As my last quotation from the poem indicates, the first
movement is made clearer by Section II; and in this connexion
I wish to draw attention to a key-phrase of the second strophe
of that section: 'Neither flesh nor fleshless.' The imagery
of the rose-garden appears in The Family Reunion at the rare
moments when there is reunion--a genuine understanding,
a real relationship between Harry and Mary or between
Harry and Agatha. The suggestion of human relations in the
mention of 'the children' and of 'guests' is not the whole
meaning of the vision of the rose-garden in Burnt Norton,
but is that part of it which makes the communication of the
whole meaning possible.

The first strophe of Section II forms the most diverse
images into a pattern: one's first impression is that here more
than anywhere else in the poem is a symbolist construction
rather than a statement. First the feeling is earth-bound,
then as free as the leaves dancing in light; and we seem to
see the purified essence of what we have known, with the
accidents of our life removed and its conflicts resolved. The
effect is described in the third strophe:

. . . both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.

The thread of life and consciousness, 'the trilling wire in the
blood',

Sings below inveterate scars
And reconciles forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars . . .

It is a vision of the ordered universe in which movement from
one part of it to another seems so effortless that it is not
movement at all, and it is the whole of which we are conscious,
not the part. The strophe begins with a strangely potent,
concentrated sense-impression:

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree. . . .

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