Burnt Norton – 2

Imagery

The initial impression the poem gives of abstract, philosophical language is quickly dispelled
by the mesmerising, personal image:

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

The Latinate endings of the first ten lines give way to the Anglo-Saxon simplicities of
footfalls, echo, towards, door, opened, rose-garden. These are all very early English words in
use before 1600 and many before 1400, and nearly all used in a figurative sense – “open a
door”, “echo”, “rose-garden” – before 1600.
Look at the negatively falling cadence of the passage from footfalls, down, towards, did not,
never. The passage takes place in the Latin ‘memoria’ so it is both real and imaginative. Eliot
seems unconsciously to be echoing Dante’s Vita Nuova (1295) which begins

“In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria, dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si
trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova” (In that part of the book of my memory, at
least in that small part that one can read, one can find a rubric that says, “Here begins a new
life”). Just as Dante begins his new life with pushing back into memory, so Eliot goes back
into the past, but with this disconsolate coda, with gloomy dentals and hard plosives threaten
the images of love on the rose-leaves, both a pot-pourri and some echo of the leaves of a
book or the tea-leaves of a fortune-teller:

“But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

The strong presence of roses in the first 17 lines suggests both human love (Le Roman de la
Rose, an allegorical dream vision that takes place in a walled garden) and an image of divine
love.

The first section already establishes motifs that run through the whole text: poignant personal
memories in vivid tactile images in tension with abstract philosophical, even theological
reflection. The “we” of line 12 includes us as surely as Dante’s “di nostra vita” in the first line
of the Commedia. This poem is Eliot’s and ours, but the “your mind” is equally ambivalent: is
it Emily Hale or the reader?

IV. Perhaps the best example of the impact of imagery is in the ten lines of section IV, whose
beauty is almost beyond analysis. The ten lines seem to descend into the darkness of death
before rising to some mystical vision of light and stillness:

Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us?
Half-way through line 7 the images change to light and movement with the kingfisher, light
to light and the concluding silence of the “still point of the turning world”. The precise source
of the images may never be known, but its yearning quality is reinforced by the ‘c’ and ‘s’
alliteration, following from the tolling of “t b b d” in the first line (Time and the bell have
buried the day) to the ethereal beauty of a line that consists almost entirely of ‘i’ and ‘l’: “Has
answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still” (6xl; 6xi).

I am starting our discussion of this poem with the sounds and images because I wish you to
approach it through listening to it and letting it sink into your inner being, your soul. The
intellectual ideas in the poem we will come to in time, but at its core is the unsolicited vision
given like grace in the first part, the sense that this moment outside time is what really
matters, followed by the exploration of a deliberate path to recover this experience of a
spiritual world: the ascetic path of darkness, deprivation, descent. So, the poem ends where it
began, with the ‘timeless’ moment “Sudden in a shaft of sunlight”. The rest is not silence,
rather:

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

Gerard Kilroy
9/11/2023.