Notes

There are several internet sites offering online texts of the "Four Quartets". I do not know which site was the first; but its author saved his successors much work, for they evidently copied his text exactly - including his errors of spelling, punctuation, and even his missed lines. This is amusing inasmuch as these sites were presumably constructed as the result of genuine enthusiasm for Eliot's poetic masterwork. But it is saddening to see basic standards of academic accuracy disregarded thus; moreover, these sites remain uncorrected. (They are welcome to take my own source code, which will enable them to amend their errors without much effort.)

I have omitted line numbers in the texts at this site; they can easily be added if the documents are opened in any good word processor.

FRONT PAGE

The two extracts from the fragments of Herakleitos (Heraclitus) are presented here in English translation, owing to the difficulty of reproducing the Greek in current html code.

BURNT NORTON

Written in 1935.

Burnt Norton is a manor in Gloucestershire visited by Eliot in 1934. Its rose garden suggested the imagery of the opening section.

Part II
"Erhebung"
Elevation/exaltation (German).

Part V
"As in the figure of the ten stairs"
The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross states that "there are ten steps on the mystical ladder of divine love." Other references to St. John of the Cross are scattered throughout the poem.

EAST COKER

Written in 1940.

East Coker is a village near Yeovil, Somerset, Eliot's ancestral home. Andrew Eliot left East Coker for the New World in about 1669.

Part I
"In my beginning is my end"
Cf: "In my end is my beginning" in Part V. The latter is the motto of Mary Queen of Scots ("En ma fin est mon commencement").

"The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie..."
This passage is taken from The Boke Named the Governour (1530) by Sir Thomas Elyot, an ancestor of T.S. Eliot.

THE DRY SALVAGES

Written in 1941.

"The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a small
group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann,
Massachusetts."
Eliot's family spent time in this area during his childhood.

By his own reckoning (in a speech given upon receiving the Emerson-Thoreau Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959, at which he read this poem), the poem begins where Eliot began (St. Louis, the Mississippi River) and ends where he expected to end (a parish church of a village in Somerset).