1. Theme

    Burnt Norton IV · Line 8 · After the kingfisher's wing

    A kingfisher’s wing shows as a sudden flash of electric blue, and here it answers light with light, reflecting the sun. The lyric’s dark questions are not answered in argument but in an image: a moment of brilliance, after which the light is still — both motionless and continuing — at the still point of the turning world, the phrase from the second movement.

    Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sonnet beginning ‘As kingfishers catch fire’ (published 1918) makes the bird a figure of each thing flashing out its own nature; it is a possible, not a documented, source.

    Interpretive Light & dark Still point

    Sources Gerard Manley Hopkins (locator to be verified)

    See also The fourth movement: a lyric of ten lines The still point

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