1. Place

    Burnt Norton · The whole quartet

    Burnt Norton is a manor house in the Cotswolds, just north of Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire. In late summer 1934 Eliot walked through its then-deserted formal gardens with Emily Hale, the American friend he had known since his Harvard years, who was staying with relatives in Chipping Campden.

    The house takes its name from an eighteenth-century fire: the owner, Sir William Keyt, is said to have set the old house alight in 1741 and died in the blaze. Nothing of that story enters the poem directly, but the name — a place already marked by ruin and absence — suits a meditation on what might have been.

    Established Garden Rose

    Sources Gordon 1998 (locator to be verified) Ricks & McCue 2015 (locator to be verified)

    See also The door into the rose-garden The drained pool

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