Alan Jacobs: Burnt Norton, T S Eliot

'Burnt Norton', T S Eliot from Paula Marvelly on Vimeo.

 

Four Quartets is T S Eliot’s poetic masterpiece, published in four parts over a six-year period and printed in 1943, with each part associated with one of the four classical elements: ‘Burnt Norton’, air; ‘East Coker’, earth; ‘The Dry Salvages’, water; and ‘Little Gidding’, fire. Such was its literary import, the Four Quartets won T S Eliot the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Quartets are interconnected reflections on the nature of time, the universe and the divine. Eliot’s religious heritage was strongly rooted in Anglo-Catholicism; however, the poem also draws on mystical traditions from both the East and the West, with references to the Bhagavad Gita, St John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich.

Written against the backdrop of the First World War and the sense of nihilism and desolation of the modern world, ‘Burnt Norton’, the subject of the above short film, explores the concept that only the present moment is all that really matters and that time future and time past are mere abstractions of the mind:

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.

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.

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.
                             
But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

References to the rose garden are deeply symbolic; in the Sufi tradition, the rose evokes the soul, with the garden representative of the world; the growth and blossoming of such an exquisite flower thus being the individuation of the self amidst the weeds and thorns of daily life.

Eliot also uses the metaphor of the dance to symbolize the Kali-like movement of the manifest world, with its centre the eternal still point from which everything radiates and turns:

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.

Indeed, stillness is a place beyond all manifested phenomena:

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Together with ‘East Coker’, an examination of time and its meaning, and ‘The Dry Salvages’, which links the image of water and sailing as a metaphor for humanity, the Four Quartets concludes with ‘Little Gidding’ and its final meditation on the redemptive power of Love. Moreover, Eliot’s concluding immortal lines remind us that at the end of our spiritual journey, we shall come full circle, like the turning wheel, and wake up to what has always been and what shall always be, and what is always eternally present:

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
 Calling
We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.