Customer center

We are a boutique essay service, not a mass production custom writing factory. Let us create a perfect paper for you today!

Example research essay topic: T S Eliot Rose Garden - 6,364 words

NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote

Helen Gardner The more familiar we become with Four Quartets, however, the more we realize that the analogy with music goes much deeper than a comparison of the sections with the movements of a quartet, or than an identification of the four elements as thematic material. One is constantly reminded of music by the treatment of images, which recur with constant modifications, from their context, or from their combination with other recurring images, as a phrase recurs with modifications in music. These recurring images, like the basic symbols, are common, obvious and familiar, when we first meet them. As they recur they alter, as a phrase does when we hear it on a different instrument, or in another key, or when it is blended and combined with another phrase, or in some way turned round, or inverted. A simple example is the phrase a shaft of sunlight at the close of Burnt Norton. This image occurs in a rudimentary form in The Hollow Men, along with a moving tree and voices heard in the wind: There, the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There, is a tree swinging And voices are In the winds singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star.

At the close of Burnt Norton a moment of happiness, defined in The Dry Salvages as a sudden illumination is made concrete by the image of a shaft of sunlight which transfigures the world: Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick now, here, now, always Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after. This is the final concrete statement of what Burnt Norton is about; but it recalls the experience we have been given in a different rhythm and with different descriptive accompaniments in the second half of the first movement, as the sun for a moment shines from the cloud, and the whole deserted garden seems to become alive: Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged, And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the loto's rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of heart of light, And they were behind us, reflected in the pool. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. The image repeated, but with such a difference, at the close establishes the validity of the first experience. Brief and illusory as it appears in the first movement, it has not been dismissed.

It has remained in thought and it returns. Though Time and the bell have buried the day, The black cloud carries the sun away when the sudden shaft falls, it is time that seems the illusion. From The Art of T. S. Eliot. Copyright? 1949 by The Cresset Press.

Helen Gardner The subject of Burnt Norton can be defined in various ways. If we adopt the method of commentators on The Divine Comedy, we may distinguish a literal, a moral and a mystical meaning. The literal meaning is simply that the poet has felt a moment of inexplicable joy, a moment of release, like the moment Agatha speaks of when she looked through the little door, when the sun was shining on the rose-garden. It is a moment of escape from the endless walking down a concrete corridor'; or through the stone passages of an immense and empty hospital. This moment of release from the deadening feeling of meaningless sequence, in and out, in an endless drift, to and fro, dragging my feet, into the present, the moment when, in Agathas phrase, the chain breaks, is connected here with the memory of what might have been. The poem springs from this experience, and it sets by it another experience, which is sought deliberately, but which is the same, for the way up is the way down.

If we pass from the literal to the moral meaning we may say that the virtue to which Burnt Norton points us is the virtue of humility: a submission to the truth of experience, an acceptance of what is, that involves the acceptance of ignorance: Internal darkness, deprivation And destitution of all property, Desiccation of the world of sense, Evacuation of the world of fancy, Inoperancy of the world of spirit. If we pass then to the use of theological terms we may say that mystically the subject of Burnt Norton is grace: the gift by which we seek to discover what we have already been shown. From The Art of T. S. Eliot. Copyright? 1949 by The Cresset Press.

Morris Weitz However, it is in the Four Quartets that the immanence theory of time is worked out fully in poetic terms. The first lines open on what seems to be the classical Augustinian conception of time, with its placing of the sense of the past and the future in the present; but the poem soon shifts to an orthodox neo-Platonic theory: [Quotes first 10 lines of " Burnt Norton" ] The present and the past are perhaps already part of the future but the future is determined by the past. In this sense, all temporal experiences are in the present, at every moment, and we cannot redeem the temporal because it is never away from us to be redeemed. Also, and this becomes clear in the total context, All time is unredeemable has another meaning: There is no redemption if we recognize only the flux. Further, even the realm of pure possibilities, of things that might have happened, is no different from the temporal: Past, present, future and possibility point to one end which is always with us; that is, which end, as the Eternal or Timeless, immanent in the flux, is the ultimate source of explanation of it. This notion of the Eternal or ultimate reality being immanent in the flux as the Logos which anyone can discern, but which only a few do discern, clarifies most of Burnt Norton.

Consider the following lines; Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind. The rose-garden is the key idea in this passage. Eliot has used this image in much of his poetry and there is cogent conflicting opinion about its meaning. Whatever the general meaning may be, if there is one, at least here it seems to function in a double sense, as an actual place a rose-garden; and as a symbol of those temporal experiences which reveal most poignantly the immanent character of the ultimately real.

Like the Christian Kairos, the rose-garden symbolizes those moments that show, more than any others, the meeting of the Eternal and the temporal. Besides the echo of the Logos, which is the meaning of the temporal, there are other echoes in the garden. There is, first, the deception of the thrush, calling us to a world of mere temporarily. But such a world is one of indolence and desiccation, a reiteration of the waste land and the land of the hollow men: There they were, dignified, invisible, Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves, In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air... There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting, So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern, Along the empty alley, into the box circle, To look down into the drained pool.

There is also the echo of the undeceiving bird, who leads us to other, more alive voices, to those who are less dignified and patterned: to those who can see the reality of the roses, for the roses do have the look of flowers that are looked at. These are the voices of the children, hidden excitedly in the apple tree, who are laughing and singing; but who are, as we realize in Little Gidding, Not known, because not looked for / But heard, half-heard, in the stillness / Between two waves of the sea. The bird is the messenger of Truth, telling us that the rose-garden echoes with life: and that this life itself is a manifestation of something which is more than the mere flux. But the bird also knows that man will not acquiesce to that which is true: Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. The second movement of Burnt Norton sharpens the immanence conception of time: that the Eternal or Timeless is the ultimate dimension of the flux and gives it whatever reality and meaning it has. After an introductory passage, in which physical movement, The trilling wire in the blood, epitomized in the struggle between the boarhound and the boar that ends in death, is falsified as the only movement there is, we come to true, nonphysical movement: At the still point of the turning world.

Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. The still point, of course, is the symbol of the Logos, but it is also the symbol of the Christian God. In God is the source of movement and the temporal.

Not that God is movement; rather from Him emanates movement, to utilize a neo-Platonic idea. There is the temporal, the flux; but without God, the Timeless, there would be no temporal. To experience the Eternal, the still point, is to transcend the temporal; it is to give up desire, action and suffering; to rise upto God, but with no physical action; and to understand both the Timeless and the temporal for the first time: [Quotes from " I can only say, there we have been; but I cannot say where" to " The resolution of its partial horror. " ] We must start with the temporal, the ever-changing experience; and come to see its dependence upon the Timeless: Time past and time future Allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, The moment in the draughty church at smoke fall Be remembered; involved with past and future. Only through time time is conquered. In the final movement of Burnt Norton, the distinction between the Timeless and the temporal becomes the distinction between The Word and words.

Words lie, but it is only through words that we can conquer them, to express the truth which is The Word. And what we want to say we cannot say because words are always changing, being in the flux; but even with words we can suggest The Word: That God, Who is the Final Cause, did initiate the first event and does determine the last event: Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and un desiring Except in the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being. The movement and the poem end with a concrete and visual return to the rose-garden with their contrast between the inadequate affirmation of the sole reality of the flux and the true recognition that there is something more, the Eternal, echoing in the laughter of the children. How ridiculous, then, the sole acceptance of the waste sad time Stretching before and after.

From " T. S. Eliot: Time as a Mode of Salvation. " Sewanee Review (1952). F. O.

Matthiessen It seems doubtful whether at the time of writing Burnt Norton, just after Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot had already projected the series. His creative energies for the next three years were to be largely taken up with The Family Reunion, which, to judge from the endless revisions in the manuscript, caused him about as much trouble as anything he has done. With East Coker in the spring of 1940 he made his first experiment in a part for part parallel with an earlier work of his own. Again Donne's practice is suggestive: when he had evolved a particularly intricate and irregular stanza, he invariably set himself the challenge of following it unchanged to the end of his poem. But in assigning himself a similar problem for a poem two hundred lines long, Eliot has tried something far more exacting, where failure could be caused by the parallels becoming merely mechanical, and by the themes and rhythms becoming not subtle variations but flat repetitions. East Coker does indeed have something of the effect of a set piece.

Just as its high proportion of prosaic lines seems to spring from partial exhaustion, so its resumption of themes from Burnt Norton can occasionally sound as though the poet was merely imitating himself. But on the whole he had solved his problem. He had made a renewal of form that was to carry him successively in the next two years through The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding. The discrimination between repetition and variation ties primarily in the rhythm; and these last two poems reverberate with an increasing musical richness. A double question that keeps insisting itself through any discussion of these structures is the poets consciousness of analogies with music, and whether such analogies are a confusion of arts.

One remembers that Eliot, in accepting Lawrence's definition of the essence of poetry as a stark, bare, rocky directness of statement, drew an analogy with the later quartets of Beethoven. This does not mean that he has ever tried to copy literally the effects of a different medium. But he knows that poetry is like music in being a temporal rather than a spatial art; and he has by now thought much about the subject, as the concluding paragraph of The Music of Poetry shows: I think that a poet may gain much from the study of music: how much technical knowledge of musical form is desirable I do not know, for I have not that technical knowledge myself. But I believe that the properties in which music concerns the poet most nearly, are the sense of rhythm and the sense of structure. I think that it might be possible for a poet to work too closely to musical analogies: the result might be an effect of artificiality. But he insists and this has immediate bearing on his own intentions that the use of recurrent themes is as natural to poetry as to music.

He has worked on that assumption throughout his quartets, and whether he has proved that there are possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quartet, or that there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter, can be known only through repeated experience of the whole series. All I wish to suggest here is the pattern made by some of the dominant themes in their interrelation and progression. Burnt Norton opens as a meditation on time. Many comparable and contrasting views are introduced. The lines are drenched with reminiscences of Heraclitus fragments on flux and movement.

Some of the passages on duration remind us that Eliot listened to Bergson's lectures at the Sorbonne in the winter of 1911 and wrote an essay then criticizing his dur? e r? elle as simply not final. Other lines on the recapture of time through consciousness suggest the aspect of Bergson that most stimulated Proust. But the chief contrast around which Eliot constructs this poem is that between the view of time as a mere continuum, and the difficult paradoxical Christian view of how man lives both in and out of time, how he is immersed in the flux and yet can penetrate to the eternal by apprehending timeless existence within time and above it. But even for the Christian the moments of release from the pressures of the flux are rare, though they alone redeem the sad wastage of otherwise un illumined existence.

Eliot recalls one such moment of peculiar poignance, a childhood moment in the rose-garden a symbol he has previously used, in many variants, for the birth of desire. Its implications are intricate and even ambiguous, since they raise the whole problem of how to discriminate between supernatural vision and mere illusion. Other variations here on the theme of how time is conquered are more directly apprehensible. In dwelling on the extension of time into movement, Eliot takes up an image he had used in Triumphal March': at the still point of the turning world. This notion of a mathematically pure point (as Philip Wheelwright has called it) seems to be Eliot's poetic equivalent in our cosmology for Dantes unmoved Mover, another way of symbolizing a timeless release from the outer compulsions of the world. Still another variation is the passage an the Chinese jar in the final section.

Here Eliot, in a conception comparable to Wallace Stevens Anecdote of the Jar, has suggested how art conquers time: Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness. From The Achievement of T. S. Eliot. Oxford UP, 195 Hugh Kenner The third section of Burnt Norton provides a second experience, located not in the Garden but in the City, or rather beneath the City, on an underground platform, no doubt of the Circle Line. The Undergrounds flicker is a mechanical reconciliation of light and darkness, the two alternately exhibited very rapidly.

The travellers emptiness is neither plenitude nor vacancy. In this dim light we have neither daylight Investing form with lucid stillness Turning shadow into transient beauty With slow rotation suggesting permanence Nor darkness to purify the soul Emptying the sensual with deprivation Cleansing affection from the temporal. There is rotation, but it does not suggest permanence; there is darkness, purifying nothing; there is light, but it invests nothing with lucid stillness; there is a systematic parody of the wheels movement and the points fixity Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind That blows before and after time, not like the souls of Paolo and Francesca, who were somewhere in particular throughout eternity for a particular reason known to them, nor even like de Bailhache, Fresca, and Mrs Came, who were disintegrated; but simply The strained time-ridden faces Distracted from distraction by distraction Filled with fancies and empty of meaning Tumid apathy with no concentration. Light and darkness are opposites, apparently united by this flicker. Their actual reconciliation is to be achieved by descending lower, into an emptier darkness: Descend lower, descend only, Into the world of perpetual solitude, World not world, but that which is not world, Internal darkness, deprivation And destitution of all property, Desiccation of the world of sense, Evacuation of the world of fancy, Inoperancy of the world of spirit; This is the one way Opposites falsely reconciled, then truly reconciled: in the central section of the poem its central structural principle is displayed. The false reconciliation parodies the true one, as the Hollow Men parody the saints, as Gerontion parodies Simeon, as Becket suicide would have parodied Becket martyr, as the leaders eyes in which there is no interrogation parody that certainty which inheres at the still point of the turning world.

In this Underground scene curiously enough, the instructed reader may catch a glimpse of the author, sauntering through the crowd as Alfred Hitchcock does in each of his films. For its locale, Eliot noted, sharing a private joke with his brother in Massachusetts, is specifically the Gloucester Road Station, near the poets South Kensington headquarters, the point of intersection of the Circle Line with the Piccadilly tube to Russell Square. Whoever would leave the endless circle and entrain for the offices of Faber & Faber must descend lower, and by spiral stairs if he chooses to walk. This is the one way, and the other is the same'; the other, adjacent to the stairs, is a lift, which he negotiates not in movement, but abstention from movement. As Julia Shuttlethwaite observes in The Cocktail Party, In a lift I can meditate. After this whiff of the Possums whimsy, section IV displays the flash of the kingfishers wing, to offset an instance of the Light which rests.

The sun is the still point around which the earth turns, and light is concentrated there; it subtly becomes (for Eliot does not name it) a type of the still point where every variety of light inheres, which transient phenomena reflect. And section V presents language itself as a transience on which sufficient form may confer endurance. The poem ends with a reassertion of the possibility, and the significance, of timeless moments: Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick now, here, now, always Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after. In this elusive vision the moving dust in sunlight suggests the conditions of human existence, dust sustained and made visible by whatever power emanates from the still point; quick means both instantaneous and alive; here and now acquire momentarily the significance of always'; and the before and after which for Shelley contained those distracting glimpses of what might have been, cease to tantalize: they are merely aspects of the waste sad time which the timeless moment has power to render irrelevant. This remarkable poem, which no one, however well acquainted with Eliot's earlier work, could have foreseen, brings the generalizing style of the author of Prufrock and the austere intuitions of the disciple of Bradley for the first time into intimate harmony. Suggestion does not outrun thought, nor design impose itself on what word and cadence are capable of suggesting.

It was a precarious unobtrusive masterpiece, which had for some years no successor The five-parted dialectic of Burnt Norton is exactly paralleled three times over, and so raised by iteration to the dignity of a form. Or so one would say, were not Burnt Norton, surprisingly enough, the exact structural counterpart of The Waste Land. That form, originally an accident produced by Pounds cutting, Eliot would seem by tenacious determination to have analyzed, mastered, and made into an organic thing. Burnt Norton, terminating the 1935 Collected Poems, appears meant to bear the same relation to The Waste Land as Simeon to Gerontion. Its rose-garden, for instance, with the passing cloud and the empty pool, corresponds to the Hyacinth garden and the despondent Oed und leer das Meer, while the heart of light, the silence that was glimpsed in the presence of the hyacinth girl is the tainted simulacrum of that light which is still at the still point of the turning world. Each Quartet carries on this structural parallel.

The first movement, like The Burial of the Dead, introduces a diversity of themes; the second, like A Game of Chess, presents first poetically and then with less traditional circumscription the same area of experience; the third, like The Fire Sermon, gathers up the central vision of the poem while meditating dispersedly on themes of death: the fourth is a brief lyric; the fifth, a didactic and lyric culmination, concerning itself partly with language, in emulation of the Indo-European roots exploited in What the Thunder said. from The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. W. H.

Allen & Co. , 195 Denis Donoghue The fifth and last movement of the poem is its most contentious part, for reasons Ill try to explain. Much depends on the value we give to the first three lines: Words move, music moves / Only in time; but that which is only living / Can only die. It recapitulates the statement about being conscious and remembering; as if to say that while of course we have to live in time, we are not obliged to live according to its chronometer or in deference to its metalled ways. The distinction between Chronos (Yeats: the cracked tune that Chronos sings) and Kairos, the time of meaning and value, is much to the point here. The silence into which words reach is, so far as it is attended to, their meaning, not their defeat: Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, Not that only, but the co-existence, Or say that the end precedes the beginning, And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end. And all is always now. In The Living Principle Leavis gives an account of this passage so invidious that it impels him beyond the necessity of his argument into a commentary, finally negative, on Eliot's entire later poetry. It is clear that he reached this position for many complicated reasons; including a radical shift in his scale of values, such that Eliot must be diminished by a revised comparison with Lawrence, a fate that Lawrence, too, suffered by still later comparison with the Tolstoy of Anna Karenina. Leavis allowed himself to be scandalized, in his commentary on Burnt Norton, by Eliot's insistence at least it appeared to Leavis to amount to insistence that the really real is the eternal (177).

Except by relation to the ultimately real, which is eternal, human life has no significance: this is what Leavis accused Eliot of believing, on the evidence of Burnt Norton. Eliot, that is, insists on the unreality, the unliving ness, of life in time (179). I dont find Eliot believing anything of the kind: he couldnt have believed it and still be a communicant of a Church which is founded upon the redemption of time by the Annunciation. How Eliot judged those forms of temporal life which, were content to be, in every limiting sense, merely temporal, and to obey the call of punctuality and immediacy, is of course a different matter: on that, the evidence he has left is clear. In Burnt Norton, the words which induced Leavis to protest are those which seem to entail a claim, on Eliot's part, to know what the meaning is; such words as form and pattern, and, from an earlier movement, the dance. The ultimate really real that Eliot seeks in Four Quartets, according to Leavis, is eternal reality, and that he can do little, directly, to characterize (175).

Directly, of course not. Nor is there any pretence of characterizing. Form, pattern and dance are merely analogies, ways of putting not eternal reality but the poets striving to apprehend it. Form, pattern and dance denote the point at which an otherwise mere event may be brought to disclose its meaning; brought, by exerting upon it the pressure of a more demanding moral and spiritual perspective than any judgement entailed in the immediacy of the event itself. That the meaning is dynamic is clarified by the Chinese jar which still / Moves perpetually in its stillness. Where Eliot comes a cropper is in his attempt to be more specific than that, distinguishing between a visible and an audible stillness, and trying to go beyond the distinction.

Not that only, but the co-existence': the co-existence of what? He finds it impossible to say just what he means; as the passage about the incapacity of words goes on to confess almost at once. In the interval between Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion, Eliot had temptation much on his mind; the temptation of Thomas? Becket, of Harry's father, of Christ in the desert and more generally the temptation of silence to dissolve in chatter.

The last lines of this movement are perhaps melodramatic: The Word in the desert Is most attacked by voices of temptation, The crying shadow in the funeral dance, The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera. I cant find any particular or particularly cogent meaning in the last two lines: what the shadow is, or who or what the disconsolate chimera is. Eliot is rattling old bones. The poem ends more quietly in another attempt to represent the pattern as dynamic: [Donoghue quotes from " The detail of the pattern is movement, " to " Stretching before and after. " ] Structurally, it is a return to the beginning, a discursive passage about time, love and desire; a passage in which the English language, in this respect like Mallarm?

s French, seems to be intoning itself without requiring either a speaker or a listener to be in attendance. As in the first movement, we are released from its monitions to the imagery of gardens, children and laughter. The figure of the ten stairs comes from St John of the Cross and may be left unloosed; it sustains the Heraclitean motif of the way up and the way down. It would be more useful to quote, from the third movement of Little Gidding, the passage about the use of memory: This is the use of memory: For liberation not less of love but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the future as well as the past. This is what Burnt Norton, and indeed the other Quartets, are about: starting from the unquestionably rich ground of laughing children in the foliage, how to avoid losing or, worse still, humiliating the promise implicit in the sunshine and the laughter.

How to convert the low dream of desire into the high dream of love. In the chapter on Alice in Wonderland in Some Versions of Pastoral William Empson remarks how a certain feeling about children developed in England after the eighteenth-century settlement had come to seem narrow and inescapable; a feeling that no way of building up character, no intellectual system, can bring out all that is inherent in the human spirit, and therefore that there is more in the child than any man has been able to keep (260 - 1). This idea of the child, that it is in the night relation to Nature, not dividing what should be unified, that its intuitive judgment contains what poetry and philosophy must spend their time labouring to recover, was accepted by Dodgson and a main part of his feeling (261). Burnt Norton is full of this feeling, along with a doomed conviction that it cant be recovered, and that the only thing possible is to invoke the plenitude of ones memory of such unity, and start again from there under better, because more exacting, auspices. The success of Burnt Norton is still in dispute.

The reason is, I think, that none of the critical procedures developed and employed in the fifty years since the publication of the poem has been responsive to the kind of poetry we find in Burnt Norton. I can put this briefly by saying: nobody, not even Leavis, took up where D. W. Harding's account of the poem left off. Most of the critical procedures which have been used with success in the analysis of poems have concentrated upon one or another of a limited set of terms: image, symbol and structure. No critical method has arisen which proposes to show the poetic character and potentiality of discourse.

It is still an effort to take the harm out of the word discursive'; as reviews of John Ashberys poems sufficiently indicate. From " On Burnt Norton" in Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot's Four Quartets. Ed. Edward Lobb. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 199 Donald J. Childs Here is part of the argument and imagery of Four Quartets.

First there is the argument by Bergsonian, Christian and Indian mystics alike that the moment of illumination reveals (as in Plato's metaphor of the cave) the distinction between reality and its mere shadow. The sunlight fills the empty pool; presence is overcome by absence; meaning seems to be revealed. Then there is Eliot's reservation about the Platonic language of light and shadow, for, given the values of light and shadow defined in the early essay, one finds a significant ambiguity in this mystical moment of illumination in Burnt Norton. It is not clear what has been revealed, what truth it is that humankind cannot bear. Is the light (presumably the light of the Gospel of John that becomes the Word by the end of this poem) real, marking all else as merely shadow?

Or is shadow real (the darkness that comes with the cloud), marking the momentary light as merely an illusion? It is not clear which of these phenomena the bird is calling reality. The ambiguity is no accident; it comes from Eliot's disenchantment with the meretricious captivation of this sort of promise of immortality that he had encountered in Bergsonism. His fear was that the inner light was no more trustworthy than the inner voice, I which breathes the eternal message of vanity, fear, and lust. As always, the test is pragmatic; these moments can be judged only by their fruits. And yet pragmatism is no simple alternative to this mystical moment, Bergsonian or otherwise.

One therefore also finds in Burnt Norton the twenty-year fear of pragmatism's replacement of the spiritual part of our diet by fiction. The mysterious, lyrical fourth section of the poem focuses upon this fruitless option. The puzzling rhetorical questions serve to mock the pragmatic proposition that reality is a function of human need. The passing away of the sun (as in the first section of the poem, symbolically the reality outside the human being) exposes the ludicrousness of the suggestion that we could replace the sun: Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis / Stray down, bend to us: tendril and spray / Clutch and cling? How can the worlds being depend on human being? This section of the poem ironically reverses the birds claim that humankind cannot bear very much reality: it is no longer to bear reality in the sense of to endure reality; it is to bear reality in the sense of to sustain, support, create reality.

From " Risking Enchantment: The Middle Way between Mysticism and Pragmatism in Four Quartets. " In Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot's Four Quartets. Ed. Edward Lobb. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 199 A.

David Moody Thus, in the first movement of Burnt Norton, the theme of Time and its end is introduced in the voice of impersonal thought, seeking a universal truth through abstraction, logical argument, and the resolution of paradox. This modulates in the course of lines 11 - 19 into a personal voice with a contrasting sense of " What might have been and what has been, " a sense arising from experience rather than from abstract argument. Memory and imagination combine in a sustained development of this second theme as a paradoxical experience of the world of light. At its close, (" a cloud passed and the pool was empty" ), this voice rises in intensity and then abruptly gives way to the detached voice of the opening lines. The arrangement of the voices in the second movement is the reverse of the first.

It opens with a passage of taut lyrical writing in a symbolist manner, as if memory and imagination were essaying their own statement of the universal truth of sensual experience. Then thought takes over and continues to the end in a sustained exploration of how time and the sensual body might be transcended. " At the still point of the turning world" appears at first to take up the conclusion of the lyric; but the series of paradoxes would have us conceive a realm beyond sense and contrary to sense. In fact the meditation begun in the opening lines of the poem is being resumed. If there is a pattern in earthly experience it is because " the one end, which is always present" may be found " At the still point of the turning world. " The meditation unfolds through three distinct sections: eight lines of paradoxes determined by negatives and exclusions are followed by nine lines positively affirming what is to be aspired to; then there is a return to the inescapable complications of a consciousness that is in time and in the sensual body.

Here memory and imagination re-enter, but now we find that they have been incorporated into the process of thought and subjected to its perspective and its ends: " only in time can the moment in the rose-garden Be remembered; involved with past and future. " In the third movement the thought does what it will with the world of experience, determining its nature, and then dismissing it with outright satire. With " Descend lower, descend only" the meditation modulates rather suddenly into a third voice, that of prayer or exhortation. The desire and direction of the will which have been present but in suspense from the beginning here reveal themselves as the motive-force behind the thought, from which they effectively take over now that it has done its work and prepared their way. The fourth movement, like the lyric at the start of the second movement, is an account of the world of experience. But it differs from it in being informed by the thoughtful critique of experience, and it affirms the light that is beyond sense.

Moreover, it does this with an air of desiring to be with that light, and thus to transcend time. It would seem then that the three voices previously made out, and which have followed one upon another, are here heard in unison, thus producing the fourth voice which completes the quartet. It is wholly characteristic of Eliot that there should be a hierarchy of instruments, that the lower should give rise to the higher, and then be caught up into the ultimate voice and vision. (In the fifth movement of Burnt Norton the three individual voices are heard both separately and together. ) From " Four Quartets: music, word, meaning, and value. " In The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. (Ed. ) A.

David Moody. Copyright? 1994 by Cambridge University Press.


Free research essays on topics related to: rose garden, t s eliot, ann arbor, universal truth, waste land

Research essay sample on T S Eliot Rose Garden

Writing service prices per page

  • $18.85 - in 14 days
  • $19.95 - in 3 days
  • $23.95 - within 48 hours
  • $26.95 - within 24 hours
  • $29.95 - within 12 hours
  • $34.95 - within 6 hours
  • $39.95 - within 3 hours
  • Calculate total price

Our guarantee

  • 100% money back guarantee
  • plagiarism-free authentic works
  • completely confidential service
  • timely revisions until completely satisfied
  • 24/7 customer support
  • payments protected by PayPal

Secure payment

With EssayChief you get

  • Strict plagiarism detection regulations
  • 300+ words per page
  • Times New Roman font 12 pts, double-spaced
  • FREE abstract, outline, bibliography
  • Money back guarantee for missed deadline
  • Round-the-clock customer support
  • Complete anonymity of all our clients
  • Custom essays
  • Writing service

EssayChief can handle your

  • essays, term papers
  • book and movie reports
  • Power Point presentations
  • annotated bibliographies
  • theses, dissertations
  • exam preparations
  • editing and proofreading of your texts
  • academic ghostwriting of any kind

Free essay samples

Browse essays by topic:

Stay with EssayChief! We offer 10% discount to all our return customers. Once you place your order you will receive an email with the password. You can use this password for unlimited period and you can share it with your friends!

Academic ghostwriting

About us

© 2002-2024 EssayChief.com