엘리엇의 『네 사중주』: 확장된 장미정원의 노래

Abstract

This thesis intends to explicate T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets with the image of the rose-garden as an important clue to it. The mystical experience of rose-garden is the starting point of “Burnt Norton”, the first poem of Four Quartets. In “Burnt Norton”, this ecstatic moment of illumination can be said to save the poet from the flux of time, even momentarily. At this time Eliot applies the Dantean concept of “the still point of turning world” to the rose-garden experience. This image of rose-garden repeats itself in the rest of the poem. However, the meaning of visionary experience is criticized within the work itself. In the concluding section of “East Coker”, the poet attempts to revise his attitudes to those mystical experiences. He wishes to put more value on the enlarged consciousness covering the collective community rather than the isolated ecstatic moment of one solitary mystic. In “The Dry Salvages” he is concerned with giving poetic form to theological thoughts such as Annunciation and Incarnation. The poet accepts historic Incarnation, namely the birth and life of Jesus Christ on earth, as the intersection point of the timeless with time. However, when he poeticizes the Christian doctrine, he just takes the method of connecting Incarnation with the small experiences of illumination. Now we can realize the rose-garden experience of “Burnt Norton” as “The hint half guessed” or “the gift half understood” of Incarnation, as it were, a shadow of Incarnation. Finally, at the end of “Little Gidding” the poet reaches the rose-garden once more. At this time this last rose-garden could be thought to be a more expanded one than that of “Burnt Norton”, for we know well that it only could be reached after various spiritual, political, and historical disciplines.