In the first of our new series of weekly poetry features on the Faber Journal, we welcome the New Year with the first twenty lines of T. S. Eliot’s poem, ‘Little Gidding’.

from ‘Little Gidding’

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 blindness 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 sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

Copyright © The Estate of T. S. Eliot, 1944. Used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.

‘Little Gidding’ by T. S. Eliot is from Four Quartets.