- Theme
Burnt Norton II · Line 8 ·figured in the drift of stars
An old correspondence, familiar from medieval and Renaissance thought: the small world of the body mirrors the great world of the cosmos. The dance of the blood in the artery is ‘figured’ — represented, and also patterned — in the slow movement of the stars. Burnt Norton is drawing on that inherited picture of an ordered universe, while the rest of the movement asks whether such order can be experienced rather than merely asserted.