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).