Time Conquered

By Ben Haslam and Suzanne Gosney

Time — an ever-advancing current many of us feel caught in, acutely aware of its swift passage, especially as we age. But what if there’s more to existence than merely being at the mercy of time?

What if, beyond time’s constraints, we could find a deeper, more enriching life? T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets delves into this profound possibility, enveloping readers in exquisite language and evocative imagery. Time Conquered illuminates these poems, making their profound insights accessible even to those unfamiliar with Eliot’s work. The core of Four Quartets offers a revelation: we are not mere captives of time. Instead, by embracing glimpses of the eternal in our daily lives, we can live more vividly within the moment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Apr 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9781035802951

Ben Haslam

Ben Haslam is a Methodist minister currently serving in the Southwest of England. As well as Church ministry, he loves history, literature and a good view. This is his first book.

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About the Author

Ben Haslam is a Methodist minister currently serving in the Southwest of England. As well as Church ministry, he loves history, literature and a good view. This is his first book.

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Ben Haslam 2024

The right of Ben Haslam to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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The story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781035802944 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781035802951 (ePub e-book)

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Introduction

I began to write this book in the early stages of a pandemic, shortly after the government had mandated a national ‘lockdown’. This was a time when many people, quite suddenly, had more spare time at their disposal than they ever desired. Nor was this spare time empty. It was full of anxiety, uncertainty and even fear for many and, at the very least, boredom and frustration for others. At the same time, there were those whose occupation rendered them essential partners in a frantic struggle against an unseen adversary. For such people, their time did not drag, as it did for so many others, but was filled with an urgency of such intensity as they may have seldom, if ever, experienced before. Time was not following its usual rhythms for anyone, whether they had too much of it or far too little. For many, their days seemed to collapse into one another and the usual markers which signpost the year had become blurred. Many even considered putting their Christmas decorations up much earlier than usual, perhaps in part to lend distinctiveness and a sense of location within the year to otherwise colourless days. People of faith had an advantage over others in this regard: they have liturgical seasons, rituals, special days, to mark out the year. This at least can give some sense of orientation in disorientated times. The four poems, written by Thomas Stearns Eliot and published as the Four Quartets between 1936 and 1942 are a series of interlinked meditations on time and eternity, with each poem taking as its dominating motif one of the classical elements: air, earth, water and fire. They proved to be the summation of everything Eliot wanted to say, and he published no more poetry after the last of the Quartets in 1942. They are monumental poems. Scholar Thomas Howard has this to say: Four Quartets stands as Eliot’s valedictory to the modern world. I myself would place it, along with Chartres cathedral, the Divine Comedy, van Eyck’s ‘Adoration of the Mystic Lamb’ and the ‘Mozart Requiem, as a major edifice in the history of the Christian West’¹. Helen Gardner notes that ‘the experience of each (poem) is expressed in imagery which arises from a deeply felt sense of place and time’². In Burnt Norton, Eliot responds to the particular atmosphere of the place, in East Coker, whereas in East Coker there are very particular associations connected with his ancestors. In Dry Salvages, there are childhood associations, vividly evoked, and in Little Gidding, historical rather than personal echoes reverberate. Places and times are not just what they are in themselves. Their significance is bound up with the memories they revive, the future they suggest, the different ways in which they have entwined themselves in the lives of the people who have lived amongst them.

I will drift into my own reflection on these poems, with little warning as to when I’m referring to the text and when the text has led me on to reflections which were not necessarily in Eliot’s mind as he wrote these Four Quartets. This is not an academic study, but more in the nature of a devotional one. The emphasis will be primarily on the way in which Eliot traces the path of salvation, as creatures struggling with the limitations of time but dimly aware that there might be more to us than that. I unashamedly focus on Eliot’s Christian concerns, and I am interested most of all in how these poems can enrich Christian understanding and devotion. I prefer to say that what I am offering is a reflection on the poems, rather than an interpretation, and it is certainly not an analysis – I am not a literary critic. Somebody who was a literary critic, and one known for her work on T.S Eliot, Helen Gardner, offered some excellent advice – we ought not to be less concerned with what everything ‘means’, but rather take the poems as experiences, letting the cadences and rhythms, and the form of each poem nudge us towards truths the full and total comprehension of which would require more than human language can convey. The poems deal, after all, with time, and how it can, fleetingly, be ‘intersected’ by the timeless. Eliot was a Christian, converting to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, and The Four Quartets represents his clearest expression of his faith and how he believed faith could provide perspective on the dark and disorientated years of the late 1930s and early 1940s. I have often felt presumptuous, not to say foolhardy in attempting to write this book, but if it will encourage anyone to explore these wonderful poems, or engage with them afresh, I will be more than pleased. The Four Quartets remain vivid and arresting even today and it is fitting that poems which wrestle with time and timelessness should speak far beyond the context in which they were written.

I should also say that I write as a practicing Christian, and a Christian minister at that, so Eliot’s Christian vision is one that I share. If any reader does not come from that perspective, I hope they will still find these reflections helpful, as I believe only the most determined materialist can fail to be moved by Eliot’s profound probing of time and eternity, of human being and human existence, of the anxious questions that so often go unasked because few of know how to articulate them. Eliot found many beautiful, resonant and often striking images which help the reader to do just that. The questions explored are ones which lurk underneath our most immediate concerns and are most likely to manifest themselves as an underlying disquiet or dissatisfaction with our lives, or a troubling sense of not being at ease in the world. The poems represent a spiritual quest for meaning, a determination to find hope, not through reassuring platitudes or in any way evading reality, but by facing what is there and going beyond it. What if there is a pattern discernible in the texture of our day-to-day reality which gives us a clue as to what lies beyond it? By exploring questions such as these, Eliot shows himself to be influenced by Christianity’s mystical tradition, but the fruits of his exploration never seem tied to any particular age and time. He is still read and enjoyed today, giving inspiration and hope to many. No doubt there is much that I have missed, and this book could have been much longer, but I hope you find riches for yourself as well as the ones I have discovered in these wonderful poems. My main motivation for writing this book, however, is quite simple: these poems are full of rich wisdom, and our contemporary world is full of foolishness. There are many references to the war in which three of them were written, but the truth they strive for is the truth of all of us, as human beings, physical yet spiritual, living in time yet haunted by eternity. In our absorption in a very noisy and demanding ‘now’, it’s not easy to stand back from it all and attain the perspective and distance which bring wisdom.

Each of the quartets is pervaded by a dominating element: air, earth, water and fire. This is not a rigid scheme: these are quartets after all, and all these elements are woven into all the poems. Nonetheless, one element predominates in each poem. Burnt Norton evokes an original world of innocence, a world we have but a faint vestigial memory of, glimpsed in rare and fleeting moments (via the medium of air). East Coker sees Eliot visiting the home of his ancestors (buried in the earth) and reflects on historical memory. The Dry Salvages takes Eliot from the old world to the new, evoking memories of Eliot’s childhood summers on the Massachusetts coast, and of the great Mississippi River (water). Finally, in Little Gidding, fire is the central element, but fire that refines rather than destroys. These elements provide Eliot with a powerful and evocative way of exploring ‘the intersection of the timeless with time’, and of how finite, time-bound creatures such as we are, can apprehend the eternal. Each poem has five sections, with each section relating to its counterpart in the other poems, and each poem, as Ackroyd points out, ‘develops and resolves its theme (with Little Gidding) gathering up the three preceding ones in a magisterial synthesis’³. The title points us towards the musical structure of the poems, which is linked with Eliot’s exploration of time. Each of the poems consists of five movements. The first movement in each poem, as Gardiner notes, contains two contrasting but related themes, the second takes one subject and approaches it from two different angles. The third movement is the pivotal section of each poem and explores further the ideas introduced earlier in the poem, and moves towards finding a way to reconcile them. The fourth movement is a brief lyric, and the fifth completes the resolution begun in the third, rounding off the poem by applying this resolution to a theme or situation pertinent to the poet’s experience. The last line of the fifth movement always echoes the beginning of the poem, thus reinforcing one of Four Quartets most famous lines: ‘In my end is my beginning’. I will end the book by drawing out what I believe are some of the ways in which the Quartets can still speak, in a lively and timely way to present day Christians, or even open-minded non-Christians. I believe the questions Eliot was exploring were perennial ones and will never cease being asked, as long as there are human beings to ask them, meaning these poems will always reward careful study, not to mention to aesthetic beauty of the words. They are best read through at least a couple of times before reading this book, and my advice is not to worry overmuch about what words, phrases or images ‘mean’. Some will be immediately clear, whereas others may seem more significant for the feeling or mood they generate, or the mental image they create. ‘Absorb’ the poems and let them speak to you.

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¹ Howard T, Dove Descending, Ignatius Press, 2006, p.16↩︎

² Gardner H, p.159↩︎

³ Ackroyd, P,↩︎

Burnt Norton

Burnt Norton is a manor house in Gloucestershire, which Eliot visited with his friend Emily Hale in 1934. This was the same year in which Eliot became warden of St Stephen’s church, Kensington and taken up residence in the presbytery there. Much regretted by Orwell, who deplored the Christian themes of The Four Quartets, Eliot had begun to explore his relatively newfound faith in ‘Choruses from the Rock’ and the ‘Murder in the Cathedral’. This new approach was well received and, it could be argued, saw its full flowering and supreme expression in the Four Quartets. Burnt Norton was the first, and not originally conceived as part of a set. The Second World War called a halt to Eliot’s intention to write more for the stage and led to the ruminations and reflections which produced East Coker. Whilst writing this poem, Eliot began to imagine a set of four related poems which became the Quartets. It is hard to believe, reading them now, that they were not conceived as a whole from the very beginning, so cohesive are they. So we