The Four Quartets- Little Gidding and Dante

So I found it especially hard to do a presentation on Little Gidding because as Dr. Sexson said, there is just so much there that it is almost hard to first nail down a singular meaning and second to try to fit everything in to a 45 minute presentation. So here are some things that i know i left out of my section and that i think deserve further exploration. I feel it is also important to point out that the section i had to present on was difficult, really difficult, so jam packed with imagery and meaning and allusion that it would seem almost impossible to fully understand and flush out. Eliot himself even remarked on this part of the poem as one of the hardest things he had ever written saying once that "This section of a poem-not the length of one canto of the Divine Comedy- cost me far more time and trouble and vexation than any passage of the same length that I have ever written."

Dante in Little Gidding Part II:
The meeting of the ghost in this part is very similar to Dante's meeting with Ser Brunetto. In book 15 of the Inferno, Dante and his guide Virgil come upon Dante's former master who was a politician and writer but is now among the sodomites. What seems important to me here is that in this meeting in the Inferno, the questions of immortality and death are brought up as Dante learns from Ser Brunetto that immortality can be found in ones literature which can last forever. This is an interesting moment in time in the poem as it is right after an air raid ( "After the dark dove with the flickering tongue/ Had passed below the horizon of his homing") and the fire that would be raining down upon Eliot in England is mirrored by the fire that is falling on the sodomites in Dante's Inferno. This image also brings to mind the fire that rained down on Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis, but that is for a different blog post all together. Upon seeing his former master Dante says "Siete voi qui, Ser Brunetto" or "Are you here, Ser Bruneto?" This is one of the lines that Eliot echoes in Little Gidding with the line " What! are you here?" Further Eliot makes use of Dante's description of Ser Brunettos in his use of the line "brown baked features" which is taken from Dante's exact same description of "lo cotto aspetto." This again happens in the lines " I fixed upon the down turned face" which comes directly from Dante's "Ficcai...la sua facia." It becomes clear that the influence of Dante in this part of the poem is overwhelming yet i still stick to my original conclusion that while Dante's work certainly played a large role in the section he also does not entirely make up the character of the ghost that Eliot encounters. Instead this "familiar compound ghost" in my understanding is, as Helen Gardener put it "both one and many" and is both "intimate and unidentifiable."