The Orchestration of 'Burnt Norton, II'

The new reader of Four Quartets has no sooner found his way into the mysterious rose garden of 'our first world' than he is confronted with the first of the poems' compact, allusive lyrics – and with one of 'Burnt Norton''s scholarly cruces, 'Garlic and sapphires in the mud.' Critics as varied as Helen Gardner and Hugh Kenner have emphasized that the lyric is not susceptible to too close analysis and should not occasion puzzlement, for the poet's obvious general intention is to juxtapose the heroic and the sordid, the mundane and the celestial in a statement of cosmic unity. Eliot's wish to be evocative is fulfilled, however, in the many attempts to fix his exact references, especially in the first two fugitive lines. The consensus is that, for his alteration of Mallarme's phrase, Eliot drew upon his verbal memory of Chapman's Bussy d'Ambois and perhaps upon I Henry IV. These conjectures have the merit of pointing the reader toward Elizabethan cosmology, but they over-emphasize the 'magpie' quality of Eliot's imagination, for their suggested sources have little relation to the remainder of the lyric. Moreover, although students of the Quartets' structure agree that the 'prose' portion of each second movement should explain what the lyric exemplifies, Chapman and Shakespeare offer no clues to that relationship in 'Burnt Norton.'