The Bossy Bird
This little fella first pipes up in line 21 of "Four Quartets," telling us to "find them, find them," and probably referring to the children who are playing in the speaker's garden (also check out...
Playing Children
These little tykes pop up mostly in "Burnt Norton," frolicking in a bunch of fallen leaves, but the speaker also comes back to them in the latter parts of the poem, too, especially the final flurry...
"The Still Point of the Turning World"
This is one of the speaker's most concrete attempts to bring together a whole bunch of life's contradictions together in harmony in a single image. The "still point of the turning world" is a place...
Dancing
Like his "still point in the turning world," the speaker's dancing imagery is also his way to fuse all of the contradictions he's trying to bring together in his vision of a better spiritual existe...
The Bell
The bell seems to be a sea bell, and it pops up in line 430 of "Four Quartets" in "The Dry Salvages." This bell "[m]easures time not our time, rung by the unhurried / Ground swell, a time / Older t...
The River
At the beginning of "The Dry Salvages," the speaker muses that "the river / Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed, and intractable." A he goes on, he talks about how the river has meant different...
Seasons
The speaker mentions the "autumn heat" in line 27 in "Burnt Norton," and goes on to make several more references to the four seasons in the poem. The four seasons, of course, are traditionally symb...
Roses
Roses, like almost all of the speaker's symbols in this poem, are double-edged. On the one hand, roses represent love, rebirth, and the coming of a better time. They also have thorns, though, and c...