The Four Quartets text is difficult to understand. I recommend the following site that links TSE concepts to Maharishi
Vedic Science.
This site has a thorough analysis of all the Four Quartets.
Looking at Little Gidding and the concept of a Zero Summer… (Little Gidding text is highlighted in bold in the following text taken from the above site)
Little
Gidding
Little
Gidding ranks with Burnt Norton as the best of the Four Quartets. It has a
wider philosophical scope than East Coker and The Dry Salvages, and is more
personal and concrete than Burnt Norton. Written primarily in the first half of
1941, the poem was both aided and hindered by the German air raids on London.
The ubiquitous sight of fire and ash, the nightly terror of sirens and
explosions, the constant presence of death and demolition, creates a visceral
immediacy in Little Gidding missing in the other Quartets even though such
horrors are presented indirectly and symbolically. The air raids, on the other
hand, were less beneficial for Eliot's work habits, causing him to write the
poem's first draft quickly and superficially. Writing about the timeless, he
constantly felt the pressure of time, the futureless future: "Like
everyone else in this period, his life became one of monotony and anxiety,
caught in a middle period when pre-war life seemed unreal and post-war life
unimaginable" (Ackroyd, 1984, p. 264).
In spite
of his personal anguish, or any doubt he originally had about the quality of
Little Gidding, the poem begins with amazing surety and affirmation. Burnt Norton had posed the problem of time;
East Coker and The Dry Salvages elaborated on time's character; but Little
Gidding redeems it and in so doing presents Eliot's most definitive spiritual
vision.
The
poem's first two words, "Midwinter
spring," metaphorically suggest its vitality and direction. The phrase
is not only the kind of mind-challenging paradox that Eliot relished; but in
context it envisions an end to the air raids, a peace in the heart of war,
heaven amidst the inferno, an interruption to what had become life's status
quo-suffering as usual. This unlooked-for spring "is its own season / Sempiternal . . . Suspended in time." Not
a common annual season, it is a new eternal season of its own making, existing
in a time that never existed, reconciling and unifying sets of opposites,
"pole and tropic . . . When the
short day is brightest."
The
opposing forces "frost and fire"
literally represent the seasons winter and summer and characterize the harsh
weather that defines them. Metaphorically they are the polarized means by which
the eternal spring comes into being. The fire of war is calmed by the frost of
winter, and the holy fire "that is
the heart's heat," in contrast to the fire of desire (symbolized by
leaping through the flames in East Coker), melts the congealed emotions and
awakens the dormant inner life. The sun shining on the pond on the shortest day
of the year generates a blinding light that "Stirs the dumb spirit." The "[s]oul's sap" that had long been frozen "quivers" and begins to flow. This
is a celestial spring "not in
time's covenant," devoid of the taint of earthly existence.
The
opening stanza concludes with the question answered in the rest of the poem:
"Where is the summer, the
unimaginable / Zero summer?" Summer is fullness, more than spring, and
the zero summer is brought about by a fusion of winter and summer-the hedgerow
blooming more suddenly from a temporary snowfall-a summer that is "neither budding nor fading." It is
an "unimaginable" summer
because suffering and the horrors of war have made it so, but also a zero summer
because it transcends human imagination. It is the full ripeness of spiritual
awakening that the poet longs for, a summer that exceeds the still point and
the midwinter spring, embracing all life and all things in the warmth of
eternity.
The Zero
Summer Concept is discussed … The zero summer is for Eliot analogous to the
ancient concept of paradise on earth, a period of peace and abundance, a period
that has long been chronicled in the history of literature as Plato's Republic,
More's Utopia, Shakespeare's Arden Forest, the many versions of Camelot, and
Morris's The Earthly Paradise to name a few.
Little
Gidding describes the path to the zero summer in language reminiscent of East
Coker ("To arrive where you are, to get where you are not, / You must go
by a way wherein there is no ecstasy"):
If you came this way / Taking any
route, starting from anywhere, / At any time or at any season, / It would
always be the same.
A
spiritual pilgrim traveling this route to the midwinter spring would find the
"voluptuary sweetness" of
May, "the same at the end of the
journey," and a meaning that fulfills and exceeds the original
purpose. The journey begins at any time and from any place that is the "world's end," for Eliot "Now and England." It is the end of
the world because the war has made it so, but every place is the end just as
every place is the beginning. That is what distinguishes the still point from
the point in time.
To get there one must "leave the rough road," and "put off / Sense and notion." The
coarseness of ordinary desires must be abandoned, and the route taken cannot be
one of ideas or even rational thinking. Eliot says the route to the zero summer
is through prayer, but for him "prayer
is more / Than an order of words," more than the act or sound of
praying; it is a means of transcendence to "the intersection of the timeless moment [that] / Is England and
nowhere. Never and always."
My comment on Zero Summer ...
Zero Summer is a case of describing the impossible or an absolute so it is rather difficult ... to say the least. How do you describe Heaven. Perhaps easier to describe Hell. The important thing is the journey ... to work to create 'Heaven on Earth' and to be inclusive ... to leave the world in a better state ... and if you believe in Christ, Pentecost and Prayer to work with such remarkable powers to achieve this end.
