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As the seasons change, now and always, perhaps the time has come to revisit T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Written amid the spiritual tumult and existential despair rife in the World War II era, Eliot’s poems ask us to consider the nature of time, the infinite universe, and the divine. While this collection of four poems, each in five movements, is perfect for the armchair philosopher in us all, I recommend strongly that this symphony of language be performed outdoors in the round, perhaps from lawnchairs circled around the campfire.

Eliot troubles with time and the referential language we have for it. The past, Eliot says, and all versions of the past, both actual and possible, are all present, always. He repeats what has become the poem’s famous mantra: “What might have been and what has been/ Point to one end, which is always present.” Parallel universes or David Ives’ All in the Timing one act plays come to mind. Perhaps there is hope in permutation? Power in impermanence?

The cycling of the seasons seems to catch us in the paradox that while we have seen it all before, the falling leaves and the changing colors, each leaf is falling for the first time; when we are once again blanketed it will be fresh snow. Eliot’s pointing to one end of time is like pointing to the end of the earth. To follow that line is to trace a curve round.

The third movement of the poem “Burnt Norton,” to me, is an ode to a befalling winter. Besides a single orienting verb in the first line, “Here is a place of affectation,” the rest is a litany of images, prepositional phrases, past and present participles, a motionless hovering, until, “descend lower” is given almost as a stage direction. We are then told what the world “is not”—darkness, destitution, desiccation, evacuation, inoperancy, and that it “is not” moving but for “appetency”—desire. This apophatic way of describing the world, which is the way of dispossession, or knowing something only by what it is not, is, perhaps, one attitude we could choose in the face of winter. Paradoxically, the lack of motion, the darkness, the cold of winter, all serve to evoke their opposites—movement, light, and warmth, and “at the still point,” Eliot smiles, “there the dance is.”

“Will the sunflower turn to us?” Eliot wonders. He offers a conditional clause in response: “after the kingfisher’s wing/ has answered light to light, and is silent.” Instead of telling us what will happening after, he says, “the light is still,” perhaps to suggest that what is hoped for is happening, now—the light is. “There [referring to the sudden shaft of sunlight] rises the hidden laughter/ of children in the foliage/ Quick now, here, now, always—“ This kind of conclusion makes me want to jump upon a desk like in Dead Poet’s Society and Yawp! Our youth is with us always, night and day, growing and dying, war and peace, destruction and creation, spring and summer and fall and winter are with us always, and they are new, always new, even though we return to them again and again and again. “So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the/ dancing.”

But in the final poem of the quartet, Little Gidding, Eliot frames a scene with every preposition at hand as if doing so would better specify the time: “In the uncertain hour,” “Near the ending,” “At the recurrent end,” “After the dark dove…passed,” “While the dead leaves rattled,” “Over the asphalt,” “Between three districts,” Eliot met one walking. This person talks to Eliot about humility, how all else but the dance is “shadow fruit,” “the impotence of rage at human folly,” “the laceration of laughter at what ceases to amuse,” and then, “in the disfigured street/ He left me…and faded on the blowing of a horn.”

In a headwind of present events in which the reader is always experiencing and always waiting, this incident, a real event, a dialogue with a man that doesn’t go on existing, but a man that left, is the literary equivalent of a thrown anchor. Something happened. Permanent. For a moment, we are transformed.

What follows that scene is dense with Eliot’s heavy use of future tense. As one would expect in a finale, it is a forecast of all that is to come, and he uses the following refrain thrice: “All shall be well, and/ All manner of thing shall be well.” A chorus for all seasons. And in the final stanza, Eliot trumpets: “We shall not cease from exploration…the end will be to arrive where we started/ and know that place for the first time.” Moving and yet still, Eliot champions paradox right through the final lines of Four Quartets which declare in a Dante-esque conflagration that all shall be well, “when the tongues of flame are in-folded/ into the crowned knot of fire/ and the fire and rose are one.” To every season, turn, turn, turn the still dancing pages of this brilliant book of poems again and again.