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Burnt Norton V · Line 14 ·Crack and sometimes break
Almost immediately the claim for words is qualified. Words cannot bear the load put on them: they crack, slip, decay, will not stay in place. The lines strain as they say it — broken across line-ends, piled with verbs. This candour about failure is one of the sequence’s signatures; each later quartet returns to the struggle with language (most famously in East Coker V).