“Midwinter Spring”: The ‘Logic’ of “Little Gidding”

This essay traces the contour of the poetic “logic” in T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding.” Inscribed in Little Gidding (the site of Nicholas Ferrar’s religious community) is Eliot’s self-consciously constructed identity as classicist, royalist, and anglo-catholic and the place is envisioned to be in and out of time simultaneously, both historical and transcendental in the way the human and the divine intersect in the Incarnation. As a matter of fact, the poem begins with a miraculous seasonal intersection (“Midwinter spring”), which constitutes a paradox so characteristic of the poem as a whole. “Little Gidding” is, indeed, a poem of intersections, and the figure of paradox consistently functions at the rhetorical and thematic levels. As a poem of World War II, “Little Gidding” cannot help but witness to the fall of human civilization symbolically represented in the death of the four elements but ultimately embraces the Christian vision of Julian of Norwich (“All shall be well, and / All manner of thing shall be well”). The vision can be realized when the symbols of fire and rose become one, a union made possible, if we follow this purgatorial poem’s argument, through extremely rigorous self-reflection and purification.