http://alum.hampshire.edu/~rb97/eliot.html

Roger Bellin

The Seduction of Argument and the Danger of Parody in the Four Quartets

The seduction of reading the Four Quartets as a systematic, coherent exposition (whether of doctrine, thought, or faith) is both induced and resisted by the text itself. The text integrates paraphrases, near-quotations and direct citations from disparate times and cultures (Heraclitus, Krishna, St. John of the Cross, et cetera), and its citations are made to appear thematic and unified: all bear on time and renunciation, a negative theology or mysticism. Many critics have remarked that these quotations are "integrated" or "assimilated" (Traversi 89) rather than "twisted" into a "clash" with their original meanings (Gardner 30) like the allusions of The Waste Land. And the formal unity of the Quartets' imagery and structure, their very apparent craft, suggests an analogous unity of content. But the poem itself – considered not merely as a fabric of allusions, concepts, and images but a text, as it must be – steadfastly resists systematization. This is not merely a modernist poem, with the suspicion of directness which that implies, but an explicitly self questioning one whose overt content deals with the difficulties of reading. The Four Quartets use paradox, contradiction, tautology, and the performance of self doubt as their poetic method, more even than they rely on image or form. And the frequent, jarring shifts of tone, from evocative or witty lyric to prosaic self-doubt or meditation, disrupt the poem's aspirations to formal unity. In particular, the poem's discursive, abstract, conceptual, and self-doubting passages are enough unlike Eliot's earlier poetry, and critics' idea of poetry, to be puzzling. (To narrow the scope of inquiry slightly: a partial enumeration of these non-lyrical, discursive passages, highlighting those of particular length or interest, might include the opening meditation on time of "Burnt Norton" I, the second section of II, and the whole of part V; the second section of "East Coker" II, the later portion of III, and the start of V; the second section of "The Dry Salvages" II, the introduction of Krishna in the first few lines of III, and much of part V; the end of "Little Gidding" I, the beginning and end passages of III, and the whole of part V.)

The "conceptual" voice of the Quartets has been an object of critical attention of one kind or another since the initial reviews of "Burnt Norton." The passages in question have been heralded, most generously, as "highly abstract language, for the purpose, essentially, of putting forward and immediately rejecting ready-made concepts that might have seemed to approximate to the concept" of regret or eternity created by the poem (Harding 30). And they have been dismissed as "attempts to break up [Eliot's] splendid incantations with passages of the prosiest of prose," leading to the conclusion that "[p]oetry is worn out," a relic, even an embalmed corpse ("Mr T.S. Eliot's Confession" 34). Karl Shapiro accuses the Quartets of "the complete abandonment of poetry" (247), and Orwell insists similarly: "Perhaps what we need is prayer, observance, etc., but you do not make a line of poetry by stringing those words together" (86). The poem's discursive voice, then, caused many early critics to conclude that some passages of the Quartets might not even merit the title of poetry. But, judging by Helen Gardner's account of The Composition of Four Quartets, the discursive passages were composed just as laboriously as the rest of the poem (and perhaps even more so); and it is easy to see that these apparently prosaic passages are often the same ones that carry the poem's own charge against poetry, bearing its self-critique within and among its lyrical passages. The poem has several voices.

This proposition – that the Quartets contain several sharply distinct voices – is unsurprising; they are obvious successors in form and content to The Waste Land, which was famously almost titled "He Do the Police in Different Voices." Hugh Kenner finds four voices:

Like the voices of a string quartet, the lyric, didactic, colloquial, and deliberative modes of these poems pursue...the forms of intent conversation;...the voices have stable identities. East Coker introduces them in turn: the inhabitant of England, with a family, a past, and a penchant for visiting significant landscapes; the lyric poet; the sombre moralist, intermittently Christian; and the man of letters, "trying to learn to use words." We may enumerate them in this way without implicating the now wholly effaced Invisible Poet, who composed the score, but is only figuratively present in the performance. (261)

This division of the poem's voices, while not beyond question, is a well-articulated beginning. (Perhaps the separateness of the "deliberative" and "didactic" voices is not always certain, and the "colloquial" flavor is only briefly used to soften these two, never deployed on its own.) Kenner insists, in this generally well-regarded reading, on the Quartets' effacement of any unitary authoritative voice; the text may have a figural relation to the "Invisible Poet," but it does not speak for him directly. The poem uses anonymity as a "self-sustaining technique," as the "indispensable condition" (Kenner 251) of its existence.

Despite Kenner's insistence, though, much criticism persists in reading the Quartets' different voices as aspects of a single narrator. One critic proposes that the poem uses a "stream-of-consciousness method...though whose consciousness is a crucial question" (Hay 161); and this critic, not alone, swiftly proclaims that "in the late poetry the consciousness is clearly Eliot's" (Hay 161). Even a more cautious reading of the poem as dramatic monologue easily falls into personalizing "the poet as a protagonist" in order, in reading, to "participate in his struggle" (Thompson 83); the work of criticism, then, is "to reintegrate the poet's sensibility by finding, largely by a labor of intelligence, a formula that sets down all he feels" (Thompson 85). From here it is a short step to reading the Quartets in their entirety as a kind of doctrine, Eliot's personal theology:

Four Quartets begins with a reflective passage on actual time and memory, reminiscent of Augustine's opening in the Confessions and perhaps thus signaling that the poem is a real confession – a poet's memory of his "way." ...Instead of Prufrock's "Streets that follow like a tedious argument," leading to an overwhelming question, each Quartet follows a visible path, and all paths lead to an answer that might be overwhelming if Eliot's whole poetic development had not prepared us for it. (Hay 166-170)

To take the Quartets in their entirety as describing a "spiritual discipline" of "the poet's way intersecting with a higher way" (Hay 172) is to forget that they are, first and foremost, a poem (and not necessarily "a dogmatic poem in an age hostile to dogma" [Donoghue, "T.S. Eliot's Quartets" 212]). But the impressive artifice of their construction – an artifice which appears natural and unconstructed, an act of poetry which pretends to absolute, univocal sincerity – has found its voice in much critical exposition. Treading more carefully, one might look for argument, rather than doctrine, in the poem: "The problem differs from that of 'argufying in poetry' – Empson's programme – because such argufying is content to take concepts as they come, and to engage in conversation with them. Quite a different matter" from the Quartets' creation of new concepts (Donoghue, "On 'Burnt Norton'" 19), but still a reading of the Quartets that is unduly swayed by the poem's aspiration to a single voice and an argument like that of discursive prose.

Eliot himself was apparently not averse to a univocal, transparent reading of the Quartets, on Helen Gardner's account: "In speaking of [the Quartets] he never employed the defensive irony that marks so many of his references to The Waste Land. He never suggested that he did not himself know 'what he meant' and that a reader's guess was as good as the author's. If asked to explain a reference he did so" (3). Gardner then quotes Eliot, in an interview, saying that the "obscurity" of The Waste Land was a product of his "learning how to use language. You have to say the thing the difficult way....In The Waste Land, I wasn't even bothering whether I understood what I was saying" (Gardner 4). Surprisingly, Eliot's offhand dismissal here of the poem generally considered his greatest work has attracted little comment, though it is just as obviously a stance "defensive" of the poet's desired reading as his earlier refusals to comment. Eliot proclaims that the Four Quartets are straightforward, told in the simplest language possible, "like conversing with your reader....Sometimes the thing I am trying to say, the subject matter, may be difficult, but it seems to me that I am saying it in a simpler way" (Gardner 4). It hardly seems necessary – except in view of the perhaps unreasonable privilege accorded to Eliot as commentator on his own work – to point out the tendentiousness of this claim, considering the enormous critical energy that has since been expended on unpacking the alleged "simplicity" of the poem's form. The complex development of the Quartets' themes and imagery within their repeated five-part form has been ably described in criticism; but a residual trace of Eliot's faux naif attitude may still cling to readings of the poem's discursive passages.

Eliot's claim that the Quartets are "conversing" with the reader might be more tenable if the poem had the dominating first-person voice of a dramatic monologue. Personal narration takes on considerably more weight in the Quartets' progression from "Burnt Norton" through "Little Gidding," but there is no textual reason to see this as the emergence of the voice of the poet (or even of the poem). In "Burnt Norton" the later Quartets' equivocating "I" makes its appearance for only two lines: "I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. / And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time" (li. 68-69); here as elsewhere, the "I" exists as a method of breaking out of the poem's narrative progression, a way of arresting the poem's flow long enough to inject doubt about what can be said. The "I" calls into question the capacity of language, the ability of the poem to contain its meaning. In "East Coker" the mystical "I said to my soul, be still" (li. 112, 123) is near enough to the equivocating "one" of part II's "It was not (to start again) what one had expected" (li. 72) and the uncertain "I" of part III's "You say I am repeating / Something I have said before" (li. 133-134) that the poem's formal doubt begins to infect the transcendent sureties of the mystical paradox. The first-person narration is a strong link here between the paradoxes proffered by the spiritual voice ("Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: / So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing" [li. 127]) and those of the poem's performed self doubt and doubt of language ("That was a way of putting it – not very satisfactory" [li. 68]); the poem, clearly enough concerned with the possibility of deriving spiritual insight from apparent paradox of meaning, deals just as much with the possibility of its own self-contradictory poetry. The voices which Hugh Kenner called "deliberative" and "didactic," those of "the sombre moralist" and "the man of letters," cross each other here, polluting each other by proximity. The narration of "The Dry Salvages," as Kenner perceives (267), is framed from the outset as personal opinion: "I do not know much about gods" (li. 1); "I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant" (li. 124). The repetitive uncertainty of this narrator comes to infect the motif of intergenerational memory that was first offered in "Burnt Norton" without a trace of a speaking voice: "I have said before" (li. 96), "not forgetting / Something that is probably quite ineffable" (li. 99-100); here the "I" is just one of the equivocating "lecture-stigmata" which Eliot's editor Faber criticized (Gardner 133), adulterating passages that would otherwise have a more visceral power; but clearly this was not the only desired effect, as the poem's equivocation and self-criticism does not cease. The encounter with the "familiar compound ghost" of "Little Gidding" is recounted in the first person, though this "I" is introduced gently, after eight impersonal lines that serve to introduce the bleak setting and Dantesque line separately from the complication of the narrator (li. 86). And this narrator is also the ghost with whom he speaks (assuming "a double part"); nevertheless, this passage is unlike any other section of the Quartets for its reliance on character and dialogue rather than an austere poetic voice with an effaced speaker. The Quartets do, then, rely increasingly on the first person singular as they progress; but their "I" serves so often as a marker of equivocation, a discomfort of the poem with itself, that there can be no question of reading it as the single voice of the poem. This performance of self-doubt casts doubt on the poem's supposedly "simpler way" of diction elsewhere, as well; the "I" of the poem's obsessive self-interpretation infects the whole text with the self-reflexive uncertainty of reading.

A discursive poetry, one concerned with contradiction and self-doubt, is not by any immediate necessity simpler, more direct, or more prosaic than one of image. The cluster of paradoxes around the poem's key terms (dance and still point, time and memory, future, past, and now, and so on) serve the same purpose for the conceptual content of the poem as its self-doubting equivocations and frequent, jarring shifts of tone (from evocative or witty lyric to prosaic address) do on the formal level: they ceaselessly disrupt the poem's aspirations to unity of voice or concept, proclaiming that the truth of the poem can only be approached through the endless betrayal of its poetry. This text is resolutely literary, even theoretical, in the sense developed in Paul de Man's "The Resistance to Theory": the poem, contradicting itself constantly, proclaiming as a poem that "poetry does not matter," provides "negative knowledge about the reliability of linguistic utterance" (10). The simply doctrinal reading of the Four Quartets is easy to recognize in de Man's description of "ideological" readings; it mistakes the substance of poetry for the substance of belief:

It would be unfortunate, for example, to confuse the materiality of the signifier with the materiality of what it signifies. This may seem obvious enough on the level of light and sound,...no one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word "day," but it is very difficult not to conceive the patterns of one's past and future existence as in accordance with temporal and spatial schemes that belong to fictional narratives and not to the world. This does not mean that fictional narratives are not part of the world and of reality; their impact upon the world may well be all too strong for comfort. What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism. (11)

The Four Quartets bear explicitly and constantly on this theme. What has generally been described as "conceptual" about the work, and what de Man calls "very difficult" in its task, is the attempt (which may, in the end, necessarily be a failure) to use the "shabby equipment" of language itself to get outside linguistic fictions about time. We might even, following de Man (and despite his characterization of Eliot as the paragon of the New Criticism), describe the particular difficulty of the poem's discursive voices as "theoretical" – not purely philosophical in the sense of ontology or theology, for it is resolutely textual and performative; but having to do with the possibility of a poetry about philosophical concerns. From beginning to end, the Four Quartets turn poetry against itself, in an endlessly frustrated attempt to gesture beyond it to the wordless spiritual truth that is the poem's desire (or perhaps rather its "love beyond desire"). In de Man's discussion as in the Four Quartets, this "very difficult" need for a non-ideological objectivity, for thought beyond the "confusion" of language, is set out negatively: "not to conceive the patterns of one's past and future existence as in accordance with...fictional narratives and not the world."

The "time" of the Four Quartets is always within language; it is the time of "fictional narratives and not the world" (though the "world" of the poem is also aligned with the fallen realm of words) in which "Time past and time future / Allow but a little consciousness" (BN li. 83-84). This "consciousness" outside of time, or of the timeless from within time, is the goal of the Quartets, though it may stand outside language:

This is consciousness, not the consciousness which philosophers think about, but a consciousness as enveloping and undiscussable as the Bradleyan "immediate experience"; and, "To be conscious is not to be in time." (Kenner 255)

To discuss the "undiscussable," to approach it by the indirection of poetic form, is the Quartets' sole purpose, as the conclusion to "The Dry Salvages" makes clear:

Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled (li. 216-219)

Here, the twice-repeated "Here" must be taken as a literal self-reference – "here, in these lines, the impossible is actual, the past and future reconciled" – though it is also a reference to the preceding "Incarnation" (which may itself refer to the poem's textual incarnation of its elusive meaning). The poem is pulling its "undiscussable" goal closer, into its own discussion, reaching "into the silence" with its own words. It is attempting to induce, to enact, the state of consciousness of the timeless which it discusses; thus, perhaps, the frequent critical willingness to quote the crucial lines without any comment ("[This] paradox...is the new discovery of this part of the poem. 'To be conscious is not to be in time.' Yes, perhaps; but, on the other hand, 'Only through time time is conquered'" [Traversi 114]). But simply to quote "To be conscious is not to be in time" (BN li. 85) does not aid a reading of the poem's "consciousness," because it does not do justice to the words' indirection: even this apparently pivotal line can be understood at least three distinct ways. It can mean that a truly mystical consciousness, once attained, allows the mystic an extra temporal vantage point (this may be the most obvious reading in the context of the whole body of the Quartets). But it can just as well be taken to say that every person's consciousness already contains an element of awareness of the timeless, though it lives inside of the temporality of our lives (this reading is more salient in the context of the preceding lines, "Time past and time future / Allow but a little consciousness" – this "little" may be all we can aspire to). Or it can mean that human thought is only possible within time, and so to be conscious is always to die ("not to be, in time"), presaged by the earlier reference to "heaven and damnation / Which flesh cannot endure". All of these meanings must be held at once: the poem is manifestly about the saint's mystical experience, but also about the "temporary translation of that beatitude into...a mode of experience available to human kind" (Kenner 270); and there is no need for psychoanalysis to read the preoccupation with death into this poem which asserts "Every poem an epitaph" (LG 225).

The Quartets have many names for their mystical goal of knowledge outside language – "still point," "pattern," "love," "consciousness" – but all these share the paradoxical need to use language in order to get at this goal outside it, making their glimpses of redemption more doubt-tinged than self-assured. In "Burnt Norton" the redemptive power of language and the distaste for language are both staged at once:

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness (li. 137-142)

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. (li. 149-153)

This is a self-description, not an abstract discussion. The "burden" of meaning is great enough to strain poetry to the breaking point, and this poem itself may be cracked and broken, but some remainder is left after the death of the poem. The "form, the pattern" of the poetic text reaches beyond the transience of speech; but in reading it is not "still," its meaning escapes it and cannot be completely controlled. The poem's "reach / Into the silence" may exceed its grasp. These passages on the hope and futility of words, as well as any from the Quartets, exemplify both the text's self-justification and its self-criticism: for if "Burnt Norton" is "one of the great defenses of poetry in the English language" (Thompson 81) in its hope that words can, through form, "reach / The stillness" and thus be redeemed, then in its own form and content it is just as much an attack on poetry, whose words "Will not stay still." This poem is not simply a "defense," nor primarily an argument; though among its voices there is room for the "didactic," the poem's abiding self-doubt about the very possibility of its success absolutely precludes the triumphal tone of a successful defense attorney.

That is, if the poem does approach the mystical "still point" which it seeks, this point is always "still with the intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings" (EC li. 70-71). The crucial ambiguity of this "still" has gone seemingly unremarked in criticism – again, perhaps, because of the seduction of the discursive or anti-poetic passages, which are generally treated inattentively, almost as though the poem bore appendages of critical prose (as they feign to be). But this "still" is not simply prosaic, and cannot only mean "yet"; it is also another description of the center of the dance, the "still point of the turning world," and so it leaves the poem's "consciousness" more within than outside language, forcing it toward a performative meaning rather than an unapproachable mysticism. The poem's performance of direct, honest self-doubt, of "the wrestle / With words and meanings," brings the performance of its lyricism and its mystical surety more clearly into the realm of words, as well.

With this performance comes the risk of parody: once we accept the Quartets as many-voiced and irreducible to an argument beyond the words, the danger exists that the humorous perception of mannered language, and the unwanted foregrounding of form, may contaminate the most religiously serious, mystically revelatory passages. As we saw, the constant self-defeat of the Quartets' form, for some commentators, precludes even calling this text poetry. Once it is admitted to the realm of poetry, the next concern is that it might be self-parody. This charge is not only manifest in condemnations of the poem: it is an abiding concern, for those defensive of the Quartets, that the text's moral seriousness be protected. Two critical discussions have offered a focus for this anxiety: Hugh Kenner's argument that the Quartets' form proposes an opposition to which it always offers a false reconciliation before the true one (which opens the anxiety of just where the "false" parts begin and end), and Donald Davie's extension of this principle to the four Quartets themselves, suggesting that "The Dry Salvages" may have been a deliberately false note. Denis Donoghue responds with a defense of Eliot's moral seriousness:

[This argument eventually] implies, of course, that everything leading up to the last section of "Little Gidding" from the first words of "Burnt Norton" is, more or less, parody; the disclosure of moral positions which Eliot – the suggestion runs – has never inhabited or from which he has detached himself....This is hard to take. I cannot believe that when the voice of "East Coker" II says

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless

we are to interpret this as yet another moment in which the mind responsible for its existence is deceiving itself. (Donoghue, "T.S. Eliot's Quartets" 227)

This argument undermines itself: for if the poem is "more or less" parody, then some passages of it might appear, or even be, quite serious; and the same essay that calls the claim "hard to take" that Eliot does not "inhabit" the poem's "moral positions" goes on to evict the poet from their premises, saying that the poem's chief concern is to "evacuate...the areas in which [its] readers live" (231), to "clear a space, or if necessary to take over a bombed-out area, and there to build a new life of the spirit" (232). The vacillation of the argument's own identification of the poem's subject (from "Eliot" to "the voice of 'East Coker' II" to "the mind") could be taken as evidence of such an "evacuation." This defense against parody is a concern that one voice of the poem might contaminate another; that the "sombre moralist" might be too affected by the false reconciliations of "the man of letters." For if the false reconciliation which "parodies the true one" (Kenner 256), the proposal of the too easy solution in order to dismiss it, is admitted to be part of the Quartets (as it must be), the defender of the poem's moral seriousness is faced with the problem of drawing boundaries in order to contain the threat of parody.

But the assumption is unfounded that to call the Quartets self-parody is to condemn them through and through. This would rely on the premise that the text was intended purely seriously, in high moral sincerity, and had nothing else to offer; but its sincerity may be as much a "detachable manner" as its paradox and self questioning. The poem's deadly earnest may also a performance: for the appearance of sincerity may be the last refuge of the insincere, the bare face the last mask of the actor:

[I]t is Old Possum's last disappearing-trick. No persona, Prufrock, Gerontion, Tiresias or the Magus, is any longer needed....[Eliot] had employed masks, he had employed styles; he had manipulated ventriloqually the effects of respected poets; in Ash-Wednesday he had allowed a discontinuous poésie pure to imply a moving zone of consciousness. In Ash-Wednesday the relation between speaker and reader – indeed the speaker's very mode of existence – is made to seem artless by an extreme of artifice...In Burnt Norton such problems are not so much solved as caused to vanish. (Kenner 250-251)

Perhaps this conclusion is over-optimistic, given the continued critical concern with questions of by whom, and in what mode, the Quartets are narrated; indeed, the description of Ash-Wednesday's artifice of apparent artlessness is more than applicable to the Quartets' discursive voices (as we saw, Eliot's artifice even extended to his extra-textual claims about the poem). The sincerity of the Quartets is just as constructed as the "masks" and "styles" that the poet purportedly laid aside; in fact, we might see this sincerity as the evolution, not the end, of what Kenner describes as the poetry of self-effacement and disguise. The charge of self-parody need not be feared; the Quartets may be richer in meaning when charged with the play of language and voice, as they self-critically demand, than when insistently treated with moralistic straightforwardness. Indeed, the critical essay that has inspired the most defensive reaction among the "serious" camp of readers (Donoghue quoted above, Gardner 4n4), Donald Davie's "T.S. Eliot: The End of an Era," is among the readings of the Quartets most sensitive to the poem's continued use of voices and masks (always including the mask of "T.S. Eliot," the great poet purportedly dropping pretense and style for a moment and addressing the reader, or the poem itself, directly). Where Kenner sees in "The Dry Salvages" and its "cumbrous" diction "enough detachable mannerisms to have permitted the only successful parody of an Eliot manner, Henry Reed's Chard Whitlow" (268), Davie insists that the poem's apparent lead-footedness and inarticulacy may not be a "detachable" failure, but instead an inherent necessity:

It is hardly too much to say that the whole of this third quartet is spoken by a nameless persona; certainly it is spoken through a mask, spoken in character....It is thus that the incompetence turns out to be dazzling virtuosity;...[insisting] that all varieties of human folly and imperfection are the conditions for apprehending perfection....What kind of poetry is this, in which loose and woolly incoherent language can be seen to be – in its place and for special purposes – better than clear and closely articulated language? (Davie 162)

The apparent inadequacy of technique (which is also among the poem's explicitly stated themes) is in fact a triumph of technique; the poem's self-parody is a deliberate, considered attack on its own poetry, on the inadequacy of form. This persona is not nameless, though, for it pretends to be Eliot "himself"; its "loose and woolly" language is the only medium possible for a constant critique of its own desire for moral seriousness. Ironically, the poem's own self-critique, once expressed at more length in criticism, has forced the poem's defenders into the position of proclaiming some sections of the Quartets failures, rather than regarding the poem's self-defeat as mastery (thus missing the reflexive, self-ironizing sense of "East Coker" V: "every attempt / Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure" [li. 174-175]).

The poem contains its own parody because its (still very serious) content deals with the inadequacy of poetry to its goal, with words that "Will not stay still" and a stillness that continues in the "intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings," because its wordless goal can only be approached through words. If "The Dry Salvages" is "some ideal Matthew Arnold's road out of East Coker" (Kenner 271), this may mean that the poem apprehends its own tendency to moralize ironically and self-critically, not that it slips into an unintended, unironic moralist's tone; and the poem continues to risk a "language, unprotected by formalities of diction, [which] maintains commerce with deliquescent cliché" (Kenner 276). The technique of the poem's self-critical voices jeopardizes the seriousness of the entire poem, causing it to run the constant risk of parody. It decenters all of its approaches to the unspeakable, rendering the poem vulnerable to a parody which it has always already included: it is a "procedure in which the true key is never sounded, but exists in the poem only as the norm by which all the voices that speak are heard as delicately off key, as the voices of parody" (Davie 167). The voice of parody is even apparent in "Little Gidding" V, the cycle's apparently masterful completion, undercutting its own claim to mastery:

And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. (li. 216-225)

By the time the poem reaches this conclusion, it has violated each of these alleged principles of "right" language in turn. We might note first that this sentence itself is ponderous enough to need repetition of the subject after the long parenthetical digression, mimicking speech rather than "righting" writing. We have already seen how the poem "evacuates" its own meaning, preventing its words from being "at home" by paradox and parody; the diffidence of its discursive voice, and the ostentation of its lyrics, are equally apparent. Rather than maintain "an easy commerce," the poem displays its old quotations' spelling in antiquarian fashion, and leaves its Greek epigraph untranslated; it unquestionably deploys the "common" words "Dung and death" for their visceral "vulgarity" as well as their exactness; and we may take this catalog of language's failings, along with the Greek epigraph and the opening lecture on time, as evidence enough of the poem's occasional pedantry. And the list's form itself betrays the technique of the Quartets: rather than disjoining the identical ("fire or fire"), or insisting on implacable oppositions, the list repeatedly chooses one alternative over another ("exact without vulgarity," "precise but not pedantic"), or breezily reconciles opposites by discarding or accepting both terms ("neither diffident nor ostentatious," "the old and the new"). It has the manner of a false solution to a difficult problem – but its place in the poem is the conclusive location where a true reconciliation is expected. This catalog cannot help but be understood as a self-parody, an admission that the poem's own language is not "right" but, inevitably, wrong for its unspeakable content.

If this "delicately off-key" voice of parody is present throughout the Quartets and must be taken seriously, then we might also find serious meaning in Henry Reed's parody of the Quartets, which, jokingly, makes explicit an omnipresent theme: "As we get older we do not get any younger." "Chard Whitlow" was published in May 1941, before the composition of "Little Gidding" was far along, if it had then been begun. While Kenner read it as a use of the "detachable mannerisms" of "The Dry Salvages," it contains none of that quartet's American imagery, and the title obviously echoes "Burnt Norton." Instead of parodying the river imagery of "The Dry Salvages," this poem eerily anticipates "Little Gidding" and its finally explicit reference to times of war:

There are certain precautions – though none of them very reliable –
Against the blast from bombs, or the flying splinter,
But not against the blast from Heaven, vento dei venti,
The wind within a wind, unable to speak for wind;
And the frigid burnings of purgatory will not be touched
By any emollient.

The editor of Reed's Collected Poems suggests that this satire may have influenced the composition of "Little Gidding." Without making a claim for explicit influence, we can still remark on the coincidence; the preoccupation with death, and the Quartets' negative mysticism, must have partly emerged from, or been amplified by, the second world war and made reference to its constant threat all along (though there can be no causal connection in the case of the earlier "Burnt Norton"). Aside from the punch line, this passage can be read entirely seriously despite its tongue-in cheek effusiveness, and it amplifies the themes of Eliot's poem as it echoes their manner. In this light the parody-voice of "Chard Whitlow" ends up appearing close to the Quartets' own self-deprecating parody. The silence of Reed's "listeners, / And you especially who have switched off the wireless" is very near to the silence of Eliot's prayer. Language itself, when not silent, is an unreliable, none too "certain" precaution; it cannot protect "against the blast from Heaven" or the cold, unspeaking wind of purgatory which the Quartets aim to approach or echo in their words. "The dove descending" of "Little Gidding" IV might even be read as Eliot one-upping his parodist, for the bird of peace is a considerably more incongruous image of a dive-bomber than "the blast from Heaven" is of a falling bomb; and this image, which a reader of "Chard Whitlow" can no longer take entirely seriously, opens the intensely serious, lyrical climax of the fourth section of the final quartet. The burning core of the Quartets' mystical encounter with redemption, the indistinguishable "choice of pyre or pyre" (li. 205) which offers no hope but renunciation, the resignation to no action toward salvation – the poem's closest approach to the Center it seeks – begins to seem faintly ridiculous, like a premature, Prufrockian renunciation of life in favor of some nebulous half-joking "Love."

By now the gently insinuated contamination of parody has incurably infected the entire body of the poem, endangering even its desired final reconciliation, even the intensity of its lyric imagery. The seduction of argument and the risk of parody are opposite dangers: the poem's moral and formal seriousness expose each other as imperfect. The risk of parody, if taken seriously, jeopardizes all the serious claims made by the poem's moral and didactic discursive voice; meanwhile, this very voice's serious claims about the unreliability of language and the unspeakability of the poem's goal, if taken playfully, render all the poem's voices suspect as more personae and more masks of the "invisible" poet. The rigor of the Four Quartets, despite appearances, may be absolute; but it is a self-questioning, self-critical, self parodic, in short, a completely reflexive rigor. In the end, the poem need have no object other than itself, though it must continue to believe otherwise: it is a meditation on its own accomplished impossibility.

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