The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding

Stearns and I had Hopkins and Whigwham over last night to read the last two of the Four Quartets. Rule #1 for reading poetry: do not get your friends drunk first by opening a gigantic bottle of Riesling and then claiming y'all must finish it since you're going out of town. When it was my turn to read, I inevitably started giggling uncontrollably somewhere in the middle of my section.

Okay, so it worked out well in the end. As Whigwham wrote afterward, "I can really get into this way of poetry reading. Hit the drinks first, then go with the flow!" (edited for capitalization). Another Whigwham gem: "When I eat mushrooms, I feel like I'm eating pinky toes."

There's much I don't understand in these poems. This time I was struck by the line, "The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree / Are of equal duration." It seems to me that this is a comment on the similarities between the via negativa and the via affirmativa. At the end of the poem, I think Eliot takes this even further when he writes that "the fire and the rose are one." The end of Little Gidding is wonderful in weaving together the themes from the other quartets.

Next up: The Cocktail Party, The Waste Land, and The Wreck of the Deutschland.