Four Quartets

Four Quartets is the name given to four related poems by T. S. Eliot, collected and republished in book form in 1943 (ISBN 0156332256). They had been published individually from 1935 to 1942. Their titles are Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding.

Burnt Norton (1935)

:Burnt Norton is a country house in the Cotswold Hills of Gloucestershire that Eliot visited in the summer of 1934. The house's rose garden is the main spatial scenery of the poem.

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As all the quartets, Burnt Norton is a deep meditation on the meaning of time and its relationship with human beings and the Christian meaning of Redemption.

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The first verses are the best summary of the poem:

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:Time present and time past

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:Are both perhaps present in time future

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:And time future contained in time past.

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:If all time is eternally present

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:All time is unredeemable.

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With plastic images as "the passage which we did not take", "the door we never opened", a "rose garden" full of children who weren't there, the poet sees himself before those things which "might have been" but never were and perceives him as a powerless witness of unreal things.

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Then he meditates on the meaning of eternity, using a figure of which Eliot is very fond, "the still point of the turning world" (the center of a turning wheel is not turning) is really the source of movement:

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: Except for the point, the still point,

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:There would be no dance

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But human beings, still submerged in time and movement, are not able to perceive it, because

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::Time past and time future

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:Allow but a little consciousness

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and consciousness is required to catch the glimpses of eternity.

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The third stanza is a first clear statement on what the poet sees as the way to redeem time and to give a value to our actions in time: to free oneself from worldly attachments,

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:Desiccation of the world of sense,

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:Evacuation of the world of fancy,

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:Inoperancy of the world of spirit;

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This is a repetitive idea in Eliot's later (after The Waste Land) poems (and will appear several times in the Four Quartets), and reflects his devotion for the Church's teaching concerning poverty and detachment, together with the parallel doctrines of Nirvana in Buddhism. The imagery in the stanza ("a dim light", "time-ridden faces, istracted from distraction by distraction") was said to be inspired by Eliot's trips on the London Underground.

Related Topics:
The Waste Land - Poverty - Detachment - Nirvana - Buddhism - London Underground

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A quotation from Burnt Norton appears around the water feature The River in Birmingham's Victoria Square - see http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/GenerateContent?CONTENT_ITEM_ID=776&CONTENT_ITEM_TYPE=0

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