A correspondent asked me to discuss the following three stanzas from TS Eliot’s “Little Gidding” (from Part 2 of the fourth part of the Four Quartets). First think I should say, is that the best online criticism of TS Eliot’s poetry, in every sense, is by Nasrullah Mambrol at Literary Theory and Criticism. This is the best and most readable site of its kind and, as far as I’m concerned, Mambrol offers the best (most useful and informative) analyses of Eliot’s poems that I’ve found.

Scholarly sources write that The Four Quartets is Eliot’s masterpiece, but for me the poem reads like TS Eliot garrulously imitating TS Eliot. The Four Quartets reminds me of a comment made by Alfred Einstein (Albert’s brother) regarding Mozart’s 26th piano concerto:

…It is very Mozartean, while at the same time it does not express the whole or even the half of Mozart. It is, in fact, so ‘Mozartesque’ that one might say that in it Mozart imitated himself—no difficult task for him. It is both brilliant and amiable, especially in the slow movement; it is very simple, even primitive, in its relation between the solo and the tutti, and so completely easy to understand that even the nineteenth century always grasped it without difficulty…. 

Likewise, I might write that The Four Quartets is undeniably Eliotesque. It is brilliant (even amiable in a way that The Waste Land is not) but it is, in fact, so Eliotesque that one might say: ‘In it, Eliot imitated himself’ (having already written the quintessential “Eliot poem” with the The Waste Land).

The other reason I personally don’t care for the poem—as much— is that I’m not a Christian. The Christian allusions add a layer that goes right over my head, but they’re not missed by the likes of The Modern Age: A Conservative Review, (which will once again inform us that this is Eliot’s greatest poem):

…Eliot set to work writing what would become his greatest poem, Four Quartets. The ambition of that four-part sequence was to provide the fullest account of the truly Christian life the modern world had yet seen. Having diagnosed the inadequacy of devotional poetry on several occasions, Eliot’s poetic sequence would avoid them. Rather than expressing a feeling, the poem provides us the dramatic moments as well as the full intellectual architecture of faith necessary for us to feel.

Elsewhere, one will read that The Four Quartets‘s universality transcends its Christian grounding; but one wonders if it’s mainly or wholly Christians writing that. For a reader like me (for whom the Christian allusions are meaningless) these parts of the poem just don’t land. And then there’s the poem’s obscurity. Debating whether a poem should be comprehensible without footnotes and index is mostly an academic exercise at this point. It’s mostly accepted that some poems are incomprehensible without cabooses full of critical exegesis behind them (which effectively become a part of the poem).

Or not.

Nasrullah Mambrol, in a section of his analysis (of The Four Quartets) called Approaches to Reading The Poetry (which in itself should be a tip off), will dedicate one thousand seven hundred and thirty two very fine words explaining why it’s not necessary for readers to understand the poem (the length of which rather begs the question); but I wasn’t persuaded. Mambrol goes on to close the section by asserting that the “Four Quartets must be read again and again in order for the poem finally to become an experience of truth and of beauty…” But that did not and never worked for me. Before the invention of the internet, I had —no idea— what Eliot was nattering on about, and reading the poem twenty times over didn’t change that one whit. It wasn’t until I read something like Mambrol’s brilliant analyses that I began to “experience” its “truth and beauty”. Until then, The Four Quartets was full of ‘high astounding terms’ but otherwise meaningless. One wonders whether Eliot, ultimately, would have been satisfied with being read but not comprehended.

But now that I’ve horrified TS Eliot cognoscenti, I can say that what I love about the poem, Eliot’s inimitably and beautiful poetry. And that brings me to the following three stanzas (as requested by my correspondent):

Ash on an old man’s sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house-
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.

There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth.

Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.

My first observation is that Eliot has momentarily detoured into Hymn Meter (or more strictly, Ballad Meter), the favored meter of Emily Dickinson. I’m sure there’s an analytic reading of this poem that will find it ‘significant’ that Eliot, at this moment, writes “Hymn Meter”, but I leave that speculation to those with a foot in Christianity. The meter is a (very loose) 6,8 meter (referring to the number of syllables in the lines), or a Compound Meter ending with with a 6,6 couplet; but, again, the many variant feet make it a ballad hymn. (Bold = Accented)

Ash on | an old | man’s sleeve
Is all | the ash | the burnt ros | es leave.
Dust in | the air | suspended
Marks the | place where | a stor | y ended.
Dust | in breathed | was a house–
The walls, | the wain | scot and | the mouse,
The death | of hope | and despair,
This is | the death | of air.

The meter is varied by trochees, anapests and feminine endings and the monosyllabic first foot, but enough of the metrical pattern (by modern standards) is left undisturbed so that the reader/listener recognizes the meter (subliminally or otherwise).

There | are flood | and drouth
Over | the eyes | and in | the mouth,
Dead wa |ter and | dead sand
Conten |ding for | the up |per hand.
The parched | evisc |erate soil
Gapes at | the va |nity | of toil,
Laughs |without mirth.
This is |the death | of earth.

• Notice how Eliot uses personification: “The parched eviscerate soil/Gapes…Laughs without mirth”. This is Eliot having learned a trick from Shakespeare. The personification of the inanimate world was intrinsic to Shakespeare’s art and his instinct for drama. In other words, it’s not just the characters in the play acting out the play’s drama, but also (in a sort of pscyho-dramatic sense) the world itself. Eliot, who was nothing if not a bardolator, adopts this trick of Shakespeare’s to draw the world itself into the human drama.

Eliot keeps the same pattern apart from the seventh line. I don’t know how to read that as other than a disyllabic line, but it’s close enough to trimeter that that overall pattern is recognized. There is also a pyrrhic foot.

Water | and fire | succeed
The town, | the past |ure and |the weed.
Water | and fire | deride
The sac |rifice | that we | denied.
Water | and fire | shall rot
The marred | founda |tions we | forgot,
Of sanct |uar |y and choir.
This is | the death | of wa |ter and fire.

• Shakespeare again: What and fire deride…

Once again, Eliot largely hews to the 6,8 pattern. The final line breaks the pattern, being tetrameter, but since Eliot was less interested in form than content (like Emily Dickinson), he was content to break the pattern already broken in the previous stanza.

Here is Nasrullah Mambrol’s brilliant analysis of this passage, from here:

The ash that falls “on an old man’s sleeve” as the second section begins is clearly the soot and dust in the air from London’s nightly fires in the present moment as the city endures the constant German air attacks. Where there was a house and the lives lived in it, there now is nothing. “This,” the speaker tells us, like a bell tolling the final hour, “is the death of air.” The litany of doom and terror continues as in each succeeding stanza the speaker makes the reader painfully mindful of the tragedies unfolding all around him. Existence collapses into its absence, which is death. There are the dead at sea washed up on sandy shores and the dead in the mud of the water-filled craters the bombs have left in their wake. “This is the death of earth.” There are the bombed-out churches, their ruins still smoldering, the foundation drenched and flooded with water, gone both “sanctuary and choir. / This is the death of water and fire.”

The world and all its glory having been thus reduced to its elemental baseness, which is dead, inert matter, the speaker suddenly finds himself on a foot patrol searching for smoldering fires through the ruined and deserted city streets after the bombing has ended but still during “the uncertain hours before the morning.”

Structurally, the stanzas are mostly composed of semantically distinct rhyming couplets. Each couplet is essentially added to the next like a brick, one atop the other (not meant to be a disparaging).

Ash on | an old | man’s sleeve
Is all | the ash | the burnt ros | es leave.

Followed by the wholly separate:

Dust in | the air | suspended
Marks the | place where | a stor | y ended.

• Just want to take a moment to beat a drum I’ve often beaten. There were other ways to write these stanzas without meter or rhyme. Eliot could have written free verse or defaulted to prose, but more than half the power of these verses is not just in their semantic content, but in the aesthetics of the language. The rhyme and meter add a cogency and beauty to the semantic content that neither free verse (nor prose) can match. Simply can’t be done. The formal aspects add emphasis to the content. Eliot understood this and understood that these stanzas would take on additional resonance by virtue of being bracketed by less structured verse. Each verse form burnishes the other. Current and aspiring poets can learn from this.

Anyway, the second and third stanzas break this pattern when the semantic sense runs through the couplets (in the last four lines of each). The effect, after the diffuse free verse, is of sudden focus. The meter and rhyme focus the reader’s attention, drawing attention to the horror’s being described by the narrator. There’s also an element of irony in using the flowing, lilting feeling of the hymn/ballad meter (some might associate it with nursery rhymes) to describe the observed horrors. One could argue that this is the narrator’s way of processing what he sees—a desperate, if failed, retreat into innocence. These stanzas will be followed by blank verse (in my copy —The Poems of TS Eliot Vol. 1: Collected and Uncollected Poems—formatted like tercets and possibly meant to echo Dante). This could be interpreted as the narrator trying to pull it together, but the blank verse also feels strained and artificial—possibly signalling a failing(?) attempt to comprehend the violence (to structure it) through the distancing formality of a bygone age—the verse of Shakespeare and Milton. The blank verse is followed by Part 3, and a return to (strongly iambic) free verse, in which Eliot will write, perhaps tellingly:

We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.

It’s possible that “antique drum” is a reference to the meter of blank verse.

I have read that TS Eliot wanted to write something in verse that would be equivalent to Beethoven’s achievement in his late quartets—hence the name given to the poem — The Four Quartets. What’s interesting though, is that I find Little Gidding to be more like Beethoven’s Hammerklavier, Piano Sonata 29, Opus 106. If you’re curious to know what I mean, go to this video (and go to 35 minute mark in case the link doesn’t land you there). After the slow movement, there’s a fascinating preamble, where Beethoven seems to recapitulate the history of music. First come octaves, then toccata-like scale passages of 32nd notes, then at 36:34, we go from the Renaissance/Early Baroque to Bach, with a contrapuntal and imitative passage between the right and left hand, then to another toccata-like flourish that ends in an explosion of emphatic Beethoven. All this is followed by a massive fugue—one might almost call it a free-verse fugue. There’s a comparison to be made between this passage and what TS Eliot did. TS Eliot goes from the simplistic ballad hymn, to blank verse, and then to free verse, as though recapitulating the history of poetic forms (and by extension the history that led to this moment of war), but then again this might be reading much too much into the formal aspects of the poem.

But anyway, that’s all I have to say on that.

by me, October 26th 2025