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Mama Liked the Roses (And So Did T.S. Eliot): Deciphering “Burnt Norton” – Part 1


Eliot’s Four Quartets remain among his most critically acclaimed and notoriously inscrutable works. Although there’s no established consensus on the precise meaning of these poems, they’ve all been viewed as meditations on time, each focusing on a particular aspect of this central reality of human life. Constantly going back to the Quartets and always enjoying them, this summer I’ve taken it upon myself to try and tease out some of the questions and ideas Eliot develops. Feel free to comment with other takes on the poem.

In “Burnt Norton,” Eliot struggles with the contingency of the past: there was a genuinely good, enjoyable experience which he might have had and yet did not. To build a framework for looking at Eliot’s angst over this, we’ll briefly turn to a couple of his other poems.

In “Ash Wednesday,” one of the first poems he wrote after his conversion to Anglicanism, Eliot faces the threat of unredeemable time:

    Because I know that time is always time
    And place is always and only place
    And what is actual is only actual for one time
    And only for one place
    I rejoice that things are as they are and
    I renounce the blessèd face
    And renounce the voice
    Because I cannot hope to turn again
    Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
    Upon which to rejoice.

This early resignation in the poem captures the poet’s troubled emotional life, dealing with the difficulty of human spiritual agency and the threat that there is nothing we can truly rejoice in without having to construct something. Through this place of resignation, however, Eliot’s speaker comes to a place of prayerful dependence, begging to God:

    Redeem the time, redeem the dream

Eliot could only hope for redemption to the extent that he dealt with the true threat of unredeemed time, and this contrast gives both “Ash Wednesday” the poem and Ash Wednesday the day their beauty and poignancy. In “Ash Wednesday” the threat is merely immanent time, time which holds no eternal significance and is not positioned within a transcendent metanarrative. What if time doesn’t point to any good beyond itself but is mere time, what if place is only place? Thoughts and fears like this one, motivated by frequent anxiety and depression in Eliot’s personal life, push him toward the religious vision of his later poems. In some ways his earlier “Waste Land” is an honest look at unredeemed, merely immanent time, an eternal stagnation which his epigraph hints is worse even than death. Luckily for him and his readers, however, Eliot’s search for meaning was answered, though he continued to struggle with certain questions within a Christian context. These struggles play out in his Four Quartets.

“Burnt Norton” has been described as a meditation on time and possibility. It’s based on a manor Eliot visited with a woman named Emily Hale, although he was still married to his wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood. Hale asked Eliot to marry her soon after his wife died, and many read romance into their friendship, even into the period when Eliot’s wife was still alive. The letters between them are sealed for close to another decade on Hale’s request, so we’ll have to wait on a verdict.

Many contemporary critics believe that Eliot’s abstract meditation on what could have been in “Burnt Norton” was occasioned by a personal fixation on the foregone possibilities with Eliot and Hale during the manor visit. Eliot was constrained by a failing marriage to Vivien, so he was unable to act on his attraction to Hale. He explores it, however, in an imaginative walk into a rose-garden on the property with an unnamed companion:

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

While Eliot paints a happy picture of the speaker and his companion strolling among the roses—with strange laughing children thrown in for good measure—he hints that all is not well. Why not?  None of it actually happened. The children are ghostlike, “moving without pressure, over the dead leaves.” They’re both “dignified” and “invisible.” Finally, toward the end of his reverie, a bird which acts as his guide through the garden continues to urge him forward into the garden, for “human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality.”

In short, this as an angle Eliot takes on the classic problem of suffering. Why were good experiences foregone?  Why must his trip to the rose garden be incorporeal? The past is unalterable, which makes Eliot both nostalgic and despairing for a nostalgia that can never be fulfilled:

    Time present and time past
    Are both perhaps contained 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.

In the present moment the past is unalterable; since the future is determined by the past, in the present everything seems determined and therefore closed to redemptive possibilities. Suffering and the pain of missing out on a genuinely good thing are not redeemed because all time is eternally present; the current, purely immanent moment is all we get, and past and future are practically necessary while theoretically contingent—that is, the moment in the rose-garden could have happened, but it was always never going to.

Perhaps a key to unlocking this problem is the Edenic character of the garden, described as “our first world.” The past is not what it could have been because that is unrealistic—there has been a Fall. Without forcing the Genesis narrative onto Eliot’s poetry, I do want to say that the empty paradise of the first strophe, in which humans move as ghosts, reflects a world of Edenic perfection which has been lost or perhaps never possessed. We cannot reach the garden.

Where is reason to be found in the world and in time? Where are the possibilities of redemption?  I’ll mention one for now, which is Eliot’s epigraph: “the way upward and the way downward are the same.”

From Heraclitus, this passage asserts the ultimate harmony of the universe, which is a collection of processes unified by Reason, or the logos. St. Paul appropriated this Greek idea of a unifying universal Wisdom to form his idea of the Christological Word. Eliot, later in his poem, will make a similar move from purely immanent harmony, to transcendent meaning, to their incarnational unity:

    Only through time time is conquered.


Mama Liked the Roses (And So Did T.S. Eliot): Deciphering “Burnt Norton” – Part 2

Have you ever wanted to reclaim the past? In images, especially those of poetry, we possess a moment frozen in time. It seems so accessible the more detailed and the more sensuous a description we give it—such as Eliot’s ghostly trip into the rose-garden last week—and yet the permanence which it suggests is devastatingly illusory.

In one of Kurt Vonnegut’s descriptions of aliens, the Tralfamadorians from Slaughterhouse-five compare the human experience of linear time to being strapped down on a moving train, without being able to turn one’s head right or left, and having to look through a small hole at a six-foot long pipe. The reality of our imprisonment to time can be brutal amidst ageing and change, and Eliot meditated on this pain in some of his other works as well.  Last week I used “Ash Wednesday” as an entry into the Quartets, and this time I’ll briefly cite a line from
Eliot’s “Prufrock”:

    Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
    I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
    I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

    I do not think that they will sing to me.

Disillusionment. Ageing. Change. These can be especially brutal when the future looks bleak, as it did for Eliot’s old man. And this despair only increases the temptation to look backward, to fetishize images that can be permanently inscribed in one’s memory or in verse.

In “Burnt Norton,” after Eliot’s reflection on what could have been in the rose-garden, he addresses the problem of temporality by taking refuge in divine stillness and immutability. In Dante’s Paradiso, which was very influential for Eliot, there was a divine Wisdom, or Mind of God, at the very center of the universe. Sure, medieval Catholics believed that Earth was the physical center of the universe but, in a deeper sense:

    The nature of the universe, which holds
    the center still and moves all else around it,
    begins here as if from its turning-post.

    This heaven has no other where than this:
    the mind of God, in which are kindled both
    the love that turns it and the force it rains.

Later, Dante looks more closely at this turning-post:

    And when I turned and my own eyes were met
    by what appears within that sphere whenever
    one looks intently at its revolution,

    I saw a point that sent forth so acute
    a light, that anyone who faced the force
    with which it blazed would have to shut his eyes,

We saw in Eliot last week that the epigrams come from Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who developed the pre-Christian idea of logos as the central Reason in the universe. In a pagan Greek view as well as a medieval Christian one, the physical world on earth is messy. Things decay, good things fail to happen or end, and suffering strikes unexpectedly. In the Word, however, all chaos holds together and forms a beautiful and yet unseen harmony.

Eliot was an unhappy man for most of his life, a man to whom time brought a failed marriage, episodes of anxiety, and crushing flashes of despair best expressed in his “Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men.” Even the episode in the rose-garden was despairing because in it Eliot ascribed the false permanence of memory and artistic imagery to the fundamentally impermanent—a necrophilia of sorts. He compares himself and his companion to ghosts. No surprise, then, that he follows this by a meditation on the Word, in which all things hold together in the one thing truly permanent and unmoving:

    At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
    Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is…

    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 [elevation] 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.

Amidst the pain of past pleasure foregone, Eliot understandably latches onto the still Word, the Word outside time. It’s here that all of the worldly ecstasies are shown to be partial and wonderfully completed, and in which the horrors and sufferings are shown to be partial and finally resolved. Everything is made explicit and understood, and from this the poet takes comfort. This vision, furthermore, is not mere cosmological reflection, but rather it is occasioned by a view of the cross:

    Garlic and sapphires in the mud
    Clot the bedded axle-tree
    …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 about the moving tree

An axle-tree, in Eliot’s time, was a carriage part shaped like a cross–an image of one is on the home page. Eliot combines the cosmological turning-post—or Mind of God—with a stationary cross and anatomical imagery of the crucified Christ. The combination is appropriate because both images are associated with the person of the Word, and it is only in the cross that the majesty of the Word and the higher vision of cosmological  harmony may be recognized. So Dante, of course, takes comfort in a beautiful vision of higher harmony, an order of which he can be cognitively assured.

And yet such ecstatic visions are also images, and though they are true they do not provide escapes from time. As Dante’s vision of paradise progresses, he learns that he must eventually bear his own cross in horrific exile from Florence. For Eliot, too, the vision into higher reality is itself false permanence, as the speaker must continue to live in time, strapped to a train whose speed he can’t control and looking through a six-inch tube. Things may not even look any different in time, but the Cross and the Word still do reveal a higher reality:

    Below, the boarhound and the boar
    Pursue their pattern as before
    But reconciled among the stars.

Everything is reconciled—this is the Good News! And yet “among the stars”—how does Eliot’s speaker apply it to down-to-earth, everyday life? We’ll look at Eliot’s response next week as he applies the idea of transcendent reconciliation with the unchanged patterns of the physical, time-bound world.