#four quartets

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

~ T. S. Eliot

Little Gidding

As@adventuresofalgy  reminds me in a comment on my last post, poets sometimes deliberately use words that don’t seem to make much sense, producing the same effect as the wonky lyrics I quoted there. Consider this, from TS Eliot’s Burnt Norton

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle tree.

Aye, right.

And here’s what Eliot had to say on the subject himself (actually talking about a Mallarmé sonnet that inspired the line):

It is a mistake to suppose that a simile or a metaphor is always something meant to be visible to the imagination; and even when it is meant to be visible, that all its parts are meant to be visible at once.

[…]

Poetry is incantation, as well as imagery.