ABSTRACT
The Huntingdonshire village of Little Gidding, the starting-point of the fourth poem, is significant on several counts. Little Gidding stands as a symbol of reconciliation. In the elemental scheme Little Gidding is concerned with Fire, where Burnt Norton was concerned with Air, East Coker with Earth, and The Dry Salvages with Water. ‘Midwinter spring’, with its reconciliation of frost and fire, is the appropriate time for a visit to Little Gidding. The day of sunshine in the middle of winter has various symbolic significances. It is a season of its own that breaks the natural cycle. Its shaft of sunlight is a point of illumination intersecting time’s familiar routine of successiveness. It belongs, in a sense therefore, to the pattern of the timeless. It remains to add that, in terms of the long spiritual pilgrimage from theBurnt Norton garden, the note of absolution is as crucial (if not as explicit) as the note of penitence echoed in Little Gidding II.
