- Allusion
Burnt Norton I · Line 30 ·unheard music hidden in the shrubbery
Music that is present but unheard recalls Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1819): ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter’. The echo matters because Burnt Norton V will return to the figure of a jar or vase that ‘moves perpetually in its stillness’ — art as a form that holds time. Here the unheard music belongs to the garden itself, as if the scene were a composition only partly audible.
Sources John Keats