Plague and the comforts of history

Mar 24, 2020 by

by Tom Holland, UnHerd:

“History is a pattern / Of timeless moments.” So wrote T. S. Eliot in Little Gidding, the greatest work of literature to have been inspired by the Blitz. Written at a time when it seemed that Britain would lose the war, and civilisation itself be lost to ruin, the poem offered no easy comfort.

Eliot, who worked as a firewatcher on the rooftops of London, knew what it was to stare crisis in the face. The bomber and the terror it brings are a menacing presence throughout the poem. Flame descends through the darkness, and then, in the uncertain hour before the morning, smoke raises from rubble. Dead leaves rattle like tin. Dust hangs in the air, marking “the place where a story ended”.

Yet agonised and unflinching though the poem is, it does not eschew redemption. If history is a pattern of timeless moments, then an end can also be a beginning.

“We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration…”

Perhaps it is not surprising that Eliot should have felt this particularly strongly in a church. In part, of course, this was due to his profound Christian faith: to his conviction that fire might purge and purify as well as consume. The secluded chapel of Little Gidding, the tiny village outside Huntingdon which gives the poem its name, is a fitting place for a Christian poet to pray — and believe — that all manner of thing shall be well.

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