- Allusion
Burnt Norton I · Line 31 ·the unseen eyebeam crossed
‘Eyebeam’ — the old idea of sight as a beam sent out from the eye — recalls John Donne’s ‘The Extasie’, where the lovers’ eye-beams twist together into a single thread. Here the beam is unseen, and it crosses the roses, which look like flowers that are being looked at: the garden seems watched, and the observer observed. The sense of an invisible exchange of glances, like the lovers’ in Donne, keeps the passage on the edge of a love poem it never quite becomes.
Sources John Donne (locator to be verified)