In the first few lines of Burnt Norton, Eliot was being completely and baldly literal: 'If all time is eternally present then...' It is dry philosophical stuff, and I think unpacking the meaning is not doing any violence to the robust text.
In the remaining lines of the first stanza - about the rose garden - he speaks obliquely or metaphorically. There are massive problems - don't think I don't know - with unpacking that imagery. Some people - and I think
But I have found that trying to put implicit meaning into words has made the poem richer for me, and that is why I am sharing it as I do it. Trying to articulate something I felt without words forces me to join up the verbal and non-verbal parts of my mind and for me that is pleasurable. I don't know how common that is.
And I do believe without any real doubt that in talking about the rose garden and our first world, Eliot is referring to the Fall and our lost innocence. Or no - no, let me put it like this - he is making a poem about a tragic paradox of human consciousness which is also dramatised in a Biblical story and in various other stories and personal experiences.
The lines about ghosts of children and leaves and formal structures are about a way of living with that tragedy: he is saying the same thing as Yeats said in the lines 'How but in custom and in ceremony/ Are innocence and beauty born?' I think this second reading of the rose garden section is less solidly compelling, and furthermore Eliot presents this way of being - ceremonial calm as a way of suspending our grief and loss - as a transient or failed strategy, in the next lines, which I will put in another post.