It’s hard to imagine T.S. Eliot riding the subway. In his three-piece tweed suit, topped by a bowler hat, and with a furled black umbrella firmly in hand, he would present a startling apparition to most commuters. I can picture him in a hansom cab or a taxi or even a stretch limo, but he seems a bit too unworldly for the dim and gritty labyrinth of mass transportation. It’s surprising then to realize that in “Four Quartets,”his final masterpiece, he invokes the subway (or in his case, the London Underground) more than once, often to dramatic effect. Whether he rode it every day to his editorial offices, or only sheltered there at night during the Blitz, isn’t clear to me. But in these poems, published in 1943 in the midst of war, he captures something unmistakable about traveling underground. And as it turns out, the portals to the subway offer a modest point of entry to these great poems.

In “East Coker,” the second of the quartets, in which Eliot alludes to the village in Somerset where his ancestors originated, he uses one of those maddening pauses during a subway trip to suggest “the darkness of God.” He says:

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about …

We all know this little experience when life seems suddenly suspended. A train connects two points and when it pauses, we appear to be nowhere. Not only is our journey interrupted but time itself seems arrested. We are abruptly cast into no time and no place, and it’s a bit spooky. But how does it suggest a religious perception?

One clue is in the phrase “mental emptiness.” All four poems are concerned with time, “time before and time after,” and the possibility, just for an instant, of stepping outside of time “into the rose garden.”The stalled subway resembles such a timeless moment, “at the still point of the turning world,” but it comes to nothing or it inspires only the “terror of nothing to think about.” I have to admit that one of the few pleasures of riding the subway is to feel my own mental emptiness deepen; I like having “nothing to think about.” But of course, there’s a sly play on words here. The terror lies not in having “nothing to think about” but in having to think about nothing. “Nothing” is terrifying to think about. Suspended in a steel compartment, deep beneath the streets, we’re stripped of all but that nothing which, because it’s truly nothing, is beyond time, too. The more I consider this, the more apprehensive I grow about the next unscheduled stop between stations.

Throughout “Four Quartets” Eliot contrasts such moments from daily life with deeper, more baffling moments. We descend into the subway but we should “descend lower, descend only / into the world of perpetual solitude” where we renounce property, the pleasures of the senses, the play of fancy, and even “the world of spirit.”

In all four poems Eliot quotes or alludes to the teachings of mystics, Hindu and Buddhist, as well as Christian, drawing on everyone from Krishna to St. John of the Cross. And these are, in a surprisingly persuasive sense, genuinely mystical poems, which urge renunciation and the “dark night of the soul” at every turn. This is an unfashionable message, to say the least, and yet the poems survive it and remain deeply moving.

“The sea has many voices,” Eliot writes in “The Dry Salvages,” the third of the Quartets, but so has Eliot, and all are audible in these untimely meditations. He can be caustic, snobbish, and condescending, but he also, often unexpectedly, soars and sings. Perhaps most irritating is his unctuous parson’s voice; he’s not above sandwiching sermons between gorgeous lyrical interludes. I’ve come to feel that these accents — “scolding, mocking or merely chattering,” as he himself puts it — add to the greatness of the work. A genuine poem should unsettle us, rock our assumptions, even annoy us; and in this Eliot succeeds spectacularly.

Apart from the incomparable music of the verse, at least two features save “Four Quartets” from sanctimony. First is Eliot’s disillusion with his own old age. Unlike the randy Yeats, rejuvenated by dubious injections for hankypanky in his declining years — and whose apparition Eliot encounters in “Little Gidding,” the last and greatest of the quartets — Eliot is inconsolable as he ages. “Do not let me hear,” he exclaims, “of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,” and he continues:

Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

Old age holds out nothing but “the cold friction of expiring sense” and “bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit.” Worst perhaps is the charade of renown, discovered too late, when “fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.” Eliot once complained, in a moment of self-pity, that he had “given up too much” for poetry; for a man laden with accolade, this was perhaps an unpardonable outburst, but here we can see what bitterness lay behind the complaint.

The second saving grace is that “Four Quartets” deals with merciless honesty in every section with the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of writing well. Because “words move … only in time,” they are continually eluding our attempts to use them. No sooner have we written them than they appear inadequate; the pattern has changed, the words no longer correspond: “And so each venture/ is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate / with shabby equipment always deteriorating/in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.”After the exquisite lyric which begins, “What is the late November doing/ with the disturbance of the spring?” he comments dryly,”That was a way of putting it — not very satisfactory.” But he also offers advice that’s valid for every writer who should use

The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together.

“Four Quartets” is included in the “Collected Poems, 1909-1962” (Harcourt, 240 pages, $24), but I like it best in the little paperback edition (Harvest Books, 64 pages, $9), not least because it fits so snugly into a pocket. On long subway rides Eliot’s cadences, which somehow contain all time even as they evoke the timeless, fill the mental emptiness that looms between every stop.

eormsby@nysun.com