This Is The Day!

No matter the press to keep producing, I've been spending this day gently, by reading some poetry. This is one of those days that just seems to hang suspended in time....blue sky, white snow, bright sun that causes crisp shadow lines of muted grey trees painted onto the white earth, and I think to myself that winter will be gone soon, and spring is beginning to nudge at the door, wanting in. At the points where the seasons come closest together and begin to mingle that little bit, I never cease to find myself wanting to breathe in every moment and remember it. We like to think we have four seasons, and the calendar tells us we have four, but how can this be possible on a day like today?

I have been pondering T.S. Eliot's life, the impressions he must have soaked in with a country centering around the War effort. Eliot was an assistant at Harvard in 1913-14. He was then awarded a travelling fellowship, and went to study for the summer at Marburg in Germany, but the outbreak of war forced him to Oxford. This move for Eliot was pivotal in his life because three major life changes happened: he gave up the appearaance of the philosopher for the reality of the poet, he married, and he settled in England.

I have also been pondering my paternal Grandparents' lives and that of my Dad too. Grandmother in England with young children, Grandfather in France in the trenches, lives in uproar, W.W. I, then immigration to Canada, 1926, and what my Dad always recalled as one of the best days of his life, to finally know he was here and walking around.

To get back to my daydream....I found this wonderful Eliot piece (The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry Second Edition, P504.) It's the last of Eliot's Four Quartets. Each Quartet is based upon one of the four elements. Each of his Quartets is divided into five parts and this, "Little Gidding" being based on "fire". This is the First Part, of the Fourth Quartet.

Little Gidding
II
Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
when the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindnes in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more suddern
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

T. S. Eliot 1942

Note: Little Gidding was an Anglican religious community founded in 1625 by Nicholas Ferrar; it is now a village in Huntingdonshire. Although the community lasted only twenty-two years, the memory of its devotion persisted, and the chapel was rebuilt in the nineteenth century.