- Place
Burnt Norton III · Line 1 ·Here is a place of disaffection
The third movement descends into the London Underground. The setting is never named, but the tube passengers, the wind that drives them and the list of London districts make it unmistakable. Eliot lived and worked in London (at Faber and Faber in Bloomsbury), and would have known the tube at rush hour.
‘Disaffection’ means estrangement, the absence of affection or attachment. This is a place without love or purpose — not yet the purifying darkness the poem wants, but a half-light where nothing is either fully seen or fully renounced. East Coker III will return underground.
Sources Southam 1994 (locator to be verified)