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Burnt Norton II · Line 27 ·Erhebung without motion
Erhebung is German for elevation or exaltation — a raising up. The poem needs a word for a rising that involves no movement, and borrows one from a language of philosophy and devotion; the foreign word marks the limit of what English can say about the experience.
The surrounding lines move by paradox — concentration that eliminates nothing, a new world that is the old one made explicit — the method of mystical writers who describe God by saying what he is not.