The Children of Eliot’s Quartets

In an earlier blog on Eliot’s Four Quartets I wrote of the three separate times that Eliot brings up “the children in the leaves.” I wanted to look into these passages farther, but since I have no internet at home I thought I would take a stab at it myself before plunging into the world of Google.

I reread the Four Quartets this past weekend, and each time is a richer experience. I understand something more fully, I see an allusion I missed before or even find connections between other literature from class and the themes we have been discussing. But there is one true constant each time I read it, and that is that I love it completely. In particular, I love the image of the children in the leaves.

When I first read the Four Quartets I thought what a wonderful image. Hidden children and the only sound is of their laughter, as if the lines were images and thoughts of the seeker in a game of hide and seek. Eliot mentions them explicitly three times and the lines are as follows:

“Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.” (14)

“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)

Eliot writes of them only three times, twice in Burnt Norton, at the beginning and the end, and once in Little Gidding at the very end. When reading these lines for the second time I began to think of the role children play in general, in both their own lives and others around them.

Right at the beginning of Burnt Norton Eliot writes, “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future” (13). When I thought about this idea more I thought “isn’t that just what children are?” If one of the major themes of this work is the 20 minute lifetime, or a lifetime burning in every moment, is not that how children live? They are the three tenses embodied within one begin. As adults we often lose the ability to live life that way, but children hold on to that enthusiasm for life. This is seen in Eliot’s lines that they are heard but only half-heard. It is our other “lives” and another time calling to us from the "trees."

This is what children are to me at least. They are past, present, and future. They have their own past, especially if we believe in eternal recurrence, and they have already been here before. And they embody the past of their parents, a past love and union that lead to their ultimate creation. They are the present, in that they live wholly in it and think of little else but the reality around them. And they to are the future in that each child has the capacity to do and be so much.

Perhaps this is not what Eliot imagined, that the combining of all tenses is found within children. But it is their ability to live within the moment, and yet hold so much for the future that makes them immune to the mundane world that so many fall into as they get older. Eliot seems to be writing of a way of living that we lose if we don’t remember the child within and that "Time past and time future/What might have been and what has been/Point to one end, which is always present" (14).