They can be translated as ‘Though wisdom is common, the many live as if they have wisdom of their own’ and ‘The way up and the way down are one and the same.’ But the epigraphs to the poem are from a pre-Christian – and, for that matter, even a pre-Socratic – source: the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. It also reflects Eliot’s conversion to Christianity (he had been received into the Church of England in 1927), and is partly about the soul’s salvation and how we might hope to be saved. This visit was the starting-point for the five-part poem that Eliot wrote and published the following year.Īs the opening lines of ‘Burnt Norton’ make clear, time is a major theme in the poem. Following his separation from his first wife, Vivienne, in the early 1930s, Eliot rekindled his old friendship with Hale, and the two of them visited Burnt Norton in 1934. Burnt Norton is a manor house in Gloucestershire, England, which Eliot visited with an old friend, Emily Hale, whom he had known as a youth in the United States.
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