Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre - To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Love is the unfamiliar name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame.
Which human power cannot remove. Consumed by either fire or fire. T.S. Eliot, whose genius for being succinct remains unrivalled, wrote those remarkable words in his poem, The Four Quartets. Brief though they are, they capture an entire anthropology, a spirituality of longing, and a theology of Advent. They tell us that we are born congenitally dis-eased, incurably erotic, restless, consumed by a thirst that cannot be quenched and a fire that will not be stilled.