Burnt Norton, Section III, and IV

Long overdue they are, but here be the analysis of Burnt Norton Sections III and IV.  Good news, we are almost to East Coker.

A recurring theme of the work seems to be “time present and time past” the contemplation of the past accompanied, or inspired by, the swift-flowing insolvency of the present. While the present is vivid, it is moving too swiftly to provide rest or answers. The past, is captured in staccato images—images that mix the beatific with the mundane, “garlic and sapphires in the mud.” Artistically, there is nothing to capture the poet in the past or the present; he must chase the future. Here, “is a place of disaffection…neither daylight / investing form with lucid stillness / nor darkness to purify the soul.” The scene is reminiscent of Dante’s Paradise for Pagans. There is a loveliness to it, but the scene is haunted by an incompleteness, a sense that so much more beauty would be possible, if you could only see the Sun. But, there is hope, this poet can and will strive for the Son. In an almost Siddharthic cleansing, the empty whirl of time and image are “emptying the sensual with deprivation / cleansing affection from the temporal / neither plenitude nor vacancy.”

Also, as in Limbo, the poet is not alone. In the congestion of nothing he is accompanied by people—or is it memories?—all filled with the same yearning, yet chasing it in different directions. “Distracted from distraction by distraction” like an over-caffeinated student writing a paper in the early morning, they get distracted from the bunny trails to chase the bunny trails, all the while forgetting that they were supposed to be hunting bear. They are reduced to “Men and bits of paper, whirled by a cold wind / that blows before and time after.” They yearn for the future, they can’t escape the past, but they so frantically chase the present that they drive themselves into the echoing dark. The wind of the present sweeps through London, consequently through all the world. Yet still, it is not an entirely unfriendly wind, or an empty darkness, “this twittering world” is still alive.

As the wind leaves London, so the poet leaves the present, physical world. He leaves the crowd, leaves the light, and descends from Limbo to the world that isn’t even a world—one might even say hell—the place of no light, no substance, no senses, no company, no spirit, not even an imagination—truly hell for the poet. The hell is not like Dante’s, not one of an excess of sensitivity, but an absence of all things. By an absolute stillness “while the world moves / in appetency, on its metalled ways / of time past and time future.”

But while the poet descends to the depths, where is “the twittering world”? It continues on, by custom and the natural order, where “time and the bell have buried the day.” This nightfall of sunfall will not follow the poet into the Stygian depths. The sunflower does not worship the ground, and the clematis clings only to the tallest trees. Yew, the ever-faithful wood, even it refuses to follow. Yet one thing of the natural world remains….the light still remains.