SOURCE: "Eliot and Elytis: Poet of Time, Poet of Space," in Comparative Literature, Vol. 36, No. 3, Summer, 1984, pp. 238-57.

[In the following essay, Malkoff compares and contrasts Elytis's To Axion Esti to T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and asserts that both poets are seeking a unity of being in their work.]

In this essay I propose to explore the differences between T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Odysseus Elytis' To Axion Esti, in the hope of discovering patterns that may contribute to an understanding of their poetry in general. As a preliminary to such an investigation, it would be prudent to establish a common ground of discourse for two poems that are only rarely mentioned in the same breath, and which, at first glance, may seem quite unrelated. Is is a commonplace in criticism of modern Greek literature to note that while George Seferis, Greece's first Nobel Prize-winning poet, came very much under Eliot's spell, her second, Elytis, though admiring his American contemporary, has gone out of his way to characterize Eliot's work as being far too despairing. Nonetheless, the Quartets and the Axion Esti often coincide in theme—that is, in historical focus, and in the attempt to bridge the gap between man and God—and in form, as Eliot and Elytis use strikingly similar structural principles in their struggle to perceive order in the world's apparent chaos.

I use the word "historical" in two senses. First, and more generally, I refer to the concern of each poet with the nature of man's involvement in time. In "Burnt Norton" Eliot is preoccupied with the irredeemability of time, with an irrevocable past and a determined future. To participate in eternity, perhaps mystically, offers the only release; but we still face the paradox that "Only through time time is conquered." It is hardly necessary to document the importance of the idea of time to the Quartets, so frequently and explicitly does it appear. Time is sometimes linear or progressive, sometimes cyclical, sometimes chaotic; it is often understood, though not necessarily experienced, as a function of eternity. It is also noteworthy that while Eliot begins with emphasis on the individual's experience of time, there is a movement through the Quartets toward a more public context, from the Rose Garden to the streets of London. In fact, the final formulation of the paradox that time can be conquered only through time reads:

                 A people without history
         Is not redeemed from time, for history is a
                 pattern
         Of timeless moments.

Although Elytis is far less concerned with the idea of time, with its abstraction (a point important later in this essay), he gives ample attention to the experience of time. In the first section of To Axion Esti, "Genesis," which is at once about the creation of the universe, the Greek people, and the poet himself, the hours of the day—the precise o'clock is important enough to be referred to three times—tick away as well as the months of gestation and the seven days of the Creation. The passing seasons are almost characters in the poem, so forcefully do they participate in its actions. And just as ontogeny is said to recapitulate phylogeny, in Elytis' world the individual Greek seems destined to bear the burden of his race's history. When, for example, in "The Passion," the poem's second section,

           They came
        dressed up as "friends,"
           came countless times, my enemies,
        trampling the primeval soil,

the language is equally appropriate to the innumerable invasions of Greece through the centuries, to the wars of the poet's own time, or to even some incident in his private life. In To Axion Esti's third and final section, "Gloria," Elytis most nearly approaches Eliot's concern with the idea of time. The section concludes with seven couplets, each first line praising the now—the ephemeral world—and the second the always—the eternal. This sense of the dual nature of things is related to Eliot's "still point of the turning world." Although there are important differences in means of expression, both poets are seriously concerned with the notion that our lives take shape at the point where time and eternity intersect.

The second sense of "historical" has to do with a specific cataclysmic event in the lives of both poets: the Second World War. We have already noted Eliot's tendency toward the abstract and therefore should not be surprised to find a less consistent preoccupation with the particular. Nonetheless, the war, frequently the unspoken but crucially implied backdrop to Eliot's speculations, becomes increasingly important as he moves from his exploration of time as a universal to the historical moment. "Burnt Norton" (1935) was written before the start of World War II (though not before Hitler's rise to power). By the time "East Coker" (1940) was published, the war had begun, and though the suggestion of its opening lines that houses rise and fall may be influenced by that fact, the only certain reference to the war is in Section V, where Eliot mentions his wasted "years of l'entre deux guerres." "The Dry Salvages" (1941) is even less explicit, but two movements of "Little Gidding" (1942) focus specifically on the war. In Section II, in lines whose form and content evoke Dante's Inferno, air-raid warden Eliot walks through the hellish streets of London during the Blitz, encountering there a ghostly poetic ancestor, while "the dark dove with the flickering tongue," the war plane, passes overhead. Section IV is devoted wholly to that dove "With flame of incandescent terror," at once war plane and Holy Spirit, creature of both time and eternity. Eliot patrolling the wartime streets is perhaps the most eloquent testimony of all to his dictum that "only through time time is conquered"; though the path of the mystic beckons, there is no escape from the world of the particular. Or, to borrow (steal?) Dante's formulation, in order to see God we must first descend into Hell.

Although the threat to Europe's survival is the Quartets' most pressing historical context, Eliot pursues a more private historical quest through the poems: the establishing of his roots in England. That they require establishing is acknowledged tacitly in "The Dry Salvages," a quartet which takes its title from the scene of Eliot's childhood vacations in Massachusetts and opens with a mediation on the Mississippi, near whose banks the poet was born. However, the titles of the other three Quartets refer to places in England, including East Coker, the village from which the Eliots emigrated in the seventeenth century. In this context, Eliot's birth in America comes to seem an accident of exile; the Quartets, insofar as they partake of time, are grounded on English soil—"History is now and England."

In To Axion Esti, where Greece is the link between microcosm and macrocosm, between the individual and the universe, there is no similar complication: this is a national poem. And there is no need to scour the text for allusions to World War II. The heart of the poem is its series of six Readings, whose architectural functions we shall soon have occasion to clarify. They consist of a generalized prose account of Elytis' experiences during the Albanian campaign, the Occupation, and finally the Civil War that without respite followed the liberation of Greece. These Readings literally provide the text that the contemporary Greek must interpret in order to understand his place in the universe. Elytis is not coy about giving the temporal its due; it is around the major historical events of his time that To Axion Esti coalesces.

The search for God, which involves doing business with eternity, is nonetheless pursued under the pressures of history. By what path does one reach the God who has either presided over the horrors of our world or has ceased to preside over anything? Enmeshed in time, how do we taste eternity? For both Eliot and Elytis, the solution—if solution it can be called—lies in immersion in the destructive element, whether that element be called Time or War or the Dark Night of the Soul. In "East Coker," Eliot says:

         O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,…
         I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come
                 upon you
         Which shall be the darkness of God.

In Elytis' Second Reading, the soldier (whose name means "Freedom") says that "only he who wrestles with the darkness inside him will find his own place in the sun someday." Of course, the mystic's Dark Night is Eliot's concern, while Elytis, whose religious forms sometimes seem like empty shells, is far more secular. But in each case there is the notion of sacrifice, of denial, as the path to salvation; and in each case the instrument of salvation is a love whose darker implications are scarcely disguised. Our only hope, insists Eliot, is "To be redeemed from fire by fire. / Who then devised the torment? Love." And for Elytis, "The blood of love has robed me in purple / And joys never seen before have covered me in shade."

Ultimately most significant, if not most immediately obvious, are the similarities in structure between the Four Quartets and To Axion Esti. It is arguable that a poem's form is its most important statement about the nature of reality, that content is simply a commentary on form's assertions. In any case, if we suggest that two works embody similar visions of reality, we may look to form as a promising source of confirmation. The structure of the Four Quartets is far more familiar to English-speaking readers. Each of the Quartets, modeled loosely on the last quartets of Beethoven, has five movements. The first is always a verbal equivalent—if we can speak of such a thing—of a sonata; the second, a lyrical mode shifting abruptly to the prosaic; the third, development of a theme; the fourth, a relatively brief lyric; and the fifth, a further variation on themes suggested by the opening movements. Perhaps most important is the simple fact that in the Four Quartets form is repeatable and recognizable. Although Eliot may have labored long hours inventing his verbal equivalents to musical form, the effect of using the same formal sequence in each of the Quartets is to reinforce the illusion that the poem's structure precedes its content (this is, in fact, literally true for the last three poems, some of whose materials—e.g., the Blitz—could hardly have been foreseen when "Burnt Norton" was written, but whose basic shapes had already been determined by that earlier poem). This may not seem extraordinary in itself, but if the composition of the Quartets is placed in its proper historical context, their shapeliness becomes noteworthy. In the mid-1930s, Ezra Pound was well into the Cantos, an open-ended poem in free verse, almost entirely devoid of repeated formal patterns. Eliot's previous major poem, The Waste Land (1922), written with substantial editorial help from Pound, and whose subject may be described as the fragmentation of western culture, eschewed symmetry. Since there was ample precedent for the "open" poem, and since The Waste Land seems to exhibit an interdependence of form and content, one might expect the form of Four Quartets to be similarly mimetic.

The very title of To Axion Esti suggests that its organizational principles will be ecclesiastic. The phrase "Worthy it is" is drawn from the Greek Orthodox liturgy, where, as in Elytis' poem, it is a frequently recurring refrain. The poem has three—obviously theologically significant—broad divisions, "Genesis," "The Passion," and "Gloria," which reflect the Christian itinerary of birth, suffering and death, and rebirth.

The first section, "Genesis," is divided into seven "hymns," each corresponding to a day of the biblical creation. The Genesis itself, however, applies simultaneously to the cosmos, eons in the making, the Greek people, and the poet himself. In fact, a tension persists, not only through this section but through the entire poem, between theologically inspired form and generally secular content. This has the effect of utilizing Christianity as a source of myth, and therefore of metaphor, much in the way that William Butler Yeats used his Vision to inform his poetry (with the significant difference that Elytis' myth is immediately and emotionally available to his audience).

By far the most substantial segment of the triptych, as well as the most complexly structured, is part two, "The Passion." It is as if the experiences of the war years, unless subjected to rigid discipline, could yield no more than an undifferentiated cry of pain and terror; only under the most formal circumstances can the emotions provoked by those years be revisited. The matter of "The Passion" is contained in its Readings, prose passages stylistically reminiscent of General Makrigiannis (whose Memoirs of the war of liberation against the Turks—an adumbration of World War II—have become a touchstone of demotic prose). As in the Greek Orthodox liturgy, whose general structure is suggested by "The Passion" (just as Beethoven's quartets are suggested by Four Quartets), the Readings are centerpieces for liturgical music, represented here by Psalms and Odes. Each Reading is preceded and followed by an Ode, a strictly metrical lyric (although the meter varies from Ode to Ode). The unit of Ode-Reading-Ode is itself preceded and followed by two Psalms, poems in free verse. Two Readings, with their attendant poems, form a structural unit, of which there are three all told, so that "The Passion" may be represented as follows:

               PPOROPPOROPP  PPOROPPOROPP
     PPOROPPOROPP

The precise nature of these intricacies is less important than the fact that they exist at all. And though the need to contain the experiences of the Readings, which are absorbed and transformed by the encompassing lyrics, partially justifies such form, we may still hope to find further support for such complexities.

"Gloria" has a less obvious, but in its own way intricate, structure which, as Edmund Keeley and George Savidis point out, serves to prevent "this section … from degenerating into a random enumeration of things 'worthy of praise,'" though, again, other explanations are possible. This section of the poem is also divided in three, with the arrangement of quatrains, triplets, and couplets of the first and third sections identical to each other, and similar to that of the second section. There are further refinements: for example, the triplets always provide specific instances—specimens. I am tempted to say—of the generalizations made in the quatrains preceding them; the groups of seven couplets, always introduced by a quatrain headed by "Axion esti," in turn echo the Ave, praise Him, and distinguish the Now from the Always.

To this point, both similarities in theme and complexities in structure have been observed in the two poems. Do their structural complexities also share some common characteristic? One way of approaching this question is suggested by George Savidis' remark in his essay "'Axion Esti' To Poiema tou Elyti": "The numbering of the sections by Elytis, not according to their typographical order, but distinguished by each genre … permits us also to read in their own order all the corresponding sections." In other words, all the Psalms can be taken from their sequential place in the poem and read together, as can the Odes and the Readings; most important, the new groupings have unity and coherence. Curiously, the same is true of Eliot's Quartets. For example, excerpting the fourth movement from each Quartet would give us a series of lyrics devoted to God the Father, Christ the Redeemer, the Virgin, and the Holy Spirit; the sequence as a whole could comprise Eliot's vision of Godhead. A cross-section of the opening movements would reveal the range of his perspectives on time: linear, cyclical, chaotic (in flux), and as a function of eternity. In neither poem, of course, would the aesthetic wholeness of the original work survive. We can nevertheless learn a great deal about the Quartets by reading the fourth movements in sequence, or, in To Axion Esti, all of, say, the Readings.

We now face the task of interpreting this similarity in structure. I acknowledge at once that it is futile to attempt to put into words what is expressed by a poem's form; the material will be too complex, or too subtle, or both. Nonetheless, statements general enough not to do violence to the form, but specific enough to shed light on its purposes, are not out of the question. By facilitating readings of their poems in other than typographical order, Eliot and Elytis invite their readers to recognize the spatial, as well as the more obvious temporal, aspects of poetry. That is, to borrow the notion E. M. Forster applied to the novel, the poem exists not only in time insofar as we are in the process of reading it but also in space insofar as we can apprehend it as a whole, a pattern. Eliot, whether or not he had Forster in mind, is quite explicit about this dimension of poetry:

                          Only by the form, the pattern,
       Can words or music reach
       The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
       Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Although we can only experience one moment at a time, our awareness of pattern, as it is pressed on us by Eliot and Elytis (not only in passages like Eliot's cited above but continuously in the structures of their poems as well), reminds us that every moment of the poem exists simultaneously. The analysis of any complete poem implies recognition of its spatial dimension, but few poems suggest so clearly their own reordering, insist so strongly on their existence in space as well as time.

What makes this hypothesis especially interesting is that both poems are deeply involved in the exploration of the relationship between time and eternity, which, as Eliot's metaphor makes evident, correspond to typographical sequence and pattern respectively. In addition, both poets deal with the tension between place and infinity ("England or nowhere" in Eliot, the microcosm and macrocosm in Elytis), between the one and the many. If we look at the epigraphs—taken from fragments of Heraclitus—to Eliot's Quartets, we find that they have as their common theme the resolving of dichotomies:

        Although there is but one Center, most men
        live in centers of their own.
 
        The way up and the way down are one and the
             same.

The epigraphs would not be out of place affixed to the beginning of To Axion Esti. In content as well as form, both poems are committed to the recognition and resolution of dualisms.

Dualism, the perception of such dichotomies as time and eternity, the one and the many, spirit and matter, body and soul, may be either cause or symptom of man's separation from God or of the alienation of the individual from his society. The dualistic perception of reality has been a characteristically Western way of—or obstacle to—looking at the world, but at certain times in history it has been felt as more particularly painful. Clearly, the Second World War, when man had even more reason than usual to suspect God's absence and the very fabric of society was in danger of disintegrating, was one of those times. But our century as a whole has been preoccupied with the apparently widening gap between man and God and the fragmentation of Western culture; in fact, we have had to confront the waste land given mythic reality by Eliot in the 1920s, and to which both the Four Quartets and To Axion Esti are answers, assertions that in spite of apparent difficulty—or impossibility—the isolated individual can experience his existence as part of a greater whole.

It is now clear that in certain themes, and in principles of structure as well, there are important similarities between Four Quartets and To Axion Esti. Both are located in the mainstream of a poetic tradition which has had as its chief concern the identification and reconciliation of dualisms. It reached its greatest notoriety in the French Symbolistes, but also included such poets as John Donne, William Blake, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. Eliot and Elytis stand out because they have made the structure of their poems directly bear the weight of their visions of reality. The nearly contemporary appearance of these poems—little or no direct influence is involved—helps argue the existence of a common European literary tradition, not simply in the more obvious sense that in an age of relatively accessible translations international contemporaries affect one another, but in the more profound sense that they have emerged from a common store of preoccupations and strategies (rather as breakthroughs in science sometimes occur independently in two or more places, based on a common body of understanding, instead of on the more usual collaborations). There are, however, crucial differences between Eliot and Elytis which should not be overlooked.

My preliminary remarks, designed to emphasize similarities, have nonetheless touched on contrasts. I have said in passing that in Eliot an emphasis on time and eternity is accompanied by a tendency toward the abstract, while in Elytis an emphasis on the one and the many is accompanied by a tendency toward the concrete. I shall develop these propositions in greater detail. At the same time I shall be interested in determining whether the differences are accidental or are an inevitable and orderly consequence of distinct sensibilities being applied to the same problem.

I shall begin by examining how Eliot and Elytis treat the paradox that is important to both their works (although more nearly central to Eliot's): that salvation comes from the awareness that time and eternity are in contact with each other, and consequently that only through time can time be transcended. Eliot characteristically expresses this paradox in abstract language:

         Time past and time future
         What might have been and what has been
         Point to one end, which is always present.
                                 .....
 
                                           the light is still
         At the still point of the turning world.
                                 .....
 
         Time the destroyer is time the preserver.
                                 .....
 
         Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
         Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

These examples could, of course, be multiplied considerably. They are nevertheless sufficient to indicate that Eliot's vision of reality invites abstract formulation, and that a good deal of the appeal of his verse is to the conscious, logical intellect. If it were entirely that, Eliot need hardly have bothered to write a poem; an essay would have sufficed. (Indeed, Eliot's Ph.D. dissertation was a study of the philosopher F. H. Bradley.) There are, however, at least two reasons why these abstractions are distorted when removed from context.

First, Eliot uses ideas the way other poets use images; they do not appear in an absolute sense, but rather are juxtaposed with other, often contradictory, ideas, so that the poem's significance lies not in the idea but in the tension between ideas. For example, the proposition offered by Eliot at the start of "Burnt Norton" has sometimes been taken as the poet's unambiguous assertion about the nature of reality.

       Time present and time past
       Are both perhaps present in time future,
       And time future contained in time past.
       If all time is eternally present
       All time is unredeemable.

The key words in this passage are "perhaps" and "if." But even if the syllogism stands on its own feet logically—because time present and time past are both present in time future—the conclusion is nonetheless seriously challenged by the rest of the poem. Time is redeemable poetically by the imagination and theologically by the Redeemer and the mystery of the Incarnation, that is, by the paradoxes central to the Quartets.

Second, the poems are hardly devoid of imagery, and the images, in juxtaposition to the abstract statements, alter the abstractions. In the example given above, the images of rose garden, birds, children, and light which fill the first movement of "Burnt Norton" do not so much illustrate as explore the opening lines, so that the abstractions do not limit the meanings of the images, which retain a fine mysteriousness. In some cases, as when Eliot refers to the light that is "At the still point of the turning world," imagery and abstractions are thoroughly entwined, as in the Metaphysical poets.

Still, in Eliot, as in the Metaphysicals, it is the abstract mode that organizes and dominates the poem. The poet appeals to the conscious intellect, and he must supply in condensed and rationally apprehensible form his vision of reality. This emphasis on the abstract does not necessarily amount to that "dissociation of sensibility," the splitting of intellect and emotion that Eliot felt the Metaphysicals had been the last to avoid. But it does entail enough condensation for the conscious intellect to grasp in a given moment what is placed before it. Ezra Pound's well-known definition of an "Image" can be applied to the "conceits" used by Eliot in Four Quartets: "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."

In Elytis, the convergence of time and eternity is rarely expressed so abstractly, so baldly as in Eliot. In "Genesis," the persona of To Axion Esti describes himself as "the One I really was, the One of many centuries ago, / the One still verdant in the midst of fire, the One not made by human hand." The convergence of time and eternity is implicit in the notion that the self in the present is also the Self that has always existed; but it is characteristically in terms of the merging of selves, of the One and the many, that the paradox is expressed—abstraction is given bodily form.

In "The Passion," the eternal is overshadowed by immersion in time. The war makes one painfully aware of accident and chaos, and obscures visions of underlying permanence and harmony. Only—as Eliot might have put it—the pattern imposed by the poem's structure stands up to the welter of events. In "Gloria," which is unmistakably an assertion of underlying harmony, the connection between time and eternity again comes to the fore. The poem ends with seven couplets, each celebrating the now in its first line, the forever in its second. For example, "Now the Moon's incurable swarthiness/Forever the Galaxy's golden blue scintillation." The first line depicts the heavens in terms of the mutability of their separate parts, the second the everlastingness of the totality. Elytis works paratactically rather than through the syntax of metaphor, by accretion rather than concentration. It is by the piling up of images rather than the distillation of ideas that his perspective takes shape.

As noted earlier, the dominant dualism in the Quartets is temporal, that is, it involves the tension between time and eternity. But spatial dualism is unquestionably important, if only because imagery is by necessity spatial, even when it is used metaphorically to express temporal duality, as, for example, in "the still point of the turning world." At times Eliot is also interested in spatial imagery for its own sake, in the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm, and in the ancient Hermetic formula—"As above, so below"—which unites them. For instance, the first stanza of "Burnt Norton" 's second movement begins in mud—its first word, "garlic," is symbolic of whatever is at home in the earth's embrace—and ends with "stars." In between, Eliot spells it out:

             The dance along the artery
             The circulation of the lymph
             Are figured in the drift of stars.

In short, "as above, so below," with one proviso. Below is war, below is conflict: above is reconciliation. Even here temporal dualism is implied—below is the world of time, above, eternity. The "bedded axle-tree" of the first stanza will soon become "the still point of the turning world" of the second.

For Eliot, the individual's relationship to God is at the heart of things. From this perspective, space is nearly illusory. What principally separates man from God is the former's existence in time. His chief problem is how to bridge this gap. God managed it in the Incarnation. For man, it is indeed an imposing task. To achieve it, it seems that one must escape rather than celebrate the physical world.

           Descend lower, descend only
         Into the world of perpetual solitude,
         World not world, but that which is not world,
         Internal darkness, deprivation
         And destitution of all property,
         Desiccation of the world of sense.

This is a dominant—if not exclusive—mode in the Quartets: to escape from space in order to be able to escape from time through time. Eliot's poetry, as I have already noted, contains a good deal of imagery, which by nature is spatial. However, I have also observed that these images are often temporal metaphors. Even in one of the Quartets' most impressive (spatial) images, the evocation of the Mississippi which begins "The Dry Salvages," Eliot soon reveals that the river corresponds to time, as the ocean into which it flows corresponds to eternity: "The river is within us, the sea is all about us."

Far more secular, Elytis hopes not to transcend time—he seems unable, in this poem, even to imagine transcending it—but to be aware of his existence as part of an entity (or series of entities) greater than himself, which is, for all practical purposes, eternal: Greece, the human race, the cosmos. For him, the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm is central. Indeed, each of the last six hymns of "Genesis" concludes with the following formula:

                  THIS
                  the small world, the great [world].
                                  (AE, p. 6, etc.)

At times the distinction between great and small seems to break down. In Psalm XV, which compares the poet's self to God, Elytis writes:

          Look, it is you who speak and I who come true,
       I hurl the stone and it lands on me.
          I deepen mines and elaborate the skies.
       I hunt the birds and lose myself in their weight.
          I was your will, my God, and here I pay you
       back.
                                               (AE, p. 99)

It is not inconsistent with the distinctions I have been developing between Eliot and Elytis that the former's god disappears into the featurelessness of undifferentiated being and seems, like the god of the via negativa, describable only in terms of what he is not, while the latter's god is close enough and definite enough to be addressed face to face, superior but somewhat fathomable, perhaps to be argued with, certainly to be appealed to. This god is not always distinguished from the poet's self and sometimes seems to be the self's creation. Clearly, in Elytis' world, man performs many of God's functions, for example, in the poet's sanctification of the things of this world by naming them in "Gloria." In general, Elytis' poet shares with God the title of "Master-builder." For Eliot, the vastness of the gulf between the poet on the one hand and God and his universe on the other is far more important than what they might have in common. Eliot's view of the poet as creator can be understood as a function of this belief.

Throughout the Four Quartets, the theme of creativity, of art, is always near the surface. The arrangement of what is essentially a search for God in the form of a musical composition says volumes about art's relevance to that quest. But on at least three occasions, Eliot turns directly to confront the shortcomings of art, and most particularly of literature:

      Words move, music moves
      Only in time; but that which is only living
      Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
      Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
      Can words or music reach
      The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
      Moves perpetually in its stillness.
      Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
      Not that only, but the co-existence,
      Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
      And the end and the beginning were always there
      Before the beginning and after the end.
      And all is always now. Words strain,
      Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
      Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
      Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
      Will not stay still.

The first twelve and a half lines of this passage provide still another metaphor for "Burnt Norton"'s main theme. The pattern is the conception of the work as a whole; but at any given instant only one finite point in the work, rather than its wholeness, can be experienced. In other words, the reading of the poem (or listening to the piece of music) is to time as pattern is to eternity. As part of man's world, art participates in the temporal paradox and assists greatly in helping us to understand it. However, the last four and a half lines develop the linguistic consequences of the gap between time and eternity. Like the individual grappling with the implications of his distance from God, words—timeborn creatures—are in danger of collapsing under the burden of sustaining the timeless pattern. In a sense, it cannot be done. Poetry is an attempt to get around the imposing task of abstracting truth from reality. But even poetry is only a relative improvement.

In "East Coker," the critique of language continues:

        That was a way of putting it—not very
     satisfactory:
     A periphrastic study in a wom-out poetical fashion.
     Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
     With words and meanings. The poetry does not
     matter.

It is somewhat ambiguous whether this discouraging conclusion applies merely to the lyric passage which immediately precedes it in the text or to poetry in general. What follows, however, is an explicit indictment of language, and particularly of the attempt to embody an understanding of the world in language. Wisdom, we learn, "is only the knowledge of dead secrets." Experience seems to teach us to impose patterns on reality, but the patterns are necessarily false.

         For the pattern is new in every moment
         And every moment is a new and shocking
         Valuation of all we have been.

Language, striving to capture the passing moment, the now, falls into the trap of time's continual movement. Not only does the moment remain tauntingly out of reach, but even the past is beyond our mastery, since the inexorable wave of new presents cannot fail to modify whatever pattern we think we have seen—a more pessimistic application of the position Eliot had taken earlier in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919).

Eliot returns once more to this theme in the fifth movement of the same Quartet.

         So here I am, in the middle way, having had
                   twenty years—
         Twenty years largely wasted, the years of
                   l'entre deux guerres—
         Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
         Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of
                   failure
         Because one has only learnt to get the better of
                   words
         For the thing one no longer has to say, or the
                   way in which
         One is no longer disposed to say it.

As significant as the fact that the world the poet observes exists in time is that he himself is subject to time and change. How to give permanent shape to experience, when both the experiencer and the world experienced simply will not stand still, is yet another version of the problem of reaching the still point of the turning world while still a part of that changing world. If there is any solution to this apparent dilemma, it must lie in paradox, beyond ordinary logic and analysis. The still point, for example, may be reached mystically, in the place where "the fire and the rose are one." Perhaps the pattern that is permanent yet reflects change can exist in the poem grasped as a whole. Surely nothing less, no mere part of it, would do, nor would analysis demonstrate adequately that it had succeeded. It is arguable, of course, that neither solution can be realized. One may contend that mysticism has no connection with the affairs of time, and that one is therefore left with existential hope and anguish, and that the struggle of words and with words must continue without final victory and be its own reward. However we read the poem and interpret Eliot's final position—if, indeed, he has one—on the feasibility of such final victories, time remains language's chief tormentor.

In Elytis, although the passing of time may evoke occasional nostalgia—as in the naming of women in the poet's past—this aspect of reality is not poetry's signal enemy. Elytis' decision to confront experience not as an individual but rather as part of a greater whole results in a far more relaxed—though not less respectful—attitude toward language. While Eliot addresses the difficulties of using words throughout the Quartets, Elytis only once self-consciously considers his language, in Psalm II of "The Passion," and here not to wrestle with words but to establish their connections with those greater entities, cosmos and country.

Elytis' Greek language is seen in connection with the Greek people and their history, from Homer, whose great epics fathered classical civilization, and the Byzantine hymns which are the backbone of Greek orthodoxy—not to mention of To Axion Esti—to the first words of Dionysios Solomos' "Hymn to Liberty," the national anthem of Greece, grounded in that nation's war of independence from the Turks.

Words, however, are connected not only with things Greek but also with the universe at large; they are creatures in nature. Bream and perch are "wind beaten verbs," the songs of the sirens "rosy shells with the first black shivers," and sweet psalms to God "the first chirping of finches." It is out of this intimate relationship between words and things that a definition of the poet emerges which does not arise in Eliot's work: the poet as namer. As "Genesis" is given over to the creation of the world, so "Gloria" is devoted to the naming of its representative features. In the first instance, it is God or the powers of nature which do the making; in the second, it is the poet. Elytis will become a "monk of things verdant, / And reverently serve the order of birds." He names and praises winds, islands, flowers, women, ships, mountains, and trees, a selection with universal applicability, but in its particulars characteristically Greek. In addition, there is for each category a stanza made up of proper names of eight or nine items in that class. The name—the poet's contribution—is a palpable entity in its own right, not quite separable from the object it designates.

Concern with words leads each poet into the past of his language; but here, too, differences in their approach to that past conform to the general pattern. Eliot, in "East Coker," quotes from The Governour of Sir Thomas Elyot, originally published in 1531:

         Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
         Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
         Whiche betokeneth concorde.

This passage, of course, evokes a particular moment in English history. It is equally significant that Elyot is an Eliot—or Eliot an Elyot—an ancestor of the poet, a part of his personal past. This is perfectly in keeping with the Quartets' emphasis on the individual's struggle as an individual to overcome the constraints of time.

For Elytis, on the other hand, language is the instrument of a people, in this case the Greek people, which leads him both to a sense of language in history, in time, and of its overriding unity—that is, of both the movement and the pattern. In addition to acknowledging the past in a number of allusions (such as the one to Solomos mentioned above), Elytis also seems to deny time's effects in his use of words drawn from the full range of the Greek language. Okypoda, agkhemakhos, and simantores, for example, are Homeric; ikthyophores, classical; ta Minaia ton Kipon, Byzantine; Thee protomastora, from folk tradition. By combining such words and phrases with contemporary demotic Greek, e.g., okypoda philia 'swiftfootedkisses,' Elytis downplays the fact that those words are archaic and makes them part of a continuous, living language. The tension between demotic Greek and katharevousa—between the language as it is commonly spoken and the scholarly attempt to preserve as many as possible of the characteristics of the ancient tongue—has existed since the Greeks achieved their independence from Turkey and has always had strong sociological and political overtones. It has resulted in a sensitivity to language on all levels of society quite unparalleled in the modern English-speaking world. The sense of continuity is also unique. Despite the far greater time span, there is less difference between Homeric and Modern Greek than there is between Middle and Modern English. The Greek persistence in pronouncing all Greek from Homer on—to the horror of most non-Greek classicists—in the same (that is, modern) way, has also served to reinforce this sense of wholeness of the language—a sense that Elytis has taken full advantage of.

Not surprisingly, then, Eliot's and Elytis' attitudes toward language turn out to be special instances of their broad visions of reality. Eliot, who must in a single instant capture an essence which partakes of both time and eternity, is, at least on the surface, humble in his inability to make words do what he demands of them (although we may well suspect a certain coyness in such protestations); Elytis exults in the godlike power to name and sanctify, and, although respectful of the formidable tradition to which he belongs, is consequently far less critical of language's ability to perform as required.

For Eliot, struggling with time, the most significant confrontations of words are with the abstract. Time is an experience of the intellect rather than of the senses (except for the present; but without an awareness of past and future, the present has nothing to do with time); language, which originates in concrete experience, must always borrow from the spatial world of the senses in order to express the abstract. Such borrowing (more commonly known as metaphor) is not without special power, but used extensively it risks diminished impact. Elytis, committed to space, can push language back to its sources, where, like the giant Antaeus, it gains strength by making contact with the ground from which it sprang. This does not, of course, necessarily make Elytis a better poet than Eliot (even if his work were utterly free of the abstract, which it is not); but it helps to explain Eliot's sense of struggle and tension with regard to language as opposed to Elytis' sense of sheer pleasure.

There is a relationship between the two poets' preferred locations along the space-time continuum and the respective literary traditions where they sought support early in their careers. Eliot's well-known essay "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921) has long been taken as an accurate signpost identifying the poetic preoccupations of that stage of his development. He complained of the dissociation of sensibility that has taken place since the seventeenth century, of poets who do not "feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose." In a sense, all of Eliot's poetry has been an attempt to counter that long-dominant tendency by reuniting feeling and intellect; indeed, such conceits as Christ the wounded surgeon (in the fourth movement of "East Coker") healing us with "sharp compassion" are closer in sensibility to John Donne—for example, in the paradoxes of Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV, "Batter My Heart"—than to most of Eliot's contemporaries. Though the purpose of such poetry may be the joining of feeling and intellect, it is through intellect that feeling must be reached (just as eternity must be reached through time), both in Metaphysical poetry and in Four Quartets. It is not illogical to suppose that Eliot's concern with time contributed to his predilection for this poetic mode.

Elytis, on the other hand, is known for his early interest in (especially) French surrealism. Surrealism, of course, rather than emphasizing the claims of intellect as a means of organizing one's response to experience, pays homage to the irrational, or at least to the nonrational. Logical distinctions between inner and outer realities (including the one and the many), conscious and unconscious, fantasy/dream and objective perception are broken down. Even more important, the "reality" of surrealism is fully available to the senses. When Elytis follows Paul Eluard's "blending of the human body and the nature of the world" in a poem like "Body of Summer," he is not simply exploring a rich source of metaphor but also anticipating the emphasis of To Axion Esti on spatial rather than temporal relations. As in To Axion Esti the individual is not clearly distinguishable from his surroundings. While he may be subject to the cyclical time of nature, he is oblivious to linear, irredeemable time.

Unity of being. In the end, that is what both Eliot and Elytis, like so many of their contemporaries, seek. Of all dualities to be resolved—thought and feeling, time and space (with the crucial subdivisions of time and eternity, the one and the many), body and spirit—none is more imposing than the alienation of the individual from that which is greater and more enduring than himself. The Second World War, bringing to the forefront of consciousness the often repressed awareness of death, superseding with its peculiar chaos the ordinary structures of society, questioning by giving shape to human evil the very notion of a divinely ordered universe, makes even more pressing than usual the need to escape from accident to necessity, from helplessness to strength. What similarities in structure and theme between Four Quartets and To Axion Esti possess are due to this underlying sameness of purpose.

As important to the poems' final nature as their creators' need to resolve dualities is the difference in sensibility which determines from which end of the continuum the attempt to bring unity will begin. Eliot struggles to give body to his abstractions; Elytis must impose intelligible order upon the sensory world. It is arguable, then, that Eliot and Elytis not only define the chief preoccupations of twentieth-century European poetry but also establish the boundaries within which poets so preoccupied may operate.