The speaker tells his soul to be patient and wait, and they will all find out together what waits for them after death. Instead, people need to trust in Christ and have faith that death is not the end.

He does not trust science to save them from death because in his experience science only leads to war. The speaker contemplates his own death, but takes comfort in the fact that everyone dies. Aspects of nature are more permanent and long-lived. He sees buildings being constructed, then crumbling, then being rebuilt. The beginning of the poem takes a long view of history. The second poem is “East Coker,” which mimics the style and themes of “Burnt Norton,” though it was written several years later. Then the speaker hears the laughter of children from elsewhere in the garden, and he realizes that all his meditations are silly and only leading him to sadness. He determines that death gives life meaning because that which has begun must also end. The speaker follows his train of thought to its logical conclusion: death.

He knows that he will look back on this moment and remember it, but he can only do that by returning to the flow of time. However, the speaker knows that it is only through the construct of time that the state of enlightenment he has achieved gains any meaning. He no longer feels that he needs to get somewhere and has reached a state of stillness. He attunes his senses to the sounds of the birds, the smell of the flowers, and the movement of the clouds in an attempt to exist entirely in the moment.Īs the speaker’s meditation continues, he feels that he has come to exist outside of place and time. The speaker of the poem takes a walk in the garden and tries to focus completely on the present. Eliot imagines a construct in which all moments in the past and the present exist simultaneously at a time in the future. The first poem is called “Burnt Norton,” a meditative poem on the nature of time.

Eliot four quartets