- Allusion
Burnt Norton V · Line 6 ·a Chinese jar still
A Chinese jar is a made thing whose form holds still while it seems to move — the curve carries the eye around it forever. The image answers Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, already echoed in the first movement’s unheard music.
‘Still’ is doing double work, as often in the sequence: motionless, and also continuing, even now. The pun is the whole idea in one word: stillness that persists through time.
Sources John Keats