Little Gidding-'Where prayer has been valid':
Coady, Mary Frances
T.S. ELIOT AT ONE HUNDRED: A REFLECTION Little Gidding: 'Where prayer has been valid' MARY FRANCES COADY The road to Little Gidding, in the heart of Cambridgeshire, a remote corner of England,...
...In 1646, Oliver Cromwell's Puritan troops, on the hunt for royalists who still clung to the established church, ransacked Little Gidding and burned the buildings to the ground...
...On the universal level, war is linked to war throughout history, and the poet is seized with "conscious impotence of rage/At human folly...
...not surfaced in his memory in 1941 when he was casting about for a fourth poem to complete the first three of his Four Quartets...
...The buildup of themes and images is so complex that it comes as a surprise to find that the ultimate condition is one of ''complete simplicity.'' Its price is high, "costing not less than everything...
...The Eliot scholar Helen Gardner speaks of Little Gidding as "a place of defeat,'' and in this section we discover a further paradoxical insight: that in defeat is victory...
...Yet life and death are "of equal duration," Eliot says, and because "history is a pattern/ Of timeless moments," all the countless moments of history—tragic, mundane, and ecstatic—become linked to the moment of history, the moment of Christ...
...The poet crowns his passage on poetry with the startling phrase, "every poem an epitaph...
...Every word is at home," and the result is "the complete consort dancing together...
...A Christian paradox indeed...
...In the midst of the horror, his own "lifetime's effort'' seems to lead to nothing but' 'bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit," and the futility of his life produces only a mute helplessness...
...Little Gidding, then, in the midst of loss and ruin, is actually a place of triumph...
...In the second section the scene becomes the aftermath of a bombing raid...
...The short, lyrical fourth section reveals humanity's two basic choices: the way of hope, which leads to love and self-surrender, and the way of despair, which leads to anxiety and terror...
...The redeeming fire is inflicted by love, "the unfamiliar Name"—God...
...He is surrounded by the death of the once-vibrant community, and his reflection on the carnage produced by a long-ago war heightens the tragedy of his country's present war...
...As a result, Little Gidding has become a symbol of the startling paradoxes that make up the Christian life...
...He meditates on the life of love that built and sustained the little community, but his experience is not one of unalloyed joy...
...The community dispersed...
...They are united by death and defeat...
...He explains this anomaly by quoting directly from one of the voices that spoke to Julian of Norwich in a mystical vision: evil is a necessary part of life, but in the end, "all manner of things shall be well...
...The place may have remained hidden, unknown to all but a few, had not T.S...
...To its right is a small graveyard...
...it is the condition of one who has been totally consumed by the love of God...
...ELIOT AT ONE HUNDRED: A REFLECTION Little Gidding: 'Where prayer has been valid' MARY FRANCES COADY The road to Little Gidding, in the heart of Cambridgeshire, a remote corner of England, seems to lead nowhere...
...The poet reflects on his own writing of poetry and applies his reflection to life itself...
...In the third section a paradoxical insight enters Eliot's meditation...
...In front of the chapel stands a tomb, mildewed, unmarked...
...After Ferrar's death in 1637, the community carried on, but the rising tide of civil war in England threatened the little group...
...The bare historical facts of the place are these: in 1625, a young man named Nicholas Ferrar left a brilliant parliamentary career in London and became a deacon in the Church of England...
...Eliot's many legacies as it celebrates the centenary of his birth...
...That's all...
...The poem and the poet and all humanity are, even while dancing at the still point, experiencing their own death...
...The destruction, "near the ending of interminable night,'' becomes a perversion of Christian efforts throughout history to keep alive the pentecostal fire...
...In "Little Gidding," Eliot has left us, among others, this legacy: he has presented a small and simple community, hidden in an isolated pocket of the world, then laid to ashes and dust, as a symbol of life and hope...
...When Eliot's memory of the "secluded chapel" surfaced, England was once again at war...
...There is both winter and spring, darkness and light, cold and heat, and the poet's soul is a "dumb spirit...
...It is a choice of "pyre or pyre...
...The chapel ruins, the graves, and the unmarked tomb—Ferrar's burial place—were all that remained...
...So while the light fails/On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel," the poet knows that the defeat and death of Little Gidding are the necessary condition for love...
...The London blitz was at its height, Eliot worked nightly as an air raid warden, and terror and uncertainty provided the background as he relived his experience at Little Gidding...
...This was how Christ came to victory, and his pre-eminent defeat unites and gives meaning to all the other defeats in history...
...The words, in a sense, transcend poetry...
...This is Little Gidding...
...The people associated with the earlier war are linked "in a single party" with those who are dying in a war three centuries later...
...In the end, however, all of humanity throughout history is caught up in an eternal'' now,'' forever ancient and new: "the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/and know the place for the first time...
...To choose hope rather than despair is "to be redeemed from fire by fire...
...Although a "pentecostal fire" enflames "the dark time of the year," the little community, like the small band in the upper room who witnessed the birth of Christianity, was doomed to defeat...
...There is only one alternative to the nightmare: "that refining fire/Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'' In the midst of destruction, then burns the fire of divine illuminations...
...The first section of the poem is a reflection of Eliot's journey there...
...In the fifth section, all the positive and negative elements in the poem are brought together in a total agony and total ecstasy drawn and sustained by love...
...During this year, 1988, the world of letters recognizes T.S...
...He moved to Little Gidding and, with several family members and a few others— about thirty people in all—established a Christian community which devoted itself to prayer, intellectual pursuits, manual labor, and service to the neighbors around them...
...Finally, the "tongues of flame," which refine and purify us in agony, darkness, and defeat, "are in-folded into the crowned knot of fire...
...Reflecting on the wars in which his country has been engaged, he realizes that they are linked not only by a common horror, but by a common love...
...Eventually, past a couple of farmhouses, behind a row of bushes—a "hedgerow" as the English call it—one comes upon a tiny chapel dating originally from the seventeenth century and restored in the nineteenth...
...Eliot visited it in May 1936, and had it MARY FRANCES COADY, a Canadian freelance writer, is an associate editor of Compass, a Jesuit journal, and a regular contributor to Catholic New Times, an independent Catholic newspaper...
...Gardner says that the "defeat of a poet is seen here as the very condition of his existence...
...Little Gidding" became the title and context of the poem, which is the crowning achievement of Eliot's career as a poet...
...Once again, Pentecost signals the victory of humanity over evil...
Vol. 115 • September 1988 • No. 16
