And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

From East Coker (No. 2 of Four Quartets) by T.S. Eliot

I've know The Waste Land for several years, and its imagery has crept into my life. I doubt I could quote it to you, but I'd know if you were, and I've hardly walked home from work of an evening without wondering what sort of stream of the damned we must look like. Having begun to read, absolutely sight unseen, Four Quartets feels unusually like a great gift. I feel like I've discovered a new wing to the house, or a new stretch of trees in a much-loved wood.

My immediate impressions, having read Burnt Norton and East Coker now, are that they are very different from The Waste Land, with its playful and mocking acrostics. They (BN & EC) seem to be more compartmentalised at first glance, like a cabinet of curiosities rather than a palimpsest, with their varied imageries and voices set rather more squarely. My apprehensions of Eliot's riddling text are unformed though. Burnt Norton's images of time and stillness and East Coker's ones of change, rebirth and mortality seem to accumulate in drifts rather than articulating exactness: my first, swift reading here. I wonder how the poet and I will contrive to meld his clockwork into something that runs more precisely. Certainly I look forward to looking again and again. I have never felt I understood poetry, and definitely not Eliot. But The Waste Land has been part of my mental furniture long enough that I feel that I have, if not an understanding of it, then at least a way of getting inside the ideas and driving them around for myself. I wonder if I ever go where the poet intended?