Reconciling Existential and Mystical Elements in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12671536

Reconciling Existential and Mystical Elements in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12671536

Author(s): Dr. Ajaz Ahmad

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12671536

PDF: Download Full Text

Volume 15 | Issue 3 | June 2024

Pages: 309-323

 
AboutUs: https://www.the-criterion.com/about/
 
Archive: https://www.the-criterion.com/archive/
 
ContactUs: https://www.the-criterion.com/contact/
 
EditorialBoard: https://www.the-criterion.com/editorial-board/
 
Submission: https://www.the-criterion.com/submission/
 
FAQ: https://www.the-criterion.com/fa/
 
 
 
 
ISSN 2278‐9529
Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal
www.galaxyimrj.com

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-III, June 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
Reconciling Existential and Mystical Elements in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry
Dr. Ajaz Ahmad
Lecturer,
Mission Educare School of Arts and Social Sciences,
Srinagar.
Article History: Submitted-17/04/2024, Revised-19/06/2024, Accepted-21/06/2024, Published-30/06/2024.
Abstract:
T. S. Eliot was triumphant in making poetry out of the philosophic, religious and mystic
concepts that he imbibed. He realized that the true task of the artist in the modern world is one
not of repudiation but of reconciliation. His journey from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock to
his poetic swan song of Four Quartets is a journey in which he explores the spiritual status of
man and the dark nights and barren territories of the modern mindset, uniting his skepticism with
faith in divine transcendence. The poet moved beyond the dogma of religion to feel and
experience the bliss of eternal world where the mind and spirit are joined and integrated in
unitary consciousness. Through the detailed study of Eliot’s poems, the present paper is going to
highlight not only existential and mystical dimensions of his poetry but the novelty will be to
trace the reconciliation between the two.
Keywords: triumphant, reconciliation, transcendence, skepticism, integrated, repudiation.
Existentialism is a philosophical movement started in France. The main exponents of
existentialism are Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert
Camus. Existentialism is most commonly acknowledged with the modern French existentialist
Jean Paul Sartre’s famous anti-foundational dictum “existence precedes essence” which means
that there is no pre-defined essence to humanity except that which it makes for itself.
Existentialists out rightly reject pre-existing structures that might endow antecedent meaning to
the human experience. Atheistic existentialists attached no importance to divine artesian, they
refuted the existence of God. Rationality and reason, according to them are the mere linguistic
constructs articulated to deceive man. Any outward imposition is not binding to a man according
to existentialists. They believe that subjectivity and freedom makes a man sensitive to the
309
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12671536

Reconciling Existential and Mystical Elements in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
questions concerning the purpose of life which lastly drive him towards the crisis known as
existential crisis. Death, suffering, meaninglessness, and identity crisis; keep on torturing man
who becomes the victim of existential crisis. Henry Miller depicts a dismal picture of the modern
world: “We are all dead, or dying, or about to die”(46). William Shakespeare, the artist and
literary spokesperson of Elizabethan age, excellently sums up the absurdity and futility of life
and man in his famous play, Macbeth. He points out the ephemeral nature of man’s existence and
his limitation:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing (Muir 15).
Eliot as a modernist poet presented the modern man’s growing sense of futile existence,
alienation and loss of identity followed by the deadly effects of two world wars which have left
the existence of modern man to insignificance. The poet displayed the themes of alienation and
meaninglessness of modern world which has lost its stability and significance due to the
widespread fragmentation. The poet considers the human life in relation to its unavoidable
destiny, suffering meaningless existence and death, therefore, views human existence as diseased
and disorganized. His poetry echoes the voices of existential philosophers such as Kierkegaard
and Sartre. Anxiety, sense of nothingness, urban indifference, loneliness and a confrontation with
death are the existential themes that T.S. Eliot makes modern man aware of.
Eliot gives us a peep into the existential void in which modern man is in conflict with.
To start with Eliot’s narrative poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The poem
symbolically depicts unsettling journey of modern man into his own mind. Prufrock, the narrator
of the poem, remains locked within his neurotic self, moving from one situation to another to
escape the hellish existence. The poem which seems to be apparently dialogue is rather a mental
conflict and fragmented consciousness of the protagonist’s ‘divide self’, demonstrating how
beneath the seeming glitter of modern life, lurks degeneration. Prufrock thus is having a crisis of
existence. His existential void is so intense that he fails to connect himself to the outer world. He
310

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-III, June 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165

www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
is the symbol of disintegrated personality of a modern man who is enduring the suffering in this
meaningless world. The mind of Prufrock, “… reveals a patient etherized upon a table, a
paralyzed intellectual whose mind is a prison, a Hell with no exit” (Brooker 14). Therefore, the
poem, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, can be read as an examination of the tortured psyche of
the prototypical modern man whose meaningless existence makes him to succumb to the
disintegration of will. The schizoid personality makes him feel dehumanized and in this state of
disintegration he speaks: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors
of the silent seas” (73-74). The fragmentation of crab into claws and ‘scuttling’ convey the sense
of disintegrated personality of Prufrock. The voices he hears around him symbolize the reality of
life, but he fails to overcome his indecisiveness.
As a true existentialistic character, Prufrock understands the life around him from his own
prism of subjectivity. It was flaw in his character to subjectivise everything he looks at, which
subsequently gets developed into phobia. That is why instead of confronting the outer world, he
escapes into his inner self of apathy and inertia by raising self-debating questions, which in
reality speak about his existential anguish. Do I dare / Disturb the universe? (45-46), “How
should I presume?”(54) are the riddles related to doomed and meaningless existence of man on
earth. Prufrock meaningless and isolated life confines his existence to empty rituals of trivial
routines. Free choice is denied to him in the world where he is shocked and tormented by the
feelings of self-alienation and gloomy existence. The mortal nature of man makes him to
question his own existence. His plight is similar to that of Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel
Becket’s Waiting for Godot, who aimlessly try to engage themselves in different trivial activities
in order to escape the meaningless existence. Prufrock has been squeezed off in the flow of time;
he neither comes out of it, nor can deny it. He is represents the plight of the modern man who
becomes the victim of time, which precipitates his suffering and reduces the man to the state of
in action and apathy. The question which has become obsession with Prufrock is the question
regarding the meaning of existence. The wearing of social masks cannot give a modern man
solace from the existential crisis. Prufrock fails to come to terms with the despair of doomed
existence. Fear of death and meaningless existence shatter him to the core. It is this crisis which
causes his alienation from the outer world and also his self-alienation from his internal self.
This existential anguish and futility of existence, is nowhere better portrayed symbolically
than in The Waste Land. The Poem is prefaced with the epigraph from Satyricon by poet
311

Reconciling Existential and Mystical Elements in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
Petronius, a work which Eliot had gone through during his undergraduate days at Harvard. The
preface is showing that Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a bottle wants to die . This shows that Sibyl’s
existential bliss is superseded by death wish. She represents the decrepitude of the modern man,
who inevitably endures the pangs of hollow existence, thus the poet at the very outset introduces
his readers with the central theme: ‘life devoid of meaning is death’. The people in The Waste
Land languish in a state of crisis of existence .The Waste Land exemplifies with mingling of
different genres, the existential uncertainty of human beings. It is crippled world full of crises
and no meaning. The denatured state of people under such condition is voiced in this poem: “He
who was living is now dead / We who were living are now dying” (328-29). Eliot mirrors the
picture of the modern humanity. The modern man has lost his sense of thinking. He cannot
move beyond the circle of painful existence and aspire for nothing, thus are dead. The crowd of
characters like, German princess, Madame Sosostris, Belladona, one-eyed merchant and crowd
over London bridge, all are overpowered by ‘death in life existence’ and they drown their
existential grief in different futile and insignificant activities. Beneath the apparent glitter and
pomp in their life, lies boredom and angst which meaningless life offers to a man in the present
disgusted world
The ‘fragments’ of conversation between the lady and her lover in with the repeated
question endorses that the man in the modern world cannot think of anything which can guide
him to any meaningful direction. She questions her lover again and again who stays silent and
does not answer. The lady tries to know what has occupied his mind. He responds late with the
puzzling and shocking revelation which sums up the meaningless existence of the human beings
in this world. Human beings are like rats in their holes. They keep running around their confined
holes. Not only life but death too is without any significance for them. It is life which bestows
meaning to death. When life is meaningless, death loses its significance automatically. In such
condition ‘nothingness’ prevails everywhere:
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
Nothing again nothing.
Do
312

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-III, June 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165

www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
You know nothing? Do you see nothing?”
I never know what you are thinking. Think.
I think we are in rat’s alley
Where the dead men lost their bones (113-16).
The Hollow Men is the poem about despair, pessimism and lack of vision and hope. The
theme of hopelessness and meaninglessness runs through the poem. In The Hollow Men, people
suffer the same agony which develops into trauma like experience. They face the same crisis
which the people in The Waste Land have met. They are paralyzed, hollow and inactive almost
dead: “Shape without form, Shade without color, / Paralyzed force, gesture without motion” (11-
12).The insignificant futile life makes them paralyzed. They display complete estrangement and
their unreal vision of modern society is brought out in the poem. They are pervaded by a sense of
alienation and failure of communication not with each other only but also within their own
internal selves. Hollow from inside, not in position to confront time as they are thrown into utter
helplessness and helplessness. Life is burden to them and death they are reluctant to face. The
poem is the expression of modern society without any vision and purpose in life their futility and
uselessness is writ on their faces:
We are the Hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! (1-4)

The Symbols of “Cactus land” (38), and “fading star” (42) represent the
dilapidated condition of modern existence which is falling, therefore, has lost the sense of value
and significance. The poem ends with a sad note representing the fatal and tragic end of human
beings: This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper (97-98).
Eliot besides mirroring the objective correlative of the modern mind gives also an insight
into those significant moments which lead man to the transcendental reality through the
spiritually highest state of consciousness, called as mystical consciousness. This is the merit in
Eliot’s poetry that besides being a modernist intellectual he exhibits mystical sensibility in an age
313

Reconciling Existential and Mystical Elements in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
of chaos and disorder. Mystical consciousness is one such main state of consciousness, an
awareness originating from one‘s soul through which man can transcend his senses and approach
the unseen. It is a supra-sensible experience which acquaints a mystic with realities and states of
affair that one can hardly apprehend through sense perceptions. The mystical experience
transcends the apparent and the physical and merges into deeper mysteries of the universal soul.
It is, therefore, an organic growth of man’s transcendental consciousness. William James while
giving an account of mystical experience said that “In mystic states we both become one with the
absolute and we become aware of oneness. This is an everlasting and triumphant mystical
tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed” (30).
As an intellectual saint, Eliot revealed to the fragmented modern world that the anguish and
nothingness can be transcended by moving to a place of spiritual serenity, which gives a man
place to stand in the world. His poetry from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock to Four Quartets
is the clear endorsement of this. He reconciles the polarities of experience in the still point and
taking God consciousness to be this still point rather than some abstraction. He believed that,
“All human faculties are ultimately grounded in mysticism” (Child 145). He upholds with all the
force and conviction the claims of the transcendence. His poetry is much dabbling in paradoxes
which reveal the complexity of opposite view points. He expresses himself in modernist
language of paradoxes and tightly holds seemingly contradictory positions or both poles of
binaries. His philosophical preoccupations and evolutions reveal diverse dimensions of his
poetry. His interest in mysticism is not simply an escape from the modern hellish existence;
rather it is a move towards higher truth. He takes us the eternal world of ‘still center’ where the
differences between the binary opposites get resolved. The poet creates an eternal moment where
the apparent gap between time and timelessness is bridged. In Four Quartets, Love, redemption
and true pattern of history are the themes which interact with the central theme of time and
timelessness. The poet expresses how in time, time is conquered and redeemed. The poem in this
way is an attempt to move beyond existentialism to repair the chaotic and fragmented modern
world by offering a mystical synthesis, reconciling the aesthetic world of The Waste Land and
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, with the renewed mystical world of ‘still center’, of Four
Quartets where empirical distinctions of the temporal and eternal, birth and death, flux and
stillness, light and darkness, are obliterated and transcended.
314

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-III, June 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165

www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
“Burnt Norton” is the first poem in Four Quartets, which refers to a manor house the
poet once visited in Gloucestershire in England. Its rose garden had tremendous effect upon Eliot
which he uses as an important symbol in this quartet. The poem starts with the paradox,
sandwiching past, present and future:

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 (1-5).
Eliot creates an eternal moment by shattering the notion of age-old divisions of time
into present, past and future. The poet under the mystical and philosophical influences,
experiences here the eternal, cyclical time, moving beyond the bondage of linear time. Time is,
therefore, a stream of flow without any divisions. Such an eternal moment is created in
spirituality as time in its spiritual sense entails eternity. Helen Gardner evaluated the subject of
time used in Burnt Norton. She communicates that “It is an experience for which theology
provides an explanation and on which religion builds a discipline, the immediate apprehension of
a timeless reality, felt in time and remembered in time, the sudden revelation of ‘the one end,
which is always present” (63)
It is the rose garden where one can feel the bliss of timelessness in time temporal or
earthly garden which may convey ultimate real or meeting of the eternal and temporal. Eliot
writes:

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passages which we didn’t take

Towards the door we never opened
315

Reconciling Existential and Mystical Elements in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030

Into the rose garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind (11-15).
The rose garden, as per the analysis of Paul Kramer, “is filled with echoes – earthly
and mythic, personal and universal, from the present situation and from inner recesses of …
memory. A feeling of excitement enters the poem. The sound of birds fills the rose garden and
urges the poet to risk the terror and ecstasy of entering a new world” (36).
The rose garden is a starting place of a mystical journey, a journey which bestows
meaning to meaningless moments in time that Eliot presents in The Waste Land. The symbols
presenting sterility and meaninglessness are reconciled with the image of rose.
At the end of “Burnt Norton”, The significance of timeless moments is emphasized
here sudden illumination is expressed which transfigures the world. This is the reality which
dawned upon Eliot when he concludes:
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 (172-78).
“East Cooker” is associated with the ancestral home of T. S. Eliot. The poem meditates on
the passage of time experienced by the poet in his own life time. The first line, “In my beginning
is my end” (1), reveals the ephemeral nature of life and inevitability of change. In this quartet,
Eliot foregrounds the eternal cycle of creation and destruction. This cyclic change occurs in
temporal time lined in history. The circular nature of history is thus pointed out here with
musical pattern. It shows that temporal existence lived in history end in death. Eliot continues:
316

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-III, June 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165

www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
The association of man and woman
In daunsynge, signifying matrimonie
A dignified and commodious sacrament. Two and two, necessary coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm/ which betokeneth Concorde. Round and
round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles (31-37)
The celebration of the matrimonial event, involving dancing by the villagers gives
a freedom of joy and communion to the scene. Though the peasant finds joy and transcends time,
yet it proves to be ephemeral. “East Cooker” symbolizes earth and its activities, associated with
the human beings, and other animals. Eliot thus brings out the triviality of life absorbed in the
rhythms of nature. People get completely engrossed in the various temporal cyclic activities,
which hardly lead a man towards timelessness. The circular pattern of life leads down through
various stages of change and ends in ultimate death.
Humility can uplift man to eternal, asserts Eliot, “The only wisdom we can hope to
acquire / Is the wisdom of humility” (101-2), which has no end. This humility is important, as it
has to do a lot with man’s spiritual growth. Man needs to cultivate humility in the temporal
world, so that he can envisage a possible union with the divine.
This state of bliss and ecstasy guarantees a deep spiritual consciousness as said before,
which is a dawn of the new order:
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth (132-36)
These lines echo the voice of St. John of the Cross. Eliot believes that one can attain
divine grace by following the mystic way of saints like St. John of the Cross. The poet doesn’t
317

Reconciling Existential and Mystical Elements in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
only advocate Christian concept of self-denial but also Eastern way of emptiness to suggest the
implications of the dark night of the soul. The soul is lost in ignorance and darkness which is
paradoxically movement towards timelessness. Eliot’s persona expresses belief in trying only
and not thinking beyond it. He utters “For us there is only trying. The rest is not our
business”(193). Striving shouldn’t cease even if one gets bogged down by the suffering and the
ordeals of inner life. This seems to be the echo of The Gita, where Krishna says to Arjuna the
action is important not its fruit. Eliot considers life as a journey starting from home. In this
journey nothing is static, as everything is in flux.
The first line of “East Cooker” “In my beginning is my end” (1) is reversed, as this
section is concluded with “In my end is my beginning” (213). The fusion of beginning and end is
a movement from temporal to the eternal, towards a new dawn.
The third section, “The Dry Salvages” actually is a small group of rock off the coast of
Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Eliot used to play there as a boy during his vacation. The memories of
this aspect stayed with him. Eliot used imagery of this place out of fascination for such a place
(Reibetanz 99). River here is the earthly or temporal dimension of one’s life and on the other
hand, the image of sea symbolizes eternity. The river is shown to have god like power which has
been neglected and forgotten by urban people who are “the worshippers of the machine” (10).
The river keeps on maintaining the “seasons and rages” (8), “The river is within us” (15), as we
can never be freed from our own mortality, it is engrained within each and every one of us.
Temporal time becomes a necessary entry through which we can enter the higher realms of
timelessness. Thus, Eliot does not advocate renouncing the temporal completely because it is
ultimately through it one reaches eternal. “The sea is all about us” (15) with its “many voices, /
Many gods and many voices” (24-25). It is, therefore vast and limitless. Santwana Haldar makes
a wise observation when he says, “The ‘river’, is ‘within us’, is time that is experienced by us, as
is suggested through the references to the four seasons. And the sea which is ‘all about us’ is
likely to symbolize all time in timeless extension. The rivers merges in the sea” (110).
Eliot maintains that “Time the destroyer is time the preserver” (115). If time is cruel
which inflicts sufferings and miseries, it can be moment of eternity within time also. “The bitter
apple and the bite in the apple” (117) remind us of the Garden of Eden .
318

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-III, June 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165

www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
In the third section of “The Dry Salvages”, there is mention of The Bhagavad-Gita.
Eliot wonders “what Krishna meant” (124). The poet expresses what Krishna teaches his
disciple, Arjuna in an insightful moment. “The future is a faded song’, a Royal rose or a lavender
spray” (128). It is a ‘wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret” (129). Time is in a
state of flux it cannot be captured, it keeps on changing. The future changes into the present, the
present into the past and then after remote past, is heard of no more. Therefore, every moment is
new, even body is changing in every moment. For a mystic present now is important, not the
future and past. Eliot emphasizes the teaching of Krishna to Arjuna: “do not think of the fruits of
action / Fare forward” (163-64). The statement is about the going ahead in one’s journey. As far
as present context of the poem is concerned, this statement can be interpreted as the need to
move forward in transcendence experience the ultimate reality which is eternity, keeping the
desire aside. The advice of Krishna may be taken as a call to purge one’s self off the temporal
longings and desires. This section end with the Lord Krishna’s admonition to Arjuna when he
directs “Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers” (169-70)
Eliot in the last section of “The Dry Salvages” conveys that all the approaches to fathom
the ultimate reality futile and misleading. Psychoanalysis, Magic, tarot cards and other means,
get at the surface of reality and they cannot give us the real spiritual vision. He stresses “But to
apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / with Time, is an occupation for the Saint”
(187-89). Saints are, very rare, and their teaching should be beneficial for those who live an
ordinary life without rejecting the same. It must bring fulfillment to everyone. Saints and mystics
should come out of the cocoon of a blessed state of transcendence to benefit the human kind so
that the spiritual revitalization is extended to the entire human kind.
The final reconciliation between timelessness and times takes place in the last quartet,
“Little Gidding”. The poet believes that there is need to achieve union with the divine being
through purgation. This purgatory stage exonerates – one’s self from the desire which is
detrimental to love. The narrator now proceeds to lay down the route of attachment and
detachment which is inevitable sacrifice in the direction of achieving religious synthesis:
There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet different completely, flourish in the same hedgerow
319

Reconciling Existential and Mystical Elements in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and growing between them indifference (152-
56)
History in attachment is servitude and when there is a shift from attachment to
detachment, it becomes freedom as stated by the poet:
History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See know they vanish
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern (165-68).
Therefore, history is servitude when we remain glued to the phenomenal self and it is
freedom only when ‘our significant self-moves closely to the nominal self’ (Patrick 347). In this
state one lives in peace and stability, where one sees the pattern of the past ‘transfigured’ having
the divine source.
The narrator now seems to be content and it looks that he has overpowered the evil within
him. He declares his faith in the tradition of Julian of Norwich that all things shall be well and
the riddle and guilt of existence shall finally be over. He is sanguine and speaks thus: “Sin is
behovely, but / All shall be well, and / All manners of things shall be well” (173-75). The
optimism emerging here can be attributed to Bradley. However, its main source is the saint,
Julian of Norwich. The idea of good and bad, sin and virtue are of no value till the motive is
purified. Thus, what matters in the long run is the motive that has undergone purification. This is
the end of the journey of the dark night of the soul, which evacuates the sin from the hearts of
men. The persona moves ahead and celebrates the ‘refining fire’. The trumpet of the descent of
the Holy Spirit on the Apostle is blown:
The dove descending breaks the air
With a flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
320

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-III, June 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165

www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire. (203-09)
Fjordbotten on elucidating it comments:
The dove is … traditional symbol for the Holy spirit which breaks the air in its descent to
earth. … when the spirit comes, it prompts a choice – either remaining in sin and thus
being subjected to the fire of Judgment or becoming subject to the spirit’s enlightening
and refining fire and thus being set free from sin and death. Thus, these… lines relate
back to the end of immediately preceding section, with the suggestion of purification of
motives” (290).

The poet brings the final reconciliation in the last section of “Little Giddings”. We are
again reminded of the cyclical time. The narrator avers: what we call the beginning is often the
end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from” (217-19).
Thus Eliot’s words do not strain and fail here; rather they are ‘transfigured’ into a ‘pattern’
which attains atemporal stillness.
Leaving behind the course of secular time and seeking the circular pattern of dance
needs to descend into the darkness that leads to the divine light. The narrator sees history as “a
pattern / of timeless moments” (237-38) and this is the pattern of God in history.
The poet advises that we should go on exploring the journey further for a deeper
communion with the eternal:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time (243-46).
321

Reconciling Existential and Mystical Elements in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
The narrator highlights the inevitability of cyclical time, as the poem completes its
cycle by returning to the garden of Burnt Norton. “The children in the Apple- tree” (252) . The
tree is the way of ‘ascent’, leading to the goal which the persona seeks to achieve. At last the
narrator experiences peace, as the soul has reached to the world of ‘Shantih’, where beauty and
suffering; time and eternity exploring and arriving, birth and death are reconciled. It is a real
transcendence from the binaries of time and timelessness:
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and rose are one (260-63).
The faring forward and waiting without any hope and desiring spiritual journey
enables a man to rise to the summit of spirituality where he can find redemption from the
divisions of time. Time for a mystic is a moving image of eternity. Through this mystical
synthesis the ‘death in life’ situation is transformed into a new life of vivacity where the soul
released from the prison (body) gasps freely in celestial light. In this way, Eliot succeeds in
showing how timelessness is achieved in time. The last three lines possibly advocate that “ all
shall be well” (259) when the “tongues of flame” (260), an image of expression of man
controlled by the spirit of God, are in unity in the crowned trinity-knot, where all opposites are
reconciled and the fire of love and rose of desire are one and the same thing. The poem, thus
ends at mystical affirmation of non- duality of things, which is the basic foundation of
mysticism.
It is, therefore, true that, the vision of Four Quartets can be read as a revision of the
earlier poetry. In the final synthesis of the poem lies the solution of the riddle of overwhelming
question, raised by Prufrock in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. From the beginning to the
end of Eliot’s poetry, there exists a continuity showing a quest and the longing of mind for the
spirit.

322

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-III, June 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165

www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
Works Cited:
Brooker, Jewel Spears, and Bentley Joseph. Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits
of Interpretation. Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.
Childs, Peter. Modernism. 2nd ed. Oxon, 2008.
Earls, John Patrick. The Moral Argument of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Diss. University of
Arizona, 1986.
Eliot, T.S. The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
1962.
Fjordbotten, A.Lee. Diss. Liturgical influence of Anglo-Catholicism on The Waste Land and
other works by T.S. Eliot. Fordham University, New York, 1999.
Gardener, Helen. The Art of T.S Eliot, London: Faber and Faber, 1969.
Haldar, Santwana. T. S. Eliot: A Twenty First Century View, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers And
Distributors, 2005.
James, Williams. The varieties of religious experience. London: Panguin classics, 1982
Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer. London: Flamingo, 1993.
Muir, Kenneth. Ed. Macbeth. London: Methuen and Co Ltd., 1951.

323