN,
V). God, art, one's perceptions, and even time itself preserve ele-
ments from the flux that seems to spare nothing.
The linear powers of time are further qualified by our awareness
that time is also cyclical. The patterns of circular movement de-
scribed most fully in East Coker remind us of the strong repetitive
element in human existence-not merely the daily round or the
yearly cycle but the endless recapitulation of the past in the
present, of one life in another, of one's whole history in every new
beginning. Every significant event re-enacts, in Eliade's terms,
"'the eternal return,"'8 a primordial archetype rather than a new
development.
But the most impressive argument against the conception of time
as merely linear is the religious insight at the heart of the poem:
that every moment is, at least potentially, a moment of "intersec-
tion," a moment in which our ordinary linear experience is miracu-
lously in touch with another dimension of reality-not merely with
past or future, but with permanence, with eternity. Again in
Eliade's terms, we feel that such sacred moments are essentially
re-enacting primal creation, or, in the word Eliot uses, the "Incar-
nation," the event of human history which, in its integration of
divine and human, resolves all the contradictions inherent in the
human experience of time:

Here the impossible union

Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled .
(DS, V)

Eliot's solution to the problem of time is familiar enough to read-

ers of modern literature. In The Waste Land he had already used
Joyce's mythical method of giving resonance to the present by con-
necting its events with archetypes drawn from the past. For Yeats
the present is continually invaded by images from the Anima
Mundi, so that deeply as personal, national, or world history may
touch us, we live always on a multitude of stages. Similar multiple
perspectives on the moment are offered to us by such seers as
Freud, Mann, and Kafka. Proust's counter to the relentlessness of

George T. Wright 239

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temporal sequence is posed in private and personal terms-terms
which, as we might expect from a writer strongly influenced by
Ruskin, bear some resemblance to the terms of Gray. The whole of
A la recherche du temps perdu, with its pictures of village life
beside its pictures of the lives of the urban powerful, with its shy
protagonist sensitively observing the world around him (its grand-
eur, its corruption, its transiency) and composing at last his own
epitaph, proof against time, is in a way a magnificent amplification
of the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.
To redeem time, to embody their assurance that time is not, or not
merely, consecutive, modern writers consciously construct worlds,
works of art, that exist, for a while at least, apart from time. It is a
solution that as a poet Gray adopted but that as a man of his age he
could not claim. The paradox is for him too inapprehensible; the
opposition between stillness and motion, stillness and sound, re-
main oppositions for him, whereas in Eliot's symbolist imagination
they become at once oppositions and identities. Where for Gray
poems and epitaphs are finally vain, Eliot, even more deeply reli-
gious, and at last in his way affirming life, tells us:
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.
(LG, V)

All actions, all moments, reverberate endlessly for Eliot. And the
reverberations are no mere illusions. It may be that "<the still point"
at the center of things will free us from motion, yet "at the still
point, there the dance is" (BN, II). At least no human perception
can ever divest itself absolutely of the motion natural to our condi-
tion; and the work of art that reflects that condition, though its
source and end be "form" and "pattern," is no inert Unity but a
"complete consort dancing together" (LG, V).
One measure perhaps of Eliot's superior mastery of the paradox
that comprehends both stillness and motion is to be found in the
two poets' treatment of themselves when they are confronted, to-
ward the end of each poem, by its only other fairly substantial
character: in the Elegy "some hoary-headed swain"; in the Quar-
tets, "some dead master" (LG, II). Gray, moving from the village
dead to himself, begins, in that notoriously clumsy phrase, "For
thee who . . ."-a way of referring to himself so circumspect as to
drive scholars into over-ingenious theories about a stonecutter.
Thereafter the poet is described by the old swain in the third person.
Eliot's speaker, in a curious echo of Gray, even to the emphatic use

240 Eliot Written in a Country Churchyard

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of an obscure second-person pronoun, has a similarly elusive iden-
tity:
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another's voice cry, "What! are you here!"
Although we were not. I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other ...
(LG, II)

Gray's ambiguity is mere trifling, Eliot's deliberate and functional,

reinforcing the whole poem's doubtfulness about dimensions to the
point where the speaker as well as the ''familiar compound ghost"'
is "Both intimate and unidentifiable." Indeed, the textures of the
passages are here so different that no earlier reader of Four Quar-
tets has been disposed to interpret as addressed in part to Thomas
Gray and his Elegy-or to the long tradition of the personal land-
scape lyric-that dubious troubled question, "'What! are you
here!' "19

The University of Minnesota

FOOTNOTE S

"'The Metaphysical Poets," Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932),
p. 247. Two pages earlier, of a poem by Lord Herbert: "The effect, at its best, is far
less artificial than that of an ode by Gray." Small points about Eliot's indebtedness to
Gray are made in D. E. S. Maxwell, The Poetry of T. S. Eliot (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1952), p. 27; and in Peter Milward, A Commentary on T. S. Eliot's Four
Quartets (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1968), pp. 54, 58-59. The only critic to make
much of the connection is cited in n. 19.
2On Poetry and Poets (New York: Noonday Press, 1961), p. 91. Subsequent refer-
ences to this volume abbreviate it as OPP and cite the page numbers in parentheses
in the text.
3Burnt Norton, Section III, in T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-
1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958). All quotations are from this volume, and
their exact source will be indicated in parentheses in the text by the initials of the
quartet's title and the number of the section.
4I have included here only the most striking parallels, preferring to leave a
number of more doubtful ones uncited rather than weaken my case. Italicized words
and phrases are common to both poems, or are similar in sound or meaning to, or in
direct contrast with, words and phrases in the other poem.
5 My article, "Stillness and the Argument of Gray's Elegy," forthcoming in Modern
Philology, maintains that the poem is constructed upon the symbolic polarities of
stillness-motion and stillness-sound, which convey the whole opposition between
death and life, an opposition which the Epitaph stands on its head.
6 Still or stillness occurs seventeen times in the Quartets; silent or silence ten
times; quiet or quietly three times; soundless, voiceless, and unheard once each.
Some of these words, and mute, noiseless, and dumb, appear six times in the much
shorter Elegy. The idea of stillness is, of course, frequently conveyed in lengthier
phrases in both poems.

George T. Wright 241

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 7Gray's dire verdict, "The paths of glory lead but to the grave," and its amplifica-
tion in the rhetorical questions of Stanza 11, are echoed in Eliot's list, in East Coker,
of the houses that go "under the sea," the dancers that go "under the hill" (EC, II)
and the procession of

captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,

The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors

who "all go into the dark" (EC, III).

8 See especially Chapter 1, "Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred,"
Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, tr. Willard R. Trask
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1959), pp. 20-65.
9 London: John Murray, 1949. Clark tells us that "ideal landscape" is dead: "the
feeling that'some God is in this place' and has given to nature an unusual perfection,
was bundled away [by Malthus and Darwin] . . . and can never be revived" (p. 73).
Yet Eliot gives us this feeling (as do some more recent poets), which suggests that
ideal landscape poetry is still possible. It is tempting, too, to see Eliot as comparable
to Cezanne in being a modern appropriator of the elements of the art of Poussin, a'
propos of whose meager British following Clark writes: "The idea that an apprecia-
tion of nature can be combined with a desire for intellectual order has never been
acceptable in England" (p. 70). Eliot, of course, was American. Dare one, along the
same lines, mention Turner's great paintings not as a source but as an analogue of the
powerful sea-imagery of The Dry Salvages?
10 The sense of varying time-levels in this passage is somewhat reinforced by the
infinitives and a past participle, but I have not marked these because they are not,
like the changing tenses and moods of finite verbs, unusual in earlier lyric poetry.
On the incidence of progressive verbs in different eras of English poetry, see the
Appendix to my article, "The Lyric Present: Simple Present Verbs in English
Poems," PMLA, 88 (May, 1974), 563-79.
"See "Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry," pp. 206-30, and
"Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci," pp. 311-36, in Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond
Formalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
12 "Upon Epitaphs" (I), in Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. William
Knight, Vol. II (London: Macmillan, 1896), 133-34.
13 "The English Romantics: The Grounds of Knowledge," in Romanticism: Point
of View, edd. Robert F. Gleckner and Gerald E. Enscoe (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 335.
14 "The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery," in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the
Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), p. 110.
'5 "The Still Heart: Poetic Formr in Wordsworth," New Literary History, 2
(Winter, 1971), 306.
16 Although Eliot's tense shifts occur mainly as he moves from one passage to
another, in a few places the rapid shifts have an intentionally bewildering effect,
e.g.:

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
(BN, I)

242 Eliot Written in a Country Churchyard

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Here, too, as in Gray (or Wordsworth, as Miller shows) the negatives have the effect of
blurring what has or has not occurred, is or is not occurring.
'7 As Yeats puts it in " 'I Am of Ireland,' " The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
(New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 262.
18 See especially The Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History, tr.
Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954).
19 Except Hugh Kenner, who, in The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1971) partly anticipates the points made here when on p. 438 he compares
the Elegy with East Coker in particular and points out its debt to the Augustan
tradition of voiceless anonymity. He had made this observation earlier in "Eliot and
the Tradition of the Anonymous," College English, 28 (May, 1967), 558-64. Donald
Davie, responding to this suggestion, makes some valuable observations about the
Quartets' debt to an eighteenth-century (and earlier) "tradition of prosaic verse"
characteristically represented rather by Johnson than Gray. See "Anglican Eliot," in
Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Waste Land, ed. A.
Walton Litz (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 181-96.

George T. Wright 243

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