- Theme
Burnt Norton I · Line 1 ·Time present and time past
The sequence begins not with an image but with a proposition, in the manner of a philosopher testing a premise. If past and future are both somehow contained in the present, the opening lines reason, then time cannot be undone or redeemed — a conclusion the rest of the sequence spends four poems trying to answer.
Readers have heard in these lines an echo of Ecclesiastes (‘That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been’, 3:15). Whether or not that is a deliberate allusion, the tone is similar: abstract, measured, faintly desolate. Against it the movement sets the concrete: footfalls, a door, a garden.
Sources Gardner 1949 (locator to be verified) Ecclesiastes (locator to be verified)