The Musical Structure of Four Quartets
By Pariksith Singh, MD
The Four Quartets is a masterpiece. It is Eliot at his maturest, though perhaps not necessarily best with each line. The great achievement of this poem, if one may call it one poem, is its verse structure made to look or sound like a quartet. While it is impossible for a poem to sound like a quartet, Eliot has used different ‘instrumental voices’ in his ensemble to project a similar interplay of sounds.
In this essay, I have restricted myself to the versification in each quartet as opposed to the substance. Eliot has also very adroitly created an interaction of various themes and images to run parallel to his musical structure. But that is a subject that would invite another exposition beyond the parameters of this essay.
What is a quartet? Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines it as a musical composition or movement in four parts each performed by a single voice or instrument. Usually, a quartet comprises of two violins along with a viola and a cello. The violins touch the highest frequencies of sound, the cello the lowest, while the viola employs the middle range of frequencies. Usually, the instruments play at the same time though one instrument may dominate at one time or another. It is important to understand the musical composition of a quartet to better appreciate what Eliot accomplished as a poet.
The only way Eliot could create another voice poetically was by employing a different line-length and verse-form to represent each different instrument. He used blank verse and lyrical structures, narrative, and dramatic forms, at times resorting to Dantesque terza rima, at times breaking into Chaucerian diction. He broke each quartet into different segments, varying the sound-texture of each segment. Some of the segments could stand as separate lyrics of their own. Some are more like verse essays, where he thought slowly, deliberately.
Throughout Eliot has retained a classical approach — just as one would expect a quartet to be — though at times he breaks off into free verse. He does not try to split the page into two vertical poems running parallel to another, like Mallarme did — an experiment which failed, incidentally, even in Mallarme’s masterly hands.
If we take ‘Burnt Norton’, for instance, the meditation in the beginning of the poem is a hidden iambic pentameter:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
The second segment begins with an intricate and dense versification, that is lyrical, rhymed and in tetrameter.
Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
He then employs the famous Upanishadesque line ‘at the still point of the moving world’ in a heptametric section that, to me, is the epitome of meditative poetry:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards…
He then moves again to pentameter, continuing the meditation, yet changing the color of the sound:
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood…
He begins the third segment switching back and forth between tetrametric and pentametric lines, then startlingly moves to a trochaic line that is a heptameter:
…Time before and time after,
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London…
He reverts to a pentametric line immediately after and again alternates between four and five syllables in each line.
The fourth segment is short, the first five lines lyrical and rhymed:
Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
The next five lines vary in length with each line, still rhymed, lyrical and involved, the first line only a word, like a note floating in air.
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.
The fifth segment begins with a tetrametric tone, slow and deliberate, bringing to a synthesis the various voices that played through the entire piece. However, he quickly moves to the pentameter with the next line:
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach…
He again alternates between four and five syllables to each line and ends the poem with a burst of tetrameter:
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always —
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.
The other three quartets employ a similar — though not same — interaction of voices, each comprising of five segments. Each quartet has a distinct flavor to it, and together, all four reach another new synthesis in musical composition.
Ezra Pound noted in his essay In Retrospect, “The Musician can rely on pitch and the volume of the orchestra … The term harmony is misapplied in poetry; it refers to simultaneous sounds of different pitch. There is, however, in the best verse a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the hearer and acts more or less as an organ-base.” If we agree with Ezra Pound, Eliot’s attempt to create a quartet must be assessed keeping such limitation in mind.
However, there is the other kind of verse, which creates its own background music, and has been studied extensively in Vedic and Upanishadic verse known as the mantra. Sri Aurobindo talks about the undertones and overtones of poetic lines in a letter to one of his disciples, “I was speaking of rhythmical overtones and undertones. That is to say, there is a metrical rhythm which belongs to the skillful use of meter―any good poet can manage that; but besides that there is a music which rises up out of this rhythm or a music that underlies it, carries it as it were as the movement of the water carries the movement of a boat. They can both exist together in the same line; but it is more a matter of the inner than the outer ear …” T.S. Eliot might have known about the mantra in theory since he had studied Sanskrit and the Upanishads and the Gita during his graduation at Harvard, but that acquaintance might have been cursory.
It is curious to see how Sri Aurobindo developed his theory of the mantra and created a whole epic, Savitri, with such orchestral or symphonic reverberations of music as we find in ‘the Upanishads or Kalidasa.’ Sri Aurobindo was more architectural in his experiments with musical harmonies in poetry and was able to sustain the inspiration and harmonies in long passages of Savitri while Eliot seems to have believed that the modern long poem by necessity would need to have variations in rhythms and meter to avoid dullness of impact.
In Breaking Expectations: The Prosodic Techniques of T.S. Eliot’s Approximated Verse, Laura DiCarlo Short notes that “Eliot’s understanding of what it meant to master form allowed him to loosen or slacken his meter, resulting in two primary structural flexibilities: varied line lengths, and varied stanza lengths, both of which in turn caused the development of new prosodic techniques…. The prosodic techniques that developed from Eliot’s use of approximated verse did not change the essence of prosody but merely provided more avenues for the poets who have followed him to create and break expectations.” Eliot’s breakthroughs with The Wasteland and Four Quartets came with how he combined various tones and frequencies to create a new effect of musical anticipation and movement and not by creating new meters in English like Tennyson or Swinburne.
In a previous essay titled The Four Accompaniments of Four Quartets I have discussed how Eliot might have used the four themes of time, space, name, and form as his four musical instruments. But Eliot’s music is multi-layered, and he has not only used four recurring themes as his four accompaniments perhaps, he has also used different verse forms or meters to signify these instruments. And these might be broadly outlined as the lyric, blank verse, or some variation of it, tetrametric or hexametric variations and possibly vers libre. If this proposition is accepted, we see in the Four Quartets the final flowering of T.S. Eliot technical genius as a poet.
The Four Quartets are truly Eliot’s magnum opus. He attempted to create a new interaction of verse forms and tones in his work as in chamber music and succeeded brilliantly. His quartets are not quartets musically speaking but are more in the nature of verse artifacts, curiosities and inventions, something truly novel and a remarkable addition to the vast repository of English poetry.