Deliberately bearing to brutish tribes
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hristian assurance, arts of agriculture. Eliot himself continued to make increasing use of stressrhythms, both in his poems and in his plays. As HelenGardner has pointed out," the 4-beat non-syllabic linehas in fact become ‘the norm to which the verseconstantly returns’. It is seen very clearly in the openingpassages of Burnt Norton and Little Gidding, or in theselines from The Dry Salvages— And the ragged rock in the restless waters,Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it; On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,In navigable weather it is always a seamarkTo lay a course by: but in the sombre seasonOr the sudden fury, is what it always was. But it is especially in the dramas that Eliot has seizedthe opportunities offered by stress metre, and by the4-beat line in particular, in the modern poet’s séarchfor a continuous medium to replace blank verse and allits inevitable Elizabethan associations. Already inMurder in the Cathedral (1935) stress rhythms areuppermost, and are used both for ordinary narrativeand conversation (frequently ‘pointed’ by rhyme and © The Art of T. S. Eliot, 1949, p. 29.
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