This has been a rereading after many years for me. The poems are just as beautiful and as mesmerising as I remember them. For me they are collectively a meditation on the human condition, and our need to feel that there is a purpose and a meaning to our lives.
While Eliot was informed by his Anglo-Catholicism, for me the poems have something to say to anyone who wishes to be still and to contemplate time and eternity.
Quote:
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.
(Burnt Norton, Part V.)
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The section in Burnt Norton Part II which begins “At the still point of the turning world” seems to me to show the similarities that can be found in all the great religions and philosophies of how to live one’s life.
Joseph Campbell in
Myths to Live By quoted this passage when writing of the Buddha arriving “at last at the Bodhi-tree, the tree (so called) of enlightenment at the midpoint of the universe – that centre of his own deepest silence …”
I really feel inadequate trying to write about these poems, They affect me in the same way that great music (whether religious or secular) affects me – a feeling of awe, a need to be quiet and to experience something profound.