If Shakespeare Had Written T.S. Eliot

I’m reading T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and I came across a section in East Coker that feels exactly like what Shakespeare would have said if you’d asked him why he wrote The Tempest.

V

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. 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,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

The Tempest was one of the last plays Will wrote. It’s the story of a deposed king and his daughter, isolated on an island upon which the king’s usurpers become shipwrecked one day. Rather than taking his revenge on those who betrayed him, he leads them through a magical ordeal on the strange island and then forgives them all. (That’s a very simplified summary.) The story’s themes of isolation, forgiveness for things past, the triviality of human conspiracy, as well as the main character being a learned man who works magic with words and has straightened out his priorities in life remind me very much of Eliot’s poem. I can easily imagine Will writing it in his personal journal.