Four Quartets – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’

A summary of a classic Eliot poem by Dr Oliver Tearle

‘Little Gidding’ is the last of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, but it is also his last significant poem. What’s more, there is a sense in this poem of Eliot seeking to join the threads of his work together, to ‘set a crown upon a lifetime’s effort’, as he puts it in ‘Little Gidding’ itself. But this remains a puzzlingly abstract poem in some ways, resisting any straightforward explication or analysis. There is nothing little about ‘Little Gidding’. You can read the poem here.

A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Dry Salvages’

A summary of a classic Eliot poem by Dr Oliver Tearle

Air was the loose elemental theme of ‘Burnt Norton’, earth the element of ‘East Coker’. In ‘The Dry Salvages’, the third of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, we find ourselves among a different element: water. The Dry Salvages, as Eliot’s note tells us, is probably derived from the French les trois sauvages, and is a small group of rocks off Cape Ann in Massachusetts. (‘Salvages’ should be pronounced ‘sal-VAY-jiz’ rather than ‘SAL-vi-jiz’.) In this poem, Eliot further analyses and explores a number of themes including Christianity and divination, the future and the past, using water as a chief symbol. You can read ‘The Dry Salvages’ here.

We begin the first of the five sections of ‘The Dry Salvages’ with what we might style a comparative analysis of the river and the sea. The ‘strong brown’ river, the Mississippi, which is ‘untamed and intractable’, and has served as a frontier and as a conduit for commerce. But unlike the river, which is within us, the sea is all about us. The river is a ‘god’, but the sea has ‘many gods’ and ‘many voices’: a polytheistic force of nature.

A Summary and Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Four Quartets was T. S. Eliot’s last great achievement as a poet. After its publication in the early 1940s, Eliot would write occasional minor verses, but much of his creative energy was directed into the theatre, where he wrote a series of attempts to bring about a renaissance in English verse drama (with mixed results).