Little Gidding

Like the other poems in Four Quartets, “Little Gidding” is executed in five sections of varying length, the longest (Section 2) captures the empty feeling of Eliot’s soul-wrenching walk through bombed-out London where he meets the stranger; the shortest, Section 4, lyrically hymns the beauty and mystery of Christ’s love.

The poem is executed in free verse with lines of varying length. Only Section 2, which Eliot admitted in letters published after his death posed the greatest challenge to him formally, upends that patterning. The section opens with a dramatic rhythmic pattern: nearly 20 lines alternating between trimeter (six beats per line) with tetrameter (eight beats per line). The clipped form contrasts to the subject itself, creating a dark irony—after all, these lines, which can read like a child’s nursery rhyme, recreate London in ruins and capture the speaker’s dazed confusion over the depths of the destruction. When the speaker meets the stranger, Eliot uses terza rima, a poetic form made up of three-line units with intricate internal rhythmic variations. The form itself is most associated with Dante’s Inferno, which gives the meeting between the stranger and the speaker amid the ruins of London the gravitas of Dante’s Virgil meeting the poet and in turn serving as the poet’s mentor and guide through the forbidding wasteland of the Dante’s Hell.

Much like the poem’s theme, the poem’s metrics juxtapose urgency against calm, panic against stillness. Although Eliot offers a traditional affirmation of the power of faith, he executes the lines of “Little Gidding” in a richly textured free verse that moves line to line with differing rhythms created by Eliot’s subtle musical effect (appropriate for a larger work that uses the motif of music itself). Eliot worked for months crafting the lines, creating a sonic effect through the use of long vowels and sibilant (hissing) consonants that act as stops against the sharp chop of guttural g’s and d’s and t’s that create an urgency and rush.