Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding Analysis

Four Quartets1942IMidwinter spring is its own season

Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,

Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.

When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,

The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,

In windless cold that is the heart's heat,

Reflecting in a watery mirror

A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.

And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,

Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire

In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing

The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell

Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time

But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow

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?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.

It would be the same at the end of the journey,

If you came at night like a broken king,

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

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

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 city-

But this is the nearest, in place and time,

Now and in England.If you came this way,

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

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,

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.IIAsh on and old man's sleeve

Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.

Dust in the air suspended

Marks the place where a story ended.

Dust inbreathed was a house-

The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,

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

Contending for the upper hand.

The parched eviscerate soil

Gapes at the vanity of toil,

Laughs without mirth.This is the death of earth.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

The marred foundations we forgot,

Of sanctuary and choir.This is the death of water and fire.In the uncertain hour before the morningNear the ending of interminable nightAt the recurrent end of the unending

After the dark dove with the flickering tongueHad passed below the horizon of his homingWhile the dead leaves still rattled on like tin

Over the asphalt where no other sound wasBetween three districts whence the smoke aroseI met one walking, loitering and hurried

As if blown towards me like the metal leavesBefore the urban dawn wind unresisting.And as I fixed upon the down-turned face

That pointed scrutiny with which we challengeThe first-met stranger in the waning duskI caught the sudden look of some dead master

Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalledBoth one and many; in the brown baked featuresThe eyes of a familiar compound ghost

Both intimate and unidentifiable.So I assumed a double part, and criedAnd heard another's voice cry: 'What! are

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