Talking a visual walk through Burnt Norton

Some dreamy images produced by Midjourney in response to prompts from the first of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. These are all in the style of Polish painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.

The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars

But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.

Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London

After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage

March 23, 2022