T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, IIIa “In this twittering world”

29 Friday Oct 2021

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Burnt Norton, Distraction, poem, Poetry, Poetry Analysis, T.S. Eliot, Time, Twittering

III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: 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.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

This next section of the poem has resonance and even some ironic humor not conceivably present to Eliot, but unavoidable to see now. So I am going to take a section out of order and begin there:

Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

We cannot miss the last phrase, “in this twittering world.” The ironic use of the word “twitter” for Twitter (like the Facebook’s “friends”) reads like a parody of postmodernism. But look back how Eliot gets to a “twittering world”: it is the

Eructation of unhealthy souls

Into the faded air.

Like volcanoes, these unhealthy souls are bleching into the air. But the air is faded: it is worn out. This is not a place of healthy life (the souls are unhealthy), but ghostly existence which is not quite alive or dead. It sweeps across the world after the Great War has ruined all and the next war is on its way.

Note: This is not even the darkness:

Not here

Not here the darkness.

They are not in the darkness, that would be too definite. I cannot help but think of his lines from the Waste Land:

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

There is an insistence of modern life, which its getting and spending: Eliot living in the bitter parody of Romanticism. As Wordsworth wrote

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

These people are too busy to be redeemed. Consider the lines immediately prior to what we have considered:

Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.

The language sounds prophetic as to contemporary screen-based reality and life:

Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning.

Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction

We are distracted from distraction by yet another distraction. And there is no meaning in anything

Filled with fancies – that is diversions—and all of it: “empty of meaning.” It would be difficult to better skewer modern life. And none of this would lead to the anti-capitalist socialism. The problem is far deeper than an economic structure. Notice the line

Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces

Marxism is intensely time-bound: the dialectic moves through economic powers through time. But this being time-bound is the trouble: These faces are faces who cannot escape time. Is “all time … unredeemable”?

Now we can consider how Eliot begins this section:

He is speaking of a very particular place, the time before and the time after: Before and after what? The still point he has been writing of. A place to get outside of the driving of history. But just on either side of a place of eternity (because Eliot seems to be thinking of Boethius’ understanding of eternity) there is

a place of disaffection
Time before and time after

That before and after comes again in lines we have already considered:

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.

So what we have “a place of disaffection”, a time-ridden place, without meaning, capable of offering nothing but distraction. It is a place of “faded air,” a place without even darkness:

In a dim light: 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.

This place outside of the still point has less than true human existence. It is not day or night. It is a place without beauty. The darkness which is not present in the time before and after

Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Is the darknight of the soul: a darkness which “purifies the soul.” Note in particular how this darkness is the exact opposite of distraction and time-ridden:

Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.

There is no salvation is in the twittering world, but all the twittering world can offer is distraction. It is not even a place of fullness:

Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces

What then is the use of this poem? There is a note in Christianity of not being bound to the world

¹⁵Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. ¹⁶For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. ¹⁷And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

The poem takes us this strand but forces us to stare directly into what this world is: void all illusion. It is a world of nothing beyond distraction. The air is faded, because it will pass away. The world offers neither full joy nor purification. Come stare directly into this ghostly world which is neither alive nor dead. It is merely

Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind

I thought of adding a photograph of people staring into their phones.

A Garden Wall

21 Thursday Oct 2021

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China, great wall, poem, Poetry

Last night a friend (who grew up in China), told me of a traditional poem which illustrates the vanity of humans, and how we can so easily over estimate ourselves. He explained the rhyme scheme and stanza structure. I have attempted to take what he told me and create passable English verse. Whether it is successful as a re-creation of the Chinese poem or as passable verse I will leave to others. But since the exercise amused me, I set it down here for the possible amusement of others.

The width of a wall has troubled you so

You’ve written to me to ruin your foe

Your governor-brother across the state.

Your fields spread so far and wide

A thousand acres on every side:

The width of a hand has filled you with hate!

The Great Wall guards our state against the horde

It keeps our fields peaceful from all swords,

Even your walls are safe beneath its shade.

Tell me my brother, the name of the man

The name of the emperor of all the land

Who long ago raised the Great Wall of China.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton Iid

24 Friday Sep 2021

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Burnt Norton, Literature, poem, Poetry Analysis, Rose Garden, T.S. Eliot, Time

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 the draughty church at smokefall

Be remembered; involved with past and future.

Only through time time is conquered.

This last section makes a sort of argument:

To be conscious is not to be in time. Where is a space which is not in time? It is not the present. As the poem says in section I, “All time is eternally present.”

It could be time past or time future: the poet states these all “a little consciousness.”

But it is not the place of remembrance. The rose-garden, the arbour, the church, are all remembered and thus are all “in time.” That cannot be the place of consciousness.

There was the story about the rose-garden in section I, but that event does not seem real: at least it was not in time. Perhaps that is why it is both “conscious” (because it is not in time) and reality “human kind/Cannot bear very much reality.”

Perhaps this consciousness can take place “at the still point of the turning world.” This would match the case. Of this still point, he writes,

I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

Perhaps both the imaginary space and the “still point” are available for consciousness. They do not seem to be the same place, and they are both outside of time.

What then do we do this final line, “Only through time time is conquered.”

What must be conquered in time? And why must time be conquered? Is it to let us escape and enter into the garden with the thrush or to enter the still point?

This seems to bring up an issue early in the poem

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What is this redemption? From where to what? At this point, the question is tantalizing, but the answer is certainly not clear. Fortunately, there are three more sections in the poem.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton II.c

16 Thursday Sep 2021

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Boethius, Burnt Norton, eternity, poem, Poetry, Poetry Analysis, T.S. Eliot, Time

The inner freedom from the practical desire,

The release from action and suffering, release from the inner

And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,

Erhebung without motion, concentration

Without elimination, both a new world

And the old made explicit, understood

In the completion of its partial ecstasy,

The resolution of its partial horror.

Yet the enchainment of past and future

Woven in the weakness of the changing body,

Protects mankind from heaven and damnation

Which flesh cannot endure.

We now move from a description of this place where opposites are present – and not, the still place. Rather than examining this place, Eliot turns to consider the effect of this place upon the human being. This portion of the poem considers: what does this still point do to the one who enters it.

Working backwards, we can see a parallel here with the line in the first section “human kind/cannot bear very much reality.” Here, something has been interposed which

Protects mankind from heaven and damnation

Which flesh cannot endure.

There may be an allusion here to Paul’s statement in the great 15^th chapter of 1 Corinthians on the resurrection of the body that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.” The idea of Paul is that the human body must undergo a renovation to participate in the life to come.

Here, Eliot speaks of something which protects human flesh from experiencing a too real world. In making this world too real (I am borrowing from the language of the first stanza), it seems we are in a Platonic realm with this world of ideas and forms is more real than the physical world. Lewis plays on this idea in The Great Divorce.

Continuing to work backward from this protection

Yet the enchainment of past and future

Woven in the weakness of the changing body,

Protects mankind from heaven and damnation

Which flesh cannot endure.

The present, which is neither the past nor the future is “enchained” (a fascinating word here) and “woven” in the human body. Notice how he describes the human body, it is “changing.” I believe this must be a reference to the fact that the present is constantly new as this still point between the past and future changes.

It is a quite literal statement that our human body can be nowhere but in the present. I must admit that I am not certain as to what is the reference to “heaven and damnation.” I suspect this is a merism for the entirety of Platonic reality. We cannot move outside the present and thus the powerful currents around us cannot touch us here.

The movement in the first section to the phantoms would be a movement into this Platonic realm.

And this leads to a question: is this still place something which is there, something which is there and we do not notice it, or is it a place to which we must enter? Is it a psychological relationship to this place?

The beginning of this line of thought reads

The inner freedom from the practical desire,

The release from action and suffering, release from the inner

And the outer compulsion,

This reads very much like a Buddhist idea of enlightenment and being freed from an illusory relationship to “reality” – which is really an illusion. As such we are discussing a psychological/spiritual relationship which is the result of a different understanding of such things.

But the poem complicates this conception with a contrast, “yet”

yet surrounded

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,

Erhebung without motion, concentration

Without elimination, both a new world

And the old made explicit, understood

In the completion of its partial ecstasy,

The resolution of its partial horror.

It is not just the state of detachment, he adds here “a grace of sense.” This is quite different than the dissolution of the “I”. He is moving into something perhaps more similar to a Christian Platonism where eternity is an eternal now. (And at this point, perhaps he has Boethius in mind). Quoting the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy:

In Boethius, the contrast is between timeless eternity, which only God enjoys, and everlastingness, which (following Plato) the world itself possesses.

It is the common judgement, then, of all creatures that live by reason that God is eternal. So let us consider the nature of eternity, for this will make clear to us both the nature of God and his manner of knowing. Eternity, then, is the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life; this will be clear from a comparison with creatures that exist in time.

…for it is one thing to progress like the world in Plato’s theory through everlasting life, and another thing to have embraced the whole of everlasting life in one simultaneous present. (Boethius Consolation, V.VI., transl. V. E. Watts 1969)

Boethius uses his view of eternity to address the problem of divine foreknowledge (see section 6.2). If God knows beforehand what we will do then how can we act freely? His answer is that this problem dissolves in the face of the fact that God does not know anything beforehand but has an immediate, atemporal knowledge of all things. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/eternity/

I think this conception answers more nearly to Eliot’s thought at this point. It is as if one has moved into a realization where everything is frozen in an eternal now. Scenes in a movie where there is an explosion and than a freeze frame where the character looks around and see the matter in motion perfectly still might be a good idea here.

If so, then this is a realization of what is already there. It has just been lost. Our enchainment to the present protects us in a movement from seeing the eternity about it – and eternity as a place of heaven and hell.

Erhebung without motion

The precise meaing of the German here is beyond me because the word refers to a movement up so it could be an uprising or a physical rising or a metaphorical use of the conception. There is a rising without a motion.

both a new world

And the old made explicit, understood

In the completion of its partial ecstasy,

The resolution of its partial horror.

The old and new worlds could be past and future, or perhaps mundane and Platonic. Our relationship to them is “understood.” And that understanding is both an ecstasy and a horror, which would return us to the idea that reality is simply something which we cannot bear. Hence we are protected from the full experience of this place.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton II.b

12 Sunday Sep 2021

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Burnt Norton, Literature, Parmenides, poem, Poetry, Poetry Analysis, T.S. Eliot

The previous post on this poem may be found here.

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.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

This strikes as quite similar to Parmenides’ denial of motion. In his poem, at fragment 8, beginning at line 26 we read:

But motionless within the limits of great bonds,
it is without a beginning and without an end, since the birth and death
were rejected very far, a real certainty expelled them.

It would be possible to translate the language a bit differently. For instance, it could be “birth and destruction.” The language of “real certainty” is a combination of “truth” and “trust” (or faith or belief). A fundamental difference between Parmenides is that the philosopher seems to hold that all things are without motion. Eliot, on the other hand, seems to be describing a particular place:

At the still point of the turning world.

The world turns, but in the midst of that moving world is a place without motion. This space seems to answer a question which arises with the consideration of the world of the forest floor somehow being replicated in the sky, Where is the place of connection. How does one world touch the other?

Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement.

And

Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance

This center point is a place where opposites have come together: it not movement from or towards. It is not a place of past or future. There is no “way up” or “way down” (to use the language of motto for the poem).

It is a place without place:

I cannot say where.

It is a place without time

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

Notice the opposites which do not exist here:

There is no being:

Neither flesh nor fleshless;

There is physical distance:

Neither from nor towards;

….

Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline.

There is no movement or stillness:

But neither arrest nor movement.

There is no time:

And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered.

…

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, Part II.a

23 Monday Aug 2021

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Boarhound, Burnt Norton, Peter Jones, poem, Poem Analysis, Poetry Analysis, T.S. Eliot, Time

We come to the second division of the poem. The first 15 lines which comprise a stanza and certainly must be understood together read:

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle-tree.

The trilling wire in the blood

Sings below inveterate scars

Appeasing long forgotten wars.

The dance along the artery

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

Ascend to summer in the tree

We move above the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars.

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle-tree.

The mud thrown-up by the wagon as it plunges along spray up, unto the axle and would “clot” it. That makes plain sense. Yet is not the mud which is send to clot the wagon but the “garlic and sapphires.” This is a striking and strange phrase. Why would there be garlic or sapphires in the mud. Certainly one wouldn’t leave them there – certainly not sapphires. And then to have them merely muck thrown-up to the underside of a wagon. The world is certainly mixed up. But to what end is not apparent in these lines.

The trilling wire in the blood

Sings below inveterate scars

Appeasing long forgotten wars.

The precise nature of the “trilling wire” is not exactly clear. I certainly don’t think he intends any precise physiology on this point. Then what do we have: I take this as something similar to Whitman’s “I sing the body electric” or perhaps Thomas’ “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” It is some sort of live force that runs through all things. I think he means some sort of force in all living things (even all moving things) and more than just human life.

The “scars” above the blood here will become stars above all the rest. The combination of scars and wars works well: The war brought about the scar. The scar will never be removed, it is “inveterate”. And this life at work even beneath the scars of war appease the wars. But how so appease? To appease is to bring to rest some anger. There is a life which runs through and under even wars

Eliot writing after WWI and written during at least the first part of WW2 would not have a dim idea of war. But here the wars are “long-forgotten.” In saying this, he seems to be moving in a dim history. He is not speaking of his own life, but something of life. There is a history written in the life and in the scars. This present is not sharply marked-off from the past. The present bears the scars of the long forgotten wars and the same life sings beneath.

The dance along the artery

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

Ascend to summer in the tree

The distinctions between the life of his body and the life of nature also become lost. The life in his body is the life of the movement of the stars. The parts are mysteriously linked together. My pulse is tied up with the movement of stars (and visa-versa).

The effect is quite pagan, where gods become animals or have human lovers and humans have half-god children and humans may find themselves transformed into something quite different. (For a less poetic and more philosophical consideration, see Peter Jones, The Other Worldview)

What is important here for the overall theme of the poem is that it is not just time as an abstraction, but the all things which are bound up together in this moment which is present.

Next, it is the movement above and below which are reconciled and coordinated. The sky above and the mud below:

We move above the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars.

The chase of animals on the ground is the chase of animals in the stars. The music of the spheres is transported to what we “hear upon the sodden floor.”

But there is something else here than bare correlation of opposites or even all things are one: The verb “reconciled” is interesting. What is reconciled? Most directly the chase of the boar and the boarhound. Their conflict and fight is “reconciled” above.

This moves us in a somewhat different mood than bare pagan all is one and inter-vesting each the other. The conflict upon the earth is not merely reflected in the heaven, it is reconciled. This introduces a Christian tone which moves beyond Greek or Norse mythology. Everything is telling one story, but there is a way to understand this story, if you will, in a higher key.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton.6 (Phantoms Dancing)

18 Wednesday Aug 2021

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Burnt Norton, eyebeam, Literature, poem, Poem Analysis, Poetry, Poetry Analysis, T.S. Eliot

Having come through the door we meet the “them” promised by the thrush. Here is what was lurking in the poet’s “first world”

There they were, dignified, invisible,

Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,

In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,

And the bird called, in response to

The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,

And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses

Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.

The inhabitants are described as follows:

Dignified. That is a curious word to begin. We could just dismiss this as Eliot being proper. But something more seems here. Something which is unreal could easily be ridiculous: but there is an honor here of sorts.

Invisible: How then are known? Imagination. They cannot be remembered, because this is the world which has never been. And so we enter into the imaginary world somehow shared (whether Eliot with someone else, or perhaps with us the reader is unclear).

Moving: The idea of moving is coupled with the “unheard music” compels me to think of a dance. These phantoms (I don’t think “ghost” or “spirit” is right) are dancing over “dead leaves” but they break nothing. They “mov[e] without pressure.”

I’m not sure what to do with the “autumn heat” beyond notice that the whole has the feel of being stifling. There are phantoms, but nothing is stirring. It is hot, but there is no breeze. When this is coupled with the language from earlier about unstirred dust on rose leaves, there is a feeling of an utterly closed-up world.

This was a choice Eliot has made: while this old, closed up world is one way to imagine the never-has-been past, it is also the case that he could have produced a chaotic and vibrant never-have-been. This was a choice.

Notice the environment: the air is “vibrant” but like the dancers without pressure, the vibration is of a music which is not heard. Everything is it seems potential: this is what could have been: dancing, music. But not there.

The bird is here: it is the guide into this imaginary space. The bird calls to the unheard music: it is in the shrubbery, it is off-camera, coming from some place ou cannot see.

The eyebeam crossed: This is an idea as far back as Plato in Timeaus who explained that the fire made within us can cross through the eye and shine upon things to give sight:

“And of the organs they first contrived the eyes to give light, and the principle according to which they were inserted was as follows: So much of fire as would not burn, but gave a gentle light, they formed into a substance akin to the light of every-day life; and the pure fire which is within us and related thereto they made to flow through the eyes in a stream smooth and dense, compressing the whole eye, and especially the centre part, so that it kept out everything of a coarser nature, and allowed to pass only this pure element. When the light of day surrounds the stream of vision, then like falls upon like, and they coalesce, and one body is formed by natural affinity in the line of vision, wherever the light that falls from within meets with an external object. And the whole stream of vision, being similarly affected in virtue of similarity, diffuses the motions of what it touches or what touches it over the whole body, until they reach the soul, causing that perception which we call sight.”

The idea had various uses in science and art thereafter. Eliot certainly was not proposing this as a real effect (no one believed such in the 20^th century). So why then this reference here?

Eliot was influenced by the metaphysical poet John Donne (if you are interested, here is a paper on the topic, https://www.academia.edu/38522764/The_Poetry_of_John_Donne_T_S_Eliot_as_Critic_and_Poet) and perhaps these lines from Donne’s poem the Extasie were alluded to by Eliot

Our eye-beams twisted, and did thred

Our eyes, upon one double string;

If there is allusion to regret and love in the poem, then the reference to Donne would be appropriate and ironic.

Next comes a line which has always delighted me:

for the roses

Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at

This speculative space of what has never been is inhabited and it effects and affects. The eyebeams of the phantoms (?) have seen the roses – which calls back to rose leaves above. The roses disclose the presence of the lovers seeing one-another. The roses evidence the crossed gazed. The reality of this love played out in the unseen world.

And finally:

There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.

This raises a question: Is this imaginary space the poet’s own life? Are these true third parties. Or is this some alternative to himself: this is me if the world had been different?

And how then are they here as guests? They are not recriminating: accepted and accepting.

He never quite defines these phantoms. I think they must be poet and someone else (again a lover, the reader, is this written to a particular person and we are overhearing?) are the ones at issue. The “they” is not someone else but rather a who Eliot could have been.

The reference to the “eyebeams crossed” makes this intimacy a moment of lovers. And the prove of their presence is shown in the roses.

And for a moment, there is peace. We are permitted in; and we are at peace with this other self.

In the next movement, this equipoise will be dissolved.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton.5

12 Thursday Aug 2021

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Burnt Norton, Memory, poem, Poem Analysis, Poetry, Poetry Analysis, T.S. Eliot, Time

Other echoes

Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,

Round the corner. Through the first gate, (20)

Into our first world, shall we follow

The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

To put these lines into their context, here are the lines already considered. I have also added an underscore to the word “echo”.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable. (5)
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. (10)
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. (15)
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate, (20)
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

Looking back we can a major shift in line 11 with the first “echo”. The first ten lines are philosophical and distant. But at line 11 we enter into some sort of memory and that memory is an “echo”. The echo is of “footfalls” and so of some movement which never happened (down the passage which we did not take). At line 15 there is a bit of a pause, should we follow after this memory?

Then in middle of line 17, someone else intrudes and pulls the “we” toward the door which was never opened. Here there are “other echoes”. We will meet these phantoms in a bit, but here are just sounds.

So why this word “echo”. It is not a sound but the echo of the sound; it is not the original but the copy. By using the word “echo”, Eliot increases the dream quality. Also, these sounds are “echoes” because the original happened (or did not happen) in the past, but they are being experienced in the present.

We also learn what is on the otherside of the door which was never opened, “the garden.”

Raising the image of a “garden” holds all sorts of allusions, particularly in the hands of someone like Eliot. There is archetypal garden of Eden. There are also all of the wall, specially kept places as gardens.

Here the garden is “an abstraction” and a “perpetual possibility” which exists “only in a world of speculation.” To enter through this door in the memory is to enter into this “world of speculation.”

The image of the rose-leaves now comes into focus for we know where the roses came from: the garden in this memory.

But how could there be “other echoes” in this space? If the first echoes were the hurried steps to the door, who is on the other side of this door. But the “reality” (if you will) of the echoes beckon:

He then turns to the reader (?) “Shall we follow?” We could be overhearing his conversation with someone, or we could be the one spoken to: This would mean that in reading the poem, you are being addressed in the lines, “My words echo/Thus, in your mind.” And even if the poem is addressed to a particular “you” and “we”, the fact remains that the reader of the poem is the one who is following down the path toward the garden.

There is something quite mythical about a speaking bird leading one toward a garden. I feel there must be a particular allusion here, but I do not know what it is. It might be an allusion to the Norse god of poetry, Bragi. Whatever the allusion, the image is charming.

This bird calls “us” on quickly, and now we are hurrying down the pathway through the door, through the gate.

In lines 20-22 we have the word “first” used three times: It is the “first gate” and then twice “our first world.” When we couple this with the “garden” we have our first world is the garden: this points toward Eden – at least some pre-Fall world.

Now, Eliot will not actually place in the primeval garden, but there is a deliberate prelapsarian element: The fall may not be the fall of all humanity, but rather a much more personal “fall”. This is “our first world.”

Shall you (the reader, someone in particular to Eliot) and I (Eliot) open this gate in the memory and proceed to the world which didn’t happen and yet is this real to us?

There is one more point to consider, “The deception of the thrush.” What precisely is the thrush’s deception? That there is this “first world”? That we can enter it? If I am being called into something which is abstraction and possibility, is the call to consider that at all a deception?

Is it a deception to consider a world which never happened as a reality now?

And as we know from the first lines: this world which did not happen “point[s] to one end, which is always present.” This first world which did not happen brought about this present: a present where I am being deceived to enter a the garden of our first world.

It is fascinating because it allusive and difficult, but not muddled. He is describing something which cannot easily articulated: it is the vision out of the corner of your eye, the thought which startles and then slips away before you can focus. It is real and a deception; present and only a speculation.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton.4

10 Tuesday Aug 2021

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The previous post on the poem Burnt Norton may be found here

My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

It is a path “we did not take”. My words echo in your mind. We are entering into a profoundly private space, a space of shared memory such that as the poet thinks, he sees the memory as a shared space.

Then we come to the word “But.” We are entering into this shared memory. We have come to the door which was never opened at the end of the path which we never took. And as he is standing at the door, he stops short: Why am I doing this?

It is interesting that here the metaphor changes from a door at the end of a pathway to a bowl of rose-leaves so long undisturbed they are covered in dust. To open this memory is to open a door, but it is also to trouble something which has long been a peace.

The movement from a door – which is outside – to a bowl rose-leaves – which is inside makes for a dreamlike movement: it is a shift from one place to another, from one scene to another which have some sort of association which is not clear to one from the outside.

A pathway and a door have a certain usefulness and sturdiness which is completely absent from a bowl of rose-leaves. Someone has carefully placed the leaves in a bowl. They have grown dry and are so brittle that to touch them is to break them.

The image of the bowl of rose-leaves strikes me as something we would find in a house which has long been unoccupied, or at least a room so. If the door opens to a space we never entered, then the rose leaves are in a room to which we never returned.

And so he asks, Why? To what purpose am I disturbing this memory? I do not know.

When come to these memories, seemingly of regret: something undone, some place unvisited, what compels to visit them? The delicacy of the memory and the imagery together with the intimacy of the place seem to indicate a romantic regret so long undisturbed.

Since Eliot will not answer the question plainly, we are left with the question for ourselves: Why would, why does one disturb the memory, the speculation of what did not happen? Is it, If I had done that differently, I would be happier now?

He is also trying to awaken this memory in the other: My words in your memory are disturbing the dust.

The next movement in the poem is to advance into this “deception”, a land with “unheard music”, and phantoms that walk upon dead leaves “without pressure.”

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton.3

23 Friday Jul 2021

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Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden.

I, lines 11-14.

Having raised the question of “what might have been” (from line 6), Eliot takes us into that “might have been”. In these lines he traces out how we get from “the present.”

Since we are traveling there, his description of this place here takes on a new depth of meaning. In line 7, it is an “abstraction”; thus it has some substance as an idea. In line 8, it is remaining and “a perpetual possibility.” At first read, it is easy to take “remaining a perpetual possibility” to be

Thus, there is a reality to the “might have been.”

Here, beginning in line 11, there is a movement from the present to this “abstraction” which is remaining perpetually.

We can confirm this is the event which did not happen in verse 12, “Down the passage which we did not take.” This is the thing which did not happen.

The passage creates a hurried movement: It begins with “footfalls echo”. There is a sense of someone walking, but only as heard. That would intimate the walking is taking place nearby but out of sight.

That place is then defined as “Down the passage”. Next comes “towards the door”. The use of “towards” rather than near, creates the sense of movement.

The door opens onto a rose-garden.

The speed is created by the inability to ever see who is walking. We hear the sound and move to the passage. But when we get to the passage, the sound is now moving toward the door. And as soon as we recognize the door, it has opened onto a rose garden. The effect is mesmerizing.

The place of all of this is the memory: There was a place we did not go, a door we did not open, a garden we had not visited.

This then makes for a bit of a paradox: If it is a memory it is something which did not happen. But, this never happened. Memory could be, “I remember seeing a passage I did not take.” But the memory cannot hear footfalls which never echoed.

This would then, (1) this is a memory of a constructed event. There is a place which he has returned more than once: he thought of what would have happened had he opened the door to the rose garden. He is now remembering his “speculation.” (2)
“Memory” is a trick: he is experiencing this construction as if it were a memory. By constructing what never happened, he is pretending that it did happen in fact.

My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

The plot becomes stranger: The footfalls which echoed are now the words which echo – not in my memory, but your mind. We have now entered into an extraordinarily intimate space: His memory of this door never opened are words – were these words never spoken? Are these words now being spoken? Was there an event which did not happen and of which they both spoke?

Does this mean, “You remember our conversation, when I told you of how I did not go into the rose garden?” For the poet, the memory is of the walking through the door. For “you” (whoever that might be), it is my words about that.

It is unclear what words are issue: Is the poems the words which now echo in memory, but stirring up memory?

Whatever is happening, the rather abstraction discussion of time in the first lines has moved the most intimate of spaces, a shared memory of what did not happen.

Since this memory of not happening is being rehearsed, it seems to anticipate a regret.