1. Prosody

    Burnt Norton I · Lines 1–10

    The first verse paragraph is almost entirely abstract — nouns of time, few images, verbs of being. Its music depends on repetition and variation of a few words, much as a musical movement states and varies a theme. Eliot’s 1942 lecture ‘The Music of Poetry’ argues that recurrent themes are as natural to poetry as to music; this opening is the clearest demonstration in the sequence.

    Interpretive Time Word & silence

    Sources Eliot 1942 (locator to be verified)

    See also An argument about time

Read in context

Sample text