‘This is the way the world ends | Not with a bang but a whimper’: T. S. Eliot as a Prophet of Climate Change and Apocalypse?

Poets have long been thought of as prophets who have had visions of the world beyond their lifetime. Surprisingly for a poet known primarily for his engagement with the specific issues of post-war Britain (urbanism, psychology, sociology, symbolism etc.), T. S. Eliot repeatedly uses imagery which predicts the future consequences of industrialisation, intensive farming and exhaustion of natural resources.

Eliot’s use of images of barren waste lands and arid deserts is immediately recognisable within his middle period poetry, but I was surprised to notice that this theme of climatic disorder and environmental catastrophe continues through the more rural and philosophical Four Quartets. I have selected three examples of such imagery from the poem and commented briefly on them. I will explore them in more detail within my thesis.

Section two of ‘East Coker’. Lines 51-67.

The passage open with confusion over the overlapping of the seasons: ‘What is the late November doing | With the disturbance of the spring […] Late roses filled with early snow?’. This unease about the blurring of seasonal patterns extends to the heavens where ‘Deployed in constellated wars | Scorpion fight against the Sun | Until the Sun and Moon go down’. Should any further clarity be required that this is an image of apocalypse, the ambiguity is extinguished by the statement that these irregularities foretell ‘a vortex that shall bring | The world to that destructive fire | Which burns before the ice-cap reigns’.

Section two of ‘The Dry Salvages’. Lines 69-78

In the face of environmental catastrophe the psychological reaction of humans who ‘Cannot bear very much reality’ is to block the ability to ‘think of a time that is oceanless’ and retreat to the safety of imagining the ‘shallow banks unchanging and erosionless’ and the fisherman ‘forever bailing, | Setting and hauling’; despite ominous warning that it is now impossible to think of ‘an ocean not littered with wastage’.

Section two of ‘Little Gidding’. Lines 54-77

In the final movement of the poem the imagined apocalypse is replaced with the frightening reality of the destruction of London during the Blitz. In the aftermath of a bombing raid one by one the elements close down. The bombed building ‘where a story ended’ mark ‘the death of air’, the climatic extremes of ‘flood and drouth’ and the resulting ‘parched eviscerate soil’ tell of the ‘death of earth’, and the initial victory of water and fire in devouring ‘The town, the pasture and the weed’ ends in ‘the death of water and fire’ as the last elements themselves expire.

The result of these images within Eliot’s final masterpiece reveal a poet facing the very real prospects of death and destruction at the time of its writing, whilst also foreseeing the disastrous consequences of climate change that continue to be relevant to this day.

This shouldn’t surprise us. Eliot always looked bravely and deeply at that which most people find too terrifying to contemplate for more than a few moments.

‘The Certainty of all Beautiful Places Being Haunted’: W. B. Yeats

Cloister Cemetery In The Snow by Caspar David Friedrich

Yes, but not only beautiful places.

About a mile out of the village there is a mud track which curls through the fields then tightens in to a narrow path into the dark woods. There is something strange and disconcerting about the wood that always sets me on edge. The trees skirt round enormous holes like a quarry, remains of old building are reduced to piles of bricks and there is an ominous absence of birdsong.

I know woods are deeply associated in our minds with fairy tales, Freudian analysis, and newspaper stories of bodies dumped or cruelty practised; but it is not all woods that have this dark atmosphere for me; just this one.

In terms of the relationship between poetry and place, I believe that the landscapes poets loved and recorded are haunted not by the poets themselves but by their words. When I lived in London it was easy to darken my perception to see the necropolis of Eliot’s Waste Land every time I crossed London Bridge. Now I am in the country the paths that pepper Edward Thomas’s poetry cross into my mind when I walk down the lane to our farm. I think of his reluctance to die, only because he would miss the beauty of the countryside so much.

This is the reality of how we see place. It is multilayered and complex. There is the physical reality of the place: its individual geography and ecosystem, then there is its history, what happened to us there, what happened to others there, and our emotional reaction to it (which is often beyond language). Then, if we love poetry or music or art we start making links. The wood then becomes Robert Frost’s ‘lovely, dark and deep’ place of rest, or the condemned urban trees that Charlotte Mew cried for in ‘The Trees are Down’, or the ancient woodlands of Robin Hood, Macbeth, Hansel and Gretel, or Little Red Cap.

This does not take away from the autonomous status of the place but says much about how we approach places as humans, and why we need to protect the landscapes which inspires our imaginations and make us fully human.