A Long Way Down
Four Quartets is the brain-child of 28 year-old, Bristol-born singer/songwr… Read Full Bio ↴Four Quartets is the brain-child of 28 year-old, Bristol-born singer/songwriter Rob Sharples. Distilling a breadth of influences both musical and literary: from rock auteurs such as Radiohead and Elliott Smith, to the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the western classical tradition. Harmonically adventurous and unpredictable, Sharples seamlessly weaves memorable melodies with a complex undercurrent producing music of genuine art that stands up to high scrutiny and yet is also easily accessible.

A multi-instrumentalist, Sharples painstakingly writes every arrangement and also personally performs most of parts, bringing a distinctive character to the blend. Recorded on a shoe-string budget, the debut album The Paragon of Animals reflects a year's labour, beset by faulty equipment, the necessity to borrow mics and instruments, an outmoded iMac and self-taught engineering.

The result, however, is an intelligent and diverse offering, at times soft, spectral and sparse, at others abrasive and visceral, demonstrating a range of styles and textures, yet remaining cohesive and fluid. Lyrically, the songs reflect a profound but unpretentious love of literature that evokes a picture of a world both beautiful and brutal. Contemptuous of cliches but resisting mystification, an uncontrived humanity emerges from the core of this unique and luminous record.

A Long Way Down
Four Quartets Lyrics


We have lyrics for 'A Long Way Down' by these artists:


Brian Eno Hey, see you soon sail through your room I'll meet you…
Condition K Feeling so estranged Wishing this life away Crazy liars S…
Gloria Deluxe And I'm falling, and I'm falling, and it's a long…
James T. Cotton Hounds of hell are barking Right outside my door And every t…
John Wesley When I look into your eyes it worries me what I…
Lloyd Cole Didn't I hear you say your heart's made out of…
Lloyd Cole - Didn't I hear you say your heart's made out of…
Matthew Good Today I'm leaving This bullshit one horse town Full of cowbo…
Zebra & Giraffe The joker's on the left of me, the vulture's on…



Zebrahead There's a hole in my heart And there's a hole in…
[Mark.] Your toy balloon has sailed in the sky, love But now…


The lyrics are frequently found in the comments by searching or by filtering for lyric videos
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Most interesting comments from YouTube:

Fatih Demir

The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.



Robert Madison

As I sat and pondered. I wrote this piece.

I wish I could open my mind. To see my history before me.
There would be so much to learn, and yet, so much to unlearn.
I'd see the faces of long ago, the faces of those that tried with all their might.
They call to me now, to ask their questions.
Soon I'll be like them, and so will my beloved children.
And thus, we should all sit to ponder...
Why we too make the effort.
I feel something more than I,
but through my limitations I can only see.
What happens when I can no longer breath.
What happens when I can'not be.
In all my life there were such few,
So few meaning through and through.
How hysterical it is that my dreams are so vast,
yet they are finite and of such insignificance.

At the end of this,
I see that we are small.
But there's no fear_ _ _ For I'll forever be.

R.D.M



Karu

BURNT NORTON
(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')
  

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                              But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
                        Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.



II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
                                          Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.



III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

    Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.



IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?

    Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.



V

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

    The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.



RichardFeynmanRules

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened...
~
So begins one mankind's greatest poems and one the deepest poetic meditations on our relationship with time, the universe, and the divine ever written...



AM

THE DRY SALVAGES
(No. 3 of 'Four Quartets')

I

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

    The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
                                              The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.
                                        The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
The distant rote in the granite teeth,
And the wailing warning from the approaching headland
Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
Rounded homewards, and the seagull:
And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.



All comments from YouTube:

Eleonora Branchesi

I am so grateful that this was recorded and made available.
Eliot's delivery is so uniquely odd and eerie... I could listen to it over and over.

roger powe

His rendering is clear of any kind of interpretation - so the poetry itself speaks as it must

Mëïstër Ëmm

Especially since he was born and raised and lived in America until he was twenty five.

giovannichambers

Burnt Norton 00:01
East Coker 10:42
The Dry Salvages 24:17
Little Gidding 39:08

Deep-Fried Baka

THANK YOU

Augusto Oliveira

you're the real mvp

Gerre Gannaway

Thank you, Giovanni.

justice4all

Thank you 💖

Michael Mcguinness

you can still get a cd for the car....this is for me like a monk with his prayers...i've listened to it hundreds of times while i did my deliveries from the truck..."what the dead had no speech for when living they can tell you.being dead..."

oldgeek12

+Michael Mcguinness I love your comment. Thank you for sharing.

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