Burnt Norton: “The ancient rhyme in a new verse”: “Only through time time is conquered”

Abstract

The first of Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton” appeared independently in 1936, the last poem in Collected Poems 1909–1935, four years before the next of the Quartets. The beginning of Eliot’s exploration of time and being, this brilliant poem moves from an imagined scene in a garden reminiscent of—but not identical with—the Garden of Eden to a fifth and final section on words and their movement in time, their slipperiness, and their liability to misuse and perversion. This opening poem itself moves to an embrace of “still point” and “pattern,” but does not necessarily represent Eliot’s own point of view, which, the poem suggests, emerges only with fulfillment (in time). Considered as part of a whole, “Burnt Norton” enacts and dramatizes the problem of relating part to part and part to whole.