T.S. Elliot and "Little Gidding" by Ron Dart

The Boston Globe once called T.S. Eliot “the most important English speaking poet and critic of the 20th century.” There is no doubt that Eliot was a major presence on the stage of 20th century literary, religious, political, and intellectual life.

Eliot had an uncanny and incisive way of seeing through the pretensions, distractions, mirages, and wasteland of the modern era. He saw because he went deep, and from such depths spoke forth much insight and clarity to his time. He was, in short, not a man taken in by illusions and thinness.

T.S. Eliot was very much a contemplative Christian. He was rooted deep in the rich and living soil of the ancient High Church Anglican way. He was, for many years, rector’s warden of a small Anglican parish in London, England.

Eliot’s Four Quartets was published in 1942, and in 1948 he won the Noble Prize for Literature. Each quartet walks the reader ever deeper into the simple yet complex nature of the human journey. “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding” once read, meditated upon and inwardly digested, linger and stay with the reader until journey’s end. Each quartet opens up new vistas of insight and evokes much within the soul.

“Little Gidding,” the final section of the Four Quartets, must be read slowly. The slower the read, the richer the harvest gleaned. Little Gidding is a small church building north of Cambridge. Those who have had the fortune and privilege of sitting within its quiet and inviting walls realize a presence abides in the place. Eliot sensed such a presence, and he wrote about it in a compelling manner.

I stayed, for a time, at the Little Gidding community. I often wandered the expansive grounds, sat in the time-tried forest, and spent many a still moment inside the small, rock-solid church building. The speech from the sanctuary and altar is impossible to miss for those who linger to listen.  The slowed down moments spent at Little Gidding offered me the opportunity to sit where Eliot (and many others) have sat and seen much. Let me conclude with a few lines from “Little Gidding.” May they speak to you as they continue to speak to me:

You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the
living.

From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by the refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started.
And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of fire are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

We have, in our living room, a fireplace, and above the fireplace is a rose in full bloom. The fire and the rose are, in this living room icon, one indeed. Eliot and “Little Gidding” continue to speak.

rsd