Timeless Moments: The Incarnation Theme in Little Gidding

In Little Gidding T. S. Eliot not only sustains the remarkable interweaving of theme and symbol but brings to climax and resolution the whole complex of patterns which comprises the Four Quartets. In this paper, I examine the incarnation theme-surely the central theme of the poem, though little examined by Eliot's critics-to show the richness and complexity of the theme itself. As a corollary, I should be able to show some of the richness of the poem as climax, summary, and resolution of the Quartets, The poet has apparently come to the rebuilt chapel at Little Gidding to meditate and pray. The meditation begins with a variation on the theme of time and timelessness that has been so prominent in the earlier poems. The first two words present the basic paradox that will be developed: "Midwinter spring is its own season." One imagines a kind of January thaw. But the poet insists on the literalness of midwinter: '"he brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches / In windless cold that is the hearts heat." He insists also on the paradox: 'This is the spring time / But not in time's covenant." The only blossom is on the hedgerow, "blanched for an hour with transitory blossom / Of snow." All this flowing brightness-"no wind, but pentecostal fire / In the day-time of the year-" is both a "glare that is blindness" and a glow that "stings the dumb spirit"; in it the "soul's sap quivers." The poet has already told us that the season is "suspended in time." The paradoxical promise of the brightness of this midwinter spring gets epitomized in the blossom image, because the image is another way of reinforcing his basic paradox and of negating time: "If you came this way in May time, you would find the hedges / White again, in May, with voluptuous sweetness." No matter the time, it would be the same. You would find that "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." The "way" is to the shrine itself, of course, but also the broad way of life or quest or jourey that has been suggested throughout the Quartets and that would lead one to seek the sublime at all: