Burnt Norton, Section V

Perhaps it is a mistake to try and unravel the magic of Eliot in stages. He is complex, he is abstract, and one must believe that the imagery is consistent, but it is difficult to maintain that consistency when one is analyzing in long-separated sequences. However, we try.

Throughout this segment of the poem, Eliot has been working with the divided cohesion of time. All time, past, present and future, are all gathered together in one picture, one glimpse, in the now. This last segment continues that thread.
“Words move, music moves/Only in time.” With the abstract nature of the examples, he identifies objects that possess an odd immortality, yet the epitome of a temporal life form. Words and music live only as long as the breath that summons them. Only in print can they live beyond, and even that is dependent on the book that holds them and the eyes that read them. They live, like humans, but they can live beyond, much like an antiquity, such as a Chinese jar.

Does this analysis have a point? Good question. I’d love to hear the answer. Yet, with words and music and antiquity, “Only by the form, the pattern,/Can words or music reach the stillness” dare I say? Of eternity? Yet, how does one grasp those living words that stretch into eternity. Not the “still of the violin, while the note lasts” but the stillness of a co-existence that ties the present to eternity. Words, and lives, without this binding to eternity break, crack, and crumble unto the burden of finding and upholding meaning.

Yet, like any works of art, words of import cannot be fully at rest. They are active, and as they are active, they are strained—the more important the word, the greater the strain. “Shrieking voices/Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,/Always assail them. The Word in the desert/Is most attacked by voices of temptation”

In the last two stanzas, Eliot once more binds himself to the overarching theme of the dances of time—a dance that encompasses the beautiful, the terrible, and the ever changing, the “disconsolate chimera.”

This dance of time is solved and made in the manner of the movement. It isn’t the pattern, it is the steps. I do not have an understanding of the ten steps. It is the perfect number, perhaps the Ten Commandments, perhaps the ten steps to heaven of Jacob’s Ladder. Desire makes a pattern but it does not define the pattern, love cannot move, it must be acted on within the will, and the motive of the will is what dictates its movement in the dance. In the words of Eliot: ends do not justify the means, ends determine the value of the means.

The pattern of the movement, left to itself, is dead, it is limited by its entrapment in a single dimension. It is unbeing and being, and therefore stuck. One must see the forward and backward movement of time, but one cannot treat it like an ancient vase trapped in the present in a museum case that will stolidly be sent forward in time. The movement of time is not a still picture of academic interest. No, rather to live, it is like a “Sudden shaft of sunlight/Even while the dust moves/There rises the hidden laughter.” It is a lively, intricate, joyful and beautiful dance that we enter as children. Left as an academic exercise it is “Ridiculous the waste sad time/Stretching before and after.” But, it has the trademark of "hidden laughter/of children in the foliage."

Where is Eliot going and what was he doing? In Burnt Norton, Eliot stripped away the reader's unimaginative acceptance of the mere present. He challenges them to see the present as a rich continuation of the past, and both binding the future. In short, everything one does echoes all of the past and all of the future. No pressure. He furthers the challenge. Do not be burdened by this and be like the cowardly servant that was given a talent and then buried it. Rather approach this mysterious, powerful, and utterly beautiful whirligig of time like a dance, like a note on a violin, like dust motes in the a beam of light. Knowing this, is successfully reaching childhood.

The paradox, all we do has eternal weight, yet we cannot know all of what we do. As to the Eliot's own continuation? That waits for East Coker.