GRGR (8) Fire of Paradise

[ckaratnytsky at nypl.org]

     Contrite Mascaro asks:
     
     >Allusions so hot and heavy here that I got lost--what's the Fire of 
     >Paradise in 4 Quartets 
     
     OK, start snoring, John:
     
     Among Many other things, The 4 Q is a lyric prayer -- a plea for (and 
     acknowledgment of the necessity of) Divine intercession.  It 
     celebrates Eliot's religious conversion and announces his renunciation 
     of the love of worldly, created things.  Images of cleansing, 
     purifying fire and the like fill the poem:
     
     If to be warmed, then I must freeze
     And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
     Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.
     
     And:
     
     The only hope, or else despair
     Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre--
     To be redeemed from fire by fire.
     
     All are part of the poet's effort to divest his soul of earthly 
     attachments, thereby experiencing purgation and, most importantly, the 
     attainment of a (Dantean) union with the Divine through the ecstatic 
     (Paradisical) vision -- to see "the fire [of purified love] and the 
     rose [of spiritual love]" as one.
     
     The Rose, btw, has been a symbol of sexual and spiritual love since 
     the Song of Solomon and the Roman de la Rose.  In the R de la R, it's 
     actually a rosebud.  Some of us experience an ecstatic union with the 
     Divine in the female genitalia.  Others find it in the Schwinn.
     
     Chris