27 pages 54 minutes read

Little Gidding

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1942

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Themes

The Oppressive Nature of Clock Time

“Little Gidding” reflects T. S. Eliot in late middle age when, as a Christian, his thoughts move beyond clock time. In the opening section, the speaker, locked within the heavy pull of midwinter, argues an awareness of time beyond the simple linear progression of a person’s life from birth to death. Nature itself bursts with reassurances that linear time is not the end-all. The speaker feels the animation of the coming spring when the snow gives way to spring blossoms, highlighting that “[m]idwinter spring is its own season” (Line 1). In addition, he considers how different the chapel grounds seem at night and how daylight offers entirely new perspectives.

Drawing on the cycles of nature that defy time, the speaker knows his soul represents the true time-space dimensions of the Christian cosmos itself, a magnificent energy field that beggars beginnings and renders ironic any ending. Christianity reassures those aware of the vertical reach rather than the horizontal limits of time that endings are only moments to begin. In the end, the poet affirms a transcendent non-time “[w]hen the last of the earth left to discover / Is that which was the beginning” (Lines 246-47). In breaking the logic of clock time, the speaker reclaims the innocence and grace of humanity’s prelapsarian reality, offering nothing less than Eden reclaimed, a chance to become again “the children in the apple-tree” (Line 250).

The Devastation of War

If The Waste Land expressed Eliot’s indignation over the pointless brutalities of World War I, “Little Gidding” returns Eliot to war, save that, in the coffee houses and reading rooms of World War I London, the horrors of the battlefield were abstract. Here the speaker is immersed in the treacherous immediacy of war. In Section 2, the speaker, an air raid warden, walks about the ruins of bombed-out London and later records the fierce fires of the Nazi incendiary devices dropping wholesale from the sky in an ironic parody of the New Testament accounts of the Pentecost.

Section 2 is the poem’s most direct experience of the waste land of war. The speaker moves about London in the persistent dark before dawn. He breathes in the grit of ashes. He smells the hanging pall of smoke. In the dead quiet of a city in terror, his footsteps make the only sound. Inevitably, the description recalls Eliot’s perception of London, the Unreal City of the dead, in The Waste Land, except that that was a metaphor for the spiritual and emotional enervation of the modern industrial age, and here it is a vivid description of a city turned into a war zone.

War, with its apocalyptic-scale havoc, epitomizes the dark logic of what the speaker terms in Section 3 as attachment “to self and to things” (Line 154). War epitomizes humanity’s greed for the immediate, its insatiable hunger for ownership and domination, and its unironic obsession with the material world. It is the very logic, according to the speaker, of “death” (Line 156). In the peroration of Section 4, however, the speaker fuses the imagery of the incendiary devices, with their flames of “incandescent terror” (Line 203), to the Pentecostal illumination that descended in tongues of fire from the Holy Spirit. That descending fire endowed the first-generation Christian apostles with the vision of the power and glory of the transcendent realm. Humanity then can only be “redeemed from fire by fire” (Line 208).

The Reality of the Transcendent

“Little Gidding” is a Christian sermon preaching the reality of the Incarnation, the moment when Christ entered the material world through the instrument of his human birth. Flesh fused with spirit, and, in turn, spirit redeemed the flesh. Thus, the speaker in the closing section affirms the fusion of the rose and the flame, the fusion of the material world and the spiritual world, joyously affirming its resiliency, radiance, and viability.

That radiant vision offers a world beyond the reach, really the apprehension of the immediate. As the speaker chides himself in the opening section, he makes the pilgrimage to the chapel at Little Gidding not to understand the world or find refuge from it but rather to pray: “You are here to kneel” (Line 47). The poem then unfolds as the speaker argues toward the viability of Christ, who is love. In the closing section, the speaker celebrates the love of God and its ability to purify the excesses and chaos of the material world. In embracing Christ’s love, the poet touches the transcendent, a still moment he compares to “the stillness / Between two waves of the sea” (Lines 252-53). That moment of peace, free of time and free from history, offers the poem’s affirmation of the reality of the transcendent.

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