"...human kind/cannot bear very much reality"

It feels awkward to be an elderly English major and only realize now that Burnt Norton was an actual place.  I wish I had known 60 years ago what I learned this week:

He [T.S. Eliot] was visiting his friend Emily Hale in Chipping Campden when they strayed into the garden of Burnt Norton House, overgrown and abandoned after the owner Sir William Keyte went mad and set fire to it.

The neglected gardens and the air of decay inspired his poem Burnt Norton, in which he meditates on a moment of joy and reflects on the nature of time. It is a beautiful setting, with breathtaking views towards Wales from the edge of the Cotswolds scarp, but Eliot was a pretty glum poet — the critic Randall Jarrell said he would have written The Waste Land about the Garden of Eden.

I'm sure that information must have been footnoted in tiny fonts or in the backs of anthologies, but I never noticed (or never remembered) it.  So once the narrative gets past the seemingly impenetrable opening lines:

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...

and enters the gardens..

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden... the roses

Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

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.

I now understand he was describing a real place.  I still don't fully understand those opening lines, but with advancing age I do understand that all time is unredeemable.

Photo credit Nancy D. Hargrove, via Semantic Scholar.

Addendum:  See also the 2019 post "Thoughts Upon Reading T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets." And note the relevance of Frost's The Road Not Taken.