Little Gidding

“Contemplations” by Anne Bradstreet (1645)

Written by a first-generation American Puritan, Bradstreet’s poem, like Eliot’s, juxtaposes the material world with its clock time and harsh movement toward death against the promise and grandeur of the transcendent Christian plane. Like Eliot, Bradstreet assumes the voice of a preacher addressing an errant congregation in need of the solace of the consoling message of the Incarnation.

“Design” by Robert Frost (1922)

Frost, the only contemporary rival to Eliot as an international figure in English-language poetry, unsettles Eliot’s affirmation that the brutalities and violence of the material world can lead to the spiritual dimension. Using a terrifying tableau of a spider calmly munching the moth caught in its web, Frost suggests that if this material world is designed by a God, then that God is surely twisted and dark.

“The Wild Swans at Coole” by William Butler Yeats (1917)

An influence on Eliot (Yeats may be the model for the stranger the speaker encounters in the streets of London), Yeats here ruminates, as Eliot would have 30 years later, on a material world that offers only suffering, disappointment, and bitterness. This poem reflects the melancholy message the stranger gives to the speaker, a message Eliot’s speaker will finally overcome.