Timeless Moments: The Incarnation Theme in Little Gidding

TIMELESS MOMENTS: THE INCARNATION THEME IN LITTLE GIDDING Marden J. Clark 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: The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches / In windless cold that is the heart's 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 journey that has been suggested throughout the Quartets and that would lead one to seek the sublime at all: 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. The dead alone can tell us "what the dead had no speech for, when living." They can conquer time with communication "tongued with fire beyond the language of living." The result: 10 The Incarnation Theme in Little Gidding11 Here, the intersection of the timeless moment Is England and nowhere. Never and always. Little in this particular context suggests that Eliot is thinking of "the intersection of the timeless moment" as more than the idea that at such a moment in such a place the past, present and future are one. But he has prepared us carefully for this first mention of his key idea. This moment has to do with "pentecostal fire," with language "tongued with fire." If one is to come this way, one must "put off / Sense and notion." The preparation for the phrase, in fact, goes back through all the Quartets. Back to all the play on the paradoxes of time. Back to "the still point of the turning world," where "the dance is" in Burnt Norton. Back to the moment of "the hidden laughter / Of children" in the rose garden, the moment that is the dawning of both sexual and spiritual awareness. Back to the dark night of the soul in East Coker, to the Love that is "mostly nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter." Back to the "Prayer of the one Annunciation" and to "the sudden ülumination" in The Dry Salvages. Back especially to the phrase it verbally develops from, The point of intersection of the timeless / With time." We remember all diese. But even more...