Painting Eliot
Four Quartets
Robin Richmond, April 10, 2025
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
The first lines of Burnt Norton by Thomas Stearns Eliot.
Burnt Norton
One of my most successful mental distractions during medical examinations, long car journeys, and middle of the night bouts of insomnia is the game of Desert Island Music, Paintings and Books. This is a homespun variation on the famous BBC radio programme which invites guests to choose eight pieces of music to ease their desert island loneliness. They are also given Shakespeare and the Bible, and just one book of their choice for company. My list of music and artists changes as I get older, but my chosen book has been the same since my teens. The poems have become a lodestone. I still reach for them. When my father died, I discovered a first edition that I keep safely locked up. He bought it as a very young, very impoverished American GI, the year it was published.
On the flyleaf it reads Edwin L. Richmond, London, 1944.
East Coker
I have always wanted to dedicate a series of paintings to Four Quartets. I couldn’t figure out how to do this until last summer when thinking about a tree that I had planted forty years ago. I realised that how a tree changes through the seasons, how it lives and how it dies, perfectly embodies what, in a famous essay on Hamlet, Eliot himself called the “objective correlative”, something in the outside world that represents emotion.
I’ve been working on these four paintings since last summer. The poems are considered by many to be deeply Christian, but I am a devout atheist. For me, their meaning transcends religion. The poems were written between 1936 and 1944, when life was fragile and fleeting. Bombs were flying. London was burning. Death was everywhere. The importance of living fully and consciously in the present moment is the central theme of the poems. Two were written during the Blitz.
The Dry Salvages
Like me, Eliot found his greatest solace in nature. Like me, he was a transplanted American who made his life in England.
The passing of the seasons runs through the poems as a loose thread. The tree is an embodiment of Time. I have followed this thread in the paintings. Four Quartets begin with Burnt Norton, named after the beautiful garden of a Manor House in Gloucestershire. He walked in this garden, in a state of elegiac regret and joy. My tree is in full summer glory.
Little Gidding
East Coker is a village in Somerset which meant a great deal to him. His ashes are buried there in the graveyard. My painting is autumnal. Leaves are falling. The tree is moving into suspended animation. The Dry Salvages, is named after a forbidding rock formation at Cape Ann off the coast of Massachusetts, where Eliot spent summers as a child. As a small child I lived near Boston and sailed its rocky coast with my mother on her small sailboat. In Little Gidding, a small village in Cambridgeshire, the poem refers back to Burnt Norton. As do I. It is Spring.
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future.
The cycle of life begins again.
The tree is in leaf.