1. Prosody

    Burnt Norton II · Line 1 · Garlic and sapphires in the mud

    Each second movement opens with a strict lyric, which is then followed by a looser, discursive passage. Burnt Norton’s lyric is in short, rhymed lines with a strong beat, closer to incantation than to argument. Its images join the lowest things (garlic, mud, the blood and lymph of the body) to the highest (jewels, stars), and end in reconciliation.

    Commentators have traced the opening images to a late sonnet by Mallarmé, ‘M’introduire dans ton histoire’, which ends with thunder and rubies at the hubs of a chariot’s wheels. Eliot’s jewels clog an axle instead — a wheel, and so a turning world, brought to a stop.

    Interpretive Still point Dance

    Sources Stéphane Mallarmé (locator to be verified) Gardner 1949 (locator to be verified)

    See also The axle-tree Microcosm and macrocosm

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