End Notes to the First Draft

In the summer of 2012 my friend Chris Bellavita – a wonderful name – suggested I use Mary Ruefle’s poem, Fear, as the prompt for my morning meditations. I enjoyed the experience, but wanted something stronger and spent much of the Fall with The Waste Land.

After fifty-two days arguing with Eliot over the decline of Western Civilization, I needed a new source. It was December 1, the feast day of Nicholas Farrar, the founder of the religious community at Little Gidding. The Four Quartets was close at hand and I claimed the coincidence. The Waste Land had occasionally motivated a response in verse. I decided to make this my consistent form in responding to Little Gidding.

As is my morning discipline, I did not have a plan or particular purpose for the series. I did not even read all of Little Gidding, but simply began each morning responding to a portion of the poem.

Clearly I was predisposed from the start to an ontological theme which over the next thirty days I continued to explore. In constructing my thoughts I referred to Heidegger, Hegel, Heraclitus, Augustine, and others. The coincidence with Advent is as obvious. I spent the second Sunday in Advent at the National Cathedral. Michael McCarthy’s Matin Responsory was the Introit and is echoed in my meditations. I was at Saint Mark’s Philadelpha for Gaudete Sunday. In between was the Newtown Massacre. All these have specific influence.

It was not until the third week that I noticed Little Gidding is divided into five parts (a pattern often used by Eliot) which matches the four Sundays of Advent and the arrival of Christmas. This reinforced the ecclesiastical elements I had already introduced. There are, I perceive, interesting relationships to Advent in Eliot’s text, such as the prominence of love in the fourth part and the attention to words (logos?) in the final part.

For most of the first half I am very much responding to Eliot, sometimes quoting him or disagreeing. Throughout my text I adopt the architecture of Little Gidding. Eliot also inspired – and gave me permission – to draw from Julian of Norwich and Shakespeare’s Henry VI.

Gradually in the second half I am less attentive to Eliot’s themes than to my own. I was, however, occasionally surprised by unintentional conjunction. I was not conscious of my similarities to Eliot’s verse found at beginning of Part V until a second or third re-reading. By then I was using Eliot mostly as a template into which to fit my own thoughts, rather than as a call for my response.

In the three days before Christmas I was reading Rimbaud, who Eliot much admired. My poem’s title is taken from Rimbaud’s Une Saison En Enfer and the last line is from a letter to Verlaine. The English translation: “The one true word is: come back. I want to be with you, I love you.” In French the one true word is actually one word: reviens.

In the 1940s the Four Quartets was critiqued by some as “too religious” and my poem is more High Church in an even less religious era. But it was a wonderful way to spend Advent and begin Christmas.