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Here Was One
No. 15
Grant Hodges
October 02, 2023
Little Gidding
Dear Reader,
Last week was the 135th birthday of American-English poet, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965). Born in St. Louis, Eliot was educated at Harvard and Oxford and later became a British citizen, living and working as a teacher, banker, and publisher in London. Although he wrote relatively few poems in his lifetime, virtually all are considered masterpieces, including “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Waste Land,” and “Ash Wednesday.” Eliot won the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature and today is considered one of, if not the, preeminent modernist poet.
Background
This week’s piece consists of the last two sections of the Eliot poem, “Little Gidding,” which is best known for being one of the four poems published by Eliot in the landmark volume, Four Quartets (1943). The title refers to a village in Cambridgeshire, England, which began as an Anglican community in the 17th century. Eliot wrote the poem during World War II, following his conversion to Anglicanism, and religious imagery appears throughout not only “Little Gidding” but the other three poems as well. Although the poem lacks a linear narrative or plot, frequent subjects recur, including fire, roses, and ash.
From “Little Gidding”
By T.S. Eliot
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 of 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, 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.
What It Offers
One of Eliot’s greatest contributions to modern literature was his 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in which he argued for a type poetry in conversation with—and a part of—the poetic tradition. The Poetry Foundation has an excellent summary of Eliot’s main thesis:
“A poet, Eliot maintains, must ‘self-sacrifice’ to this special awareness of the past; once this awareness is achieved, it will erase any trace of personality from the poetry because the poet has become a mere medium for expression. Using the analogy of a chemical reaction, Eliot explains that a ‘mature’ poet’s mind works by being a passive ‘receptacle’ of images, phrases and feelings which are combined, under immense concentration, into a new ‘art emotion.’ For Eliot, true art has nothing to do with the personal life of the artist but is merely the result of a greater ability to synthesize and combine, an ability which comes from deep study and comprehensive knowledge.”
“The Waste Land” is probably the best example of a poem fully within the poetic tradition. The poem contains numerous endnotes that catalogue various references and allusions to earlier works. The difficulty with this style of poetry, however, is that at a certain point it seems uneven, if not impenetrable, to the average reader.
Four Quartets, and “Little Gidding” specifically, seem to me where Eliot really got the balance right—between readability and beauty on one hand and adherence to tradition on the other. Not only is his discussion about descending doves and fire an interesting reference to Pentecostal fire in the Christian tradition, but his statements about words and poetry being “epitaphs” echoes Nietzsche’s claim that we find words only for “something already dead in our hearts,” as well as Hamlet’s famous aphorism: “What to ourselves in passion we propose, the passion ending, doth the purpose lose.”
Even Eliot’s circular, unified view of time—”to make an end is to make a beginning”—in a sense sounds a lot like Whitman’s earlier view from “Song of Myself,” that “I follow you whoever you are from the present hour[.]”
These allusions create the opportunity for meaning on multiple levels. We can read the words themselves, which are rich and textured enough for sustained study. But we can also read them through their relationship to the past, opening up whole new areas of inquiry and new opportunities to better understand the poem and ourselves.
*****
What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.