Dove Descending: A Journey Into T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets by Thomas Howard

Author:Thomas Howard [Howard, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586170400
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2006-02-20T06:00:00+00:00

IV

And now the fourth movement in “East Coker”, the lyric. Readers will notice that Eliot, uncharacteristically for him, brings rhyme and iambic meter into play here. Ordinarily he shies away from this sort of thing because the danger there is that we will be lulled. But the words are so lacerating in this lyric (like a surgeon’s scalpel) that Eliot no doubt judged that we need some balm in the form of rhyme and meter.

How did we get into this operating room? The same way we get anywhere in Eliot. We simply follow him, into a garden, after a boar hunt, into the Underground. Right. But this wounded surgeon bothers us. We would prefer a man in full control of every nerve and muscle in his body, not someone maimed.

But of course there is no such thing as an unwounded surgeon. Every man has suffered cuts and scrapes and perhaps even broken bones in his boyhood, and certainly every man has been wounded by life itself: disappointments, heartbreak, fear, anguish of one sort or another. Ah: so the surgeon is not entirely indifferent to my plight under the knife here. He himself has been cut. So he plies his steel scalpel delicately, yes, but also implacably. He will not stop short of the deepest point to which it is necessary to dig in order to get at the trouble. Sentimentality will not hamper his work. His knife “questions” the distempered (diseased) part, asking, “Is it here? Here? There?” This is the attitude on the part of this healer, then—both compassionate and “sharp”, that is, not afraid to cut to the root. But his hands are bleeding—yes. They have bled in their own day, certainly; and here it is my blood that covers his hands (or, in this latter day, the latex gloves on his hands).

We cannot, of course, hear about bleeding hands without recalling the Passion of our Lord. Bleeding hands, like the Labyrinth or the Lotos Eaters, belong to a given story, willy-nilly. But what is Christ doing here? Our question answers itself before we have time to pause: the hands that wrought our eternal salvation, not just our recovery from a tumor, bled. That Healer’s art cuts deep (we must be crucified), but not before itself has been deeply cut.

The prose in this commentary is unfair, of course, since it plunks the cards on the table flatly, whereas the poetry of the lyric does not show its hand in quite this businesslike fashion.

It is the office of poetry to show, not to tell. Bible texts in the skein of this poetry would be like cannonballs in gossamer. The web would be in tatters.

The surgery resolves “the enigma of the fever chart”. The chart, of course, listed symptoms A, B, C, and D. What do they add up to? Well, until we can get in there with the knife, we won’t quite know. The symptoms are enigmatic. The trouble might be dire, or it might be almost nothing.

But surely

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