Four Quartets and Other Poems

Abstract

Five ‘landscape’ poems recall visits made by Eliot during 1933 in America and Great Britain. They are impressionistic, illustrating the truth of the couplet with which Crabbe opens ‘The Lover’s Journey’:

It is the Soul that sees: the outward eyes

Present the object, but the Mind descries.

The first two, ‘New Hampshire’ and ‘Virginia’, form a contrast, one conveying the quick, lively movements of birds in an orchard, the other, mainly through arrested monosyllables and retarding rhyme, the slow flow of a river in heat and silence. Together they express something personal which probably relates to Eliot’s foundered marriage. This seems to be confirmed by the voices of children in the orchard; in ‘Ode’, an allusively baffling poem on nuptial disillusionment (a typescript of which is headed ‘Ode on Independence Day, July 4th, 1918’), they are remembered singing among the fruit-trees. ‘Twenty years and the spring is over’ seems to recall the time before Eliot left America to settle in England; between blossom-time and fruit-time may imply a kind of pre-lapsarian happiness.