Across the fields from the A1, nine miles from Huntingdon, is the isolated Church of St John the Evangelist, Little Gidding. TS Eliot visited it in 1936 and named the last poem in his Four Quartets after the church.
A tiny place, capable of holding only 30 people, it was where the Anglo-Catholic Nicholas Ferrar and a few family and friends established a small contemplative community in 1626. Ferrar had just been ordained deacon by William Laud, who went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury and a strong supporter of Charles I. The king visited Little Gidding three times, and on the last occasion took refuge there from Cromwell’s men after the Battle of Naseby in 1646.
Eliot was a devoted member of the King Charles the Martyr Society, and Charles is the man referred to in Little Gidding as “the broken king” – although, Eliot being never less than subtle and voluminous, there may be an additional reference there to King Jesus, who was broken for our salvation. I think Ferrar’s community must have been doing worthwhile things, for the Puritans went to the trouble of scorning it as “that Protestant nunnery”.
So why is Little Gidding regarded as one of our most powerful Christian poems – and what is it about? The notion that poetry is about something was anathema to Eliot. For him poetry is not about anything. Rather, it is the act of turning words into things. Deeply Christian: the Word made Flesh. “Poetry” does, after all, derive from an old Greek word which means to make or create. Eliot’s friend Ezra Pound said that “poetry is language charged with meaning to the greatest possible extent”. At its best, that is. And in this poem it is at its best.
Little Gidding is full of evocative landscapes: the countryside, the rose garden and “The hedges white again in May with voluptuary sweetness”. Eliot intends these various landscapes to express and embody our range of emotions. They are what he called “the objective-correlative” – which prevents the poem from becoming discursive by ensuring that whenever a particular landscape is mentioned, it calls forth in the reader a correspondingly particular emotion.
That said, there is powerful poetic symbolism in Little Gidding. There are themes, and these are historical, philosophical and theological. There is throughout Four Quartets the problem of time. What is time and what is time’s purpose in the divine economy? Eliot’s view is that “Time past, time future” are one and indivisible: “We die with the dying and we are born with the dead.”
Another motif is history, and the poet chides those who think that we can ignore the decisive influences of the past: “A people without history is not redeemed from time.” Eliot described himself as “Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics”. Deeply patriotic – “History is now and England” – he envisaged the nation as a family enlarged to include the dead, the living and the yet-to-be-born.
The symbolism of this great poem is not something that can be expounded apart from its words. We remember that Eliot’s PhD thesis was on FH Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, in which Bradley maintained that appearances are not out of touch with or misleading concerning reality, but that the appearances partake of the reality. This is a profoundly Christian view because in the act of creation God gives form to matter which would otherwise remain mere chaos.
The poem is set against the backdrop of two conflicts: the English Civil War and the Blitz. “The dove descending breaks the air with flame of incandescent terror” is the enemy bomber that produces fire. There are two more sorts of fire: that of spiritual suffering and that of purgation and purification – “Pentecostal fire”. And, “We only live, only suspire, consumed by either fire or fire”.
We must repent of our sins, and Eliot calls us to this repentance with words that are more terrifying than any hellfire sermon:
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 …
… From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire.
The final lines of Little Gidding promise the redemption that was sought throughout Four Quartets. When a critic accused Eliot that he had lifted “A cold coming we had of it” straight out of Lancelot Andrewes, he replied: “The bad poet quotes; the good poet steals!” And in these last magnificent lines, he “steals” from Julian of Norwich:
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.
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