- Allusion
Burnt Norton I · Line 39 ·the lotos rose, quietly, quietly
In Hindu and Buddhist tradition the lotus, rising clean from muddy water, is a sign of purity and awakening; in one Hindu account of creation, the god Brahma is born from a lotus. Eliot had studied Sanskrit and Indian philosophy at Harvard (1911–14), and Indian thought surfaces across the sequence, most explicitly in The Dry Salvages III.
The spelling ‘lotos’ is the older English form, familiar from Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-Eaters’. Note too the double sense of ‘rose’ — a verb here, but in this garden hard not to hear as the flower.
Sources Bhagavad Gita (locator to be verified) (Indian religious imagery generally)