How inspiration happens on a winter's day January 2, 2026

"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."

T. S. Eliot from poem "Little Gidding"

I came across this short excerpt from the long poem Four Quartets by Eliot, but I didn't know at the time where it came from. I just knew that it spoke to me about the leaving and arriving in our lives and how the returns to places of our past reveal things to us at the same time as it remains familiar - never quite the same.

When I meet my friends for lunch in Maple Shade, I drive by the places where I spent my teens, those years so fraught with the fires of emotion and which mark the major transitions in life, the leaving of the family home and the setting off into the world of independence. I see the place where I swam in the black water of the Pennsauken Creek and the little bridge I drove across a hundred times in the car of my teenage sweetheart. This is the creek where I contracted a deadly liver disease which also changed my life due to my Proustian confinement to my bedroom for nearly a year, the time it took to recover from the advanced ravages of Hepititis A.

Visiting the poem to find the context of this remarkable set of lines brought me back to another kind of memory, the kind of memory a dog might have visiting, in dead of winter, a park where it romped years ago in summer. It reminded me of college and the excitement and passion that I experienced in studying literature, the beauty and mystery of the use of words by brilliant minds.

Many people feel the desire to voice their strong feelings in what they call poetry, or some call music lyrics. I subscribe to an e-mail that sends me a poem a day, but I rarely find them inspiring or even very interesting. I guess I got spoiled by my exposure to serious and scholarly poets who were profound and visited big themes like life and death, war and survival, the immense passage of time in human lives; these are the poets who have stood the test of time itself and remain in our collective memory. Too much of the 'poem a day' offerings are pedestrian in wording and revolve around romantic disappointment complaints. They never offer a set of lines that grab me and make me want to write them down in my journal and look up the origin.

The lines above were written by T. S. Eliot during World War 2 when he was a 'fire watcher' during the blitz. He remembered the chapel in a village called Little Gidding. Reading some of the people who studied/analyzed and experienced this poem, I discovered it was the last poem Eliot ever wrote. Number four in a quartet.

Here is another quote that I chose from the poem:

"....for history is a pattern of timeless moments.

Sp while the light fades on a winters afternoon in a secluded chapel

History is now and England."

Surprisingly, T. S. Eliot was not a born Englishman but an American born in Missouri. He moved to England in 1914 to study at Oxford but World War I changed his plans. He stayed in London to work as a teacher and a bank clerk. He became a citizen in 1927 and a major figure in literary 'modernism.' His most famous work is probably The Wasteland.

I think this excerpt speaks to how events change our plans:

"Either you had a purpose

or the purpose is beyond the end you figured

And is altered in fulfilment."

Happy trails through your own drear midwinter afternoon - may a line of poetry make a flame in your mind. wrightj45@yahoo.com