1. Theme

    Burnt Norton · The whole quartet

    The collective title invites a musical reading. Each quartet has five movements; themes are stated, developed, varied and recalled across them; and the fourth movement is always a short lyric, like a slow movement. In ‘The Music of Poetry’ (1942) Eliot suggested that the use of recurrent themes is as natural to poetry as to music, and that a poem might be organised by something like contrasting movements.

    Eliot is known to have admired Beethoven’s late string quartets, in particular the A minor quartet, Op. 132. The analogy should not be pressed too hard — these are poems for one voice — but it explains why the sequence rewards reading the four quartets side by side, movement by movement.

    Interpretive Word & silence Time

    Sources Eliot 1942 (locator to be verified) Ludwig van Beethoven (locator to be verified) Gardner 1949 (locator to be verified)

    See also How Burnt Norton was made Words and music in time

Read in context

Sample text