Eliot!!

After stumbling through about a quarter of Finnegans Wake (which I love the sound of when read outloud, but which I absolutely do not understand one bit...) I was very excited to dive into the Four Quartets. Eliot has been a favorite poet of mine for years; My mom used to read me his cat poems when I was little, and I did my AP English final paper on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" for high school (a 20 page long interpretation that my teacher was both impressed and horrified by...).

I have to admit, I'm still not quite sure what a "20-minute lifetime" would consist of. I know what it means, of course, and I know what it feels like, but I'm not sure how to explain it. I'm glad we watched the episode of Star Trek, because it made it a bit more clear what exactly it means (although I was surprised at how emotional the show made me, making me realize my fear of aging...but that's another story...)

We were supposed to find an example of a "20-minute lifetime" in the Four Quartets. I found several.
The first is Stanza IV from Burnt Norton:

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world

Here, he calls dusk "the still point of the turning world." I once read that the sun takes about 8 minutes to set, so I guess this is an 8 minute lifetime! I love how Eliot takes something as ordinary as a sunset and makes it seem like everything.

Another example occurs in stanza V of East Coker:

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

Here, Eliot says that we all live every lifetime in every moment. He also mentions "the intense moment/Isolated, with no before and after." I know we have all had one of those vivid memories where it felt like a whole life passed in a few moments, and our memory of the before and after is hazy because that moment was so intense.

Another one I found (that I suppose could also be interchanged with the recurring life theme) was in the first stanza of The Dry Salvages:

Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;

Anyone who's read Eliot knows that he is obsessed with nighttime. Here he is saying that, at night, time stops and the past and future don't matter; it's the only time as humans we can appreciate the present.

I'm sure there are a lot more examples in Eliot, I'm just too tired to try and find them right now. But I'm so glad that Dr. Sexson has Eliot on our reading list, because he is probably one of, if not the, greatest poets of all time.