FOR LAST YEAR WORDS
T.S. Eliot
Four Quartets
"Little Gidding"
"For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore."
ARTICLE BY
This line comes from the last of Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” and it is a sometimes terrifying poem, full of fiery images like this striking one:
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
But he sees the flames as purifying, as a place to begin again. And perhaps this year more than many others, we can hope that the purifying fire is behind us, and we can come together in a new year, awaiting a new voice.
Little Gidding
POEM BY ELIOT
Little Gidding, poem by T.S. Eliot, originally appearing in 1942, both in the New English Weekly and in pamphlet form. The next year, it was published in a volume with the previous three poems of The Four Quartets. “Little Gidding” is written in five sections in strong-stress metre; it concludes Eliot’s study of human experience, Christian faith, and the nature of time and history.
The title is taken from the name of a village in Huntingdonshire where Nicholas Ferrarestablished an Anglican community in the 17th century. The poem, set at the Little Gidding chapel in winter and in London during World War II, addresses spiritual renewal.
