Yeats wrote​ ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ in the South of France on 13 January 1939, fifteen days before he died. In the poem, the implacable warrior has ‘six mortal wounds’. As he nears death, he moves among the shades. He is the same solitary figure we know from an early Yeats poem, the warrior who ‘fought with the invulnerable tide’, and from plays such as At the Hawk’s Well and The Only Jealousy of Emer. Since he was to be transformed, the poem itself required a new form, or a form that Yeats had not used before. The terza rima of ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ takes its bearings from Dante, but while some of the rhymes in Yeats mirror Dante in their directness, others are off-rhymes or half-rhymes. The poem’s energy comes from an idea that appears in Yeats’s ‘A Vision’: the idea that, in death, the soul ‘lives through a life which is said to be in all things opposite to that lived through in the world’. Although Cuchulain is gentled, almost socialised, by his comforters, it is not so much a repudiation of what has made him famous, but, paradoxically, a kind of completion. ‘Late style does not admit the definitive cadences of death,’ Edward Said wrote. ‘Instead, death appears in a refracted mode, as irony.’ Cuchulain’s violence is refracted. It is a great irony that he must finally consort with cowards.

Unusually for Yeats, as Roy Foster notes in his biography, the poem didn’t need many drafts. After a dream, he dictated a prose version to his wife. The poem begins with a set of clear statements, free of metaphor, tonally stark. The first stanza has assertive single-syllable words – ‘man’, ‘six’, ‘strode’, ‘dead’, ‘eyes’, ‘stared’, ‘out’, ‘gone’; the second ends in ‘wounds and blood’. This allows two soft-cadenced words to stand out when they appear in the third stanza. A ‘Shroud’ – one of the ‘bird-like’ comforters – lets something fall: it might be a sword, or it might even be a curse or a promise or a prophecy. Instead, it is a bundle of linen, something harmless and domestic. The weak trochaic sound ‘linen’ is soon followed by the stronger trochaic sound of ‘cowards’, as we discover that the dying Cuchulain has found a group of cowards as associates. The word ‘linen’ and the word ‘coward’ seem irresolute in a poem where many words appear to be certain. Cuchulain’s certainty gives way to something that has previously been anathema to him.

In this poem, the warrior Cuchulain is, among other things, a shadow version of Yeats himself, or someone who has come to share his predicament. Yeats’s wife, Georgie, said that her ‘instructors’, the voices that came to her as a medium, had told him long before that each of his Cuchulain plays ‘bore a relation to the state of his life when he wrote it’. Now that Yeats was old and weakened, so too was Cuchulain. At the very end of his life, Yeats created an image where his fierce and solitary warrior joined others in the act of sewing. While the idea of opposites coming together as an act of completion belongs to Yeats’s theory of things, there is a simpler way of reading the poem as a kind of apology for his earlier refusal to privilege the unheroic. ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ is therefore not merely a culminating statement for Yeats, but also a contradictory one.

Yeats liked dialogue, juxtaposition, dispute. His poems are often more theatrical than his plays; they are energised by conflict, by movement, by shifting light, by the power that came from action and unrest, such as the images invoked in ‘Easter 1916’:

birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute.

Part of the poems’ drama came from representing himself anew. In the last years of his life, he made two memorable statements in which he explored his own guilt and sought to expiate or recognise what he had done – or not done – in the past. The first came in Part V of his poem ‘Vacillation’, included in the volume The Winding Stair (1933):

Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.

In the second, his guilt is more precise. In ‘The Man and the Echo’, included in Last Poems and Two Plays (1940), he wrote:

All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
I lie awake night after night
And never get the answers right.
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?
Did words of mine put too great strain
On that woman’s reeling brain?
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?
And all seems evil until I
Sleepless would lie down and die.

This time it was not ‘things’ he did or did not do. It was guilt around fomenting political violence as a playwright. The play in question was Cathleen Ni Houlihan, written with Lady Gregory and first performed in Dublin in April 1902, with Maud Gonne playing Cathleen. In an interview with the United Irishman, Yeats said that the subject was ‘Ireland and its struggle for independence’. The theatre was packed every night. The message was clear: young men would have to give up everything for Ireland. George Bernard Shaw later said that it was a play ‘which might lead a man to do something foolish’. Lennox Robinson wrote that it ‘made more rebels in Ireland than a thousand political speeches or a hundred reasoned books’.

Now, at the end of his life, almost a version of Cuchulain, Yeats feels free, as though visited by the Shades, to question himself, to set out the terms by which he will be accused. He has been tamed – or so it seems. But his interest in opposites and argument remained. If he could use that singing, unwhispering metrical system for ‘The Man and the Echo’ to accuse himself, he could also – in another of his last poems, ‘Under Ben Bulben’ – make use of this iambic tetrameter to set down some defiant certainties for the future, with no guilt, no self-questioning:

Irish poets learn your trade
Sing whatever is well made
Scorn the stuff now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.

Yeats died on 28 January 1939. Two days earlier, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had arrived in New York. When Auden heard of Yeats’s death, he sought to ascertain what time of the day or night he had died. He was planning a poem. What preoccupied him most in 1939 was guilt that his gift for poetry was serving causes, including political ones, that didn’t concern him. But before he wrote the poem he wrote an essay, ‘The Public v. the Late Mr William Butler Yeats’, set out as an argument between a public prosecutor and a counsel for the defence, in which the value of poetry is itself interrogated.

The prosecutor makes little of Yeats’s engagement in ‘Easter 1916’: ‘After the rebellion of Easter Sunday 1916,’ he says, ‘he wrote a poem on the subject which has been called a masterpiece. It is. To succeed at such a time in writing a poem which could offend neither the Irish Republican nor the British Army was indeed a masterly achievement.’ The defence counsel insists that ‘the case for the prosecution rests on the fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen, whereas the honest truth, gentlemen, is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted, not a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged.’ But then Auden relents a little as he considers the history of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The prosecution, he says, has sneered at Yeats ‘for not taking arms, as if shooting were the only honourable and useful form of social action. Has the Abbey Theatre done nothing for Ireland?’

Many years later, in a letter to Stephen Spender, Auden described Yeats as ‘my own devil of unauthenticity’ and referred to the ‘false emotions, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities’ in his work. As he embarked on his poem in memory of Yeats, he must have been aware of the kind of criticism he would encounter. ‘At one stroke,’ Philip Larkin wrote, ‘he lost his key subject and emotion – Europe and the fear of war – and abandoned his audience together with their common dialect and concerns.’ Responding to Auden’s death in 1973, Anthony Powell was less circumspect: ‘No more Auden. I’m delighted that little shit has gone … It should have happened years ago … Scuttling off to America in 1939 with his boyfriend like a … like a …’

Auden’s elegy, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, begins with Auden himself in New York in winter. Yeats had died in the South of France, but it’s Auden who has ‘disappeared in the dead of winter’ and is now to be found in the George Washington Hotel on 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue. It is Auden who is freezing, having recently arrived in a city where it was snowing (their ship looked like ‘a wedding cake’, Isherwood noted). It is Auden, too, who is refusing to do anything poetic with the day or the weather or the cold other than insist on what can be measured: ‘What instruments we have agree/The day of his death was a dark cold day.’ Yeats, he knew, had no interest in what instruments might agree on: as he put it in ‘The Fisherman’, he wanted to write poems ‘as cold/And passionate as the dawn’. Auden in his first section was invoking an anti-Yeats, much as Yeats himself was doing in ‘Cuchulain Comforted’. He was emphatically not considering Yeats’s poems as he started writing his own poem. In Yeats, the wolf lived in mythology, not in ‘evergreen forests’. Yeats had no interest in ‘airports’ or ‘suburbs’.

Auden’s point was that these things remain, perhaps even prevail, now that the poet, who did not care for them, has died. The world carries on. The poems remain, as do their admirers – of whom there are only ‘a few thousand’. If the world goes on as it will after the death of the poet, how has the living poet mattered, except to those few? Of all the places where Yeats wanted his spirit scattered, most of them rural and desolate, the ‘hundred cities’ mentioned by Auden would not have been included. In contemplating Yeats, Auden is also contemplating himself: the idea that while he mattered in England, and while England mattered to him, he will not matter in America, his poems will make no difference in the ‘hundred cities’, and America, the country of his long exile, will make no difference to him. In 1939, he was desperate to lose his moorings, to move to a place, or to ‘a hundred cities’, where nothing could make poetry happen, where poetry would not echo in a public cave, where it would not have consequences.

On its first publication, in the New Republic in March 1939, the poem had no second section. In the stanza he added for the version published in Another Time (1940), what eats at him is Yeats as a public figure, hurt into poetry by a so-called mad country, Yeats as silly in his belief in magic and his dabbling in national and public life, Yeats as irrational. And then, in a line that would underscore Auden’s view that poetry is ‘memorable speech’, he wrote a memorable line: ‘For poetry makes nothing happen.’ In that hotel room in New York, Auden imagined poetry flowing ‘south/From ranches of isolation’. Ranches? Auden was already in a dream America.

In the third and final section of the poem, written in what Auden called ‘four-foot trochaic quatrains’, he echoes what Yeats had done in ‘Under Ben Bulben’ a short time before, with Yeats’s couplet ‘Sing the peasantry and then/Hard-riding country gentlemen’ becoming Auden’s ‘Sing of human unsuccess/In a rapture of distress.’ There are two quatrains in this section that Auden might have hesitated over:

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

This is, indeed, memorable speech, almost too memorable – the beat of the poem, its rhythms, seem designed to lull the reader into believing that the words are true. From ‘every human face’? ‘Frozen in each eye’? ‘All the dogs of Europe bark.’ Every one of them? Auden, like Yeats before him, had begun to feel guilt over lines he himself had written, lines that began to haunt him – what he called ‘false emotions, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities’. He strove instead to trust his gift. The word ‘gift’ was important for him. It might be the most significant word in his poem on Yeats. Yes, the poet was silly, but ‘your gift survived it all.’

What did he mean by ‘gift’? In Later Auden (1986), Edward Mendelson reports that Auden ‘began using “gift” in the special sense of an artist’s power only in the last weeks of 1938, when he was preparing to leave for the United States and was beginning his conscious revolt from political causes … The gift was the special form taken by larger and more mysterious powers when they made themselves incarnate in an artist.’ ‘Throughout 1939,’ Mendelson adds, ‘Auden named the gift as the liberating source of identity and power.’ Auden thought that D.H. Lawrence owed ‘his influence for good and evil to his gift’, but that Matthew Arnold had ‘thrust his gift in prison till it died’. According to Mendelson, ‘almost everything [Auden] wrote in 1939 was an attempt to clarify his mixed feelings about the rival claims of private gift and public good.’ The claims were not to be easily reconciled: ‘When he set these two claims against each other in a poem, the gift generally had the advantage, for it was defending itself on its own ground; when he argued them in a prose essay or review, the gift sank under a lowering cloud of rebuke and often withdrew in shame.’

This question of self-rebuke mattered to Auden as it had done to Yeats in ‘The Man and the Echo’. Late in 1939, Auden made a change to a phrase in his poem ‘Spain, 1937’, a phrase to which George Orwell had taken considerable exception: ‘the necessary murder’. Orwell wrote: ‘It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally, I would not speak so lightly of murder.’ When it appeared in Another Time, ‘the necessary murder’ had become ‘the fact of murder’. Auden had further reasons to rebuke himself. The final lines of ‘Spain, 1937’ read: ‘History to the defeated/May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.’ In a foreword to the 1966 edition of his Collected Shorter Poems, Auden wrote: ‘To say this is to equate goodness with success. It would have been bad enough if I had ever held this wicked doctrine, but that I should have stated it simply because it sounded to me rhetorically effective is quite inexcusable.’ In a note in the margin of Cyril Connolly’s copy he was more pithy: ‘This is a lie,’ he wrote. He attempted to suppress the poem.

Auden seemed to get energy, or a kind of pleasure, in denouncing his own poems. He changed his mind about the last line of ‘September 1, 1939’ after it was published. On listening to a reading of ‘We must love one another or die’, he rebelled. ‘I said to myself,’ he later wrote, ‘that’s a damned lie! We must die anyway.’ In the next edition it was: ‘We must love one another and die.’ But this was not enough: ‘The whole poem, I realised, was infected with an incurable dishonesty and must be scrapped.’ In 1967, he wrote to a friend: ‘The reason (artistic) I left England and went to the US was precisely to stop me writing poems like “Sept. 1st, 1939” – the most dishonest poem I have ever written. A hangover from the UK. It takes time to cure oneself.’

Who​ was English; who was American? If Auden was English, was T.S. Eliot American? Or was it the other way around? Eliot’s own reply in 1953 was: ‘I do not know whether Auden is to be considered as an English or as an American poet: his career has been useful to me with an answer to the same question when asked about myself, for I can say: “Whichever Auden is, I suppose, I must be the other.”’

The other came to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on Sunday, 30 June 1940 to give the first W.B. Yeats Lecture. This was his second visit to Ireland; in 1936 he had given a talk at University College Dublin. On that visit, he had also gone to Glendalough, in County Wicklow. On this second visit, he wrote to a friend: ‘I think that the lecture and the broadcast went off very well. It is a little difficult to tell when one is amongst a foreign race, who are always extremely flattering, and whose real reactions are not so easy to detect.’ He noted that he himself, during his short stay, dropped his customary ‘Curzon-like aloofness’ and took on what he called ‘a mask of playful blarney’, which must have been appreciated.

He did not think much of the Irish. ‘Apart from the fact,’ he wrote to his friend John Hayward, ‘that the Irish have a certain respect for poetry and religion, theirs is a tiring society; and the kind of war nerves they are suffering from – not really daring to make up their minds what they think, and not being really prepared for anything – is more depressing than being in London.’ On the day after his lecture at the Abbey, Eliot had lunch with Georgie Yeats. She had attended the lecture, but sat in the gallery, hoping not to be noticed. She had been avoiding the Abbey. No one would leave her alone about her husband’s body, which remained buried in France, to the consternation, it seems, of all Dublin. She had to stick to the side streets to avoid people who wanted to annoy her about it. Maud Gonne wrote to Eamon de Valera on the matter, as well as to President Hyde and the board of the Abbey, who responded: ‘We are making every endeavour to have the remains brought home to Ireland.’ The board then wrote to Mrs Yeats herself: ‘Ireland insists that Yeats be buried here.’ De Valera’s wire to her read: ‘We hope that his body will be laid to rest in his native soil.’ Yeats himself had written to Dorothy Wellesley five months before his death: ‘I write my poems for the Irish people, but I am damned if I will have them at my funeral. A Dublin funeral is something between a public demonstration & a private picnic.’

On returning to London from Dublin, Eliot slept for eleven hours. He wrote to a friend in a tone almost apologetic about his Yeats lecture. ‘You will understand, I hope, that [the lecture] is more in the nature of an occasional eulogy or funeral oration than a piece of cold criticism.’ A month later, he was preparing to be an air raid warden. ‘The first thing you do,’ he told Hayward, ‘when you hear the Syrens, or the gun fire preliminary, is to have a good Piss: after that you are ready for the Jerry.’ At the end of the year, he finished the third of his Four Quartets, ‘The Dry Salvages’. Now he had only ‘Little Gidding’ to write.

While this last of his quartets is devotional, it is also a poem written in wartime. As he told Hayward, ‘we had to watch the fires and report them as quickly as they occurred. You will be interested to know that the lines from “Little Gidding” came out of this experience.’ Little Gidding, a remote place in Huntingdonshire that was home to a religious community scattered by Cromwell, haunts him in the opening section. But there are other places in the poem that haunt him, places ‘which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,/Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city’. The dark lake here, according to Hayward, is Glendalough in Ireland. In July 1940, Eliot wrote to C.P. Curran recalling ‘that excursion to Glendalough three years ago’. Twenty years later, in another letter to Curran, he mentioned again the occasion ‘when we went to see St Kevin’s cave (to which I later referred in a poem called “Little Gidding”).’

In the second part of the poem, where Eliot invokes the ghost that he sees as he returns from a night as an air raid warden, he moves into terza rima, the form Yeats had used in ‘Cuchulain Comforted’. Following Dante, terza rima became useful to both Yeats and Eliot when they wanted to write about a single figure encountering the shades. The rhymes in Eliot’s poem are less present than in ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, but the poem has the same hushed sound, with hardly any ornament. Eliot did not believe that the poem would bear the weight of heavy rhyme. ‘I call my tercets terza rima,’ he wrote, ‘simply because this alternation of weak and strong endings is, in my opinion, the closest equivalent to terza rima possible in English.’ He felt strongly, he added, ‘that rhymes in English are too emphatic, and in a passage of any length this form of verse becomes tiring.’

This section, he wrote,

cost me far more time and trouble and vexation than any passage of the same length that I have ever written … It was chiefly that in this very bare and austere style, in which every word has to be ‘functional’, the slightest vagueness or imprecision is immediately noticeable. The language has to be very direct; the line, and the single word, must be completely disciplined to the purpose of the whole; and, when you are using simple words and simple phrases, any repetition of the most common idiom, or of the most frequently needed word, becomes a glaring blemish.

In an essay on Dante in 1929, Eliot had written: ‘For the science or art of writing verse, one has learned from the Inferno that the greatest poetry can be written with the greatest economy of words, and with the greatest austerity in the use of metaphor, simile, verbal beauty and elegance.’ About this style, Eliot wrote to a friend in 1942: ‘The simplicity of language at which one must aim, in this kind of verse, requires the avoidance of repetition of words (even ofs and ands and buts have to be carefully watched) and even the avoidance of words of similar formation too near together.’

The terza rima section describes an encounter. It is a kind of dream London, a time before dawn, a time of war, but also a time out of time. Things can be registered but not specified. ‘The dark dove with the flickering tongue’ may be a bomber that has now flown off (Germany’s military planes in the First World War were called Taube, ‘doves’). But it is also now and England: the dead leaves rattle ‘like tin/Over the asphalt’, as tiny pieces of shrapnel might do. It is here, ‘between three districts’, that the poet meets the ‘compound ghost’, the dead master who cannot be named.

In his letters to Hayward, Eliot wrote about his struggles with many lines of the poem, and often single words. He struggled, for example, over the way to describe the hour before dawn. He had found a word that he liked, ‘antelucan’. The OED gives its meaning as ‘of, belonging to, or occurring in the hours just before dawn’ and its first use in 1609. But then he thought it ‘too self-conscious’. He toyed with ‘lantern-end’. ‘It is surprisingly difficult,’ he told Hayward, ‘to find words for the shades before morning; we seem to be richer in words and phrases for the end of day.’ In early drafts, the ghost he encountered was a figure from Dante, but slowly it began to include elements of other figures, mainly Yeats, but also Joyce, who had died as the poem was being composed, as well as Milton and Shelley. As he was drafting the poem, Eliot was more tentative than he would be later about the identity of ‘the familiar compound ghost’, worried, as he told Hayward, that ‘the visionary figure … will no doubt be identified by some readers with Yeats though I do not mean anything so precise as that.’ Later, Eliot wrote: ‘I must confess I was not thinking of Robert Browning when I refer to “a familiar compound ghost”. I was thinking primarily of William Yeats, whose body was of course brought back to Ireland after the war.’ He confirmed that ‘When I left my body on a distant shore’ was a reference to Yeats.

‘Of course, I had met Yeats many times,’ Eliot wrote to the poet Donald Hall. ‘Yeats was always very gracious when one met him and had the art of treating younger writers as if they were his equals and contemporaries.’ In his Abbey lecture, Eliot teased out this idea of Yeats as a poet for the young: ‘For the young can see him as a poet who in his work remained in the best sense always young, who even in one sense became young as he aged.’ Now, two years after his death, Yeats, or some version of him, speaks to Eliot, almost a quarter of a century his junior. The address is direct, intimate and alert to the ideas of shame and regret that Yeats deals with in ‘The Man and the Echo’ and ‘Vacillation’. The ghost speaks of ‘the rending pain of re-enactment’. Eliot wrote about these lines to Hayward: ‘I mean not simply something not questioned but something consciously approved.’ He wished to blame himself for what he had done at a time when he presumed, erroneously, that he was right.

Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue

Eliot is echoing lines from the very Yeats that he had reimagined as a ghost in a London street, those lines from ‘Vacillation’:

Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day 
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.

Once the day breaks, the ghost must go. He ‘faded on the blowing of the horn’, Eliot writes, echoing the Ghost in Hamlet: ‘It faded on the crowing of the cock.’

Eliot is still striving towards what can be got from simplicity. In the final draft, he writes: ‘In the disfigured street/He left me.’ No poetic words, no large emotions. Simply ‘he left me.’ The ‘disfigured street’ is disfigured because the figure has gone but also because of the bombing. Just as snow has ‘disfigured’ the public statues in the third line of Auden’s ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, now shrapnel – ‘the dead leaves still rattled on like tin’ – disfigures the street in Eliot’s poem.

In earlier drafts, Eliot included the line ‘We strode together in a dead patrol,’ thus allowing a word we associate with Cuchulain to make a brief appearance (Cuchulain who ‘strode among the dead’). But soon the line was changed to: ‘We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.’ Eliot was worried about the sound: ‘strode’ in the same line as ‘patrol’, whose last syllable was too close to the ‘ode’ in ‘strode’. In other earlier versions, he had ‘the dismantled street’ rather than ‘the disfigured street’. And then Hayward suggested ‘the demolished street’. But ‘disfigured’ invoked the figure that had come and gone. In any case, a decision had to be made, as Eliot wrote to Hayward: ‘To spend much more time over this poem might be dangerous. After a time one loses the original feeling of the impulse, and then it is no longer safe to alter. It is time to close the chapter.’

In their introduction to Volume X of Eliot’s Letters, Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden write about ‘the impersonality’ of ‘Little Gidding’.* They quote a letter to a young poet on the importance of having ‘deep enough roots in the subsoil of intense personal experience from which poetry draws its sustenance’. While poets such as Milton and Wordsworth could justify ‘public verse’, ‘the rest of us have to be personal first, and concern ourselves with the trifles which we have genuinely known and felt, and perhaps let our private secret just peep out, and play hide and seek, and never quite disclose itself.’ The editors write: ‘It is no secret that “Little Gidding” is to a large extent a public, intensely patriotic poem – he said so too – but one has to wonder what he was winking at with the notion of a “private secret just peep[ing] out”.’

On 5 August 1941, Eliot wrote to Hayward about Part II: ‘I still think this part needs some sharpening of personal poignancy: a line or two might do it. “Autumn weather” only because it was autumn weather – it is supposed to be an early air raid.’ Some images, then, are specific; they come from memory. But although the air raids are on London, the word ‘London’ is missing. Instead, ‘Little Gidding’ uses the word ‘England’ three times, as though relocating the poem’s terrain from, say, Kensington (the original title for the four poems was supposed to be Kensington Quartets) or, indeed, London, to a Little Gidding that is an aspect of ‘England’.

‘England’, like ‘Ireland’ (perhaps even like ‘Scotland’), is a hard word to use in a poem. Since it is a trochee, it won’t rhyme easily with anything: neither Ireland nor England will sit easy in a rhyme scheme with ‘brass band’ or ‘left hand’. Yeats took pleasure, nonetheless, in invoking Ireland. A new energy comes into his late poem ‘The Statues’ when he begins line five of the last stanza with ‘We Irish’. In ‘Under Ben Bulben’, he refers to ‘the indomitable Irishry’ as something that may be ‘still’ there in ‘coming days’. In another late poem, ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, he looks at the paintings of dead friends and suggests that the viewer might ‘Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace’. The Ireland here is far from the one that Eliot experienced on his visit to Dublin in 1940, or indeed the ‘mad Ireland’ that hurt Yeats into poetry, as Auden would have it. And, after Yeats’s death, ‘Ireland has her madness and her weather still.’

For Auden, the time before he wrote his poem on Yeats’s death and the time after it are separated by the way he invokes the words ‘England’ and ‘English’. After moving to America in 1939, he became more uneasy about naming his nation. In The Island: W.H. Auden and the Last of Englishness, Nicholas Jenkins writes about the word ‘Englishness’: ‘It does not appear in the works of any of the classic poets, playwrights, and novelists who are so often taken as the constituents of an English literary canon … the term is not in any English poem written before the 20th century or in any novel I have been able to find published before 1900 or in any piece of drama from the medieval Mystery Plays through to Oscar Wilde’s comedies.’† Jenkins notes that Isherwood, when he came to stay with Auden in Oxford in 1926, ‘discovered that his friend had a new favourite adjective. Explaining his temporary fascination with the races at the local dog track, Auden called them “marvellously English”.’ ‘English,’ Isherwood wrote, ‘was his latest term of approbation.’

Auden’s juvenilia use the words ‘England’ and ‘English’ with an odd kind of ease and pleasure. As Jenkins points out, in ‘March Winds’ (1924) he writes that ‘this English Spring is lovelier than we’ and in ‘The Gypsy Girl’ (1925) he writes ‘Blessed be England for so fair a face.’ In 1930 he began to use the word again, denouncing the absence of healers ‘in our English land’. ‘The Orators’, subtitled ‘An English Study’, refers to ‘English earth’. In ‘Prologue’, Newton in his garden watches ‘the apple falling towards England’. The poem invokes, without much irony, an England close to the one invoked by John of Gaunt, as it asks love: ‘Here too on our little reef display your power,/This fortress perched on the edge of the Atlantic scarp,/The mole between all Europe and the exile-crowded sea.’

Perhaps Auden’s most powerful ‘English’ poem is ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed’, not only because it refers directly to ‘our freedom in this English house’ but because of the pleasure it takes in its own ‘time and place’ and the tonal stability (what Edward Mendelson calls ‘a reconciling cadence’) that emerges in the early stanzas, as though naturally from this ‘land of farms’. Each stanza has six lines, five in varied forms of tetrameter and the final line in trimeter. Of the sixteen stanzas, fourteen end with a full stop and the other two with a colon. The argument or the feeling in each stanza edges towards easy completion. There is no strain either in the diction or in most of the imagery. The nights are ‘windless’, all is ‘good to the newcomer’. Evenings are described when ‘Death put down his book’. When morning comes, ‘I shall speak with one/Who has not gone away.’ Even when ‘the gathering multitudes outside/Whose glances hunger worsens’ are mentioned, it is clear that ‘the creepered wall stands up to hide’ such intrusions, but, more important, the images of violence and tyranny in the second half of the poem are here to keep complacency at bay. It is part of the poem’s privilege that it can entertain such haunting shadows.

In March 1936, Auden went to Portugal to work on a play, The Ascent of F-6, with Isherwood. The protagonist, Michael Ransom, sets out to conquer a faraway mountain in a place called Sudoland. If he succeeds, it will add to the honour and glory of England. When he finally reaches the summit, he meets his mother, who is a sort of Britannia. He is eulogised as one of England’s ‘greatest sons’. In the closing moments of the play’s first version, a group shout out: ‘England! England! England!’

When Yeats saw the play in London in 1937 he wrote to the producer to say he thought parts of it were ‘magnificent’. He believed, however, that it would be ‘good theatre’ if Mrs Ransom were to appear on the summit as a ‘snow-white Britannia’ . He continued: ‘Remember the English expedition is racing that of another country because the one who gets first to the top will, the natives believe, rule them for a thousand years … Britannia is the mother.’ Writing shakily about England’s putative glory did not encourage Auden. His mad evocation of England hurt him into exile. Many years later he told an interviewer that the play had fixed his decision to leave England: ‘Yes. F-6 was the end. I knew I must leave when I wrote it.’

It was hard, in the United States, as it would have been in many other countries, for Auden to name his new nation with any confidence. On YouTube, we can hear him reading his poem ‘A Walk after Dark’, whose final stanza is:

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.

It is​ almost twenty years since I used to pass Nicholas Jenkins in the corridors of Stanford University. It was known that he was writing a book on Auden. I think he was the most English person I had ever seen, or maybe his Englishness stood out more under the manicured skies of Palo Alto. In any case, there is a passage about Auden and England at the end of Jenkins’s book that seems more poignant when we imagine that it was written in California:

Part of what makes the story of Auden’s poetry in the first half of the 1930s sobering and thought-provoking is that the myths about England that he summoned in poems full of unforgettable literary grandiloquence, such as ‘Prologue’, myths about English identity, English history, English sociability, seem so enduring but somehow also so fragile. The arc traced in his 1936 collection is long and in so many ways rich, but it bends towards emptiness – as if, after hundreds of years of lyrical rhetoric, Auden’s end point in ‘Epilogue’ is that there was something exhausted and terminal about the myths underwriting English traditions and values. If Auden deserves the title of a prophet, as he perhaps sometimes hoped that he did, then this was a large part of what his prophecy said.

Eliot took a different view. He had had his fill of bending towards emptiness. He wanted to be English. In 1927, just as Auden was submitting his first book of poems to Faber, Eliot entered the Anglican communion and was naturalised as a British subject. The following year he announced that he was ‘a classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.’ In March 1928, after his first confession, he told the priest who had baptised him that he felt he had ‘crossed a very wide and deep river … I feel certain that I shall not cross back.’

As a convert, Eliot went all in. In ‘A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry’, from 1928, he has one of his characters say:

And the only dramatic satisfaction that I find now is in a High Mass well performed. Have you not there everything necessary? And indeed if you consider the ritual of the Church during the cycle of the year, you have the complete drama represented. The Mass is a small drama, having all the unities; but in the Church year you have represented the full drama of creation.

The author of ‘The Waste Land’, who had finally seen the light, wanted big fancy cathedrals. In May 1931, he wrote in the Chichester Diocesan Gazette: ‘My cathedral, then, would be richly decorated inside: with tapestries (as, for example, they hang around the base of the columns in the cathedral of Toulouse), with modern religious paintings, with memorial tablets (but only to good churchmen), with chapels and church furniture.’

‘It is always a wonder to me,’ Eliot wrote to A.L. Rowse in March 1941, ‘how people can write an autobiography but it is probably because they have less to suppress than I have.’ In May 1941, he wrote to Emily Hale: ‘I want to share something of what London and my friends there experience. The one thing that would be unendurable would be to be wholly outside of things: and I don’t imagine for a moment that there is any heroism about this.’

By the beginning of June, he had a rough draft of ‘Little Gidding’. On 14 July, he wrote to Hale: ‘I have finished the poem but am very doubtful about it.’ He was concerned that it lacked ‘some acute personal reminiscence’ which even though not ‘explicated’ would ‘give power’ to the poem ‘well below the surface’. On the same day he wrote to Hayward: ‘The question is not so much whether it is as good as the others (I am pretty sure it is not) but whether it is good enough to keep company with them to complete the shape.’ And two days later to wrote to Frank Morley: ‘My own suspicion about it is that it is a flop and that I shall have to put it aside and make a fresh start.’ In August, he wrote to another friend: ‘I have written a fourth poem to complete the series … but I am not satisfied with it, and am putting it aside to work on in the winter … John [Hayward] has made a number of useful criticisms.’

It is clear from the commentary on ‘Little Gidding’ in the edition of Eliot’s Collected Poems edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, and Volumes IX and X of Eliot’s Letters, how closely and critically Hayward read each draft of the poem and how much he encouraged Eliot as he worked. On 1 August 1941, he wrote:

I agree with you that the poem, in the unfinished and unpolished state in which you have allowed me to see it, is not quite up to the standard of the others in the group. But it does not seem to me to be, potentially, inferior to them; nor do I think it shows signs of fatigue or that, as you seem to fear, it is merely a mechanical exercise; I am sure that it only requires to be revised and perhaps rewritten in certain passages, to which I shall refer, to be brought to perfection as the culminating poem of the series.

Eliot was seeking reassurance or entertaining an outbreak of Christian humility as he expressed his doubts about ‘Little Gidding’. But these doubts seem not to have lasted. An interviewer in 1958 reported: ‘The one work with which he is most satisfied is the last of the Four Quartets.’ Three years later, at Boston College, Eliot referred to ‘Little Gidding’ as ‘my best’. In December 1942, shortly after the poem was published, he responded warmly to a letter from Desmond McCarthy: ‘I am particularly glad that you liked the Ghost passage, because I found that piece gave me the greatest trouble.’ But it may be that the greatest trouble lay elsewhere. In 1928, Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister:

I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.

Since Eliot’s Englishness was a kind of pose, how could he, a master of self-examination and self-doubt, be sure that his interest in prayer was not also a pose? He underlined a passage about prayer in ‘The Spiritual Letters of Dom John Chapman’: ‘The strangest part is when we begin to wonder whether we mean anything at all, and if we are addressing anybody, or merely using a formula without sense. The word “God” seems to mean nothing. If we feel this, we are starting on the right road.’ This is what happened to poor Claudius in Hamlet, though he was hardly on the right road: ‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below/Words without thoughts never to heaven go.’

It is hard​ to pray. I haven’t tried for more than half a century, but I remember that it is easier to look as though you are praying than to pray. And it is easier to intone a well-known prayer over and over than to pray silently, to say things from you to God. It is easier, indeed, to pray to the Virgin Mary than to God Almighty. And easier to ask her for something – to find lost keys or to cure an illness – than it is to pray in the abstract. But it is very hard to pray if your relationship to words themselves is as fastidious, suspicious, self-conscious and filled with doubt as Eliot’s was. The language of prayer does not entertain constant word-by-word revision, no matter how gifted or eloquent the man on his knees might be. To the soul at prayer, John Hayward can be of no assistance.

Eliot, in ‘Little Gidding’, tell us what prayer is not. It is more, he writes, ‘than an order of words, the conscious occupation/Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying’. But it might also be, in a frail consciousness, much less than that. What if it was banal, filled with platitudes, pure nonsense? Eliot does not, however, want us to entertain such earthly thoughts. It is his task to see if he can lure us into assenting to all the paradoxes, improbabilities and strangenesses that fill ‘Little Gidding’. Since the poem is concerned with the space between High Holborn and the high heavens, a great deal depends on its not being a flop.

In his essay on Dante, Eliot wrote that ‘there is a difference between … philosophical belief and poetic assent.’ In 1932, as Lyndall Gordon notes in Eliot’s New Life (1988), ‘he reminded his audience that it was not necessary to believe what Dante believed in order to enjoy the poetry, although to enjoy it fully one ought to understand what he believed.’ Gordon sees the poem as a quest: ‘Little Gidding’, she writes, ‘recounts “the end of the journey”: “end”, “purpose”, “fulfilment” are the words in the air. The “end” is to come to rest in theological orthodoxy. It does not matter, though, if we do not share Eliot’s precise belief, since the greatness of the work has been the authenticity of the search.’ But what if the very point of the search is that it could, under pressure, lack ‘authenticity’? What if the search has been tentative and plagued with doubts, doubts that must be kept hidden, shrouded in paradox and verbal sleight-of-hand? The approach then is hushed and humble. The opening season of the poem is uncertain; the time is sundown or the hour before dawn. The snow is transitory and looks like blossom. The traveller may come here ‘not knowing what you came for’.

When the tone becomes ornate, when it moves away from soft speech, in the lines ‘the communication/Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living,’ it seems almost a preparation for the simple, stark place or non-place that will embody ‘the intersection of the timeless moment’. This place is ‘England and nowhere’. The tone is ghostly even before any ghost appears. But the opening stanzas of Part II become metrically energetic as well as abstract and impersonal. This, in turn, is a preparation for the scene, filled with precise objects and concrete images, when the figure of Eliot, working as an air warden, meets the ghost.

When the time comes for the self-accusation that had so energised Yeats and Auden, Eliot’s guilt, as Gordon writes, is ‘obviously about Vivienne’, his first wife. ‘It took a grim moral courage,’ Gordon continues,

to let go the visionary moments of his early life, with their latent promise, and let judgment fall, with the utmost severity, on what he must have wished to forget. But the reward of this public self-laceration was what is probably the strongest passage of poetry that he ever wrote, as he turned away from the plot of attainment to his habitat of pain.

If he wished to forget, what did he seek to establish, perhaps even remember? Since he wanted to work with a pattern where words cancel each other (‘What we call the beginning is often the end’, or ‘We are born with the dead’), did this method have a purpose? Did it reach beyond its own dry, runic wisdom?

The rhythm of the final section of ‘Little Gidding’ is calm. It is a set of propositions, with no ornament. There are strange, almost awkward repetitions of sound: ‘commerce’, ‘common’, ‘consort’. Slowly, Eliot begins to compose the most minimal music. He uses mostly words of one syllable, word after word – ‘a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat’. Soon, he has returned to abstractions (‘history is a pattern of timeless moments’). He punctures lines with indications of urgency, the second ‘See’ more direct than the first:

We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.

Four lines later the tone becomes more exact. He begins with ‘So’ to bounce against ‘See’ and ‘See’, to echo the ‘I’ sound in ‘die’ and ‘dying’ and to rhyme with ‘go’:

So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

It is not lost on the reader that this is England in wartime, that ‘the broken king’ invoked in the poem may be Charles I, but could also become George VI if England were to lose the war. The light here is not the light of heaven or the light of St John’s Gospel. It is winter light. It happened. And what occurred too was that the word ‘England’ appeared at the end of a line in an English poem without straining the metrical order or demanding a clanging rhyme. While ‘the fire and the rose’ in the last line do what they can to convince us, this England of Eliot’s lured us further into – if not philosophical belief, then at least some kind of poetic assent.