Epiphany is generally understood to be the festival commemorating the coming of the Magi to see the newly born Christ, and it’s also understood as the appearance or manifestation in different ways of some divine being. Divine experience can come through dreams, visions, and realizations and is more than just a sign as it includes some indefinable quality – something almost too elusive to be pinned down by words.

The poet T.S. Eliot seems to capture something of this quality especially in his work ‘The Four Quartets’. Earlier he wrote that ‘immediate experience is a timeless unity’ and throughout his life Eliot tried to interpret what felt like a release from the time-bound world: ‘human kind cannot bear very much reality.’ Spiritually, Eliot experienced that there were two worlds – appearance and reality, believing that to live enmeshed in the material world of artificial customs and beliefs was to risk experiences of a deeper sublime knowledge. Following the realization of his disastrous first marriage and at a very low point, Eliot became an Anglican pursuing a hidden life of Bible study and prayer. One biographer, Lyndall Gordon, describes this as: ‘a rigorous programme that would carry him across the perhaps impossible gap between time and eternity.’

The first of ‘The Four Quartets’, ‘Burnt Norton’, evokes Eliot’s epiphany of a moment when love transcends love with a glimpse of eternal ‘Love’: ‘the still point of the turning world’. In a deserted Cotswold garden, Eliot and an earlier first love Emily Hale, walk together through an aisle of roses towards a pool filled not with water, but with sunlight, Eliot experiences a moment of transformation from ‘un-being’ into full being, claiming in the poem some breathless, unforgettable bliss. Here are some extracts:

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose garden

 

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now. …

 

 

Between un-being and being.

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always –

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

As the martyr Thomas a Beckett states with conviction in Eliot’s play ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ (written shortly after ‘Burnt Norton’): ‘I have had a tremor of bliss, a wink of heaven, a whisper …’ Here then was ‘the moment that pierces one with a sense of God’s purpose.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWPeQOZMNok

Alex Guinness reading ‘Burnt Norton’