European commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s words on completion of Brexit negotiations were taken from TS Eliot’s Little Gidding, the final part of his Four Quartets, and his last great poem. It’s a work rooted in Englishness (written in London at the height of the blitz, and in part a reflection on “now and in England”), yet also deeply attached to wider European traditions, from Dante (“The first-met stranger […] Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled”) to Greek tragedy. It’s the most Christian of the Four Quartets, but profoundly meaningful to the irreligious, too, a poem haunted by themes of time, belonging and the necessity and fear of returning. Each Quartet reflects one of the elements from which many ancient cultures believed the cosmos had been created: air (Burnt Norton), earth (East Coker), water (The Dry Salvages), and fire (Little Gidding). Fire serves as a symbol of the blitz (“The dove descending breaks the air/ With flame of incandescent terror”) and as an echo of Dante’s exploration of purgation and renewal. Little Gidding speaks, if you must, to both Leavers and Remainers, depending on how one reads it. But it speaks much more deeply about time, memory and meaning. “In my beginning is my end”, “In my end is my beginning.” The lines that open and end East Coker, the second of the Four Quartets, and are echoed in Little Gidding, form the epitaph on Eliot’s grave in St Michael’s church in East Coker, the Somerset village from which his ancestors had, in the 17th century, departed for America. Rereading Four Quartets is a fitting epitaph for 2020 and no better way of reflecting on the year to come.