‘Four Quartets: Little Gidding’: Suffering and Salvation
A review of ‘Little Gidding,’ by T.S. Eliot; Faber & Faber, 1942.
In 1626, an English scholar, businessman and deacon in the Church of England retreated with his family to Little Gidding. It was a manor in what was then Huntingdonshire (now Cambridgeshire) with a church in dire need of repair. Nicholas Farrar—that was the man’s name—had lost much of his wealth when the Virginia Company, charged with colonising the eastern coast of America, collapsed. This, and the outbreak of plague in London, led him and his family to leave.
They founded a small informal spiritual community that engaged in High Anglican practices and created distinctive gospel harmonies. In 1633, King Charles I passed through on his way to his coronation. He liked it so much that he stayed there in 1642, before the outbreak of civil war, and then again, in 1646, to hide. It was, till it was scattered in the 1650s, an exemplar of religious life. And that was why T.S. Eliot named the last of his Four Quartets after it.
‘Little Gidding’ carries on from where ‘The Dry Salvages’ left off, with Eliot striving to reconcile the temporal and the eternal. Turning in this poem to the image of fire, with its power to destroy and to purify, Eliot describe a pilgrim’s journey to a sacred place and his desire for renewal. This pilgrimage is a search for meaning and transcendence, like that of Binx Bollings in The Moviegoer, with its end being a new beginning. The hero’s journey, made famous by Joseph Campbell but rooted in the thought of Carl Jung, describes a departure from the ordinary world into an extraordinary one, and a return to that ordinary world with new skills, knowledge or understanding. This is the story of inner transformation, and why the hero’s journey resonates with us.
This pilgrimage is a search for meaning and transcendence.
Eliot was writing as bombs fell on London, and in the second part of the poem he reflects on the chaos of war and the suffering to which it gives rise — a suffering that can burn away illusions and ego, but only if we let it. A ‘compound ghost’ on a misty road advises the narrator to accept his suffering and submit to the will of the divine. This is the path to spiritual growth, says the ghost, who stands for the poets of the past who are stuck between worlds. To suffer is to experience purgation through fire.
But this alone does not lead to liberation. Freedom springs from expanding love beyond desire. We must transcend the clinging and craving of the ego to find peace. Attachment, to self or memory, to history, enslaves if not transfigured into something meaningful:
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation — not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
The Holy Spirit transfigures. It descends as a dove, bringing fear and purgation. Love, Eliot writes, saves and destroys, for it demands a submission to God’s will that costs ‘not less than everything’. We are redeemed ‘from fire by fire’, that is, we grow spiritually through suffering and grace. In pain, we feel our smallness, the pettiness of our worries, and what counts in our lives is write large in our sudden apprehension that we will not live forever.
Yet we can, in a sense, live forever; for the present is eternal. The moment reconciles past, present and future. Eternity is a matter of depth, not extension. Here he returns to an idea best expressed in ‘East Coker’: that ‘through time, time is conquered’. Hence the end is also the beginning, but experienced differently:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Our life is a struggle, as in the hero’s journey, for apotheosis, that is, the union of self and world, human life and divine love, the total shedding of the ego, which bounds us within our own tiny realities. Salvation is salvation from the ego. The poem ends by saying that only through sacrifice, the wilful relinquishing of what Pablo d’Ors calls the ‘little I’ can we reborn, and that this is the ultimate goal of our lives.
Our life is a struggle, as in the hero’s journey, for apotheosis.
So this is a deeply mystical poem. Eliot touches on weighty themes like death, pain, renewal. Duality abounds, with winter, fire, suffering and God’s love combining purgation and purification with destruction. History represents enslavement and salvation, and time, like the self, is the means through which we must transcend time and the self. Despair—St. John of the Cross’s ‘dark night of the soul’—is the path to hope and liberation. It is always darkest before the dawn.
The structure of the poem reflects its themes, looping back on itself in recursive rhythms and refrains. The language is dense, layered with allusions. At times, it takes on the aspect of a riddle or koan, inviting us to perceive its meaning not through intellect but insight. Yet there are also moments of clarity that ring like a bell. Love, Eliot writes, is ‘a condition of complete simplicity.’ And the cost of this simplicity, this everything, is proportionate to the gain: not less than everything.
In ‘Little Gidding’, Eliot claims that pain and hardship are not proof of the meaninglessness of life, but the path by which meaning is found. Like Farrar and his community in that little town in Cambridgeshire, we too can find—to quote Walker Percy’s book—love in the ruins. All we need to start out on that journey is faith.
