- Theme
Burnt Norton V · Line 1 ·Words move, music moves
Every fifth movement turns to the poet’s own medium. Words and music exist only in time — a sentence, like a melody, is heard one moment after another — and yet both can reach, through their form or pattern, a stillness that seems to stand outside time. The movement asks how the temporal arts can touch the timeless, and answers with images: a jar, a violin note.
Sources Eliot 1942 (locator to be verified)