BURNT NORTON

by T. S. Eliot

(No. 1 of ‘Four Quartets’)

  Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
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.

…human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

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Saturday is somber to the eye with lowering gray clouds.  Showers are forecast.  We need the rain.  A gray day effects a slow-down of activity.  Starbucks seems not as busy as often is the case.  I sense, “feel” a slowing of time, a dampening of the frenzy which can be the morning norm in this room.  Time, action, and light are related.

These lines are from the first stanza of the first of four poems composed by T. S. Eliot.  Burnt Norton offers a proposal.  Eliot suggests that which I presently experience, this keyboard and glowing screen, the hubbub in the Geneva Starbucks room, etc. were all inscribed in the myriad of past causes — that brought me here, now.  And the future, veiled as it is to me, is inscribed in my time past, as well as in the present.  Eliot says it better, and my words here amount to a superfluous addition.

The final lines of the first stanza suggest that our compulsive regrets over the past, our obsession with “what if I had…” is a symptom of our need to deny “the real” in all of its hard edged momentum.  I cannot bear much reality.

There is only one end, — this very moment which I am living.

What attitude is recommended in the light of these ideas?

I think it is best to read the entire poem.  CLICK HERE