- Theme
Burnt Norton I · Line 6 ·What might have been
After the abstract opening, the poem introduces its most personal theme — the road not taken — in the most impersonal language. ‘What might have been’ is at first dismissed as a mere possibility existing only in speculation; the rest of the movement then walks straight into it, down the passage and through the door that were never actually used.
The tension between these two attitudes — the unlived life as empty abstraction, and as something still present in memory — drives the whole of Burnt Norton.
Sources Gordon 1998 (locator to be verified)