Burnt Norton

In dwelling on the extension of time into movement, Eliot takes up an image he had used in 'Triumphal March': Still another variation is the passage an the Chinese jar in the final section. Here Eliot, in a conception comparable to Wallace Stevens' 'Anecdote of the Jar', has suggested how art conquers time:. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness.

The third section of 'Burnt Norton' provides a second experience, located not in the Garden but in the City, or rather beneath the City, on an underground platform, no doubt of the Circle Line. The Underground's 'flicker' is a mechanical reconciliation of light and darkness, the two alternately exhibited very rapidly. The traveller's emptiness is 'neither plenitude nor vacancy'. In this 'dim light' we have. There is rotation, but it does not suggest permanence; there is darkness, purifying nothing; there is light, but it invests nothing with lucid stillness; there is a systematic parody of the wheel's movement and the point's fixity The strained time-ridden faces Distracted from distraction by distraction Filled with fancies and empty of meaning Tumid apathy with no concentration.

Light and darkness are opposites, apparently united by this flicker. Their actual reconciliation is to be achieved by 'descending lower', into an emptier darkness:.

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Descend lower, descend only, Into the world of perpetual solitude, World not world, but that which is not world, Internal darkness, deprivation And destitution of all property, Desiccation of the world of sense, Evacuation of the world of fancy, Inoperancy of the world of spirit; This is the one way Opposites falsely reconciled, then truly reconciled: The false reconciliation parodies the true one, as the Hollow Men parody the saints, as Gerontion parodies Simeon, as Becket suicide would have parodied Becket martyr, as the leader's eyes in which there is no interrogation parody that certainty which inheres 'at the still point of the turning world'.

In this Underground scene curiously enough, the instructed reader may catch a glimpse of the author, sauntering through the crowd as Alfred Hitchcock does in each of his films. For its locale, Eliot noted, sharing a private joke with his brother in Massachusetts, is specifically the Gloucester Road Station, near the poet's South Kensington headquarters, the point of intersection of the Circle Line with the Piccadilly tube to Russell Square. After this whiff of the Possum's whimsy, section IV displays the flash of the kingfisher's wing, to offset an instance of the Light which rests.

The sun is the still point around which the earth turns, and light is concentrated there; it subtly becomes for Eliot does not name it a type of the still point where every variety of light inheres, which transient phenomena reflect. And section V presents language itself as a transience on which sufficient form may confer endurance. The poem ends with a reassertion of the possibility, and the significance, of timeless moments:. In this elusive vision the moving dust in sunlight suggests the conditions of human existence, dust sustained and made visible by whatever power emanates from the still point; 'quick' means both instantaneous and alive; here and now acquire momentarily the significance of 'always'; and the 'before and after' which for Shelley contained those distracting glimpses of 'what might have been', cease to tantalize: This remarkable poem, which no one, however well acquainted with Eliot's earlier work, could have foreseen, brings the generalizing style of the author of 'Prufrock' and the austere intuitions of the disciple of Bradley for the first time into intimate harmony.

Suggestion does not outrun thought, nor design impose itself on what word and cadence are capable of suggesting.

T. S. Eliot Poems

It was a precarious unobtrusive masterpiece, which had for some years no successor. The five-parted dialectic of 'Burnt Norton' is exactly paralleled three times over, and so raised by iteration to the dignity of a form. Or so one would say, were not 'Burnt Norton', surprisingly enough, the exact structural counterpart of The Waste Land. That form, originally an accident produced by Pound's cutting, Eliot would seem by tenacious determination to have analyzed, mastered, and made into an organic thing.

Its rose-garden, for instance, with the passing cloud and the empty pool, corresponds to the Hyacinth garden and the despondent 'Oed' und leer das Meer', while 'the heart of light, the silence' that was glimpsed in the presence of the hyacinth girl is the tainted simulacrum of that light which 'is still at the still point of the turning world'. Each Quartet carries on this structural parallel. The fifth and last movement of the poem is its most contentious part, for reasons I'll try to explain.

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Much depends on the value we give to the first three lines: The distinction between Chronos Yeats: The silence into which words reach is, so far as it is attended to, their meaning, not their defeat:. Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, Not that only, but the co-existence, Or say that the end precedes the beginning, And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end.

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And all is always now. In The Living Principle Leavis gives an account of this passage so invidious that it impels him beyond the necessity of his argument into a commentary, finally negative, on Eliot's entire later poetry. It is clear that he reached this position for many complicated reasons; including a radical shift in his scale of values, such that Eliot must be diminished by a revised comparison with Lawrence, a fate that Lawrence, too, suffered by still later comparison with the Tolstoy of Anna Karenina.

Leavis allowed himself to be scandalized, in his commentary on 'Burnt Norton', by Eliot's insistence -- at least it appeared to Leavis to amount to insistence -- that 'the really real Except by relation to the ultimately real, which is eternal, human life has no significance: Eliot, that is, 'insists on the unreality, the unlivingness, of life in time' I don't find Eliot believing anything of the kind: How Eliot judged those forms of temporal life which, were content to be, in every limiting sense, merely temporal, and to obey the call of punctuality and immediacy, is of course a different matter: In 'Burnt Norton', the words which induced Leavis to protest are those which seem to entail a claim, on Eliot's part, to know what 'the meaning' is; such words as 'form' and 'pattern', and, from an earlier movement, 'the dance'.

Directly, of course not. Nor is there any pretence of 'characterizing'. Form, pattern and dance are merely analogies, ways of putting not 'eternal reality' but the poet's striving to apprehend it.

Burnt Norton - Wikipedia

Form, pattern and dance denote the point at which an otherwise mere event may be brought to disclose its meaning; brought, by exerting upon it the pressure of a more demanding moral and spiritual perspective than any judgement entailed in the immediacy of the event itself. Where Eliot comes a cropper is in his attempt to be more specific than that, distinguishing between a visible and an audible stillness, and trying to go beyond the distinction.

He finds it impossible to say just what he means; as the passage about the incapacity of words goes on to confess almost at once. The last lines of this movement are perhaps melodramatic:. The Word in the desert Is most attacked by voices of temptation, The crying shadow in the funeral dance, The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera. I can't find any particular -- or particularly cogent -- meaning in the last two lines: Eliot is rattling old bones.

As in the first movement, we are released from its monitions to the imagery of gardens, children and laughter. The figure of the ten stairs comes from St John of the Cross and may be left unglossed; it sustains the Heraclitean motif of the way up and the way down. It would be more useful to quote, from the third movement of 'Little Gidding', the passage about the use of memory:.

This is the use of memory: For liberation -- not less of love but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the future as well as the past. This is what 'Burnt Norton', and indeed the other Quartets, are about: How to convert the low dream of desire into the high dream of love. In the chapter on Alice in Wonderland in Some Versions of Pastoral William Empson remarks how a certain feeling about children developed in England after the eighteenth-century settlement had come to seem narrow and inescapable; a feeling 'that no way of building up character, no intellectual system, can bring out all that is inherent in the human spirit, and therefore that there is more in the child than any man has been able to keep' This idea of the child, 'that it is in the night relation to Nature, not dividing what should be unified, that its intuitive judgment contains what poetry and philosophy must spend their time labouring to recover, was accepted by Dodgson and a main part of his feeling' The success of 'Burnt Norton' is still in dispute.

The reason is, I think, that none of the critical procedures developed and employed in the fifty years since the publication of the poem has been responsive to the kind of poetry we find in 'Burnt Norton'. I can put this briefly by saying: Harding's account of the poem left off. Most of the critical procedures which have been used with success in the analysis of poems have concentrated upon one or another of a limited set of terms: Indeed, travelling in the elevator offered a different kind of Erhebung , we might say.

It is also a modern-day version of the Dark Night of the Soul, descending into the darkness. How can poetry address these paradoxes and problems of time, lived experience, and spiritual meaning? A number of opposites — movement and stillness, being and not-being — are here presented. Eliot , cannot be adequately paraphrased. Nor can one arrive at a neat, simplistic analysis of its themes and paradoxes. It is best viewed, perhaps, as a meditation on time and religious devotion, on the difference between materialist experience of the world and a deeper, spiritual existence.

But even this raises further questions — questions which we are probably not meant to be able to answer. Burnt Norton House by Michael Dibb, ; via geograph. The connection between the poem and the play is deep; many of the lines for the poem come from lines originally created for the play that were, on E. Martin Brown's advice, removed from the script.

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There were lines and fragments that were discarded in the course of the production of Murder in the Cathedral. However, these fragments stayed in my mind, and gradually I saw a poem shaping itself round them: Like many of Eliot's works, the poem was compiled from various fragments that were reworked over many years. In , the poem was included in Collected Poems — , [5] of which 11, copies were published; [6] the collection symbolically represented the completion of his former poems and his moving onto later works. The original Norton House was a mansion burned down in by its owner, Sir William Keyt , who died in the fire.

Even after their time at Burnt Norton, Eliot stayed in close correspondence with her and sent her many of his poems. Instead, it is the garden surrounding the manor that became the focus. The poem begins with two epigraphs taken from the fragments of Heraclitus:. The first may be translated, "Though wisdom is common, the many live as if they have wisdom of their own"; the second, "the way upward and the way downward is one and the same. The poem was the first of Eliot's that relied on speech, with a narrator who speaks to the audience directly.

The scene provokes a discussion on time and how the present, not the future or past, really matters to individuals. Memories connect the individual to the past, but the past cannot change. The poem then transitions from memory to how life works and the point of existence. In particular, the universe is described as orderly and that consciousness is not found within time even though humanity is bound by time. The scene of the poem moves from a garden to the London underground where technology dominates.

Those who cling to technology and reason are unable to understand the universe or the Logos "the Word", or Christ. The underworld is replaced by a churchyard and a discussion of death. This, in turn, becomes a discussion of timelessness and eternity, which ends the poem. Eliot believed that Burnt Norton could benefit society.

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The poem's narration reflects on how humankind is affected by Original Sin , that they can follow the paths of either good or evil, and that they can atone for their sins.