The Musicality Of Four Quartets

Musicality is the most distinctive feature in Four Quartets, one of the most highly praised poems of T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), which won him the Nobel Prize in 1948. Four Quartets, which consists of four previously independent poems and on which T. S. Eliot spent 8 years (1935-1942) was first published in 1943 as an integrated whole. This thesis sets to explore the musicality of the poem in four aspects: the rhythmic musicality, the rhetorical musicality, the structural musicality and the thematic musicality.Chapter 1 penetrates into the rhythmic musicality of Four Quartets. The basic unit of the poem is a syllable which is identical to a music tone; more than two stressed or unstressed syllables form a foot which is the minimum rhythmic unit similar to the minimum music rhythmic unit combined by the strong and weak beats, such as 2/4 beat, 3/4 beat and so on. A rhythmically organized sequence of single tones is so related to one another as to make up a particular phrase or idea. The rhythmic beauty is not limited to phonetic sense but also reflected in the semantic level, such as phrases, lines and stanzas. The syntactic elements, for instance, swift link-ups, unexpected shifts, passing leaps, sudden caesura, echoing repetition and so on make the semantic meaning fluctuate up and down; thus, emotions will inflate and deflate accordingly.In Chapter 2, melody, tempo, dynamics and tone colour will be explored as rhetorical elements in Four Quartets. One of the genuine characteristics is that Eliot adopts another form of art as a rhetorical device to enforce the artistic impressive power of poetry. Compared with rhythm, the apparent mettle of the musicality of Four Quartets, melody, tempo, dynamics and tone colour are the hidden traits. Through musical tones, melody connects multiple rhythms into a recurring and winding piece. In addition, tempo, dynamics and tone colour skillfully exert their capabilities to undergird the fair melody.Chapter 3 will interpret musical type and forms employed to frame Four Quartets. T. S. Eliot has a highly musical taste which is fully displayed in his design and arrangement of Four Quartets. Eliot adopts the musical type—"prelude", and also exploits the musical forms such as sonata form and variation form to construct this gigantic framework. With these musical forms and type, the theme of Four Quartets is developed clearly, continuously and logically. In addition, symmetry and golden cut will also be expounded in this chapter. Since the ancient times, people have used these two structural measures to create music pieces. The thesis will also intend to appraise the well-balanced structure of Four Quartets that has adopted symmetry and golden cut.By adopting such musical type and forms, Four Quartets leaves readers a strong and acute sense of musical philosophy: eternity and transience, life and death, order and disorder, harmony and chaos, historic sense and time present. All these binary ideas, as well as the paradoxical language which is just like being spoken out by a prophet, add a philosophic flavor from the very first line of the poem. Therefore, the theme of Four Quartets is endowed with musical harmony. The thesis endeavors to confirm the unity of various minor themes from the aspect of the "harmony" of the theme, another musical term, achieved through dissonance and consonance. Dissonance increases the difficulties to understand a musical piece, while consonance pours happiness and relaxation into it. In Four Quartets, dissonance and consonance develop the various minor themes into a harmonious unity. Eliot reveals that he has already probed out of the disordered waste land into a quiet and orderly world.