In such a state, we would exchange roles with time and we would become its gentle annihilator. Pointedly juxtaposing time and eternity, Eliot calls attention to the close relationship between them. By merging past, present, and future he creates the eternal present, absolute and relative, never changing and always fleeting, captured in time like the lovers on Keats' urn for future unborn generations. Because time and eternity are fundamental to the Four Quartets, this subject has been mined again and again by Eliot critics. Nevertheless, it is a topic that needs to be sifted once more.
Previous excavations have yet to examine time and eternity in a fully systematic way.
Both proponents of eastern and western thought have made invaluable commentaries on the significance of time in the Quartets, but they miss the poem's most vital element, Eliot's sincere conviction that eternity can and must be incorporated into the life of time as the sole means to revitalize the spiritual wasteland of modern life. Read with greatest profundity, the Four Quartets present the triumph of life over time. With the Bhagavad-Gita as his primary inspiration, Eliot moves forward in a continuous ebb and flow of time and eternity until he reaches the end of the poem, which is its true beginning, life lived forever in the timeless, no longer touched by the binding influence of time. Simply stated, the Four Quartets presents a progression, a nonlinear evolution of human consciousness, away from the wasteland suffering of time-locked existence and towards the full beatitude of spiritual life in the eternal freedom lived beyond time. Because of Eliot's background in such Vedic Literature as the Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads, texts that when restored to their fullest value form along with Maharishi's commentaries on the nature of consciousness the basis of Maharishi Vedic Science, make Maharishi Vedic Science not only an appropriate critical light by which to view Eliot's poetry, it illuminates it to a degree not previously attained in other critical commentaries.