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On 1st December 1942, T.S. Eliot published Little Gidding, the final poem in the sequence that would become Four Quartets (1944). Printed on a special wartime allowance of rag paper, it appeared in Britain as a stapled pamphlet with an initial run of 16, 775 copies. That figure — which would be a spectacular and unsaleable number for a single poem by a well-known poet today — gives some idea of the readership for his work. By March 1943, it went to a second printing.
Little Gidding — which would be Eliot’s last major poem before he devoted himself to writing plays — has remained one of his most widely quoted works after The Waste Land. Its resonant statements include “History is now and England”, “All shall be well” (borrowed from the mystic, Julian of Norwich), and the famous last line: “The fire and the rose are one”.
This week, though, I’ve been thinking about what I’m pretty sure is the strangest phrase in this well-known poem — two words whose meaning has puzzled readers, but whose sound may in fact have been key to the rest: “zero summer”.
The phrase ends the first verse-paragraph of Little Gidding, which opens — as did The Waste Land (“April is the cruellest month”) — like a weather forecaster speaking in riddles: “Midwinter spring is its own season”. The meaning of this is expanded in the lines that follow, which describe the contrasts of a bright cold day in the English countryside, when “the brief sun flames the ice” and
… 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?
But what is “Zero summer”? Helen Gardner, who wrote a book about Eliot’s drafts, The Composition of Four Quartets (1978), complained that
Whenever I am so rash as to agree to answer questions after a lecture on Four Quartets, I know that […] “Zero summer” will turn up.
This is Gardner’s footnote to a query raised by the first reader of a draft of the poem, Eliot’s friend John Hayward, who underlined the phrase and marked it with an X, asking
Is this an allusive reference to the Absolute Zero of physics? I feel a little uneasy about the epithet
Gardner comments, a little wearily:
Eliot did not answer this query. He might have saved his exegetes much trouble had he done so.
She is not wrong that it seems to have puzzled people trying to explain Little Gidding. But the fact that Eliot didn’t feel he needed to explain or defend the phrase may have its own significance.
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