Little Gidding

“Little Gidding,” composed by much-decorated British American poet T. S. Eliot during the darkest months of World War II, is the fourth and final poem of Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943), an ambitious philosophical exploration into the nature of time, the reality of mortality, the power of Christ’s love, and ultimately the sublime peace of transcendence. In “Little Gidding” Eliot draws on the mysticism of his adopted Anglican Catholicism to make sense of a civilization now in ruins.

Named for a crossroads village about an hour north of London known for its centuries-old chapel, the poem unfolds as the poet struggles to understand Europe’s collapse into war on a scale no civilization had ever approached. The poem is rich with theology, reflecting Eliot’s considerable erudition. The poem also draws on a wide variety of literary resources—Shakespeare’s 17th-century tragedy Coriolanus, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century epic poem Inferno, the St. John’s gospel George Herbert’s metaphysical verse, Jonathan Swift’s political satires, William Butler Yeats’ philosophical meditations, and St. Julian of Norwich’s mystical treatises.

In the closing section of “Little Gidding,” Eliot rejects despair and resists the easy dodge of

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