The Quartets taken together, then, embody a journey from the ignorance of time to an awakening in eternity.
"Burnt Norton" is the most explicitly concerned with time as an abstract principle. The first section combines a hypothesis on time, that the past and the future are always contained in the present, with a description of a rose garden where children hide, laughing. A bird serves as the poet's guide, bringing him into the garden, showing him around, and saving him from despair at not being able to reach the laughing children. The second section begins with a sort of song, filled with abstract images of pagan flavor. The poem shifts midway through the section, where it again assumes a more meditative tone in order to sort out the differences between consciousness and living in time. The speaker asserts, "[T]o be conscious is not to be in time," for consciousness implies a fixed perspective while time is characterized by relativity (around the fixed point of the present). However, this statement does not intend to devalue memory and temporal existence, which, according to the poem, allow the moments of greatest beauty. The third section of "Burnt Norton" reads like the bridge section of a song, in which the key changes. In this section, Eliot describes a "place of disaffection", perhaps the everyday world, which allows neither transcendence ("darkness") nor the beauty of the moment ("daylight"). The fourth, very short section returns to a sort of melody (some of the lines rhyme) to describe the fictional point of fixity around which time is organized. This point is described as surrounded by flowers and birds, perhaps it can be found in the rose garden of the first section. The final section of this quartet returns to reality. Despite the apparent vitality of words and music, these must die. The children's laughter in the garden becomes a mocking laughter, scorning our enslavement to time.
Comparing poems Different poems appeal in different ways and some are not really comparable. I wouldn't attempt to compare The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot - a poem I enjoyed at the age of seventeen - with Milton's Lycidas, which I had to study (and also enjoyed) when I was sixte...
