Suddenly You Breathe Differently: Little Gidding
Sarah Glazer goes back to the source of a favorite poem and muses on the power of poetry—and other great writing.
I think of myself as a prose person. I read novels for plot (yes I skipped all the descriptive passages when I devoured Dickens at age 12 and had a perfectly good time doing so). I write non-fiction as a journalist, where “facts” are checked as presumably fixed truths and hawk-eyed editors delete contradictions and ambivalence. And I have little patience for the most fashionable post-modernists like Foucault, where fact dissolves in a miasma of philosophical half-truths.
So when it comes to poetry, I’m often an impatient reader, searching for the plot or an anchor in fact that will tell me what’s going on.
But somehow, more than 30 years ago, T.S. Eliot’s fourth quartet, “Little Gidding,” spoke to me. Here’s my first memory of the encounter: I am sitting in the Poetry Library aerie of my Chicago campus looking out on a frozen expanse as I hear Eliot (through earphones), describing in lugubrious tones the very scene before my eyes—“midwinter spring. … When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire\ The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches …”
I didn’t really have any idea what it was all about, but certain lines seemed so familiar, or about things I had half-thought myself. (“The voice of the hidden waterfall/And the children in the apple-tree/Not known, because not looked for/But heard, half-heard in the stillness/ Between two waves of the sea.”)
When I heard that a highly regarded poetry teacher, Graham Fawcett, was leading an expedition to the hamlet of Little Gidding, (the place itself!) just a few hours from my home in London, to read the poem, I knew I had to go.
It wasn’t midwinter spring, but it might as well have been. A glorious November day, it was unusually bright for normally gray England this time of year. It felt warm enough to sit outside in the sun in our heavy jackets, at the Christian retreat where Eliot had stood, looking out on grazing cows and hills covered with fiery yellow and orange foliage.
Yet the day was short enough that we got to see the little chapel a few hundred yards away, just as Eliot had, when the day was ending: “So, while the light falls\ On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel/History is now and England.”
(England, that mythical place of Jane Austen novels, and now I was here!)
What I learned was that the poem was about many things I never thought about in Chicago: Dante’s journey through "The Inferno” (Eliot even lifts some lines from Dante almost word for word); the 17th century Christian community (cult?) devoted to prayer founded on the very site where we sat; Pentecostal fire (not just the “frost fire” I took as a literal description of winter). And of course Christianity, Christianity, Christianity--presumably of the high Anglican sort that American Eliot converted to. There are so many things about Eliot I don’t relate to or find distasteful: his anti-Semitism, locking his wife away in an insane asylum—even the convert’s new-found reverence for High Church symbols.
But as I listened the other day to Israeli novelist David Grossman, interviewed upon receiving the German book trade's Peace Prize, I realized that Grossman's description of reading marvelous writing is exactly what Eliot and other great writers do to me—even if they were thinking of something else when they wrote it. “Suddenly you breathe differently,” Grossman said, struggling for the right words in English, “In this world of anonymity … someone brought back your face to you”—your original self.
Who can’t help feeling that on hearing lines like these?
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Tell us, She Writers: What poems bring back your face to you?
RELATED:
Making Poetry
Poets on She Writes
Five Questions for Lyndall Gordon
I think of myself as a prose person. I read novels for plot (yes I skipped all the descriptive passages when I devoured Dickens at age 12 and had a perfectly good time doing so). I write non-fiction as a journalist, where “facts” are checked as presumably fixed truths and hawk-eyed editors delete contradictions and ambivalence. And I have little patience for the most fashionable post-modernists like Foucault, where fact dissolves in a miasma of philosophical half-truths.So when it comes to poetry, I’m often an impatient reader, searching for the plot or an anchor in fact that will tell me what’s going on.
But somehow, more than 30 years ago, T.S. Eliot’s fourth quartet, “Little Gidding,” spoke to me. Here’s my first memory of the encounter: I am sitting in the Poetry Library aerie of my Chicago campus looking out on a frozen expanse as I hear Eliot (through earphones), describing in lugubrious tones the very scene before my eyes—“midwinter spring. … When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire\ The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches …”
I didn’t really have any idea what it was all about, but certain lines seemed so familiar, or about things I had half-thought myself. (“The voice of the hidden waterfall/And the children in the apple-tree/Not known, because not looked for/But heard, half-heard in the stillness/ Between two waves of the sea.”)
When I heard that a highly regarded poetry teacher, Graham Fawcett, was leading an expedition to the hamlet of Little Gidding, (the place itself!) just a few hours from my home in London, to read the poem, I knew I had to go.
It wasn’t midwinter spring, but it might as well have been. A glorious November day, it was unusually bright for normally gray England this time of year. It felt warm enough to sit outside in the sun in our heavy jackets, at the Christian retreat where Eliot had stood, looking out on grazing cows and hills covered with fiery yellow and orange foliage.
Yet the day was short enough that we got to see the little chapel a few hundred yards away, just as Eliot had, when the day was ending: “So, while the light falls\ On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel/History is now and England.”
(England, that mythical place of Jane Austen novels, and now I was here!)
What I learned was that the poem was about many things I never thought about in Chicago: Dante’s journey through "The Inferno” (Eliot even lifts some lines from Dante almost word for word); the 17th century Christian community (cult?) devoted to prayer founded on the very site where we sat; Pentecostal fire (not just the “frost fire” I took as a literal description of winter). And of course Christianity, Christianity, Christianity--presumably of the high Anglican sort that American Eliot converted to. There are so many things about Eliot I don’t relate to or find distasteful: his anti-Semitism, locking his wife away in an insane asylum—even the convert’s new-found reverence for High Church symbols.
But as I listened the other day to Israeli novelist David Grossman, interviewed upon receiving the German book trade's Peace Prize, I realized that Grossman's description of reading marvelous writing is exactly what Eliot and other great writers do to me—even if they were thinking of something else when they wrote it. “Suddenly you breathe differently,” Grossman said, struggling for the right words in English, “In this world of anonymity … someone brought back your face to you”—your original self.
Who can’t help feeling that on hearing lines like these?
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Tell us, She Writers: What poems bring back your face to you?
RELATED:
Making Poetry
Poets on She Writes
Five Questions for Lyndall Gordon
Comment
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Comment by Emily Rolfe Grosholz on January 3, 2011 at 1:43pm -
That's a wonderful essaylet and photo, Sarah. I wish I could have gone with you to Little Giddings on that bright November day! "Suddenly you breathe differently" is just the phrase. Emily
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Comment by Victoria Pynchon on November 28, 2010 at 9:00pm -
Yes. Those three lines have been with me like a steady companion since I first read them in Tioga Hall at U.C. San Diego, looking out over the Pacific Ocean in 1974. Why a liberal arts education? Those three lines provide the answer for me. Thanks for the recollection.
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Comment by Evalyn Lee on November 23, 2010 at 6:18am -
What a wonderful essay! Thank you very much Sarah.
A poem that always catches my breath is Auden's Lullaby:
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral;
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie:
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
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Comment by Padmavani Karkera on November 23, 2010 at 12:43am -
The Solitary Reaper by William Wordsworth. Apart for the fact that it one of the few poems that I know 'by heart', I remember my father asking me to read the poem like it were a poem and not like I were mugging it up for an exam(which I was). I found I liked reciting poetry. And this eventually led me to delve into people's words, to find meaning especially in cases where meaning is not immediately experienced. To find that word or phrase or punctuation that would make me feel what the author did.
When I recite The Solitary Reaper as a lullaby or as a story, I see my son looking at me intently. Is he wondering what is it I see, that he isn't ... He will see soon... When it is time, I may advise him to read a poem like it is poetry.
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Comment by Ariana Salvo on November 22, 2010 at 3:08pm -
The poem "skeleton of winter" by Joy Harjo always has spoken to me, especially when I read it in those tender, silent moments of winter. I also love "Things I never knew I loved" by Nazim Hikmet.
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Comment by Deborah Batterman on November 22, 2010 at 12:52pm -
Isn't it wonderful the way words speak to you even when you're not fully aware of what they're saying? It's a little like music. I happen to be engrossed (couldn't help that) in David Grossman's latest book, To the End of the Land, so I have a particular appreciation for what he says about great writing. I've read other works of his, and this is a story that, yes, makes you breathe differently. Thanks for sharing these thoughts. Deborah
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Comment by Cris Phillips-Georg on November 22, 2010 at 12:31pm -
I have fallen in love with e.e.cummings again recently. His poem "somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond" is absolutely precious to me and is a reminder of the side of myself that I most adore and value.
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Comment by Marjorie Robertson on November 21, 2010 at 12:14pm -
Wonderful post.
Lisel Mueller's "In Passing" at the beginning of her book, Alive Together, is a favorite.
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Comment by Patricia A. McGoldrick on November 19, 2010 at 9:27am -
So glad you shared about "Little Gidding". This was a new one for me but it was magical to read about it.
As a poet writer, certain poems resonate with me: Carol Shields, Margaret Atwood, Edna St.Vincent Millay, and Robert Frost have all written lines that ring so true for me.
This post was a great Friday finish for me!
Patricia
http://pmpoetwriter.blogspot.com/
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