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In his 1933 Norton Lecture on Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot defined the "auditory imagination" which he found to be lacking in Arnold's poetry: it was "the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end."1 Whatever the validity of his judgement, Eliot's description gives a glimpse into the thoughts which would eventually culminate in Four Quartets (1943), a project he would not complete for another nine years. "Seeking the beginning and the end" anticipates the opening of "East Coker" ("in my beginning is my end"), as well as Eliot's description of an ideal language in which "every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, / Every poem an epitaph."2 The present poetic utterance, for the Eliot of Four Quartets, can reconcile the whole pattern of past and future, beginning and end, all "contained" within one another (177): "History is now and England," as he affirms (208). In fact, the close of "Little Gidding" is curiously conscious of "bringing something back" through the "auditory imagination," in its echoing of the children's laughter in the rose garden from the first section of "Burnt Norton," completed six years earlier:
the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
(209)
"Half-heard" across the four poems, then, is a preconscious, Edenic "origin," a recognition of the past in the present, the beginning in the end: "the last of earth left to discover / Is that which was the beginning" (209). And in fact, this echoes from even earlier in time. "The children in the appletree [...] tie up with New Hampshire',' Eliot explained in 1941, recalling the "children's voices in the orchard" from that poem of 1934 (142); they are evoked in "Marina" (1930), as Pericles, away at sea, remembers his lost daughter's "whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet" (105); and they originate, as his friend, John Hayward, wrote, from a memory of Eliot's New England upbringing.3
It is not difficult to account for such echoes in Eliot's work....