text

1. This is the fourth of Eliot's Quartets. If you are familiar with the others, can you recognize in this final poem imagery familiar from the earlier ones? (fire, rose, air, water, earth, dove)

2. What is different about the location of Little Gidding, as opposed to East Coker, Burnt Norton, and Dry Salvages? (a small church originally built by a religious colony)

3. The 30-person colony at Little Gidding headed by Nicholas Ferrar 1625-47 was the first Anglican devotional community. It was destroyed by Cromwell's forces during the English Civil War. Why would this have seemed an appropriate place for Eliot to visit in 1942?

Section 1:

4. What weather do we encounter as the poem begins? What is meant by the poet's proclamation, "This is the spring time/ But not in time's covenant"? For what does he yearn? ("the unimaginable / Zero summer")

5. What are features of the poem's tone and language? (speaks informally to reader, "If you came this way"; particular applies to general)

6. How has the season changed for the journey? (now May) What are the associations of coming by night like "a broken king"? (Charles I had visited Little Gidding) What specific route is given? (behind the road, the pig-sty, dull facade and tombstone [of Nicholas Ferrar])

7. What does it mean to say that one can't know the purpose of the journey until arrival?

8. Is this significance of Little Gidding unique, or may it be generalized? ("There are other places / Which also are the world's end") Why the choice of this specific place? (nearest, and English)

9. What is one's task on arrival? (prayer) What does the poet seem to mean by prayer? (meditation, communion with dead)

10. Why can the dead communicate better than if they were alive? Why is this a timeless moment?

11. Why is the timeless moment not only in England and always, but also "nowhere" and "never"?

Section 2:

1. What purpose is served by the shift to rhymed 8 lined stanzas? What elements associated with death are introduced in each of the next three stanzas? (air, water, earth, fire)

2. What are implications of the "death of water and fire"? May these be purgative as well as destructive?

3. What famous poem is echoed in the words, "the walls, the wainscot and the mouse"? (Tennyson's "Mariana at the Moated Grange")

4. Under what temporal and symbolic conditions does the narrator/poet meet the stranger/visitant? (just before morning, after the passage of the dove)

5. What are some features of the stranger's presence which seem otherworldly? (he moves "as if blown towards me like the metal leaves / before the urban dawn")

6. Of what does this visitant remind him? (some dead master, half-forgotten, half-recalled) What is unusual about his identity? (he is compound, one and many) What does he seem to represent? (all those in the past who have influenced him)

7. What happens to the narrator's identity in this dream? (merges with that of the visitant, is both his own self and other) What does it mean to say that they were "too strange to each other for misunderstanding"?

8. What advice does this spirit/guide give the narrator about what should be his relationship to the past? (don't follow me; "next year's words await another voice") Is this what would be expected from a critic renowned for advocating a respect for literary tradition?

9. What does the visitant claim to hold in common with the narrator? (they both sought "to purify the dialect of the tribe") Does this serve to validate the poet as well as the visitant's message?

10. What does the spirit/guide tell the narrator he can expect from old age? (his body will fall apart and he will feel rage at human folly) What will he feel about his own past? (shame, knowledge that even things he had once thought right had been mistaken)

11. What does the guide suggest may enable him to escape this stasis? (he may be restored by a refining fire which will cause him to "move in measure," like a dancer) Is this a good metaphor for a poet to use for healing?

12. What does the spirit leave with him? (a "kind of" valediction) What do you make of his disappearance "on the blowing of the horn"? (horn to dissolve sleep; air-raid horn; horn for a religious service)

13. Can you find echoes of Tennyson's "In Memoriam" throughout this section? (meets the comforting speaker in the darkness, wakes to a bleak dawn in an empty street after seeking Hallam's presence)

Section 3:

1. According to the poet, what is distinctive about detachment (as opposed to indifference)? What is its special task? (the use of memory for liberation)

2. How should our memories change over time? (should be less concerned with one's own "field of action" and subsume immediate attachments within a larger, alternative pattern)

3. What is the purpose of including at this point Dame Julian's words, "Sin is Behovely, but / All shall be well, and / All manner of thing shall be well"? In what context are they intended to be reassuring? (wartime)

4. Who are the people he recalls who have lived in "this place," and how does he describe them? ("all touched by a common genius," though not wholly commendable--he may either be describing the members of the Little Gidding colony or those who fought in the English Civil War) Why may he be criticizing them as "not wholly commendable"?

5. What king and his fellows does he commemorate? Is it consistent to say directly afterwards, "Why should we celebrate / These dead men more than the dying"? (Charles I and his attendants; he subsumes what for him is a tragedy into a new pattern which includes the present of the second world war)

6. What is meant by the reference to the "Rose" here? What does he seem to say here about the ultramontane and royalist cause? (one can't restore the pre-Civil War past from 300 years before) Would many have disagreed?

7. What has happened to all the combatants? (all "folded in a single party" of silence)

8. What does the narrator mean by, "Whatever we inherit from the fortunate / We have taken from the defeated"? Who have left a symbol? (the defeated, though it is possible to read this as meaning both the fortunate and the defeated)

9. Does the assertion "all shall be well" refer to any specific situation? Does the fact that it is a quotation from Dame Julian add to its authority? Would there be problems in generalizing this to all conflicts and wars?

10. Why is Dame Julian cited directly after the poet has said that we must free ourselves from the bonds of the past?

11. What is necessary for this condition of "wellness" to occur? (purified motive for our requests) Is all well that means well, or is there another meaning here? What are the rhythms in this section, and what is their effect?

Section 4:

What purpose is served by the different formal rhyming scheme in the section's brief two stanzas? What function is served by its brevity?

What is the reference for the dove descending? (Holy Spirit at Pentecost) What is meant by the "pyre of pyre"? (This may refer to the classical legend in which Hercules's wife gave him a shirt which ate away his flesh, and in desperation he threw himself into a fire)

What is meant by the claim that "Love" is the source of tormenting fire? What is referred to by the shirt of fire which humans can't remove? ("Love" is also a figure in the medieval interludes by "The Music" in William Morris's Love Is Enough.)

If we must be "consumed by either fire or fire," are these fires different?

Section 5:

What is meant by, "The end is where we start from"? How is this a different sentiment from "to make an end is also a beginning."

What ideals does the speaker advocate for writing (presumably both poetry and prose)? (common word exact without vulgarity, formal word precise but not pedantic, mingling of old and new)

What does it mean to state that "every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning"?

What actions does the narrator suggest we may begin or end with? (martyrdom, a tomb)

What effect do the dead (presumably the historicized dead) have on us? (we die and are reborn with them)

What is the "moment of the rose" and what is the moment of the yew-tree? (rose associated with passion and yew-tree associated with death, the former brief-lived and the second more durable) Why are they equivalent? (from the perspective of the timeless moment)

Can one escape time by ignoring history? (no, for history is a pattern of timeless moments; through history one seizes the timeless)

What does it mean to say that "History is now and England"?

What will be the end of exploration? Is this a gain? (we will finally know the place from which we started for the first time)

What images take the poet back to his childhood and origins? Why is this not regression?

Under what conditions are the words of Dame Julian accurate? (when the tongues of flame are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one") What is imaged by the union of tongues of fire an rose? (purgation and creation merge, empowering prophecy and love)

How would you describe this final state of perception? (contemplative mysticism of unities)

What has been the purpose of this poem? Does it resolve the questions or uncertainties with which it had begun?