"Burnt Norton"

Because I couldn't really make heads or tails of "The Waste Land," I decided to take a stab at "Burnt Norton." What I gathered from this poem is that it's about the presence of time, specifically about it's ever-present capacity. Eliot's speaker seems to be saying that the past, present, and future coexist simultaneously, not one after the other.

I find this interesting because I recently saw an episode of "Through the Wormhole" on The Science Channel that centered around the possibility of time not existing. Many scientists suggest that time is merely a human construction of ordering events sequentially. It is innately built in our minds to order events this way, so without that connection, time itself is nonexistent.

T.S. Eliot must have thought the same, but probably not with as much scientific influence. He expresses these feelings in the following lines:

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable."

Eliot also touches on events, as hinted in that last line of the stanza. He considers that if time is "unredeemable," then what could have happened only has value in a "world of speculation." Eventually, it all comes back to the present. But I like how Eliot constructs those "what-if" scenarios almost as other worlds -- like the paths we did not take are actually taking place in some other reality somewhere.

But if we were down that imaginary road, we'd still be questioning the other road not taken, in which case this means that no matter what events happen, there will always be an alternate present that may or may not exist adjacent to our reality.