Buirnt Norton East Coker the Essay

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" In other words, you can't change the way you are or the way you think by staying in the same clothes or the same consciousness that you have been in all this time. You must be willing to sacrifice and accept that things may get worse before they get better. "…to be restored, our sickness must grow worse" Eliot writes, and this is actually a recipe for emotional health albeit nothing close to that was to be found in the Wasteland. Indeed the world "become stranger" and the pattern of our lives becomes "more complicated" as we grow older. But these are words that sound like philosophy, not the remorse that was saturated throughout the Wasteland.

The Dry Salvages -- Number Three of Four Quartets

In the Wasteland there was no water to be found. Not a drop of water -- just rock and dust and death. And yet here in number three of the four quartets the water is everywhere, even "within us" and "all about us." Eliot wrote this on the northeast coast of Massachusetts, and he is drenched in images of life, water, hope, and quite a contrast to the dry darkness of the Wasteland. Here in this section again Eliot has fulfilled his need to be hopeful albeit he is never far from skepticism and cryptic thoughts. In this section readers learn that the people in the city, who "worship the machine" (live in the industrial world), do not honor the natural world. So what? At least Eliot is referencing the world that is alive and not dead or dying. His poetry is brilliant no matter what his theme is, but it is indeed refreshing to read about the animals that come from the sea. By mentioning the starfish, the seagull, the horseshoe crab, and whales and sea anemone -- not to mention lobsters -- Eliot is suddenly the quintessential romantic living on the coast of Massachusetts. "We cannot think of a time that is oceanless or of an ocean not littered with wastage," he warns, after painting a lively, fulfilling picture of all the wonderful natural life that thrives at the ocean's edge and in the deep ocean waters.

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Flowers will always wither and die away and the poet can look back and feel empathy for "the agony of others" and the alert person must look back over his shoulder and understand "the primitive terror" that once was, he writes. Even mentioning the "torment of others" is in a sense hopeful because prayer is a positive experience. And for the poet who says a prayer "on behalf of" mothers whose sons or husbands will not return, that means he has faith.

Little Gidding -- Number Four of Four Quartets

Even though the winter sun shines only a short time compared with the summer sun, that winter sun turns the ice to flame in this opening stanza. That is a brilliant allusion, and again it can be said that Eliot has become fulfilled. In the Wasteland Eliot could have used a little sunshine to light up his spirits -- spirits that had been darkened by the gloom of war. He hated spring in the Wasteland. In this poem May brings "voluptuary sweetness" -- the virtual opposite of his tone in the Wasteland. "What we call the beginning is often the end" he writes, and "the end is where we start from."

Conclusion and Result

Indeed, the end of the Wasteland has become the beginning of a far more fruitful, positive journey through the music of the Four Quartets. "All manner of things shall be well" when "the fire and the roses are one." The result of T.S. Eliot's work is that critics say he was among the most brilliant poets in the 20th Century, but he did not accumulate a portfolio of poems as lengthy as he could have, according to the critics.

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