Allusions of Eliot

So I read the Four Quartets this past weekend and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Almost every corner is turned down indicating passages and sections I loved.

One of the references that was easy for me to spot was in Little Gidding Section IV, and the reference to Hercules and Deianira. I only know this because it was the story from Ovid I had to present in Classical Lit. with Dr. Sexson. Eliot’s two stanzas summed up an entire tale that Ovid wrote in many more. Once again Ovid is emerging in this class as a reference and allusion for many to use.

The story is about the love of one person for another, a love that is all consuming. A fire that consumes and redeems us. Eliot recognizes that love is a torment, but it is also the thing that saves us in the end. Hercules is consumed in a “pyre”, both his shirt and of his own making, and is redeemed in his metamorphosis into a constellation. As Eliot writes, “The only hope, or else despair/Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-/To be redeemed from fire by fire” (57).

One of my other favorite references that Eliot made was to the children in the trees. I have not been able to look more into this idea but I plan to. The lines that include this idea are as follows:

“Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,/Hidden excitedly, containing laughter” (15).

“Sudden in a shaft of sunlight/ Even while the dust moves/There rises the hidden laughter/Of children in the foliage…” (20).

“The voice of the hidden waterfall/And the children in the apple-tree/Not-known, because not looked for/But heard, half-heard, in the stillness/Between two waves of the sea” (59).

I am not sure why these passages strike me so, but they stay with me even after I have finished reading. There are also so many more passages, but I will not fill this blog with lines I love, or at least try not to!