POETS Day! Thoughts on Part IV of TS Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”

Sunflower in Bavaria, November 2020 – Kritzolina

Welcome once again to POETS Day, that wonderous day where we do our best to usher in Henry Ford’s greatest creation – the weekend – a few hours ahead of schedule by embracing the ethos of the day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Life’s too short for work, and nobody’s gonna notice if you hoof it mid-afternoon.

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T.S. Eliot will with good reason be best known for The Waste Land, but it’s not uncommon to come across writings that hold up Four Quartets, considered as a whole, as the better work. The former was epochal. There is poetry before The Waste Land and poetry after, the full scope and impact being the subject of numerous heavy books. The Waste Land had the advantage of making a larger splash, not having been presaged by The Waste Land as Four Quartets was. I gladly claim agnosticism; “They can both be great,” and such. Being above the fray hides all manner of deficiencies in judgement.

“Burnt Norton” was the first of the Four Quartets, published in 1936 as part of Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909–1935. In the course of production or during the run up to his play, Murder In the Cathedral, a number of lines were discarded on advice of his director, E. Martin Browne. Eliot held Browne in some esteem – the two would continue to collaborate over the following two decades – and so deferred as to what was appropriate for the stage but he held on to the lines. He hated waste. James Matthew Wilson tells us in an informative video about “Burnt Norton” (one of four in a series on Four Quartets to which I’ll be referring to in this post – well worth your viewing time) that he was slow to write, or if not slow, frustratingly contemplative. “Constipated,” Eliot would say. It wasn’t his desire to waste what was painstakingly crafted, so a priest’s struck dialogue from Murder in the Cathedral begins his poem. In the gardens of Burnt Norton, a manor house Eliot once visited with Emily Hale, he says to her,

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

“Burnt Norton” is in five parts, as was The Waste Land and later the remaining of the Four Quartets. Eliot wrote extensively on Elizabethan drama and its five act structure is certainly being mirrored, but Wilson points out that Eliot was a devout man and this is a religious work so we see in the five parts the structure of mystical prayer. Here I’m paraphrasing, but first setting, then discovery or imagination of setting followed by a contemplation or inward turn. Fourth is a purgation, some sort of repentance or prayer of hope. Finally, we have a reconciliation.

It’s the fourth part I want to play with today, and not just because it’s particularly pretty. Wilson said something in his video which struck me.

“In Part IV, we have just this very brief lyric. The most obscure of all the lyrics of The Four Quartets. You’ll see the other ones actually, really, almost leap with their meaning off the page. This one’s very curious, and I’ve asked many Eliot scholars over the years to give me explanations and they have all sort of, to be frank, BSed me. They don’t seem to know what it means, but I think we can kind of get the gist of it.”

Russell Elliott (note the double l and t) Murphy, in his Critical Companion to T.S. Eliot, said something less entertaining, but similar.

“As the poem continues, Eliot continues to follow somewhat the five-part structural model of The Waste Land, whose part IV, “Death by Water,” is the shortest of that poem’s five sections and seems on the surface to be an opaque lyrical interlude but proves to be instead a passage that summarizes all that has come before it. Similarly, the fourth section of “Burnt Norton” is equally short and, on the surface, puzzlingly opaque; yet it, too, makes a summary point that accounts for all the musings that have come before it in the present text.”

Here’s the text, a brief ten lines.

from Burnt Norton
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

Eliot said that “Burnt Norton” was a love poem to Hale, but as Wilson points out, we wouldn’t have any way of knowing that had he not told us so. Among other things, it’s about the “Promise of Paradise” and concerns itself with the “experience of prayer and how history relates to the eternal “– again, phrases from Wilson. As the opening lines suggest, there is a great deal about the nature of time. How do we, as temporal beings, understand the One begotten and not made?

This is in no way devoting the depth deserved, but simply put, the first section discusses time as a whole, encompassing past, present, and future and the complexity of a moment. The second shows a pattern in motion and in the center, a stillness of the point of axis of a spinning wheel, a part of motion that isn’t moving, an inverted prime mover that we cannot comprehend fully.

Yet the enchantment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.

We aren’t capable of understanding so time parcels out what we can glean. Wilson compares it to God telling Moses that to see Him would be too much, would destroy him.

The third section depicts a dim place. It’s meant to be a metaphor for Modern times, Eliot’s time. It’s a between present that’s neither dark nor light. The people are busied, “Distracted from distraction by distraction.” Some have said it’s the London Underground, which it may well be. There’s descent and movement in “metalled ways.”

Now we come to Part IV.

The gist of Wilson’s gist is that in IV, we find ourselves buried, a yew suggests an English churchyard, and confronted with “bodily death.” The kingfisher, a symbol of Christ, is there to usher us from life in time to life in eternity.

Murphy writes that it is “death—the thought of death and its reality—that is catching up with the speaker.” It, he says, asks by the sunflower metaphor “Are we light enough for this dark world?” and that the kingfisher Christ is meant in contrast to transition by “metalled ways.”

I’m troubled because Part IV seemed neither “curious” nor “opaque” in comparison to the rest if the poem. It’s not a comfortable position for me because it’s rare to be right in opposition to learned consideration. I respect Wilson’s opinion eminently and, though new to me, Murphy is a well-regarded scholar and chair of the English Department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. I should say that I don’t disagree with either. I do see something else though, and if the experts are BSing I suppose the doors are wide open. A bit of Robert Graves “The Why of the Weather” comes to mind.

Since no one knows the why of the weather
Or can authoritatively forecast
More than twelve hours of day or night, at most,
Every poor fool is licenced to explain it.

I’ll do this grade school style and treat one or two lines at a time.

Time and the bell have buried the day,

The knowledge of death, as symbolized by the bell and implied by the weight of “buried,” has a hold on our thinking. We cannot experience a moment fully because of a preoccupation with what is coming and what we lost to the past. As I touched on earlier, there’s a section in Part I where Eliot lists a great many things happening at once. There’s a moment of fullness. Wilson called it an ecstasy. We can’t fully experience a present without anticipating a future or remembering a past. We can’t see it as one with all time and we can’t see it as fully separate. We can’t experience ecstasy.

The black cloud carries the sun away.

In part three, we saw distraction in absence of light and here we see light blocked or diffused by a cloud. The modern era and its preoccupation with the self, or at the least its turn away from God, is a barrier denying us a connection with what’s holy.

Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?

The is in line with Murphy. It a common observance, famously made before Eliot by G.K. Chesterton when discussing Nietzsche and after by C.S. Lewis when discussing his “Toa”, that when man rejects God he replaces something outside himself as an objective source of what is right with his own judgement. He replaces God with himself. Continuing with the light metaphor, are we capable of taking the place of God? He derisively asks, can we be the light?

Chill

This modifies “fingers” in the next line, but as its own line we see a loneliness, and so a cold loneliness.

Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us?

The question mark is intriguing. If we are the light which attracts the sunflower, what happens when we die? The metaphor hovering over this section is that of a grave. We have the death bells, the connotation of buried, and the English churchyard yew, but we’ve died. There must be something beyond us in time and eternal for anything to continue growing down when we’re gone.

After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

The kingfisher is Jesus. I don’t think there’s any doubt there. I’m not certain what light is being answered by his. It may be reconciliation with the Father, but it could also be an opening of heaven to the souls of mankind. I’m not certain what it means specifically, but it’s an aspect of Christ’s sacrifice and it is done. He is silent, meaning conformation by our senses has no bearing on His presence. When we had doubts, He was there. When we were sure, He was there. The light is “still,” meaning both enduring over time and fixed in place in eternity. It is the enduring and eternal axis. It is still accessible to us. Our doubts didn’t make it otherwise.

Part IV’s personae sees that he is limited, that presumptions otherwise are foolish, and that faith in God promises that enlightenment is possible. It’s a beautiful section of a beautiful poem.