The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
“Four Quartets”
Thomas Stearns Eliot
The Battle After the Battle "The battle is going very heavily against us. We 're being crushed by the enemy weight...We are facing very difficult days, perhaps the most difficult that a man can undergo” (Erwin Rommel). During World War II, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel says on behalf of Germany that his army faces the most difficult days they have ever been through. This relates to all soldiers in all wars, as well as to people who lost their loved ones from the war. The time during and after World War II, the Naturalist period, resembles a time when people grieve over their losses from the war, and they write about the war and its effects on them. In Thomas Stearns Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” Eliot portrays a dark, hopeless, spiritual Naturalist point of view by referencing World War II and its effects on its victims through hospital and subway imagery, two bells at sea, and opportunities for spiritual reflection.
By describing active places of escape and physical treatment, Eliot references World War II, the popular subject of writing during the Naturalist period, and he also describes the effects of the war through people’s emotions. The tunnels he describes reminds the reader of the subways in London during the war. Specifically, he illustrates the situation in the subway “when an underground train … stops too long between stations / And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence / And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen / Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about” (Eliot, “East Coker” III). The transition from “conversation” to “silence” in underground trains replicates the actual events of World War II, when people would escape underground from the incoming air raids, with “nothing to think about” but the “terror” and destruction exploding above. In addition, their “silence,” “mental emptiness,” and “growing terror” express the emotions that people experience during the
Thomas Stearns Eliot
The Battle After the Battle "The battle is going very heavily against us. We 're being crushed by the enemy weight...We are facing very difficult days, perhaps the most difficult that a man can undergo” (Erwin Rommel). During World War II, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel says on behalf of Germany that his army faces the most difficult days they have ever been through. This relates to all soldiers in all wars, as well as to people who lost their loved ones from the war. The time during and after World War II, the Naturalist period, resembles a time when people grieve over their losses from the war, and they write about the war and its effects on them. In Thomas Stearns Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” Eliot portrays a dark, hopeless, spiritual Naturalist point of view by referencing World War II and its effects on its victims through hospital and subway imagery, two bells at sea, and opportunities for spiritual reflection.
By describing active places of escape and physical treatment, Eliot references World War II, the popular subject of writing during the Naturalist period, and he also describes the effects of the war through people’s emotions. The tunnels he describes reminds the reader of the subways in London during the war. Specifically, he illustrates the situation in the subway “when an underground train … stops too long between stations / And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence / And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen / Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about” (Eliot, “East Coker” III). The transition from “conversation” to “silence” in underground trains replicates the actual events of World War II, when people would escape underground from the incoming air raids, with “nothing to think about” but the “terror” and destruction exploding above. In addition, their “silence,” “mental emptiness,” and “growing terror” express the emotions that people experience during the
Cited: Amos, Jonathan. “Haiti earthquake maps.” BBC News 13 Jan. 2010. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8456233.stm>. Crane, Stephen. “The Open Boat.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 7th ed. Ed. Nina Baym. Volume 2. New York: Norton, 2008. 603-619.