[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

“Poets do not rightly achieve their renown for saying anything new, however, or for saying anything that any reasonable thoughtful, feeling person should not already know by the time he or she has reached some measure of advanced adulthood. Rather, we expect poets to share the common experience in uncommon ways, so that simple truths emerge renewed and refreshed, or else to share uncommon experiences in common ways, so that the rare experience of a single individual becomes accessible to all. Surely, Eliot has been doing just that throughout the Quartets, so that a man visiting an English country home or riding a subway or watching for fires after an air raid or kneeling in an ancient chapel or pondering the flotsam on a river is not only the same man but the same as every other person if he or she, too, were followed through the rich varieties of experience that the typical individual may undergo in a lifetime.”

— Russell Elliot Murphy, T.S. Eliot: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work

Charles I rode into Little Gidding on May 2, 1646, alone. Behind him rode Cromwell or Fairfax or some combination of their forces loyal to Parliament. The king knew the place. Sometime in the previous decade he came to admire a gospel concord owned by Nicholas Ferrar, a former courtier who, after suffering financial losses betting on the Virginia Company, retreated to his holdings at Little Gidding for a life of prayer and contemplation. Ferrar invited others. A small religious community flourished under his, and later his brother John’s, leadership. There was no reason for him to believe Little Gidding could offer lasting sanctuary from the Parliamentarians, but the king was desperate. Afraid for the safety of the residents of Little Gidding, John hid him in nearby Coppingford. The king would be captured three days later and the faithful disbursed by force, never to reform, under suspicion of having done exactly what they did to aid the fugitive royal. But, if only for a night, Charles slept.

TS Eliot published “Burnt Norton” in 1936, intending it as a standalone poem. In it he considers an infinite God and wonders at the limits of human perception. Can a temporal being conceive of an eternal one? Does time parcel out bits of understanding, save us from confronting a vision of God so terrible it would destroy us were we to experience him whole? Man is in motion through time while God is perfect stillness; no need for desire’s impetus or fear’s escape. God is love and contentment. Eliot settles on moments of ecstasy, timeless trance like clarity where understanding seems ours, as the best contact with that stillness we can hope for.