T.s eliot burnt norton explanation

Share this: Tweet. Like this: Like Loading Subscribe via Email Enter your email address to subscribe to this site and receive notifications of new posts by email. Interesting Literature. Privacy Policy. Loading Comments Email Required Name Required Website. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality.

Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Study Guide. By Eliot, T. Previous Next. Burnt Norton, Section 1 Lines Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.

There's no messing around here. Eliot comes out throwing philosophical haymakers in these opening lines. Often, a poem will open with a really clear image to help get you grounded; but our speaker starts off totally high-concept and tells you all about how the past and present are both contained in the future.

Right away, we're wondering, "What does that mean? When the speaker says that the present and the past might both be contained in the future, it might be his way we're just assuming our speaker is a he at this point of talking about the idea of destiny. If you have a clear destiny, then everything that's going to happen has already happened in the future.

The more the speaker talks about past, present, and future being contained in one another, the more all time starts to collapse into a single moment. This effect is established further when the speaker uses chiasmus to reverse his earlier line: "And time future contained in time past. Why our speaker wants to do this, we're not so sure yet. To polish off this opening nugget of thought, the poem suggests that if past, present, and future "all time" is "eternally present" at the same moment, then there is nothing we can really do to change the course of history and no way we can make up for anything bad that's happened in the past which is "unredeemable".

In other words, the poem doesn't open on the most hopeful of notes. Looks like ol' T. At least for now… Lines What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. Just when we're about to ask the speaker what he's talking about, he keeps rambling on about time, and says that there's not much point in wondering "what if?

What if you'd sunk that winning shot at the basketball game? What if you'd been born on another continent? What if Marty McFly hadn't gone back in time and taken his own teenage mother to the "Enchantment Under the Sea" dance? You get the picture.

By calling these thoughts a "perpetual possibility," the poem is saying that our questions of "what if? The only thing that this kind of thinking will give you is "a world of speculation" 8 , or to translate, a world of endless wondering. Everything that's happened and everything that could have happened are basically the same thing, because the past is finished and all we have is what's around us right now, in the present.

As in… now. Lines Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. Does anyone else think that Eliot's starting to sound a little creepy? Just checking. In these lines, the speaker takes the abstract time stuff he's been talking about and turns it into a clear image. In this case, he takes our questions about "what could have been" and turns them into the image of echoing footsteps. The limitations of their own words make it hard for people to perceive the Word.

In order to achieve union with Christ the way up , one must die to oneself the way down. There is only one way—and that way consists both of dying to self and rising with Christ.

So, Christ is both the Word , as well as the Way. What he urges is that man recognize the inherent oneness of things and strive for an art, a society, an individual existence which is a reflection of, and in harmony with, that oneness.

Part 1 of Burnt Norton describes a transcendent experience Eliot had in a rose garden, where there was an empty pool. This introduces us to the main focus in all The Four Quartets , namely a contemplation of those timeless, transcendent experiences we experience within time that are simply isolated events that pass quickly. Or as I put it, those fleeting glimpses of eternity we sometimes have that are gone before we know it. Those experiences give us a glimpse of a union with the divine what Eliot calls the Still Point , but since we are bound in time, our experience of that union last for only a moment.

Still, those experiences point to a full realization of that union. What is the way that takes us to union with the Word? The function of memory in The Four Quartets is key. For we live our lives and experience various, random events, yet it is our memory and contemplative recollection of those events that arranges them into a pattern, and thus transforms them into something different—something that leads us to union with the divine.

And so, we realize that transcendent reality is revealed only in fleeting moments and flashes within time, and it can only be remembered when placed within the reference of time—and yet, those moments act as pointers to the ultimate end of an ever-present eternity. It is the timeless reality that gives purpose and meaning to all the events we experience within time. Yet since we are mere mortal creatures, bound by time, we cannot yet endure timeless reality.

We can only bear it in small doses—in those fleeting transcendent moments within time—and even those glimpses of the still point are given to us only by grace. Thus, it is through time , and through our use of memory and contemplative recollection of those transcendent moments within time in which we experience the still point, that we are able to conquer time and eventually experience full union with the still point. Eliot does not hide the ideas behind the poetry here.

His meditations on time and being are stated fairly explicitly and can be easily traced in the poem. The first of these surrounds the garden in which the first section is set. Yet the garden is also a part of the ruined estate from which this quartet takes its name; it bears the marks of human presence and abandonment—empty pools and formal hedges gone wild.

This famous line juxtaposes a series of random things, but the effect is not the atmosphere of belatedness and melancholy characteristic of The Waste Land. Again fragments and ruins stand in defiance of human aspirations, only this poem does not lament that things once made sense and have now ceased to do so; rather, it declares that coherence never existed at all—that meaning and human experience are necessarily mutually exclusive.

The second center of interest in this quartet is constructed around the Chinese vase and the ruminations on poetry in the fifth section. The Chinese jar represents the capacity of art to transcend the limitations of the moment, to achieve a kind of victory over, or perspective upon, time.