27 pages • 54 minutes read
T. S. EliotLittle Gidding
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1942A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
St. John the Evangelist Chapel, Little Gidding
The poem uses St. John’s Chapel in the village of Little Gidding to symbolize the poet’s search for the still quiet point above and apart from time. The country chapel is a reminder on Earth of the promise of God’s transcendent peace. Eliot himself visited the historic chapel only once, after a luncheon just before the war, but the impact of the place registered.
The speaker comes to Little Gidding to feel the reassuring there-ness of a chapel nearly five centuries old. Little Gidding was the site for a short-lived ultra-conservative Anglican commune during the early 17th-century when England itself was pitched into a fierce holy war between the Church of England and the upstart Puritans, led by Oliver Cromwell. Yes, the chapel and its grounds move through the cycle of seasons, but amid all that flux, the chapel stands. The chapel defies clock time. Despite being in midwinter, the countryside promises the return of spring.
Time is and is not a pressure in Little Gidding. Unlike war-ravaged London—through which the speaker will walk in the next two sections—Little Gidding offers a sanctuary-like feeling of a place a part yet apart, transcending time. Here, the poet yearns for “the unimaginable / Zero summer” (Lines 19-20), that is, the summer that never surrenders to the autumn, a symbol of the transcendent realm for which the poet searches. “If you came at night” (Line 27), the poet argues, “if you came by day […] / It would be the same” (Lines 28-29). In the end, the poet will find his way to this still, timeless space, albeit spiritually, not geographically.
The “First-Met Stranger”
The “first-met stranger” (Line 93) whom the speaker engages with in Section 2 symbolizes the speaker’s teacher who will guide him at the poem’s darkest moment toward the redemptive message of Christian hope. The stranger is variously identified throughout this section, appearing as the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, whose Divine Comedy Eliot used as a template for Four Quartets; Jesus Christ himself (recalling the encounter on the road to Eumaeus after the Resurrection); William Butler Yeats, a fellow poet and Catholic mystic whose influence Eliot acknowledged; and even the speaker’s own soul, struggling to access the message of hope in a dark time.
In the forbidding apocalyptic Section 2, the speaker, on patrol in the late-night streets of a bomb-shattered London, chances upon a stranger walking the same streets as if “blown towards” (Line 89) the speaker like leaves “before the urban dawn wind unresisting” (Line 90). Initially, the speaker is surprised to see the stranger and thinks he may know him. He says the stranger “has the sudden look of some dead master” (Line 94). The stranger, with swarthy brown features, seems at once “intimate and unidentifiable” (Line 98). The stranger’s face remains elusive, a “face still forming” (Line 103). It is this stranger who cautions the speaker of the tragedy of staying time-bound, of measuring a life in days and years, forever captive of history and memory. It is the stranger who warns the speaker that, locked within time, the speaker has only anger (“the conscious impotence of rage” [Line 137]), regret, and bitterness, even as the body concedes to the indignities of old age. He advises the speaker not to live that way, pivoting “from wrong to wrong” (Line 146).
Rather, he encourages the speaker to seek the refining fire of Christ’s higher love that would, in the end, burn away this heavy anchorage to the corruptions, absurdities, and endgames of the immediate world, symbolized by the city in ruins. The stranger departs the speaker at the moment the air raid sirens go off. It is left for the speaker now to move toward that epiphany.
Fire
The poem uses fire as both the destructive power of the Nazi incendiary devices raining down from the night skies during the Blitzkrieg, and as the healing, illuminating power of the Christian Holy Spirit, whose descent in tongues of fire on the apostles in the unsettling days following Christ’s ascension is commemorated on Pentecost. This tipping-point moment gave the apostles the courage to begin the difficult work of building the Church by spreading the gospel of hope in this risen Christ. The central message of the Pentecost narrative is the central message of “Little Gidding”: Comfort a devastated and troubled humanity by delivering the heroic gospel of salvation through Christ’s love.
In this, Eliot uses the fires of the Blitzkrieg to symbolize humanity’s need to burn away the attachment to things of this world. The war is an allegory for humanity’s need, in the name of a variety of “isms,” to control, possess, and direct both objects and people. The speaker compares that need to possess, whether manifested as greed or lust or ego, to an “intolerable shirt of flame” (Line 212) that only by accepting the fire of Christ’s love can finally, gloriously, be burned off. Fire destroys, yes. The speaker sees this destruction firsthand when walking the desolate streets of London, struggling to breathe in the air thick with smoke. However, fire also transforms, burns away imperfections. It is the choice the speaker offers the world teetering on collapse: We can live “[c]onsumed by either fire or fire” (Line 215)—that is, we can live consumed by the raging fires of humanity’s sinful nature or consumed within the love of Christ. In this radiant closing vision, “the fire and rose are one” (Line 261), allowing the fragile and vulnerable material world to finally be fused with Christ’s love.
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