He, and those he addressed, had been spared in the great war, but to an unknown end and a misty purpose. The sure sign that Eliot is a great classical poet in the truest sense of the word is that modern readers who take the time to ponder his lines find that they apply equally to this age. We are climbers on an increasingly slippery slope, looking desperately for hand-holds to steady our uncertain ascent. The greatest help we can obtain in the trials of everyday living is the sense that we are not embarking into terra incognito. The knowledge that one of us has been there before and left traces of awareness and understanding strengthens the mind and spirit for the existential exercise which comes with each new day.
Home is where one starts from.
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In the end is my beginning. Eliot found that deeper communion in the Anglican church, to which he became a convert in the late 1920s.