On "Burnt Norton"
Helen Gardner
The more familiar we become with Four Quartets, however,the more we realize that the analogy with music goes much deeper than a comparison of thesections with the movements of a quartet, or than an identification of the four elementsas 'thematic material'. One is constantly reminded of music by the treatment of images,which recur with constant modifications, from their context, or from their combinationwith other recurring images, as a phrase recurs with modifications in music. Theserecurring images, like the basic symbols, are common, obvious and familiar, when we firstmeet them. As they recur they alter, as a phrase does when we hear it on a differentinstrument, or in another key, or when it is blended and combined with another phrase, orin some way turned round, or inverted. A simple example is the phrase 'a shaft ofsunlight' at the close of 'Burnt Norton'. This image occurs in a rudimentary form in 'TheHollow Men', along with a moving tree and voices heard in the wind:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
At the close of 'Burnt Norton' a 'moment of happiness', defined in 'The Dry Salvages'as a 'sudden illumination' is made concrete by the image of a shaft of sunlight whichtransfigures the world:
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always --
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.
This is the final concrete statement of what 'Burnt Norton' is about; but it recallsthe experience we have been given in a different rhythm and with different descriptiveaccompaniments in the second half of the first movement, as the sun for a moment shinesfrom the cloud, and the whole deserted garden seems to become alive:
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
The image repeated, but with such a difference, at the close establishes the validityof the first experience. Brief and illusory as it appears in the first movement, it hasnot been dismissed. It has remained in thought and it returns. Though
Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away
when the 'sudden shaft' falls, it is time that seems the illusion.
From The Art of T.S. Eliot. Copyright © 1949 by The Cresset Press.
Helen Gardner
The subject of Burnt Norton can be defined in various ways. If we adopt themethod of commentators on The Divine Comedy, we may distinguish a literal, a moraland a mystical meaning. The literal meaning is simply that the poet has felt a moment ofinexplicable joy, a moment of release, like the moment Agatha speaks of when she looked'through the little door, when the sun was shining on the rose-garden'. It is a moment ofescape from the endless walking 'down a concrete corridor'; or 'through the stone passagesof an immense and empty hospital'. This moment of release from the deadening feeling ofmeaningless sequence, 'in and out, in an endless drift', 'to and fro, dragging myfeet’, into the present, the moment when, in Agatha's phrase, 'the chain breaks', isconnected here with the memory of 'what might have been'. The poem springs from thisexperience, and it sets by it another experience, which is sought deliberately, but whichis the same, for 'the way up is the way down'. If we pass from the literal to the moralmeaning we may say that the virtue to which Burnt Norton points us is the virtue ofhumility: a submission to the truth of experience, an acceptance of what is, that involvesthe acceptance of ignorance:
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.
If we pass then to the use of theological terms we may say that mystically thesubject of Burnt Norton is grace: the gift by which we seek to discover what wehave already been shown.
From The Art of T.S. Eliot. Copyright © 1949 by The Cresset Press.
Morris Weitz
However, it is in the Four Quartets that the immanence theory of time is workedout fully in poetic terms. The first lines open on what seems to be the classicalAugustinian conception of time, with its placing of the sense of the past and the futurein the present; but the poem soon shifts to an orthodox neo-Platonic theory:
[Quotes first 10 lines of "Burnt Norton"]
The present and the past are perhaps already part of the future but the future isdetermined by the past. In this sense, all temporal experiences are in the present, atevery moment, and we cannot redeem the temporal because it is never away from us to beredeemed. Also, and this becomes clear in the total context, 'All time is unredeemable'has another meaning: There is no redemption if we recognize only the flux. Further, eventhe realm of pure possibilities, of things that might have happened, is no different fromthe temporal: Past, present, future and possibility point to one end which is always withus; that is, which end, as the Eternal or Timeless, immanent in the flux, is the ultimatesource of explanation of it.
This notion of the Eternal or ultimate reality being immanent in the flux as the Logoswhich anyone can discern, but which only a few do discern, clarifies most of 'BurntNorton'. Consider the following lines;
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
The rose-garden is the key idea in this passage. Eliot has used this image in much ofhis poetry and there is cogent conflicting opinion about its meaning. Whatever the generalmeaning may be, if there is one, at least here it seems to function in a double sense, asan actual place -- a rose-garden; and as a symbol of those temporal experiences whichreveal most poignantly the immanent character of the ultimately real. Like the Christian'Kairos', the rose-garden symbolizes those moments that show, more than any others, themeeting of the Eternal and the temporal.
Besides the echo of the Logos, which is the meaning of the temporal, there are otherechoes in the garden. There is, first, the deception of the thrush, calling us to a worldof mere temporality. But such a world is one of indolence and desiccation, a reiterationof the waste land and the land of the hollow men:
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air. . . .There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting,
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
There is also the echo of the undeceiving bird, who leads us to other, more alivevoices, to those who are less dignified and patterned: to those who can see thereality of the roses, for the roses do have 'the look of flowers that are looked at'.These are the voices of the children, hidden excitedly in the apple tree, who are laughingand singing; but who are, as we realize in 'Little Gidding', 'Not known, because notlooked for / But heard, half-heard, in the stillness / Between two waves of the sea.'
The bird is the messenger of Truth, telling us that the rose-garden echoes with life:and that this life itself is a manifestation of something which is more than the mereflux. But the bird also knows that man will not acquiesce to that which is true:
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
The second movement of 'Burnt Norton' sharpens the immanence conception of time: thatthe Eternal or Timeless is the ultimate dimension of the flux and gives it whateverreality and meaning it has. After an introductory passage, in which physical movement,'The trilling wire in the blood', epitomized in the struggle between the boarhound and theboar that ends in death, is falsified as the only movement there is, we come to true,nonphysical movement:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
The still point, of course, is the symbol of the Logos, but it is also the symbol ofthe Christian God. In God is the source of movement and the temporal. Not that God ismovement; rather from Him emanates movement, to utilize a neo-Platonic idea. There is thetemporal, the flux; but without God, the Timeless, there would be no temporal.
To experience the Eternal, the 'still point', is to transcend the temporal; it is togive up desire, action and suffering; to rise upto God, but with no physical action; andto understand both theTimeless and the temporal for the first time:
[Quotes from "I can only say, there we have been; but I cannot say where" to "The resolution of its partial horror."]
We must start with the temporal, the ever-changing experience; and come to see itsdependence upon the Timeless:
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
In the final movement of 'Burnt Norton', the distinction between the Timeless and thetemporal becomes the distinction between The Word and words. Words lie, but it is onlythrough words that we can conquer them, to express the truth which is The Word. And whatwe want to say we cannot say because words are always changing, being in the flux; buteven with words we can suggest The Word: That God, Who is the Final
Cause, did initiate the first event and does determine the last event:
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
The movement and the poem end with a concrete and visual return to the rose-garden withtheir contrast between the inadequate affirmation of the sole reality of the flux and thetrue recognition that there is something more, the Eternal, echoing in the laughter of thechildren. How ridiculous, then, the sole acceptance of 'the waste sad time Stretchingbefore and after'.
From "T.S. Eliot: Time as a Mode of Salvation." Sewanee Review (1952).
F. O. Matthiessen
It seems doubtful whether at the time of writing 'Burnt Norton', just after Murderin the Cathedral, Eliot had already projected the series. His creative energies forthe next three years were to be largely taken up with The Family Reunion, which, tojudge from the endless revisions in the manuscript, caused him about as much trouble asanything he has done. With 'East Coker' in the spring of 1940 he made his first experimentin a part for part parallel with an earlier work of his own. Again Donne's practice issuggestive: when he had evolved a particularly intricate and irregular stanza, heinvariably set himself the challenge of following it unchanged to the end of his poem. Butin assigning himself a similar problem for a poem two hundred lines long, Eliot has triedsomething far more exacting, where failure could be caused by the parallels becomingmerely mechanical, and by the themes and rhythms becoming not subtle variations but flatrepetitions. 'East Coker' does indeed have something of the effect of a set piece. Just asits high proportion of prosaic lines seems to spring from partial exhaustion, so itsresumption of themes from 'Burnt Norton' can occasionally sound as though the poet wasmerely imitating himself. But on the whole he had solved his problem. He had made arenewal of form that was to carry him successively in the next two years through 'The DrySalvages' and 'Little Gidding'. The discrimination between repetition and variation tiesprimarily in the rhythm; and these last two poems reverberate with an increasing musicalrichness.
A double question that keeps insisting itself through any discussion of thesestructures is the poet's consciousness of analogies with music, and whether such analogiesare a confusion of arts. One remembers that Eliot, in accepting Lawrence's definition of'the essence of poetry' as a 'stark, bare, rocky directness of statement', drew an analogywith the later quartets of Beethoven. This does not mean that he has ever tried to copyliterally the effects of a different medium. But he knows that poetry is like music inbeing a temporal rather than a spatial art; and he has by now thought much about thesubject, as the concluding paragraph of 'The Music of Poetry' shows:
I think that a poet may gain much from the study of music: how much technical knowledge of musical form is desirable I do not know, for I have not that technical knowledge myself. But I believe that the properties in which music concerns the poet most nearly, are the sense of rhythm and the sense of structure. I think that it might be possible for a poet to work too closely to musical analogies: the result might be an effect of artificiality.
But he insists -- and this has immediate bearing on his own intentions -- that 'the useof recurrent themes is as natural to poetry as to music'. He has worked on that assumptionthroughout his quartets, and whether he has proved that 'there are possibilities oftransitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quartet',or that 'there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter', can beknown only through repeated experience of the whole series. All I wish to suggest here isthe pattern made by some of the dominant themes in their interrelation and progression.
'Burnt Norton' opens as a meditation on time. Many comparable and contrasting views areintroduced. The lines are drenched with reminiscences of Heraclitus' fragments on flux andmovement. Some of the passages on duration remind us that Eliot listened to Bergson'slectures at the Sorbonne in the winter of 1911 and wrote an essay then criticizing his duréeréelle as ‘simply not final'. Other lines on the recapture of time throughconsciousness suggest the aspect of Bergson that most stimulated Proust. But the chiefcontrast around which Eliot constructs this poem is that between the view of time as amere continuum, and the difficult paradoxical Christian view of how man lives both 'in andout of time', how he is immersed in the flux and yet can penetrate to the eternal byapprehending timeless existence within time and above it. But even for the Christian themoments of release from the pressures of the flux are rare, though they alone redeem thesad wastage of otherwise unillumined existence. Eliot recalls one such moment of peculiarpoignance, a childhood moment in the rose-garden -- a symbol he has previously used, inmany variants, for the birth of desire. Its implications are intricate and even ambiguous,since they raise the whole problem of how to discriminate between supernatural vision andmere illusion. Other variations here on the theme of how time is conquered are moredirectly apprehensible. In dwelling on the extension of time into movement, Eliot takes upan image he had used in 'Triumphal March': 'at the still point of the turning world'. Thisnotion of 'a mathematically pure point' (as Philip Wheelwright has called it) seems to beEliot's poetic equivalent in our cosmology for Dante's 'unmoved Mover', another way ofsymbolising a timeless release from the ‘outer compulsions' of the world. Stillanother variation is the passage an the Chinese jar in the final section. Here Eliot, in aconception comparable to Wallace Stevens' 'Anecdote of the Jar', has suggested how artconquers time:
Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
From The Achievement of T.S. Eliot. Oxford UP, 1958.
Hugh Kenner
The third section of 'Burnt Norton' provides a second experience, located not in theGarden but in the City, or rather beneath the City, on an underground platform, no doubtof the Circle Line. The Underground's 'flicker' is a mechanical reconciliation of lightand darkness, the two alternately exhibited very rapidly. The traveller's emptiness is'neither plenitude nor vacancy'. In this 'dim light' we have
neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
There is rotation, but it does not suggest permanence; there is darkness, purifyingnothing; there is light, but it invests nothing with lucid stillness; there is asystematic parody of the wheel's movement and the point's fixity --
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
not like the souls of Paolo and Francesca, who were somewhere in particular throughouteternity for a particular reason known to them, nor even like de Bailhache, Fresca, andMrs Cammel, who were disintegrated; but simply
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 actualreconciliation is to be achieved by 'descending lower', into an emptier darkness:
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: in the central section of the poemits central structural principle is displayed. The false reconciliation parodies the trueone, as the Hollow Men parody the saints, as Gerontion parodies Simeon, as Becket suicidewould have parodied Becket martyr, as the leader's eyes in which there is no interrogationparody that certainty which inheres 'at the still point of the turning world'.
In this Underground scene curiously enough, the instructed reader may catch a glimpseof 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, isspecifically 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.Whoever would leave the endless circle and entrain for the offices of Faber & Fabermust 'descend lower', and by spiral stairs if he chooses to walk. 'This is the one way,and the other is the same'; the other, adjacent to the stairs, is a lift, which henegotiates 'not in movement, but abstention from movement'. As Julia Shuttlethwaiteobserves in The Cocktail Party, 'In a lift I can meditate'.
After this whiff of the Possum's whimsy, section IV displays the flash of thekingfisher's wing, to offset an instance of the Light which rests. The sun is the stillpoint 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 lightinheres, which transient phenomena reflect. And section V presents language itself as atransience on which sufficient form may confer endurance. The poem ends with a reassertionof the possibility, and the significance, of timeless moments:
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always --
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.
In this elusive vision the moving dust in sunlight suggests the conditions of humanexistence, dust sustained and made visible by whatever power emanates from the stillpoint; 'quick' means both instantaneous and alive; here and now acquire momentarily thesignificance of 'always'; and the 'before and after' which for Shelley contained thosedistracting glimpses of 'what might have been', cease to tantalize: they are merelyaspects of 'the waste sad time' which the timeless moment has power to render irrelevant.
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 theaustere 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 arecapable of suggesting. It was a precarious unobtrusive masterpiece, which had for someyears no successor. . . .
The five-parted dialectic of 'Burnt Norton' is exactly paralleled three times over, andso raised by iteration to the dignity of a form.
Or so one would say, were not 'Burnt Norton', surprisingly enough, the exact structuralcounterpart of The Waste Land. That form, originally an accident produced byPound's cutting, Eliot would seem by tenacious determination to have analyzed, mastered,and made into an organic thing. 'Burnt Norton', terminating the 1935 Collected Poems, appearsmeant to bear the same relation to The Waste Land as Simeon to Gerontion. Itsrose-garden, for instance, with the passing cloud and the empty pool, corresponds to theHyacinth garden and the despondent 'Oed' und leer das Meer', while 'the heart oflight, the silence' that was glimpsed in the presence of the hyacinth girl is the taintedsimulacrum of that light which 'is still at the still point of the turning world'.
Each Quartet carries on this structural parallel. The first movement, like 'TheBurial of the Dead', introduces a diversity of themes; the second, like 'A Game of Chess',presents first ‘poetically' and then with less traditional circumscription the samearea of experience; the third, like 'The Fire Sermon', gathers up the central vision ofthe poem while meditating dispersedly on themes of death: the fourth is a brief lyric; thefifth, a didactic and lyric culmination, concerning itself partly with language, inemulation of the Indo-European roots exploited in 'What the Thunder said'.
from The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot. W.H. Allen & Co., 1959.
Denis Donoghue
The fifth and last movement of the poem is its most contentious part, for reasons I'lltry to explain. Much depends on the value we give to the first three lines: 'Words move,music moves / Only in time; but that which is only living / Can only die.' Itrecapitulates the statement about being conscious and remembering; as if to say that whileof course we have to live in time, we are not obliged to live according to its chronometeror in deference to its 'metalled ways'. The distinction between Chronos (Yeats: ‘thecracked tune that Chronos sings') and Kairos, the time of meaning and value, is much tothe point here. The silence into which words reach is, so far as it is attended to, theirmeaning, not their defeat:
Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
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.
And all is always now.
In The Living Principle Leavis gives an account of this passage so invidiousthat it impels him beyond the necessity of his argument into a commentary, finallynegative, on Eliot's entire later poetry. It is clear that he reached this position formany complicated reasons; including a radical shift in his scale of values, such thatEliot 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. Leavisallowed himself to be scandalized, in his commentary on 'Burnt Norton', by Eliot'sinsistence -- at least it appeared to Leavis to amount to insistence -- that 'the reallyreal ... is the eternal' (177). Except by relation to the ultimately real, which iseternal, human life has no significance: this is what Leavis accused Eliot of believing,on the evidence of 'Burnt Norton'. Eliot, that is, 'insists on the unreality, theunlivingness, of life in time' (179).
I don't find Eliot believing anything of the kind: he couldn't have believed it andstill be a communicant of a Church which is founded upon the redemption of time by theAnnunciation. How Eliot judged those forms of temporal life which, were content to be, inevery limiting sense, merely temporal, and to obey the call of punctuality and immediacy,is of course a different matter: on that, the evidence he has left is clear.
In 'Burnt Norton', the words which induced Leavis to protest are those which seem toentail 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'. 'The ultimate really real thatEliot seeks in Four Quartets', according to Leavis, 'is eternal reality, andthat he can do little, directly, to characterize' (175). Directly, of course not.Nor is there any pretence of 'characterizing'. Form, pattern and dance are merelyanalogies, ways of putting not 'eternal reality' but the poet's striving to apprehend it.Form, pattern and dance denote the point at which an otherwise mere event may be broughtto disclose its meaning; brought, by exerting upon it the pressure of a more demandingmoral and spiritual perspective than any judgement entailed in the immediacy of the eventitself.
That the meaning is dynamic is clarified by the 'Chinese jar' which 'still / Movesperpetually in its stillness'. Where Eliot comes a cropper is in his attempt to be morespecific than that, distinguishing between a visible and an audible stillness, and tryingto go beyond the distinction. 'Not that only, but the co-existence': the co-existence ofwhat? He finds it impossible to say just what he means; as the passage about theincapacity of words goes on to confess almost at once.
In the interval between Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion, Eliothad temptation much on his mind; the temptation of Thomas á Becket, of Harry's father, ofChrist in the desert and more generally the temptation of silence to dissolve in chatter.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:what the shadow is, or who or what the disconsolate chimera is. Eliot is rattling oldbones.
The poem ends more quietly in another attempt to represent the pattern as dynamic:
[Donoghue quotes from "The detail of the pattern is movement," to "Stretching before and after."]
Structurally, it is a return to the beginning, a discursive passage about time, loveand desire; a passage in which the English language, in this respect like Mallarmé'sFrench, seems to be intoning itself without requiring either a speaker or a listener to bein attendance. As in the first movement, we are released from its monitions to the imageryof gardens, children and laughter. The figure of the ten stairs comes from St John of theCross and may be left unglossed; it sustains the Heraclitean motif of the way up and theway 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: starting fromthe unquestionably rich ground of laughing children in the foliage, how to avoid losingor, worse still, humiliating the promise implicit in the sunshine and the laughter. How toconvert the low dream of desire into the high dream of love.
In the chapter on Alice in Wonderland in Some Versions of Pastoral WilliamEmpson remarks how a certain feeling about children developed in England after theeighteenth-century settlement had come to seem narrow and inescapable; a feeling 'that noway of building up character, no intellectual system, can bring out all that is inherentin the human spirit, and therefore that there is more in the child than any man has beenable to keep' (260-1). This idea of the child, 'that it is in the night relation toNature, not dividing what should be unified, that its intuitive judgment contains whatpoetry and philosophy must spend their time labouring to recover, was accepted by Dodgsonand a main part of his feeling' (261).'Burnt Norton' is full of this feeling, along with adoomed conviction that it can't be recovered, and that the only thing possible is toinvoke the plenitude of one's memory of such unity, and start again from there underbetter, because more exacting, auspices.
The success of 'Burnt Norton' is still in dispute. The reason is, I think, that none ofthe critical procedures developed and employed in the fifty years since the publication ofthe poem has been responsive to the kind of poetry we find in 'Burnt Norton'. I can putthis briefly by saying: nobody, not even Leavis, took up where D.W. Harding's account ofthe poem left off. Most of the critical procedures which have been used with success inthe analysis of poems have concentrated upon one or another of a limited set of terms:image, symbol and structure. No critical method has arisen which proposes to show thepoetic character and potentiality of discourse. It is still an effort to take the harm outof the word 'discursive'; as reviews of John Ashbery's poems sufficiently indicate.
From "On ‘Burnt Norton’" in Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot’s Four Quartets. Ed. Edward Lobb. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Donald J. Childs
Here is part of the argument and imagery of Four Quartets. First there is theargument by Bergsonian, Christian and Indian mystics alike that the moment of illuminationreveals (as in Plato's metaphor of the cave) the distinction between reality and its mereshadow. The sunlight fills the empty pool; presence is overcome by absence; meaning seemsto be revealed. Then there is Eliot's reservation about the Platonic language of light andshadow, for, given the values of light and shadow defined in the early essay, one finds asignificant ambiguity in this mystical moment of illumination in 'Burnt Norton'. It is notclear what has been revealed, what truth it is that humankind cannot bear. Is the light(presumably the light of the Gospel of John that becomes the Word by the end of this poem)real, marking all else as merely shadow? Or is shadow real (the darkness that comes withthe cloud), marking the momentary light as merely an illusion? It is not clear which ofthese phenomena the bird is calling 'reality'. The ambiguity is no accident; it comes fromEliot's disenchantment with the 'meretricious captivation' of this sort of 'promise ofimmortality' that he had encountered in Bergsonism. His fear was that the inner light wasno more trustworthy than the inner voice, I which breathes the eternal message of vanity,fear, and lust.' As always, the test is pragmatic; these moments 'can be judged only bytheir fruits.'
And yet pragmatism is no simple alternative to this mystical moment, Bergsonian orotherwise. One therefore also finds in 'Burnt Norton' the twenty-year fear of pragmatism'sreplacement of the spiritual part of our diet by fiction. The mysterious, lyrical fourthsection of the poem focuses upon this fruitless option. The puzzling rhetorical questionsserve to mock the pragmatic proposition that reality is a function of human need. Thepassing away of the sun (as in the first section of the poem, symbolically the realityoutside the human being) exposes the ludicrousness of the suggestion that we could replacethe sun: 'Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis / Stray down, bend to us:tendril and spray / Clutch and cling?' How can the world's being depend on human being?This section of the poem ironically reverses the bird's claim that humankind cannot bearvery much reality: it is no longer to bear reality in the sense of 'to endure' reality; itis to bear reality in the sense of 'to sustain, support, create' reality.
From "Risking Enchantment: The Middle Way between Mysticism and Pragmatism in Four Quartets." In Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot’s Four Quartets. Ed. Edward Lobb. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
A. David Moody
Thus, in the first movement of Burnt Norton, the theme of Time and its end isintroduced in the voice of impersonal thought, seeking a universal truth throughabstraction, logical argument, and the resolution of paradox. This modulates in the courseof lines 11-19 into a personal voice with a contrasting sense of "What might havebeen and what has been," a sense arising from experience rather than from abstractargument. Memory and imagination combine in a sustained development of this second themeas a paradoxical experience of the world of light. At its close, ("a cloud passed andthe pool was empty"), this voice rises in intensity - and then abruptly givesway to the detached voice of the opening lines. The arrangement of the voices in thesecond movement is the reverse of the first. It opens with a passage of taut lyricalwriting in a symbolist manner, as if memory and imagination were essaying their ownstatement of the universal truth of sensual experience. Then thought takes over andcontinues to the end in a sustained exploration of how time and the sensual body might betranscended. "At the still point of the turning world" appears at first to takeup the conclusion of the lyric; but the series of paradoxes would have us conceive a realmbeyond sense and contrary to sense. In fact the meditation begun in the opening lines ofthe poem is being resumed. If there is a pattern in earthly experience it is because"the one end, which is always present" may be found "At the still point ofthe turning world." The meditation unfolds through three distinct sections: eightlines of paradoxes determined by negatives and exclusions are followed by nine linespositively affirming what is to be aspired to; then there is a return to the inescapablecomplications of a consciousness that is in time and in the sensual body. Here memory andimagination re-enter, but now we find that they have been incorporated into the process ofthought and subjected to its perspective and its ends: "only in time can the momentin the rose-garden ... Be remembered; involved with past and future."
In the third movement the thought does what it will with the world of experience,determining its nature, and then dismissing it with outright satire. With "Descendlower, descend only" the meditation modulates rather suddenly into a third voice,that of prayer or exhortation. The desire and direction of the will which have beenpresent but in suspense from the beginning here reveal themselves as the motive-forcebehind the thought, from which they effectively take over now that it has done its workand prepared their way. The fourth movement, like the lyric at the start of the secondmovement, is an account of the world of experience. But it differs from it in beinginformed by the thoughtful critique of experience, and it affirms the light that is beyondsense. Moreover, it does this with an air of desiring to be with that light, and thus totranscend time. It would seem then that the three voices previously made out, and whichhave followed one upon another, are here heard in unison, thus producing the fourth voicewhich completes the quartet. It is wholly characteristic of Eliot that there should be ahierarchy of instruments, that the lower should give rise to the higher, and then becaught up into the ultimate voice and vision. (In the fifth movement of Burnt Norton thethree individual voices are heard both separately and together.)
From "Four Quartets: music, word, meaning, and value." In The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. (Ed.) A. David Moody. Copyright © 1994 by Cambridge University Press.
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