1. Allusion

    Burnt Norton I · Line 26 · dignified, invisible

    The poem never says who ‘they’ are. Readers have suggested the ghosts of the house’s past, the walkers’ own former or unrealised selves, or the children who were never born. The indeterminacy is the point: presences felt rather than seen, moving in a formal pattern as if in a dance.

    Rudyard Kipling’s story ‘They’ (1904), in which a visitor to an English country house senses the ghosts of dead children in its garden, is often cited as a background; Eliot admired Kipling and later edited a selection of his verse (1941).

    Interpretive Garden Time

    Sources Rudyard Kipling (locator to be verified) Gardner 1978 (locator to be verified)

    See also The door into the rose-garden Hidden children

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