The first time I saw Little Gidding, Cambridgeshire, was in Norwich public library. I had found a web page for the area which featured video panoramas of local landscapes. As the downloaded letterbox viewfinder panned slowly round to the chapel Eliot made famous - the digitised picture stretching occasionally, as if seen through old window glass - I was disappointed.
Earlier that week, I had dreamt I was there. The chapel was secreted among misty hills where monstrous birds swooped upside-down. The (virtual) reality was less romantic: a squat little building, with an oddly plain, pointy grey front and patched brick walls, at the end of what seemed to be someone's sprawling back garden.
Seeing Little Gidding is surprising. It reminds one how little Eliot actually says about it in the poem of the same name - the last of the Four Quartets, a sequence of extended lyrical meditations on religious experience. His economical description seems shaded with disappointment too:
...you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull façade
And the tombstone.
The humbleness of the scene is nevertheless appropriate to the Quartets' insistence upon humility. Eliot reminds the reader and himself, "you are not here to verify... or inform curiosity: You are here to kneel".
The second time that I saw Little Gidding, though, I was there to inform curiosity. Sixty years ago, in the middle of the second world war, Eliot, an émigré American, published a poem which settled unusually deeply into the English cultural consciousness. I wanted to know what the place which inspired it was like now.
I was a literary tourist; Eliot, a historical one. He came to see where, in the 17th century, a small Anglican community was founded by Nicholas Ferrar, a friend of the poet George Herbert (and ancestor of Ted Hughes). Famously, a fugitive Charles I fled there just before his arrest. The community was later destroyed by Cromwell's men. When Eliot visited in 1936, his interest had been whetted by reading an Anglican friend's unpublished verse-play, "Stalemate - The King at Little Gidding".
Driving from Norfolk to the place Eliot called "England and nowhere", I was reminded of his defamilarising evocation of "sombre November" in Murder in the Cathedral: "brown sharp points of death in a waste of water and mud". All around, leafless trees forked up from bare fields.
What I really wanted to see, I realised, was the "rough road". This was described, I thought, in the brilliant opening lines:
Midwinter spring is its own season,
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches
...Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow...
I walked back from the chapel's gravel car park to redo the approach on foot, as I had imagined it. The tarmac track was broken up by grass. On the left was a hedgerow and a ditch; on the right, barbed wire and a bumpy field. Again, on encountering the undazzling reality, I was struck by how artfully Eliot evokes without specifying; readers supply their own particular wet, bright, wintry English lane. There was a house at the end, and a postbox. As I reached these, a white van marked - I swear - "Reality" drove past.
Eliot visited only once, on a "really lovely day" in May. But his "midwinter spring" plays deliberately with the ambiguities of the English climate. The visit in 1936 was just before Whitsun, the fiery descent of the Holy Spirit to the disciples after Christ's resurrection. Eliot maps this memory on to a scene which suggests December, and Advent. In doing so, he echoes another 17th-century poet associated with Little Gidding, Richard Crashaw. Crashaw's "Hymn of the Nativity" has the Bethlehem shepherds singing of "Eternity shut in a span, / Summer in winter". The mystic motto of Four Quartets - "In my end is my beginning" - is applied to the Christian year, conceived as a single "timeless moment".
The chapel stands in an overgrown graveyard, by a dark pond. Inside, lines from "Little Gidding" are cross-stitched on wall-hangings. The visitor's book attests to the poem's power to inspire pilgrimage and impromptu recitation.
The restored interior is elegantly austere. Wooden columns and panelling line the walls. The oblong, stained-glass windows contain heraldic designs which filter out much of the natural light. Eliot's imagined detail of how "the light fails / On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel" might well have come to him on a sunny day in May here.
In 1936, the buildings near the chapel were a farm (hence the "pig-sty"). Some now house a residential Christian community. The farmhouse has become Ferrar House, a museum with gift shop, toilets and tearoom. I am the only visitor that morning, and the woman who lives there kindly shows me round herself.
The Eliot Room contains some memorabilia and comfortable chairs. There is the visitors' book signed by "TS Eliot" of "London". There is a modern painting which busily collages images from the poem. (Eliot's allusion to Charles I as a "broken king at nightfall" is inexplicably transmuted by the artist into a portrait of Charles, the current Prince of Wales, clinging gormlessly to a galloping horse.) And there is a first edition of the poem - a pamphlet of coarse, grey wartime paper - issued by Faber on the first day of Advent 1942.
Eliot needed a fourth quartet which would unite the sequence. The three already published - "Burnt Norton", "East Coker" and "The Dry Salvages" - were inspired by places of personal significance in England and America. "Little Gidding" represented Eliot's remarkable self-transformation into an Anglo-Catholic British citizen.
The previous poems corresponded respectively to the elements air, earth and water. Now a firewatcher in the Blitz, in 1941 Eliot began his "fire" quartet. It concludes with a symbolic vision of peace - of fire eternally tamed:
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Ted Hughes once rightly compared Eliot's ear for resonant English to the King James Bible. For many of its first readers "Little Gidding", with its declaration that "History is now and England", became a verbal touchstone of comparable resonance to Churchill's speeches (which Eliot is known to have admired).
I left with postcards and a Little Gidding leather coaster. Proofs only, perhaps, that I had "had the experience but missed the meaning" ("The Dry Salvages"). But I had also witnessed the thrift of a great poet. From his early poems set on Boston's "sawdust-trampled" streets, to his later pilgrimage past an English pig-sty, Eliot relished the dramatically sparse, the memorably unpicturesque.
· Jeremy Noel Tod is a free-lance writer
