T. S. Eliot
Four Quartets
From "Little Gidding"
V
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
…
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
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.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
This poem is typical of T. S. Eliot in its combination of deceptively simple language – “the end is where we start from” – and intricate, densely allusive imagery.
Each of the “Four Quartets” is named for a significant place. Burnt Norton, East Coker, and the Dry Salvages are places that were important in Eliot’s own life. Little Gidding is a place that is significant not so much for Eliot’s personal history, as for English history.
Little Gidding is a village in Huntingdonshire where, in 1625, a man named Nicholas Ferrar purchased a manor house, restored a church, and, with a circle of family and friends, dedicated himself to living as a Christian community. They had a schedule to ensure that perpetual prayer was being offered, night and day. They ran workshops, among them a bindery that published religious works—including The Temple of George Herbert. King Charles I visited Little Gidding several times, beginning in 1633, and in 1646, the defeated king took refuge at Little Gidding. Under Puritan rule, the community at Little Gidding was forcibly disbanded.
For T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding represented the ideal form of Anglican Christianity. Given its history, the village also represented a place of refuge for embattled England in wartime (“Little Gidding” was written in 1942). The portion that Lisa read is the very last part of the poem, which brings to a conclusion not only “Little Gidding” but the whole sequence of Four Quartets. And it’s a wonderfully hopeful conclusion.
Throughout the Four Quartets, Eliot has dwelt on themes of beginnings and endings, time and eternity. For Eliot, time, viewed in the light of the Incarnation of Christ, is paradox: “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from.” As he says elsewhere in Four Quartets, “all is always now.” Thus the gate we arrive at is “unknown” yet “remembered,” and the last “discovery” is of what has already been. We exist in time, but we are also in God’s time: “now, here, now, always.”
What does this talk of beginnings and endings mean for a world in crisis? Eliot turns to the medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich, who experienced a series of extraordinary revelations in 1373. Troubled by the mystery of sin, Julian wrote: “Often I wondered why by the great foreseeing wisdom of God the beginning of sin was not letted: for then, methought, all should have been well.” But this way of thinking, she realizes, was “folly.” Christ tells her: “It behoved that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Sin exists; and yet “all shall be well.” This is not a simplistic acquiescence to evil in the world, doing nothing about it since “all will be well” in the end. Julian’s faith, like Eliot’s, is active, not passive. It is a “condition of complete simplicity,” but getting there is a journey, an adventure, a quest, which will cost us “not less than everything.”
During this season of Advent and Christmas, “Little Gidding” has special resonance. At Christmas, Christ enters into time, and all time is changed—past, present, future. “The end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” This is the adventure of Christmas: to see all things, past and present, in new ways, in the light of the Incarnation.
Corinna Laughlin
