Little Gidding by Thomas Stearns Eliot and Asphodel, That Greeny Flower by William Carlos Williams both treat sin as a necessary precursor to redemption. Both of the poems as well are uncertain that love has any kind of redemptive power. For Eliot says in Book IV of Little Gidding: “Who then devised the torment? Love. / Love is the unfamiliar Name / Behind the hands that wove / The intolerable shirt of flame / Which human power cannot remove. / We only live, only suspire / Consumer by either fire or fire” (Eliot 5). Williams, on the other hand, does acknowledge the power of love “There is no power / so great as love”, but also wonders if there is redemption through love left for him or if he has waited too long, “I cannot say / that I have gone to hell /for your love / but often / found myself there / in your pursuit” (Williams 7).
Eliot’s poem is filled with existential angst over every beginning only representing a new ending. The speaker now understands that despite our inability to draw anything more than temporary moments of happiness out of life, this understanding makes him know how to live life more fully for the first time, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” (Eliot 6).
In the beginning of the poem the speaker is lamenting the fact that mortality eventually and across-the-board makes a mockery of all human endeavors, “The parched eviscerate soil / Gapes at the vanity of toil, / Laughs without mirth. / This is the dead of the earth” (Eliot 2). However, the speaker understands that the mistakes made in life come from being human and that in order to be redeemed one must sin. Sin comes from human desire and in order to find redemption one must learn to be liberated from desire by developing a higher form of love. This is the only path to redemption and the only way to be free f...