1. Echo

    Burnt Norton I · Line 24 · The deception of the thrush

    The bird who leads the way is a thrush, and it may be leading them astray: the experience it offers could be illusion. Eliot had used a thrush before, in the fifth part of The Waste Land (1922), where the hermit-thrush’s song is imagined in a landscape without water; his note there identifies the bird of the North American woods. Here the thrush belongs to an English garden, and its ‘deception’ keeps open the question of whether the vision that follows is true.

    Interpretive Garden

    Sources T. S. Eliot

    See also “Our first world” “Very much reality”

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