T S Eliot Little Gidding: Carol Ann Duffy Beyond the language of the Living?

T S Eliot’s Little Gidding was his favourite poem. This section of the poem plays with our sense of orientation, our certainties around time and life’s direction. I find I have to just keep reading and re-reading the poem, hearing its sounds, its cadences as much as its meanings. It has a hypnotic power and effect, reshaping how we understand through how we are hearing and then translating the poem.

It is as if the rhymn and pace of the poem alters my relationship to the words and meaning. It sounds like an acceptance, like an acceptance of unknowing.

You don’t even have to come this way. You may, you may not. The openness, the expansiveness of the ideas, casually encourages us to shed our judgements, our contexts. ‘If you came this way.’ How modest, how unassuming I feel as I begin, no duress, just choice.

Then my mind starts to relax into the words, into the sounds, like trance, like a letting go of the urge to hurry, to find out, to identify.

‘Never and always.’  fluidity, mindfulness and emptyness. Humility and awe. Listening to the dead. Resurrecting and releasing.

What would Lazarus say?

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. 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.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

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