27 pages • 54 minutes read
T. S. EliotLittle Gidding
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1942A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: The Blitzkrieg
In T. S. Eliot’s correspondence surrounding the publication of Four Quartets archived in the Eliot website, he described “Little Gidding” as a “patriotic” poem, an offer of hope and encouragement to a war-torn nation reeling in spring 1941 from the trauma of nearly eight months of aerial bombardment by the Nazi Luftwaffe, 57 straight nights during which an estimated 400,000 bombs and incendiary devices were dropped on the city and its environs. As part of the German strategy to eventually launch an amphibious invasion of England, this so-called Blitzkrieg (or “lightning war”) was designed to reduce key British cities to ruins and to demoralize the British people into a quick surrender. Because the bombings were indiscriminate, torching hospitals, homes, schools, churches, as well as businesses, casualties were high—more than 50,000 British citizens died in the bombings.
Far from demoralizing the British, however, the response to the Blitzkrieg, voiced by the stirring oratory of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, rallied the English people. Eliot, then in his fifties, volunteered to serve in the city’s massive Air Raid Patrol. His responsibility was to walk the London streets during the night and shepherd terrified residents to underground shelters, report unexploded devices or spot-fires, and even provide triage medical attention. The walk through the ashed streets of bombed London in Section 2 (which ends with the wail of the air raid alarm), as well as the description in Section 4 of the incoming Nazi incendiary devices, “the dove” that descends and “breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror” (Lines 202-03), ground “Little Gidding” in the grim surreality of London life during the bombardment. Like Churchill’s rallying rhetoric, however, Eliot moves in the closing section to offer a way to maintain hope in a dark time. The speaker, anchored in England’s rich Anglican tradition (hence the setting in the ancient chapel at Little Gidding), celebrates the reality of a transcendent realm above the brutality and chaos of war.
Literary Context: Four Quartets (1943)
Eliot conceived of “Little Gidding” as the closing poem in Four Quartets, a series of four related poems that explores nothing less than the viability of the soul in a modern world, an ambitious project that began in the early 1930s. As Eliot considered the implications of his conversion to Anglican Catholicism in 1927, he began to draft the architecture of what would become Four Quartets, seeing in each monumental poem an element of his own ongoing interrogation of the relationship between the individual and eternity. Four Quartets would emerge as Eliot’s crowning achievement, his version of a unified theory about the relationship between matter and idea, between body and soul, and between the individual and time.
“Burnt Norton” (1936), the first poem in Four Quartets, is set in a ramshackle country house Eliot knew of about two hours west of London, and uses the manor’s rose garden to introduce the tension between linear time, with its absolute beginning, middle, and end, and cyclic time, which offers a more flexible template. The second poem, “East Coker” (1940), is set in a rustic farming village south of London, and Eliot’s speaker confronts a most despairing vision of a ghost-town emptied of its vitality by the rise of industrialism, a victim of history. In “The Dry Salvages” (1941), the third piece in Four Quartets, Eliot returns to his native America and sets the poem along the rocky coast of Cape Ann in northern Massachusetts, where Eliot uses that formidable natural landscape with its colossal rock formations to juxtapose the power of nature against the erosion of time. Informed by Eliot’s perception of the resilience and hopefulness of the British people during the darkest months of the Nazi Blitz, “Little Gidding” closes Four Quartets and moves Eliot’s interrogation toward luminous resolution, offering a meditation on overcoming the drag of time and tapping into the resilient energy of the transcendent through the power of faith and prayer.
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