POETS Day! ‘Little Gidding’ the Fourth of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets

“Poets do not rightly achieve their renown for saying anything new, however, or for saying anything that any reasonable thoughtful, feeling person should not already know by the time he or she has reached some measure of advanced adulthood. Rather, we expect poets to share the common experience in uncommon ways, so that simple truths emerge renewed and refreshed, or else to share uncommon experiences in common ways, so that the rare experience of a single individual becomes accessible to all. Surely, Eliot has been doing just that throughout the Quartets, so that a man visiting an English country home or riding a subway or watching for fires after an air raid or kneeling in an ancient chapel or pondering the flotsam on a river is not only the same man but the same as every other person if he or she, too, were followed through the rich varieties of experience that the typical individual may undergo in a lifetime.”

— Russell Elliot Murphy, T.S. Eliot: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work

Charles I rode into Little Gidding on May 2, 1646, alone. Behind him rode Cromwell or Fairfax or some combination of their forces loyal to Parliament. The king knew the place. Sometime in the previous decade he came to admire a gospel concord owned by Nicholas Ferrar, a former courtier who, after suffering financial losses betting on the Virginia Company, retreated to his holdings at Little Gidding for a life of prayer and contemplation. Ferrar invited others. A small religious community flourished under his, and later his brother John’s, leadership. There was no reason for him to believe Little Gidding could offer lasting sanctuary from the Parliamentarians, but the king was desperate. Afraid for the safety of the residents of Little Gidding, John hid him in nearby Coppingford. The king would be captured three days later and the faithful dispersed by force, never to reform, under suspicion of having done exactly what they did to aid the fugitive royal. But, if only for a night, Charles slept.

TS Eliot published “Burnt Norton” in 1936, intending it as a standalone poem. In it he considers an infinite God and wonders at the limits of human perception. Can a temporal being conceive of an eternal one? Does time parcel out bits of understanding, save us from confronting a vision of God so terrible it would destroy us were we to experience him whole? Man is in motion through time while God is perfect stillness; no need for desire’s impetus or fear’s escape. God is love and contentment. Eliot settles on moments of ecstasy, timeless trance-like clarity where understanding seems ours, as the best contact with that stillness we can hope for.

Eliot began “East Coker” in the Fall of 1939, shortly after England declared war on Germany, as a companion to “Burnt Norton.” In that poem, he wrote of cycles within lives and generations, history and individuals. Sometime during this writing, he decided a third and fourth were necessary. The idea for Four Quartets was born. After publishing “East Coker” in 1940, he followed with “Dry Salvages” in 1941. In that third poem, Eliot asks what we are to do. If God is incomprehensible, unknowable other than to saints blessed or chosen, what is the common man to do? His answer is an unsatisfactory “Your best as can be done in the moment.”

In 1942, “Little Gidding” was released. In the poem’s final stanza, Eliot tells us,

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

We never escape the inescapable pattern explored in previous poems. A flavor of what happened before happens again, and we start over. At best, we touch the eternal stillness and are overwhelmed. The ecstasy he wrote of in “Burnt Norton,” “where we started,” is reconsidered. We cannot experience God fully in our lives, but moments of peace outside, if not time, our troubles and expectations, give respite. He opens the first line of “Little Gidding” with the phrase “Midwinter spring,” calling immediately to mind his most famous poem’s reference to April, but that’s an aside. A midwinter spring is a time out of season, a break from the normal cycle, a step out of timeliness. We are in an ecstasy, removed to a vantage point to look on and consider the pattern.

Like all of the poems making up Four Quartets, “Little Gidding” is divided into five parts. Here, from Part I:

It would be the same at the end of every journey, If you came at night like a broken king, If you came by day not knowing what you came for, It would be the same,

This contemplation is a refuge, as was the religious community to the “broken king,” if only for a brief period. The next stanza contains my favorite (current favorite at least) lines from Eliot, from “You are not here to verify,” to “…has been valid.”

If you came this way, Taking any route, starting from anywhere, At any time or at any season, It would always be the same: you would have to put off Sense and notion. You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity Or carry report. You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more Than an order of words, the conscious occupation Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. And what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. Here, the intersection of the timeless moment Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

There are shafts of light illuminating dust in “Burnt Norton,” “wind that sweeps the gloomy hills,” and birds among other images. Eliot made the decision while writing “East Coker” that since “Burnt Norton” was rife with images related to airiness, he’d weave an elemental theme into the series. “Burnt Norton” was air. He’d fill “East Coker” with allusions to earth and the as-yet unwritten and untitled “Dry Salvages” with water. The last would be a poem of fire. While it was certainly not fortuitous for those involved, it may be poetically serendipitous that, while composing “Little Gidding,” Eliot served as an air warden in London. Free time was spent writing in the country, a refuge in itself from time spent among the flames and wreckage from German firebombing.

In the uncertain hours before the morning Near the ending of interminable night At the recurring end of the unending After the dark dove with the flickering tongue Had passed below the horizon of his homing

The dark dove, a German bomber, unleashed hell on London. The above passage begins a seventy-line run of what the poet and critic James Matthew Wilson affectionately calls “cheap” terza rima meant to evoke Dante’s Inferno. During this stretch, the persona meets,

…some dead master Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled Both one and many; in the brown baked features The eyes of a familiar compound ghost Both intimate and unidentifiable.

The unknown master is not easily identifiable. He’s certainly a poet, but which? You might assume Dante by the form Eliot’s using, but then why not Virgil? Russell Elliot Murphy, whom I’ve quoted as introduction to this article, throws out the possibility that it may be Dante’s teacher Bruno Latini who Dante casts in the seventh layer of Hell, whose “features have been baked by the fiery rain falling on burning plains where sodomists are punished.” Murphy notices a great deal more than most. Per him, a reference to dancing might mean the then-recently deceased friend of Eliot’s, W.B. Yeats; a ghost recalls Hamlet and so Shakespeare; and a mention of a famous Provençal troubadour conjures Ezra Pound. He throws James Joyce out there too, but not convincingly. It’s probably meant to be all of them in this “compound ghost.”

In this gloaming, the persona loses identity as well: “I was still the same, / knowing myself yet being someone other.” Amidst horror and destruction, he wants answers from the master. It’s unspoken. The persona wants to know why there is suffering. Why is there evil? But he is put off by the master:

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice.

The cycle asserts itself. Each man must ask questions and find answers. Eliot was in his mid-fifties when writing “Little Gidding.” Yeats had just died. Joyce had just died. He wasn’t an old man, but he was of an age to consider mortality in ways a young man doesn’t, to evaluate age’s accumulated wisdom and decide whether he has any, by what mechanism we accumulate it, and compare himself to others in his circumstance. The blurry man talks to the blurry master and wrestles with the revelation that they are contemporaries out of time. His experience is akin to theirs. There is no answer received from the ages because the question is ageless and what we learn is, like salvation, personal.

In the next section, Eliot quotes a fourteenth-century mystic named Julian of Norwich:

Sin is Behovely, but All shall be well, and All manner of things shall be well.

This is to say, the reason for suffering is beyond us, but don’t worry. At first, this rings as unsatisfactorily as the conclusion to focus on what you do in the now from “Dry Salvages.” He goes on in her voice, speaking of Charles I and the Civil War:

Those men and those who opposed them And those whom they opposed Accept the constitution of silence And are folded in a single party. Whatever we inherit from the fortunate We have taken from the defeated What they had to leave us—a symbol: A symbol perfected in death. And we shall be well and All manner of things shall be well By the purification of the motive In the ground of our beseeching.

There is evil, but we must be subjected to evil in order to be cleansed. Evoking both the flamed tongues of German dive bombers and the flamed tongues of Pentecost, he writes:

The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre— To be redeemed from fire by fire.

And, by association, we are back to the once great mansion named Norton, laid low by fire and made fallow for the questions Eliot began with in the first poem. A new cycle is set to begin as part of a greater cycle.

Poetry is moving when done well, so we’ve grown to call poetry moving as a matter of course. I don’t think I’ve come across anything like Four Quartets. As an act of poetry, it’s impressive. There are games and devices and demonstrations of form mastery; enough of all for shelves of doctoral thesi. None of that would matter if it weren’t so satisfying. As four separate works, yes, but more so as one continuity.

As a work of Christian theology, it’s an edifice. A Christian is both flesh and soul, not either or. God is spirit, but became man and God. Again, both, not either or. In Four Quartets, Eliot appeals to the senses through poetry and intellect through theological exploration. I don’t have to explain the synthesis because he took time to tell us himself in the section from Part I I quoted earlier:

And prayer is more Than an order of words, the conscious occupation Of the Praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

The poems are prayerful, and moving in the sense we mean when we first say moving, before we know to reach for the word as pat. Regarding the whole of Four Quartets, I’m four articles and seven thousand words into trying to convey what left me speechless.

I’ll leave with the entirety of Part V of “Little Gidding” and a meant, Amen.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And 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.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]