"Our First World": Form and Meaning in The Secret Garden

"OUR FIRST WORLD": FORM AND MEANING IN THE SECRET GARDEN1 Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. Other echoes Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow? Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, Round the corner. Through the first gate, Into our first world, shall we follow The deception of the thrush? Into our first world. Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. T. S. Eliot "Burnt Norton" (Part I) In the article to which I owe the inspiration for this discussion, Alison White suggests: In the "first world" of "Burnt Norton" in Eliot's Four Quartets, an enclosed rose-garden figures prominently. It is autumn, but the roses are blooming, the pool is filled with water come out of sunlight, and behind a "door we never opened . . . the leaves were full of children, hidden excitedly, containing laughter." The insistence of first: "Through the first gate," "Into our first world," and again, "into our first world" thrusts the mind back to the time past which according to "Burnt Norton's" opening oxymoron contains its precipitated self. In its backward search for a rose garden of the "first world," the reader's mind may encounter a symbolic enclosed garden of the "submerged " literature of childhood -- The Secret Garden , a Yorkshire idyl written by Frances Hodgson Burnett, earlier the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy_ .2 White shows remarkable restraint in not insisting on the influence of Burnett's book on Eliot's poem -- I am far more willing to commit myself on that point -- but the present discussion is not a source study. It is, rather, an examination of the archetypal mode that "Burnt Norton" and The Secret Garden represent, and, more specifically, an evaluation of Burnett' s book -- Eliot's poem has many champions -- in the terms of Northrop Frye's theory of myths. Like "Burnt Norton," The Secret Garden is an extraordinarily complete summary of the symbols of the analogy of innocence. The "secret garden" of the title is Edenic. Set between Misselthwaite Manor -- the Craven's ancestral home -- and the cottage inhabited by the Sowerby clan, the rose-garden provides a meeting ground for the inhabitants of both. The children, Mary Lennox and Colin Craven, are the prominent characters, although there are significant adult figures -- notably Mr. Craven. The water symbolism in The Secret Garden approximates that of the opening lines of Chaucer's "General Prologue": Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour . . . The world of the Yorkshire moors and the "secret garden" is an animistic, magical, spirit-inhabited world, in which the Pan-like Dickon roams. Chastity, in the romantic sense of unviolated identity and the traditional sense of purity, informs the story, and "Magic" -- the children's name for the complex of healing forces they experience -- effects the rejuvenation and recovery of the earth and characters. These elements combine to form one of what Frye calls "significant constellations of images"^ -- specifically, the analogy of innocence. "The meaning of a poem, its structure of imagery," according to Frye, "is a static pattern." The analogy of 166 innocence and of other, similar structures of meaning "are, to use a musical analogy, the keys in which [works] are written and finally resolve; but narrative involves movement from one structure to another." Thus, the analogy of innocence portrays not "the garden at the final goal of human vision but the process of . . . planting the fundamental form of which is cyclical movement.^ The Secret Garden is, perhaps, as undisplaced a version of the "process of planting as one is likely to find in literature; it approaches the mythic, the archetypal. An examination of the "secret garden" itself, the enclosed rose-garden, as an image, a metaphor, and a symbol, enables us...