“And the Fire and the Rose are One”: Shared Imagery in Dante and T.S Eliot, Pt. 3

T.S Eliot imbues his poetry with a sense of longing for lost beauty. He describes an abandoned rose garden.

Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose garden (Burnt Norton 1.11–14).

Both Eliot and Dante use roses to describe their vision of beautiful and harmonious world. Humanity began in the garden of Eden but was cast into the world of weeds and briars after the Fall.

But to what purpose / Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves / I do not know (Burnt Norton 1.16–18).

Eliot’s culture seems to have given up hope of beauty and harmony. What used to be a garden is now a patch of weeds from seeds sown carelessly by the rushing wind.

“Ash on an old man’s sleeve / Is all the ash the burnt roses leave” (Little Gidding 2.54–55).

Roses are a lost state of glory. The fires of the world wars have destroyed beauty and harmony and the speaker has taken the warning on Hell’s gates to heart

ABANDON ALL HOPE YOU WHO ENTER HERE (Inferno 3.9).

But like a blossoming flower, the petals of the rose expand in Eliot’s poem as he begins to describe the reorientation needed to understand the transcendent.

For liberation — not less of love but expanding / Of love beyond desire (Little Gidding 3.157–158).

Modern man does not just crave meaning or order, he craves transcendence. Any bureaucratic corporation or government institution can be organized and claim its participants’ allegiance, but that life is unsatisfying–it merely ropes the dark wood into sections instead of blazing a path into the light. Hell is organized and Purgatory is meaningful, but Heaven unites organization and meaning in beauty.

In Paradise, Dante describes Heaven’s structure as a Celestial flower — souls each have their place among the petals and the center is where Dante “sees” the Trinity in the Beatific vision (Paradise 33.115–118). The rose is a way of organizing Heaven.

Into the many-petaled flower come down, / and from its leaves they rise again and go / where their Love dwells in day forevermore (Paradise 31.10–12).

This is symbolic. Roses express love, which is the essence of Heaven. St. Bonaventure refers to,

“The love that makes me beautiful . . .” (Paradise 12.31).

Love and beauty are interwoven, for love has the power to transform the mundane in the lovely. The revolving spheres organizing Heaven indicate order, but the beauty of the flower perfects the order. Pure organization is merely bureaucratic, but harmony comes from the purposeful integration of order and beauty. As a rose’s individual petals all connect to form a pattern, love unites beauty, harmony, order, and passion.

The three transcendentals –goodness, truth, and beauty — are all needed to restore what was lost in Dante’s crisis and Eliot’s angst. Beauty expresses goodness and truth in a way that captures the heart as well as the mind. Eliot concludes his poem,

All manner of thing shall be well / When the tongues of flame are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one (Little Gidding 5.255–258).

While Hell’s rebellious passion has no place in Heaven, Paradise is not ruled with Purgatorial rigor and penances. The flames in Heaven do not destroy the Celestial Rose. Instead, the union of the fire and rose shows that passion blossoms into harmony and beauty. Order, beauty, and passion are all connected when revolving around Eliot’s “still point” of Divine love.