Some Thoughts on Burnt Norton, Section 2

When I first read this section, I knew I had no idea what it was talking about: so, please take all my speculations with a grain of salt. However, there are some things I am reasonably confident about. For example, the essential Christological meaning wrapped up in this poem. As before, we will approach the poem, more or less, line by line.

First, “garlic and sapphires in the mud / Clot the bedded axel-tree” Take garlic, a seasoning and preservative, also, almost a universal sign against evil, specifically, evil that feeds on the inherent life of mankind, namely the blood. Mix this with sapphires, the stone that signifies integrity and perfect truth. After this, you have these muddy sapphire garlics supporting, clotting, the machine of the world. Nothing can move without an axel. The axel is the center of the wheel, and without the wheel, nothing can move. In all, you begin with a very vivid, abstract picture of a great and profound….what? The mystery is reveled in the rest of the stanza. “Wire in the blood” that “sings below the inveterate scars.” The “circulation of the lymph” “figured in the drift of stars,” both images of a man, a man perpetually scarred who stands as the axel, the center of the world—a world he must serve from the mud as the embodiment of Perfect Truth and the one Ward against an evil as essential as our blood. The implications are stunning, and quickly narrow the field to one man.

Yet, Eliot is only beginning. We “ascend to summer in the tree.” Why summer? (Here we depart into crazed speculation.) I propose summer, because summer is a time of peace that exists to anticipate death. Crops grow quickly because soon the cold will kill them, babies grow, become strong, because soon the cold will test them, animals consume the plenty because soon there will be paucity. There, climbing the tree in the summer, he climbs knowing that by the time he reaches the top, he will face Death. In the “light upon the lighted leaf” we observe the world, “boarhound and boar” predator and prey living as they have done for hundreds of years—predatory killing prey to survive, sacrifice laid down for the more important life, essentially, life as the world was Fallen to be. A way of the world, that through this man’s climb to the tree is to be “reconciled among the stars."

The first stanza is a promise of a perfect man, yet a perfect man who is debased, muddied, and beating signs of an ancient fight. This man is scarred, he has both won the fight and also approaching it in the ascent to the tree. He is out of time, and yet in it. In the garlic and the sapphire he is an abstract symbol of cleansing and integrity, yet in the lymph and the arteries, he is essentially human. Bound and boundless in time, fully man and fully spirit—this is the character conjured by Eliot.

The second stanza is where things get a little weird. At the peak of the tree, “at the still point of the turning world” we lose all “normal” links. There is no flesh nor lack of it, no stillness or movement, neither a past nor a future, and yet it is everything, rather than nothing. It is at this still point where the earth comes fully alive in a dance, “Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” It is a not-place in time that no one can define, and yet somehow, defines all of life. There can be only one center, one center of the world, time, and not-time, and that center is the axel-tree, the one clotted with much ascending to the tree. And this ascent, this scarred man on the tree, serves as both the center of all time and defines all time in one glorious, mysterious, and timeless dance.

The third stanza is glorious, and I use that almost as a technical term. It is in this stanza Eliot approaches an explanation of the mystery of the Incarnation. In this incarnation of a perfect man and yet wholly other: concrete and abstract, you have a man that is fully free from every human need, and yet is surrendered to them. In this “release from action and suffering, release from the inner and outer compulsion, yet surrendered” he becomes both “without motion, concentration, without elimination” and yet is human enough to be “made explicit, understood,” to complete this “partial ecstasy.” Yet how does this man complete the ecstasy? Become the white light, still and moving that surpasses and surrenders to all human desires? He surrenders to “The resolution of its partial horror.” Only “in the weakness of a changing body” can this perfect man bind “the enchantment of past and future” binding all of time and all of humankind to one common action—an action that will save, in one man and one act, from “heaven and damnation / which flesh cannot endure.” For human-kind can never bear damnation, and human-kind in its mud-touched state cannot bear the beauty of heaven, but in the binding of time to the consummation of the new Adam, man can be brought to a moment before the Fall where he can escape hell and endure the beauty of heaven—the rose garden.

The fourth stanza harkens back to the first part of Burnt Norton. “Time past and time future,” we go back to the snapshot of the timeless we all dance within. The timeless is not for us, the mortal man, for only in time can we reach “the moment in the rose-garden, / the moment in the arbour where the rain beat.” Only in time, did the perfect man conquer time, and buy us heaven and “the moment in the draughty church at smokefall.”

One of the things that most eludes me…is how this section follows the preceding section. I am missing the internal cohesion of the work. I would especially appreciate illumination on that regard. Otherwise, I just welcome any and all commentary on my 1000 word essay on Burnt Norton, Section 2.