yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
And so, compliant to the common wind,
Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
I ask because I'm never certain how to pronounce this word in the context. (I suspect this was Eliot's intention, but my assumption is based on the theme and conflicting "hints".)
Wind, as in moving air, seems to be the reasonable choice, and implied by:
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
and a few lines later:
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
Alternately, wind, as in a Yeatsian gyre*, provides an attractive "near rhyme", and may be implied by:
We trod the pavement in a dead patrol
because a patrol is generally understood as to "keep watch over (an area) by regularly walking or traveling around."
I wouldn't expect most readers to hold with this second option, however, the Four Quartets begin:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
which is pretty darn cyclic.
*The Second Coming was published in 1919, about 15 years before Eliot began working on the first Quartet, Burnt Norton.
