Four Quartets에 나타난 시간과 의미 = Time and Meaning in Four Quartets

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Throughout his life Eliot strove to find out whether life was meaningful and show-ed his doubt about the meaningful life in his poetry. However, since he was born to a religious family, he never failed to hold an optimistic attitude toward life.
His later work, Four Quartets, is crucial in understanding his belief in the meaning-ful life. In the work he presents life as a flow of time wherein people live their daily life mechanically, "distracted from distraction by distraction" without turning to the meaning of life. Among the negative aspects of time what he hates most is the divi-sion of past and future with no connection between them. The most desperate is the fact that the flow of time leads to death. Considering these negative appearances of time, life seems definitely meaningless.
As shown in "only through time time is conquered, " Eliot, however extracts "timeless" out of time. According to him, through the Great Memory people can re-turn to the faraway past and the Paradise where the human race started its mean-ingful life. In the first poem of Four Quartets, "Burnt Norton," he presents a mystic moment in time, what he calls the still point, to show the existence of Meaning. The moment happens in the rose-garden and in that moment the empty pond fills with light. The garden and the light symbolize Paradise and Meaning separately.
Another mystic moment is given in "Little Gidding," the last poem of Four Quar-tets when Eliot meets Dante's ghost in darkness after attack by the dove-bomber.
The meeting implies that death is not an end but a new beginning. That is, the dead men's life fructifies when it is interpreted by the living men in respect to history, not in respect to their personal life. Eliot insists that death is the right action in which time meets with timeless and life becomes significant.
The mystic moments and historical sense are timeless in which past, present, and future converge into one and meaning is revealed or formed. Metaphorically speaking, to reach the moment of timelessness is to return to home where Meaning exists.
The titles of the four poems of Four Quartets are names of place, representing home.
And the best and the oldest home is the rose garden in "Burnt Norton". In each poem Eliot returns to home through his meditation on the past. At the end of Four Quartets he realizes the meaning of the mystic experience in the rose-garden and achieves the belief that life is meaningful because Paradise is not gone and death is not meaningless.

목차 (Table of Contents)

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