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.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning
Sometimes we experience a feeling when reading which has no easy ‘conscious’ connection to the words we have just encountered. It may feel as if experience has run on ahead, leaving our ability to articulate why we feel/what we feel, still lingering at the fringes of our consciousness.
We just don’t ‘get the poem”!
Now this is a poem that I can guarantee you will NEVER encounter at GCSE!
Yet the reason I have placed it here is because its difficulty. In fact it is an excellent example of what we can do when faced by a text which escapes our comprehension because it is opaque, problematic, or both!
So let’s look at the opening sentence of T S Eliot’s Four Quartets.
‘Home is where one starts from.’
- ‘Home’is a word with significant connotations and these connotations are often highly emotive! Think about security, safety, sanctuary, domesticity, family, childhood, personal space etc. So if we anchor into the resonant connotations of ‘home’, we may finda response of an emotional kind to the origin of the poem’s effect upon us.
- For as soon as the reader hears the word ‘home’ we are straight into a world of emotions, perhaps happy, unhappy and problematic.
- We are then challenged by the proffered insight of the declaration that ‘home is where one starts from.’
- Do we agree and what are the implications of starting from a place, especially if that place can be so problematic in its connotations?
- And then, implied within the sentence, is the sense that we end up somewhere else. Where we might wonder to we end up? In a tomb, in another different ‘home’ perhaps, or in somewhere not a home anymore?
- The act of carefully exploring the possibilities(connotations) of the opening sentence helps us to ‘arrive’ at the final line by Eliot in this part of his Four Quartet’s poem.
- The last line here asserts that: ‘In my end is my beginning.’ Once again we find a seemingly clever, affecting line, perhaps unsure as to what it might signify. It feels as if one voice is replying to another and delivering paradox as a means of provocation, and yet recognition too; maybe accepting the integrity of paradox, as paradox allows for the co-existence of different viewpoints and embraces them!
- Are we searching tentatively perhaps for a certainty that will never arrive because of the innate AMBIGUITY of the line? And if there is a considerable Ambiguity then should we not allow that multi-layered aspect to remain by offering ‘seeming’/’suggesting/’appearing’ ideas that do not express definitive answers? Should we offer instead possibilities of a most flexible and even playful kind?
- Does our birth foreshadow our death? Is our mortality all tangled up with our origin?
- And is it our mortality which gives our life meaning as it sets every experience against the steady progress of time?