The Writings in the Church: T.S. Eliot, Ecclesiastes and the Four Quartets

The Bible, as many critics have remarked, ¹ echoes and re-echoes in Eliot’s poetry’, sometimes through direct quotation, sometimes indirectly, through a single word or phrase, often ‘through the device of rhythm’. The biblical citations in the Four Quartets, however, are not always easily identifiable because ‘whole congeries of sources’, layer upon layer of allusions to a wide range of texts, are often mingled together almost inseparably. ² Unlike The Waste Land, a positive Babel of different languages, which stand out as separate fragments in a world irreducible to a single meaning, quotations in the Four Quartets are often unmarked, woven into a ‘tonal and stylistic homogeneity’, the musical metaphor of the poem’s title reinforcing the attempt to create harmony from diverse elements. ³ Each quartet, of course, focuses upon one of the four elements seen by Heraclitus to comprise the unity of the world. Just as the Church, according to St Paul, has ‘diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit’ (1 Cor. 12:4), its several parts comprising a single body, so Eliot in the Four Quartets can be seen quite literally to write the Church, employing ‘the discursive practices of the English Church’, in particular the Book of Common Prayer and the Jacobean Bible, ‘whose rhythms, tonalities and …. phrases’ are evident throughout. ⁴ In the final words of the poem, the pentecostal …. tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. ⁵