Annotations to T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets

These are annotations from Little Gidding, the last Quartet; the numbers identify the line discussed. 4: This is the first of many mentions of fire in this Quartet, where it is a major theme. The four original 'elements' - air, earth, water and fire - were, in that order, the pervading themes in each of the four Quartets. (Eliot confirmed this.) 10: Pentecost=Whitsun, the seventh Sunday after Easter, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples as cloven tongues of fire, and they began to speak in all tongues so that amazed men of every nation understood them... Eliot is saying that the brief sun that flames the ice on this winter day is like Pentecostal fire out of season. 78-149: This long passage was written in honor of Dante in an adaptation of his terza rima, which was the rhyme scheme of the Divine Comedy...He describes here a Dante-type of vision, full of allusions to that poet. Eliot was an air raid warden in World War II. In this passage he is patrolling the London streets after an air raid. 81-85: The dark dove was the German dive-bomber, whose flickering tongue recalls Pentecostal fire, and also the communication of the dead which is tongued with fire (line 51). A dove - not dark - is the form usually taken by the Holy Spirit when it descends to earth in the Gospels. The dead leaves (metal leaves below) are shrapnel. The smoke arose from the bombed and burning buildings, 89-91: "That pointed scrutiny' etc.: When Dante meets his dead teacher Brunetto Latini in the darkness of Hell, the damned look at him and at Virgil (who accompanies him) 'as men look at one another in the {dim} evening of a new moon'. 95: Eliot calls the figure he meets a compound ghost because it includes all the dead poets who have been his masters and are now incorporated into his work.