[Poem] Little Gidding - T. S. Eliot

"Four Quartets" is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were published individually over a six-year period. "The Little Gidding" is the last of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. The poems were not collected until Eliot's New York publisher printed them together in 1943. They were first published as a series in Great Britain in 1944 towards the end of Eliot's poetic career. Four Quartets are four interlinked meditations with the common theme being man's relationship with time, the universe, and the divine. (from Wikipedia.org)

"There are three conditions which often look alike

Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: 

Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment 

From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference 

Which resembles the others as death resembles life, 

Being between two lives"

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"What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from."

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"We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started 

And know the place for the first time."

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"Through the unknown, unremembered gate 

When the last of earth left to discover 

Is that which was the beginning; 

At the source of the longest river 

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for 

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always-- 

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flames are in-folded 

Into the crowned knot of fire 

And the fire and the rose are one."