Little Gidding

The speaker, hungry for the transcendent, is horrified by the destruction of war and feels the first intimations of his own mortality. He argues that to shake free of the iron boundary of time allows the soul to feel the radiant urgency of the transcendent love of Christ.

Appropriately, the thematic argument of “Little Gidding,” widely regarded as one of T. S. Eliot’s greatest poetic achievements, is actually anticipated in one of his earliest poems. In 1910, when Eliot was a Harvard undergraduate, he wrote “Silence.” The brief lyric, eventually published posthumously in Inventions of the March Hare (1998), recounts a walk through the crowded streets of Cambridge. There, amid the “garrulous waves of life” (Eliot, T. S. “Silence.” Poetry Nook, Line 3), in a moment the speaker describes as “the ultimate hour / When life is justified” (Eliot, Lines 8-9), he taps into the stunning calm of a transcendent moment, when the “seas of experience” (Eliot, Line 10) part, and the speaker feels “such peace [they are] terrified” (Eliot, Line 15). That moment, beyond language, as inexplicable as it is unanticipated and unforced, envelopes the speaker: “There is nothing else beside” (Eliot, Line 15). Forty years later, Eliot affirms a similar transcendent moment in “Little Gidding,” save that the urgency is greater and the peace grander.

Section 1 opens with the speaker frustrated, knowing what he yearns for but unable to feel its immediacy. In seeking the affirmation of the transcendent, the speaker begins his search appropriately on the grounds of the ancient chapel in Little Gidding. He is tormented by reminders of time—it is winter, and spring seems at best a promise, and dusk edges into nightfall. “Where,” the speaker asks, “is the summer, the unimaginable / Zero summer?” (Line 20)—the summer that will not concede to autumn, the summer beyond humanity’s understanding, the summer that defies time. The speaker then addresses himself in second person. In making the pilgrimage to Little Gidding, the speaker seeks to touch the assurance of Christ’s love but wrestles with anxieties that what he seeks is lost: “What you thought you came for / Is only a shell, a husk of meaning” (Lines 31-32). His only hope is prayer: “You are here to kneel” (Line 47). But prayers are only words, empty and cold. He knows that true prayer is more than words, more than the “sound of a voice praying” (Line 50). For now, he seeks the “timeless moment” (Line 54) that is both “[n]ever and always” (Line 55).

If Section 2 introduces the blasted world of war that has sent the speaker to Little Gidding and created the speaker’s spiritual crisis, then war is not an end but a way. The destruction is forbidding as the speaker inventories the horrors of life in wartime. The speaker bewails the death of air, of earth, of water, each a reference to the saving elements Eliot had offered in the previous poems of Four Quartets (See: Background). Now, given the power of war, each has been eviscerated, leaving a world that “[l]aughs without mirth” (Line 70). Hope seems at best desperate, at worst ironic.

But that waste land world is offered as a landscape that can be overcome through the humbling experience of Christ’s love. That movement is signaled when the speaker, patrolling London, encounters a mysterious stranger, an amalgamation of wisdom figures (Jesus Christ, Dante Alighieri, Eliot’s mentor William Butler Yeats, and even Eliot’s own soul), surrendered to despair. The stranger cautions that becoming too enamored by the world leads to rage, what he terms “the bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit” (Line 135). This encounter, in turn, moves the speaker to begin the recovery of hope through the embrace of Christ’s love.

In Section 3, the poet restores his own sense of spiritual balance by reminding himself that attachment to the world leads to the agonies of war. On the other hand, no one can be expected to live detached from the world. Isolation is both untenable and unworkable. That the speaker counsels indifference may seem a surrender to despair, but indifference does not mean apathy—rather, perspective. Life becomes a pilgrimage, a journey toward illumination. Only through purging the self of such corrupting yearnings can the spirit embrace the thingness of things without surrendering to their persuasive siren call. Slavery to history, to time, to regrets, the speaker acknowledges, cannot redeem and can, in the end, make death seem a welcome ending. Embrace the world. Its there-ness makes any other strategy pointless. Sin is unavoidable: “Sin is Behovely [beneficial], but / All shall be well” (Lines 168-69). Death becomes the hobgoblin of the timid, those who “died blind and quiet” (Line 181). The speaker understands the powerful liberation of death. In death, the self burns away the flesh and fuses with Christ’s love—“We have taken from the defeated / What they had to leave us” (Lines 195-96).

Section 4 offers a soaring celebration of Christ’s love that also acknowledges the destructive power of that love. To love Christ is to accept the end of the self. Fusing the Christian symbol of fire as the illumination and reanimation of the spirit (as drawn from the Pentecost narrative) with the Nazi incendiary devices raining down nightly on London, the speaker offers a complex choice: “The only hope, or else despair / Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre” (Lines 206-07). Humanity is too enthralled by the world, too consumed by materialism, suggested by the image of being consumed by a “shirt of flame” (Line 212). Only Christ’s love can redeem humanity.

The closing section returns to that visionary moment back in Cambridge when a young Eliot recorded that moment of stillness within the chaos of the world. That moment did not and could not last, as Eliot himself was still bound within time. Here, Eliot’s “Little Gidding” speaker concedes what a young Eliot resisted: Only through death can the perfect stillness of union with Christ achieve permanence. Death becomes the beginning—“We shall not cease from exploration” (Line 241). Christ’s love unites birth (symbolized by the rose) and death (symbolized by the yew tree). “We are born with the dead” (Line 232), the speaker concedes, but we indeed live through Christ’s love. If the poem begins with the speaker immersed in a collapsing world destroyed by greed, violence, pride, and selfishness, the speaker now understands the purification of death and how, in that experience, the soul finds union with Christ and reclaims the innocence, simplicity, and grace of eternity.