1. Theme

    Burnt Norton I · Line 23 · Into our first world

    The garden becomes a ‘first world’: childhood, the world of first experience, and — inevitably, in a poem about a garden and a bird — Eden before the Fall. The repetition of the phrase, and the bird urging the walkers on, give the passage the quality of a dream in which one follows without deciding to.

    Interpretive Garden Time

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