TSE: “In every moment of time you live where two worlds cross, | In every moment you live at a point of intersection”, The Rock 52. “transecting, bisecting the world of time”, Choruses from “The Rock” VII 18. “language · · · the intersection of the timeless moment”, Little Gidding I 52. “That which is called by the Christian mystics ‘the mystic union’ or Union with God, is defined as ‘the timeless moment’, a glimpse of pure self-consciousness and as it were an instant of eternity”, The Timeless Moment by Warner Allen (1946), jacket material (initialled by TSE in Faber catalogue, King’s). Henry Hewes recorded of TSE: “He does not believe we can really grasp the concept of the timeless, although he himself has had intuitive flashes which he’s hinted at in the Quartets. He feels these will only be communicable to those who have had similar flashes”, Eliot on Eliot: “I feel younger than I did at 60” (1958); see note to V 24. To F. C. Happold, 18 Nov 1958: “I shall be pleased to answer any questions I can about the Four Quartets, but you must not think of me as a mystic or contemplative. I have had a few flashes during my life, though there must be many people whose experience has taken them farther. Tennyson, for instance, knew more about certain types of experience than I do.” point of intersection: “The music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection”, The Music of Poetry (1942).
[Poem I 199 · Textual History II 509–10]
V 19–20 an occupation for the saint— | No occupation either: “an occupation for prophets and makers of almanacks, of whom I am not one,” The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 159 (Clark Lecture V). “the conscious occupation | Of the praying mind”, Little Gidding I 47–48.
V 22–24 selflessness and self-surrender · · · Moment: “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality”, Tradition and the Individual Talent I (1919). In TSE’s first American ed. of Selected Essays, he later scored the second sentence, with “?” (In the same volume he drew a wavy line under “sacrifice”, with “?”, in the passage “the artist · · · must surrender and sacrifice himself”, The Function of Criticism (1923) I.) self-surrender: on Communism: “M. Gide turns to a doctrine which, while it has nothing to say to the question: what is the end of man? can say a good deal about the self-surrender of the individual to society. The âme collective does duty for God”, Revelation (1937). “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender”, The Waste Land [V] 403 (see note). For letter to Stephen Spender, 9 May 1935, on recovery and surrender, see note to Little Gidding III 15.
V 23, 43–44 For most of us · · · For most of us · · · Never here to be realised: “For most of us the occasion of the great betrayal on the clear issue will never come”, A Sermon Preached in Magdalene College Chapel (1948). (For Paul Elmer More’s The Great Refusal (1894), see note to The Waste Land [I] 60–63.)
V 24 the moment in and out of time: “a moment in time and of time, | A moment not out of time, but in time”, Choruses from “The Rock” VII 18–19 (Hayward). “The real issue is · · · between those who believe only in values realizable in time and on earth, and those who believe also in values realized only out of time”, A Commentary in Criterion Oct 1936.
V 25 distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight: “the kind of pattern which we perceive in our own lives only at rare moments of inattention and detachment, drowsing in sunlight”, John Marston (1934). For “retire into a sunlit stupor”, see note to Portrait of a Lady I 1–14. For distraction from prayer, see note to Burnt Norton V 13–22. “hysteric fits · · · distract her brain”, WLComposite 287, 290.
V 27–29 music heard so deeply · · · you are the music | While the music lasts: Edwin Diller Starbuck: “a musician may suddenly reach a point at which pleasure in the technique · · · falls away and · · · he becomes the instrument through which the music flows”, The Psychology of Religion (1899) 385; title mentioned in Harvard index cards (1914) (Joshua Richards, personal communication). Graham Greene: “When music plays, one does not see or think; one hardly hears. A bowl—and the music is poured in until there is no ‘I’, I am the music”, The Man Within (1929) ch. IV (J. C. Maxwell, N&Q Oct 1964). (Writing to Hayward, 7 May 1943, about a British Council exhibition, TSE noted the absence of Graham Greene’s name.)
V 29 variant the music lasts, the spell lasts: Hayward’s Queries: “spell lasts”.
[Poem I 200 · Textual History II 510]
V 29–32 hints and guesses, | Hints followed by guesses · · · discipline · · · The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation: Andrewes “tried to confine himself in his sermons to the elucidation of · · · dogma · · · The Incarnation was to him an essential dogma · · · a word half understood · · · an undisciplined mysticism”, Lancelot Andrewes (1926). Half a dozen paragraphs later TSE describes how, “In this extraordinary prose, which appears to repeat, to stand still, but is nevertheless proceeding in the most deliberate and orderly manner, there are often flashing phrases which never desert the memory.” He quotes the passages from Andrewes that are behind Gerontion 18–20 and Journey of the Magi 1–5, before quoting the Donne behind Burnt Norton V 13–22 and East Coker I 49–50.
V 32 variant unguessed · · · not understood · · · Incarnation: Geoffrey Faber in ts4: “Isn’t this in want of some qualification? You must guess understand, or you couldn’t say it; you wouldn’t claim to be the only percipient wld. you? Does ‘Incarnation’ mean ‘The Incarnation’ (of Christ) or the incarnation of every human spirit?” TSE: “I take for granted that Christian revelation is the only full revelation; and that the fullness of Christian revelation resides in the essential fact of the Incarnation”, Revelation (1937).
V 40 dæmonic: pronounced de’monic in TSE’s recording of 1946–47. chthonic: OED recommends pronunciation kthonnic. In his recording TSE minimises the opening consonant. Hayward’s Queries: “chthonic (sound)”. OED: “dwelling in or beneath the surface of the earth” (particularly of pagan deities); from 1882 (now citing this line). Edgar Jepson: Eliot’s poetry “is as autochthonic as Theocritus”, Recent United States Poetry in English Review May 1918.
V 41–42 And right action is freedom | From past and future also: on Gide: “exploring all possibilities, willing to try anything—the slave, not of the past, but of the future”, A Commentary in Criterion Jan 1933 (Ricks 261). “More, like Babbitt, seems almost to have been born in a state of emancipation from the prejudices of his time and place. Many people give the appearance of progress by shedding the prejudices · · · of one generation only to acquire those of the next · · · ‘keeping up to date’”, Paul Elmer More (1937). “liberation | From the future as well as the past”, Little Gidding III 9–10.
V 43–44 the aim | Never here to be realised: “we have to remember that the Kingdom of Christ on earth will never be realised, and also that it is always being realised”, The Idea of a Christian Society 59.
V 45, 49 undefeated · · · yew-tree: to William Matchett, 14 June 1949: “With regard to ‘Yew’ it may be both a death symbol, and because it is a very long lived tree, a symbol of the everlasting. But the chief point of the yew in the concluding passage of The Dry Salvages is the simple fact that so many old grave‑yards have a yew tree. I believe that the cause of this frequency was a medieval edict made with a view to insuring an adequate supply of wood for the bows of the archers; in other words the yew tree was a kind of munitions factory.”
V 46 we have gone on trying: “meanwhile we have gone on living”, Murder in the Cathedral I.
V 47 variant We content: Hayward’s Queries: “We [added: ?] content”. Geoffrey Faber in ts4: “Does the rhythm demand the elliptical ‘We content’? It is difficult for me to take it without jibbing a bit and searching for a lost auxiliary!!” See Textual History.
[Poem I 200 · Textual History II 510–11]
V 48–50 our temporal reversion nourish · · · The life of significan
t soil: to the Moot: “I quite agree that ‘real culture is something that has to be produced again and again, etc.’ but the same thing is true of real potatoes: out of the same soil, fertilised by the excrement of men and animals (some of which have eaten potatoes) and by decaying vegetation · · · Soil and vegetables are two different things, but what I mean by culture is neither one nor the other, but that which includes both”, Notes on Mannheim’s Paper (1941). “The culture of a people is not a construction, but a growth. Like agriculture, it is something formed over a long period of time by co-operation of man with his environment—not by exploitation of the soil”, Civilization: The Nature of Cultural Relations (1943). To V. V. C. Collum, 24 Mar 1943: “We are particularly interested · · · in publishing books dealing with agricultural problems, both from the most practical and the most theoretical end of the scale.” Wartime Faber titles included Soil and Sense (1941) and The Living Soil (1944). “without the life of the soil from which to draw its strength, the urban culture must lose its source of strength and rejuvenescence”, The Man of Letters and the Future of Europe (1944).
To A. L. Rowse, 3 Mar 1941: “I did much appreciate your offer of your house at St. Austell’s · · · I don’t know whether an old Tory like you ever deigns to look at the New English Weekly · · · but if you do you may have observed that I have finally tackled the sea from the coast of it which I know best. Besides, I should feel an impostor in Cornwall, as I do in Galloway · · · So my sea poem returns to Somerset (or if you like Devon, but at any rate England and not Cornwall) at the end.” (Rowse’s Tudor Cornwall, 1941, was part of a lifelong insistence that he was Cornish, not English.) TSE described his “composite” personal landscape before reading The Dry Salvages: “You will notice · · · that this poem begins where I began, with the Mississippi; and that it ends, where I and my wife expect to end, at the parish church of a tiny village in Somerset”, The Influence of Landscape upon the Poet (1960).
[Poem I 200 · Textual History II 511]
Little Gidding
1. History of Little Gidding 2. Composition 3. Dante 4. After Publication
Published in NEW 15 Oct 1942 and broadcast by Robert Speaight on 12 Nov before publication as a separate Faber pamphlet on 20 Nov (three impressions to Sept 1943). No separate publication in the US, where Little Gidding appeared first in May 1943 within Four Quartets in US 1943. Then 1944+.
1. HISTORY OF LITTLE GIDDING
Hayward: “The poem takes its title from the remote village of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, ten miles north-west of the county town, once celebrated for the religious community based on the Christian family established there in 1626 for contemplation and prayer by Nicholas Ferrar, the friend of the poet George Herbert. The community was dispersed 21 years later by Cromwell’s troops. The chapel, which they ransacked and ruined, was restored for worship in the 19th century, and was visited by the poet in the company of Dr. H. F. Stewart, the Pascalian scholar, and his wife Jessie, on May 25, 1936. There is an interesting account of the Little Gidding community in J. H. Shorthouse’s historical novel John Inglesant (1880).” Helen Gardner suggests that TSE would have known this very popular romantic tale as a boy, noting that the edition in his library was “published by Macmillan in 1927 in ‘The Caravan Library’. Mrs. Valerie Eliot tells me she cannot say whether he actually read this copy, as he often borrowed books from the London Library and purchased them much later” (Composition FQ 61).
The Little Gidding community was known for devising and compiling harmonies of the four gospels and other books of the Bible—allowing them to be read as unified narratives. Among the recipients of copies was Charles I, who visited the community in 1633 and 1642. Other visitors included George Herbert and Richard Crashaw, and when Herbert died the manuscript of The Temple was sent to Ferrar, who organised its publication. On the night of 1 May 1646, after a series of defeats in the First Civil War, the King sought shelter at Little Gidding, and was taken to nearby Coppingford where he stayed two nights. Later that year the community was vandalised by Parliamentary troops, and in 1657 it closed. (For the history see Composition FQ 58–63 and Appendix to the Victoria County History of Huntingdon.) The title page of The Arminian Nunnery or A Briefe Description and Relation of · · · Little Gidding (1641) was used by the Listener to illustrate TSE’s The Devotional Poets of the Seventeenth Century (1930), although he made no reference there to the book or the place.
Reviewing Mario Praz’s Secentismo e marinismo in Inghilterra: John Donne–Richard Crashaw, TSE wrote that the section “which deals with Roman activity and with the extreme Right of the Anglican Church under Laud, with Crashaw’s connexion with the retreat of Little Gidding and with the misfortunes of Peterhouse makes extremely good reading”, An Italian Critic on Donne and Crashaw (1925). TSE referred to Crashaw and the “cloistral society of Little Gidding” in his sixth Clark Lecture (The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 164).
[Poem I 201–209 · Textual History II 511–45]
To Mrs. John Carroll Perkins, 10 July 1936, recalling that spring: “The only really lovely day that I remember was a day at the end of May when I was motored over from Cambridge to Little Gidding” (Composition FQ 35). That year, TSE read in draft a play about King Charles and Little Gidding entitled Stalemate: The King at Little Gidding by George Every (Composition FQ vii, 62–63). He also acted as a “referee” for a Cambridge doctorate about Little Gidding by Bernard Blackstone, writing to the Secretary of the English Faculty Board, T. R. Henn, 6 Mar 1936: “I do not think, however, that I ought to do this unless the other referee is someone possessed of exact scholarship in the literature and history of the period. While I did at one time study the work of George Herbert pretty carefully, I am unfamiliar with Nicholas Ferrar.”
Schuchard 182: “When A. L. Maycock, the Cambridge author and librarian, published his Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding (1938), Eliot had Blackstone review it for the Criterion in October. Maycock’s book, wrote Blackstone, erases myths and distorted views of Ferrar and lays the groundwork for a much-needed scholarly study. Later in the year, Blackstone brought out the materials for such a study in his Ferrar Papers, declaring Ferrar to be ‘in singleness of vision and completeness of achievement · · · the most original genius in the church during the vital period of her post-Reformation history’ [xi]. Eliot had the book reviewed by another Kelham friend, Charles Smyth, who praised Blackstone’s sense of the spiritual complexity of Ferrar’s writings” (Criterion Jan 1939). In 1946 TSE became a patron of the newly inaugurated Society of the Friends of Little Gidding.
2. COMPOSITION
TSE began planning the fourth Quartet before the third was complete. To Geoffrey Curtis, 31 Dec 1940: “The unwritten one is provisionally, Little Gidding.” Early jottings and drafts were made in the same pad as those for The Dry Salvages (msA), in a matching hand and on closely succeeding pages (see Composition FQ 237–38).
After a trial typescript of Part I, TSE made another typescript of all five parts (ts2), showing them in various states of development. He wrote to Hayward, 27 June 1941: “I have had to buy a new copy of Kipling’s Poems · · · I am to edit a selection · · · it is also (as a little reflection will remind you) a kind of War Work · · · I am not getting on very well with Little Gidding: there have been too many interruptions.” On 7 July 1941, he sent Hayward a copy of his third typing, ts3b: “I am taking the liberty of enclosing what I have already done in the way of Little Gidding · · · you will understand my being worried and diffident and depressed at this writing. BUT I do not want ANY comments at this stage. You cannot form any opinion of it as a whole until you see the whole; and as for details, I want to do more polishing myself before I receive hints from the Critick. I feel especially that Part II doesn’t come off.”
[Poem I 201–209 · Textual History II 511–45]
Hayward designated ts3b the “First Complete Draft”, and ts9b (sent 17 and 27 Aug 1942) the “First Revision”, but in the meantime he was consulted about
intermediate stages. TSE wrote on 14 July 1941: “I have pushed on with Little Gidding, and enclose provisional results.” Hayward acknowledged “additional fragments of the pome” (now untraced) on 22 July, and on 1 Aug he sent his reaction. (The text as he describes it sometimes precedes the readings of ts4, but the pagination he gives is not that of a complete fair copy.) In his letter of 14 July, TSE discussed changes he was making: “You will observe that I have had to remove ‘cancel’ from Part I, because I wanted the word further on: I have also had some trouble with the words ‘broken’ and ‘common’.” Because of the phrase “Or cancelled by the Paraclete” in a draft stanza of IV (later deleted), he wished to avoid reading “or cancel curiosity” (I 44), so after toying with “instruct” in his retained ribbon copy of ts3, he typed “or inform curiosity” in ts4. After typing “broken” at II 23 in ts4, he revised it to “crumbled” in his ribbon copy (ts4a), because of the repetition from “a broken king” at I 26. As for “common”, it appears three times in the final text, which may have been what was troubling him. Neither “a common genius” (III 24) nor “The common word” (V 8) was emended after ts3. At III 41–42, TSE had tried out “common silence” in both manuscript and typescript before the lines reached their final form in ts3:
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
However, in his carbon (ts3b), Hayward put an “X” against the second of these lines. This may have been to signal an emendation made by TSE in the missing “additional fragments”, or it may have been an objection of his own. At any rate, TSE again typed “common” in ts4, before immediately deleting it and reverting to “single party”. In these weeks TSE worked intensively on Little Gidding, writing again to Hayward on 28 July: “I have I think improved the poem a little by cutting out the second stanza of Part IV and also the Anima Christi lines at the end of Part III (too heavy, I think).” TSE wrote these changes on his ribbon copy (ts4a). The carbon of this new typescript, ts4b, was given to Geoffrey Faber. Hayward did not receive a fresh typescript until Aug 1942.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 145