I remember the exact words with which I was first introduced to “The Waste Land” while still at school. “This isn’t a poem you read. It is a poem you will live with.” Everything in the years since has proved those words true. And not just with that work, but with all of T.S. Eliot—the Four Quartets above all. It seems to be the same for many people. He is the modern poet whose lines come to mind most often. The one we reach for when we wish to find sense in things. And certainly the first non-scriptural place we call when we consider the purpose or end of life.
His contemporaries, by contrast, all seem to have grown smaller. W.H. Auden has perhaps three-quarters of his reputation still. But most of the other figures who dominated English poetry in the last century look diminished in the rear-view mirror. Which makes it even more striking that Eliot seems to grow. To consider why that should be is to consider something not just about our time, or his, but something about the nature of time, and the purpose of culture.
We want to return to our lives and livelihoods, but not by sacrificing the natural world that supports us in body and in spirit. One older bird-watcher I know described the effect of seeing a bluebird in his urban backyard during the lockdown, for only the third time in sixteen years. “The aura of it was bigger than the essence, the cold hard fact, of it,” he said. “A bluebird on my backyard fence is just a bird sitting on a piece of metal. But what it does to me is so much more, the emotional and psychological uplift, the brightening. In three minutes, the bird was gone, but my day had utterly changed.”
I still remember that first night walk in King’s Forest near my Suffolk home, two years ago. The clouds were smoking-room-thick, so there had been no visible sunset. The cold, white sky did not even blush. Instead, the light thickened and clotted as darkness began to form, seeping out from between stands of pines. It puffed from the shadows of my footsteps on the track and welled up from the deep ruts made by 4x4s.
I’m not sure why I kept walking that night. Partly it was just the rhythm: the metronome swing of the legs, the freedom of having nowhere to be and no place to go. But also, I’d been rallied by my 10-year-old son who, in his campaign for an ever-later bedtime, argued that an average human spends 26 years of their time on Earth asleep. His words had wormed their way into my brain. When was the last time I had been out at night? Not camping or running or toddling home from the pub, but really out into the dark. Was my life being only half-lived?
One of the first sketches I did of London as a student was a picture of the gasometer in Chelsea, drawn on tinted paper with a black fountain pen, one evening in the summer of 1951. We had been told by our tutor to get out of the studio and draw the real world outside and I can remember cycling from the Royal College of Art in South Kensington, leaning my bike against a wall, and working for around an hour. I was fascinated by the bizarre and beautiful structure.
Last November, around seven decades after I did that drawing, I walked to King’s Cross and painted the gasometers there, this time using watercolours, but working similarly quickly, balancing my drawing board on the parapet of a footbridge. These old industrial structures are no longer functioning, either preserved as curiosities or converted into luxury flats, but they remain intriguing to look at and draw.
Unused swords rust
like your feather quill,
dipped in dry ink,
that scars the paper;