A Reverie for Fire and Death in “Little Gidding”

Abstract

The study aims to suggest that both T. S. Eliot and Gaston Bachelard are concerned with archetypal imagery and reverie for the four elements, and they have comparison to their creations and processes of poetic images. Especially, “Little Gidding,” the fourth poem in Four Quartets deals with fire or flame images and cosmic order, psychoanalysis or poetics of fire by Bachelard, also deals with fire images such as Phoenix and Prometheus, so this paper compares and analyzes two poets' poetry in the poem because their ways to develop from reverie of fire, to the consciousness for time and history, to the meditation for order of cosmos, works of both authors are comparably analogous. Eliot grasps the still point on rotating world as pure, high and sacred culmination, so finally reaches the instance that a human encounters God's love. He also materializes God's love with the fire image and regards it as the glory that we can obtain by conquering humane desires and affections. If the fire is a symbol of God's love, the rose is a symbol of humane love and death. That means the instance combining humane love and death into the fire of anguish, transcendence and purgation. This is considered as the ultimate vision in Dante's Paradiso, the intersection of the time and the timeless of Eliot, and the reverberation or transformation of being in Bachelard's poetics. As new literary images, creation of images is possible to participate in our beings, and as readers, we can experiences the kind of reverberation that give the energy of an origin to being.