All time in this poem seems to be a running-down.

Royce's seminars had acquainted Eliot with the second law of thermodynamics if he had not known it before. All time in this poem seems to be a running-down. But the way in which present and past mutually interpreting falls are linked together suggests that the idea of the Fall itself may be illusory, a lost first cause. Burbank falls; Hercules's departure marks Antony's decline. We see only what is falling, never any Edenic first position fallen from. A glance over the shoulder abolishes Eden. For though Burbank's fall, that mere matter of crossing' a little bridge' to a' small hotel' (my italics) is a shrunken affair, lacking the panoramic mythological grandeur of the Shakespearian Antony's, it none the less offers a stripped-down representation of that event. We are invited to read back destructively. If the previous