23 December 2023

"...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.

5 comments:

  1. Ephesians 5:16 KJV Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.

    I have concluded that even if we had a thousands years with those we love, we will never feel we had enough time with them.

    Being a pastor, I shared a couple of thoughts about time that I felt the Lord gave me:

    “You have all the time you need…if you won’t waste any time.”

    “You don’t have plenty of time...but you still have enough time.”

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  2. Briefly, before it's dinnertime: the key idea for TSE (by now a believer) is Incarnation — eternity intersecting time and redeeming it.

    All four quartets have place names.

    Eliot's letter about his relationship with Emily Hale makes pretty grim reading. It was recently (last few years) made public.

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    1. Relevant discussion here -

      https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/time-regained/

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  3. A friend of mine set this to music, then -- belatedly, but with no thought of potential complications -- asked the Eliot estate for permission to have it performed in public. They refused, on the ground that Eliot had forbidden musical setting of any of his texts. This was four or five years after the premiere of Cats.

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    Replies
    1. I suspect there is a fundamental philosophical difference between those two situations: $$$

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