- Theme
Burnt Norton II · Line 16 ·still point of the turning world
The governing image of the whole sequence: the point at the centre of a turning wheel that does not itself move, around which all movement is ordered. It is neither motion nor fixity, neither past nor future — the place where ‘the dance is’.
Eliot had used the phrase before, in ‘Triumphal March’ (1931), the first part of the unfinished Coriolan. Readers have linked the image to Aristotle’s unmoved mover, to the Buddhist and Taoist figure of the hub of a wheel, and to the single point of light on which, in Dante’s Paradiso XXVIII, ‘heaven and all nature depend’. The poem does not choose between these; it presents the still point as something known only in fleeting moments of experience and then named with difficulty.
Sources Ricks & McCue 2015 (locator to be verified) Dante Alighieri (locator to be verified) (Paradiso XXVIII)