- Allusion
Burnt Norton V · Line 20 ·The Word in the desert
A capitalised Word: in the Gospel of John, Christ is the Word (Logos) made flesh. In the wilderness he was tempted by the devil for forty days (Matthew 4, Luke 4). The poet’s struggle with words is thus set beside the Word itself beset by voices of temptation — the human difficulty of speech mirrored in a sacred one.
The Greek logos also links back to the first Heraclitus epigraph, where the logos is the account common to all.
Sources Authorized (King James) Version (John 1:1–14; Matthew 4:1–11)