Little Gidding

“Little Gidding,” composed by much-decorated British American poet T. S. Eliot during the darkest months of World War II, is the fourth and final poem of Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943), an ambitious philosophical exploration into the nature of time, the reality of mortality, the power of Christ’s love, and ultimately the sublime peace of transcendence. In “Little Gidding” Eliot draws on the mysticism of his adopted Anglican Catholicism to make sense of a civilization now in ruins.

Named for a crossroads village about an hour north of London known for its centuries-old chapel, the poem unfolds as the poet struggles to understand Europe’s collapse into war on a scale no civilization had ever approached. The poem is rich with theology, reflecting Eliot’s considerable erudition. The poem also draws on a wide variety of literary resources—Shakespeare’s 17th-century tragedy Coriolanus, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century epic poem Inferno, the St. John’s gospel George Herbert’s metaphysical verse, Jonathan Swift’s political satires, William Butler Yeats’ philosophical meditations, and St. Julian of Norwich’s mystical treatises.

In the closing section of “Little Gidding,” Eliot rejects despair and resists the easy dodge of irony to affirm the possibility of humanity burning away the corrosive urgencies of the flesh and tapping at last into the sweeping stillness of the transcendent beyond the manic chaos of time itself. Although Four Quartets came near the end of a long career in which Eliot pioneered new formal experiments, it was largely on the strength of the vision of Four Quartets that Eliot was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Poet Biography

Although by his death in 1965, Thomas Stearns Eliot was regarded as the world’s preeminent English-language poet, his beginnings were modest. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888, to a father who was an entrepreneur in brick manufacturing and a mother who was a teacher and aspiring poet. Encouraged by his mother, Eliot read voraciously. He attended Harvard, completing a Bachelor of Arts in 1909 and then pursuing graduate work in the wisdom literatures of Hinduism, studying them in Sanskrit. At Harvard, Eliot began publishing provocative poetry that explored teleological questions interrogating America’s new-century optimism and unexamined materialism.

In 1914, Eliot moved to London. Although he married and worked as a bank clerk, he sought out the city’s bohemian arts community, a confederation of brash young writers, painters, and composers. Unsettled by the war raging in Europe, these intellectuals, self-described Modernists, rejected conventional artistic forms and conservative thinking. Eliot catapulted to prominence with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1914), a dramatic monologue in verse about a timid academic terrified by the raw energy of emotions.

Even as Eliot struggled within a dysfunctional marriage, he pursued his iconoclastic poetry. Under the mentorship of fellow American expatriate poet Ezra Pound, Eliot crafted The Waste Land (1922), a stinging critique of the spiritual bankruptcy of Western civilization. Although its radical form and cryptic lines informed by Eliot’s erudition puzzled some, critics hailed the ambitious poem, establishing Eliot, at age 30, among the foremost poets of his generation. In 1927, unhappy over America’s consumer capitalism and religious hypocrisies, Eliot became a naturalized British citizen.

Over the next 40 years, Eliot confirmed his reputation as a major literary voice. As editor at London’s influential publishing firm Faber & Faber, Eliot shaped the direction of British letters. Reflecting his 1927 conversion to Catholicism, his major poetic works, The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1943), explored his quest for spiritual peace in a world without faith in the transcendent. In addition, Eliot pioneered the verse drama, most notably Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and the Tony Award-winning The Cocktail Party (1949). Ever idiosyncratic, Eliot published Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), later the basis for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running musical Cats.

After receiving the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature, Eliot, despite fragile health and declining productivity, enjoyed international celebrity. His readings were massive public events; his erudite interviews aired on television; he appeared on Time’s cover in 1950. In 1956, he sold out the basketball arena at the University of Minnesota, nearly 15,000 seats, for a lecture on contemporary poetry.

On Easter 1965, two months after his death, Eliot’s cremains were interred in a churchyard in East Coker, a hamlet west of London where the Eliot family had maintained its roots for centuries. His gravestone offered an inscription from Four Quartets: “In my end is my beginning.”

Poem text

I.

Midwinter spring is its own season 

Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,

Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. 

When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,

The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, 

In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,

Reflecting in a watery mirror 

A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.

And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,

Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire 

In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing

The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell 

Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time 

But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow 

Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom 

Of snow, a bloom more sudden

Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,

Not in the scheme of generation. 

Where is the summer, the unimaginable

Zero summer? 

      If you came this way,

Taking the route you would be likely to take

From the place you would be likely to come from,

If you came this way in May time, you would find the hedges

White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.

It would be the same at the end of the 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, when you leave the rough road 

And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull façade 

And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning 

From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled

If at all. Either you had no purpose

Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured

And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places

Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws, 

Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—

But this is the nearest, in place and time, 

Now and in England.

      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.

II

Ash on an old man’s sleeve

Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.

Dust in the air suspended 

Marks the place where a story ended.

Dust inbreathed was a house— 

The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,

The death of hope and despair,

   This is the death of air.

There are flood and drouth

Over the eyes and in the mouth,

Dead water and dead sand

Contending for the upper hand.

The parched eviscerate soil

Gapes at the vanity of toil, 

Laughs without mirth.

   This is the death of earth.

Water and fire succeed

The town, the pasture and the weed.

Water and fire deride

The sacrifice that we denied.

Water and fire shall rot

The marred foundations we forgot,

Of sanctuary and choir.

   This is the death of water and fire.

In the uncertain hour before the morning

  Near the ending of interminable night

  At the recurrent end of the unending

After the dark dove with the flickering tongue

  Had passed below the horizon of his homing

  While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin

Over the asphalt where no other sound was 

  Between three districts whence the smoke arose

  I met one walking, loitering and hurried

As if blown towards me like the metal leaves 

  Before the urban dawn wind unresisting. 

  And as I fixed upon the down-turned face

That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge 

  The first-met stranger in the waning dusk

  I caught the sudden look of 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.

  So I assumed a double part, and cried

  And heard another’s voice cry: ‘What! are you here?’

Although we were not. I was still the same,

  Knowing myself yet being someone other— 

  And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed

To compel the recognition they preceded.

  And so, compliant to the common wind, 

  Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,

In concord at this intersection time

  Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,

  We trod the pavement in a dead patrol. 

I said: ‘The wonder that I feel is easy,

  Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:

  I may not comprehend, may not remember.’ 

And he: ‘I am not eager to rehearse 

  My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.

  These things have served their purpose: let them be. 

So with your own, and pray they be forgiven 

  By others, as I pray you to forgive 

  Both bad and good. Last season’s fruit is eaten

And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail. 

  For last year’s words belong to last year’s language

  And next year’s words await another voice.

But, as the passage now presents no hindrance

  To the spirit unappeased and peregrine

  Between two worlds become much like each other,

So I find words I never thought to speak 

  In streets I never thought I should revisit 

  When I left my body on a distant shore. 

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us

  To purify the dialect of the tribe 

  And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight, 

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age 

  To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.

  First, the cold friction of expiring sense

Without enchantment, offering no promise 

  But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit 

  As body and soul begin to fall asunder. 

Second, the conscious impotence of rage 

  At human folly, and the laceration 

  Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment 

  Of all that you have done, and been; the shame

  Of motives late revealed, and the awareness

Of things ill done and done to others’ harm

  Which once you took for exercise of virtue. 

  Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.

From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit

  Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire 

  Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’

The day was breaking. In the disfigured street 

  He left me, with a kind of valediction, 

  And faded on the blowing of the horn. 

III

There are three conditions which often look alike

Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: 

Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment

From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference

Which resembles the others as death resembles life,

Being between two lives—unflowering, between

The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:

For liberation—not less of love but expanding

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country

Begins as attachment to our own field of action 

And comes to find that action of little importance 

Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,

History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Sin is Behovely, but

All shall be well, and

All manner of thing shall be well.

If I think, again, of this place,

And of people, not wholly commendable,

Of no immediate kin or kindness,

But of some peculiar genius,

All touched by a common genius, 

United in the strife which divided them; 

If I think of a king at nightfall, 

Of three men, and more, on the scaffold

And a few who died forgotten

In other places, here and abroad, 

And of one who died blind and quiet 

Why should we celebrate 

These dead men more than the dying?

It is not to ring the bell backward

Nor is it an incantation 

To summon the spectre of a Rose.

We cannot revive old factions 

We cannot restore old policies 

Or follow an antique drum. 

These 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 all shall be well and 

All manner of thing shall be well

By the purification of the motive 

In the ground of our beseeching.

IV

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. 

Who then devised the torment? Love. 

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove 

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

  We only live, only suspire

  Consumed by either fire or fire.

V

What we call the beginning is often the end 

And to make an 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, remembered 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.

Eliot, T. S. “Little Gidding.” 1941. Famous Poets and Poems.

Summary

Seeking refuge from the bombardment of London during the Blitzkrieg, the speaker makes a midwinter pilgrimage to a 17th-century chapel in the village of Little Gidding. Despite the “windless cold” (Line 6) and the heavy feel of winter (“There is no earth smell / Or smell of living thing” [Lines 12-13]), the speaker feels a reassuring heat in his heart. The speaker thinks how for now he must be content with the thought of the “voluptuary sweetness” (Line 25) of the village in spring, the hedgerows white not with snow but with blossoms. He comes to the chapel, this sacred place that is both “England and nowhere” (Line 55), to find hope in this dark time, but he fears it might be futile, that he may find only “a husk of meaning” (Line 32). He scolds himself: You are not here to test, to “verify” (Line 45). “You are here to kneel” (Line 47), the speaker thinks, hoping that prayer might lead to the fire of illumination “beyond the language of the living” (Line 53).

Section 2 recounts the apocalyptic waste land of bombed London, the “parched eviscerate” (Line 68) city now in ruins. The speaker recalls a walk while on civilian fire patrol “[n]ear the ending of interminable night” (Line 81) when he meets a stranger whose face is obscured. The figure seems “both intimate and unidentifiable” (Line 98). The two “trod the pavement in a dead patrol” (Line 109). The stranger reveals his despair. “Let me disclose” (Line 131), he confides, “the gifts reserved for age” (Line 131): bitterness, impotent rage, physical disabilities, and memories of mistakes. He concludes that “[f]rom wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit / Proceeds […] / […] like a dancer” (Lines 146-48). He is doomed, the stranger says as the air raid sirens sound, to live like a hapless dancer forever responding to difficult realities, pointlessly, helplessly, dodging and weaving.

In Section 3, the speaker responds to the stranger’s bleak assessment by offering two extreme conditions and what he will argue is the viable middle way. There is the attachment to the material world, “to the self and to things” (Line 154); there is the detachment entirely from that world, separating the self in monastic isolation; and there is the condition of sublime indifference, to be both a part of and apart from the material world, to be liberated from desire but not separated from the world’s beauties and wonders. The speaker introduces the rose to suggest this balance between the beauty of the material world and the transcendent possibilities of the spiritual world.

In Section 4, the speaker introduces the image of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost to capture the possibilities of burning away the pull of the material world and liberating the soul. That is “[t]he only hope, or else despair” (Line 206). The speaker offers a choice: Be consumed by the “shirt of flame” (Line 212), that is, by worldly desire, or burn it off and feel at last the love behind and above the material plane, the fire of Christ’s love.

Section 5 completes the inspirational message: Burn free of the material world and death will be not an ending but rather a beginning, representing the “easy commerce of the old and the new” (Line 222). The speaker believes that “[w]e are born with the dead” (Line 232), at last “redeemed from time” (Line 236). To arrive at death is to begin exploring. The speaker compares this epiphany to the stillness “[b]etween two waves of the sea” (Line 253). We would recover our “complete simplicity” (Line 255) and be again like “children in the apple-tree” (Line 250), the innocents in Eden. The poem closes with the hope of the transcendent, where “all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well” (Lines 257-58).