time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
i5 Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom Of snow, a bloom more sudden Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading, Not in the scheme of generation. Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer?
20 If you came this way, Taking the route you would be likely to take From the place you would be likely to come from, If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
25 It would be the same at the end of the journey, If you came at night like a broken king,1
1. This is the last of Eliot's Four Quartets, four community was broken up in 1647, toward the end related poems each divided into five 'movements' of the English Civil War, by the victorious Puriin a manner reminiscent of the structure of a quar-tans; the chapel, however, was rebuilt in the 19th tet or a sonata and each dealing with some aspect century and still exists. Eliot WTOte the poem in of the relation of time and eternity, the meaning 1942, when he was taking his turn as a nighttime of history, the achievement of the moment of time-fire-watcher during the incendiary bombings of less insight. Although the Four Quartets constitute London in World War II. a unified sequence, they were each written sepa-2. On the Pentecost day after the death and resrately and can be read as individual poems. 'Little urrection of Jesus, there appeared to his apostles Gidding can be understood by itself, without ref-'cloven tongues like as of fire . . . And they were erence to the preceding poems, which it yet so all filled with the Holy Ghost' (Acts 2). beautifully completes' (Helen Gardner, The Com-3. King Charles I visited Ferrar's communitymore position of Four Quartets). Each of the four is than once and is said to have paid his last visit in named after a place. Little Gidding is a village in secret after his final defeat at the battle of Naseby Huntingdonshire where in 1625 Nicholas Ferrar in the civil war. established an Anglican religious community; the
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2314 / T. S. ELIOT
If you came by day not knowing what you came for, It would be the same, when you leave the rough road And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
30 And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for Is only a shell, a husk of meaning From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled If at all. Either you had no purpose Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
35 And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws, Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city1? But this is the nearest, in place and time, Now and in England.
If you came this way,
40 Taking any route, starting from anywhere, At any time or at any season, It would always be the same: you would have to put off Sense and notion. You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
45 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,
50 They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. Here, the intersection of the timeless moment Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
II
Ash on an old man's sleeve
55 Is all the ash the burnt roses leave. Dust in the air suspended Marks the place where a story ended.5 Dust inbreathed was a house? The wall, the wainscot, and the mouse.
60 The death of hope and despair, This is the death of air/'
There are flood and drouth Over the eyes and in the mouth, Dead water and dead sand
4. 'The 'sea jaws' [Eliot] associated with lona and St. Columba and with Lindisfarne and St. Cuthbert: the 'dark lake' with the lake of Glendalough and St. Kevin's hermitage in County Wicldow: the desert with the hermits of the Thebaid and St. Antony: the city with Padua and the other St. Antony' (Gardner). 5. Eliot wrote to a friend: 'During the Blitz [bombing] the accumulated debris was suspended in the London air for hours after a bombing. Then it would slowly descend and cover one's sleeves and coat with a fine white ash.'
6. 'The death of air,' like that of 'earth' and of 'water and fire' in the succeeding stanzas, recalls the theory of the creative strife of the four elements propounded by Heraclitus (Greek philosopher of 4th and 5th centuries B.C.E.): 'Fire lives in the death of air; water lives in the death of earth; and earth lives in the death of water.'
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LITTLE GIDDING
65 Contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil Gapes at the vanity of toil, Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth.
70 Water and fire succeed The town, the pasture, and the weed. Water and fire deride The sacrifice that we denied. Water and fire shall rot
75 The marred foundations we forgot, Of sanctuary and choir. This is the death of water and fire.
In the uncertain hour before the morning7 Near the ending of interminable night 80 At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue' Had passed below the horizon of his homing While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was 85 Between three districts whence the smoke arose I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves Before the urban dawn wind unresisting. And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
