East Coker
About five years passed between the publication of Burnt Norton and the second Quartet, East Coker. We can see Eliot using the shape of the first poem as the framework for the second. Like the first, it starts with a statement, this time with a repeated use of the first person: ‘In my beginning is my end’ which is apparently an reversed echo of the motto of Mary, Queen of Scots: ‘En ma fin est mon commencement’. The use of allusion, as well as the placing of the sentence at the beginning of the poem, like the text of a homily, masks the personal nature of this opening. However, the first part of the first section is firmly located in the personal and the particular, in the earth which is the key element of this quartet. Eliot has visited East Coker, a Somerset village and the home of his ancestors. His opening line might convey a belief in determinism, but, in fact, in his life he willed this line to be true, in that he chose to have his ashes buried in this ancestral village. Immediate physical reality is conveyed in lines 14 -23 where the poet describes the ‘open field’ and
the deep lane
Shuttered, with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes
but the lived experience of this moment is muffled by the introduction of the second person pronoun as a substitute for ‘I’.
However, the section retreats into the literary in its second part, with an evocation of villagers of the past who are presented rather like fairies or little people. These ghostlike figures are condescended to with their ‘weak pipe’ and ‘little drum’ as well as their ‘heavy feet in clumsy shoes’. They are not the ancestors Eliot is looking for and finds instead in Sir Thomas Elyot[1] who is quoted, or paraphrased:
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie…[2]
These dancers seem to be enacting a form of pagan fertility rite which the poet presents as part of the natural cycle, the pattern or dance of the seasons and life and death which was introduced in Burnt Norton. However, there is an uncomfortable disjunction between the idea of dance as a metaphor for the order of the universe and the very earthy lumpen quality of these rural bumpkins. In addition, the repeated echoes of Ecclesiastes remind us that life and time are shaped by the cycles of the seasons, by birth and death –‘Dung and death’. Perhaps this is why the last four lines move back to air and water and some kind of retreat from definition:
Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
The poet has owned the first person but negated it by refusing any fixity, reducing the reader to a confusion that carries forward into the lines at the beginning of the second section.
This part of section 2 is chaos confined by rhyme and a tetrameter line; pattern and dance have disappeared as the seasons are disordered and the sidereal harmony of Burnt Norton is replaced with war in the heavens and a threatened apocalypse of fire and ice. Probably, this part of the poem reflects the context of its writing, during the Blitz. It might be better to describe the style as oracular rather than lyrical; as in the other quartets, the second section begins with a passage which is formally poetic, foregrounding the techniques and diction of verse. However, in East Coker, the most startling aspect of Section II is the rapidity with which the writer disowns the opening passage:
That was a way of putting it – not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
The language here is prosaic and the introduction of the impersonal pronoun ‘one’ in place of ‘me’, ‘us’ or even ‘you’ is notably awkward. If the poetry ‘does not matter’ what or who is all this for? Once again, we get the sense of internal debate, as if Eliot is talking to himself, even as ‘one’ modulates into a generalised ‘we’ and ‘us’. This may be an attempt to include the audience, to suggest that the poet is speaking on behalf of others at a similar age and stage of life –‘mon hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère’ [3] as he had it in The Waste Land. This sense of an even partly external audience breaks down with the phrase ‘it seems to us’ in line 81, where ‘us’ is fairly obviously an evasion of ‘me’.
In 1940, Eliot would have been 52, hardly an old man, yet these lines are a meditation on old age. Someone has said that Eliot was born old and certainly, he seems to have been preoccupied with the notion of age from early in his life. ‘Gerontion’, his dramatic monologue in the voice of an old man, was written in 1920. Here Eliot seems to be debating two points of view which he has found attractive but which are to some extent contradictory. The first is the yearning for a conservative, classical, organically ordered society sometimes placed in the pre-Reformation past and given the name of Christendom. In this reading, the ‘quiet-voiced elders’[4] may be a reference to Sir Thomas Elyot and his ilk. Elyot’s views were certainly conservative and classical. T.S. Eliot quickly rejects this ‘serenity’ as ‘hebetude’ and, with a relish in assonance which belies the depressing content, accuses these forebears of ‘Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit’. In his essay, Traditional and the Individual Talent (1919), Eliot wrote:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
In this poem, in 1940, the ‘serenity’ of a tradition constantly renewing itself by the addition of the new has transformed into a radical uncertainty:
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.
The poem returns to the theme prefigured in the previous quartet, the descent into darkness, but here the abstract negations are replaced by terrifying gothic images, blending Dante and Sherlock Holmes:
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment.
The scholar or theologian will pick up on the allusions in the attempt to follow the writer’s argument and spiritual struggle but the imaginative reader will respond to the lexicon of childhood, folktale and nightmare: ‘monsters’, ‘fancy[5] lights’, ‘enchantment’ and feel the terror. Eliot dismisses the idea of wisdom in old age:
Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or others, or to God.
As he advocates humility as the only path to wisdom, the poet reverts to ‘we’ but this terror of self-surrender must be very personal. The section ends with the disappearance of all the evocations of the past: ‘The houses are all gone under the sea.//The dancers are all gone under the hill.’ The last line, like other parts of this poem, remind me of Puck Of Pook’s Hill (1906). Eliot would have been too old for this as a child, and although he went on to edit a collection of Kipling’s poetry in 1957, I have no idea whether he had read the Puck stories. Nevertheless, in his pursuit of Englishness he had something in common with the earlier writer. Both, in different ways, were the children of Empire and colonization.
Section III seems finally to confront death, though the nearest the poet comes to mentioning this idea is in the repetition of ‘dark’ and ‘darkness’ and the image of the ‘silent funeral’:
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
The reader experiences some kind of sleight of pen at this point as the fear of death, apparently too terrifying even to be said, turns into a vision of annihilation, of total nothingness which seems to be the consequence of this fear and the absence of hope, hope perhaps predicated on the existence of, or the belief in, God. “Without faith in a divine providence, isn’t hope for the future just whistling in the dark?’ asks Richard Norman in a recent article, a question which he goes on to answer positively.[6] Here, Eliot seems certainly to be in the dark, not even prepared to whistle. Suddenly, the first person appears but it is a first person whose immediacy is weakened by the sense that the poet is quoting: ‘I said to my soul be still, and let the dark come on you’ which echoes the Lutheran hymn ‘Be still my soul’ and, ultimately the Psalms. Again, Eliot seems to be seeking the dark way towards God. The line is like a reverse of the experience of the shepherds at the Nativity in the Gospel of St. Luke: ‘And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them’(Luke,2, ix) or even like a yearning for some kind of dark annunciation. The key point is the subduing of the will and suggestion that ‘faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting’, gifts to be conferred by God, not achieved through any act of will. However, Eliot explores his idea of an extreme negativity through three analogies from contemporary life which he expects ‘we’ will recognise and share; in all three situations, ‘I’, ‘we’ and ‘you’ are increasingly passive and powerless, threatened with darkness, first as theatre audience, then as passengers on the underground and finally as patients in the operating theatre. It is difficult not to see this abnegation of the will and the self as also an abdication of or flight from responsibility. The poem then signals the possibility of redemption, not only of the self but also of history as we return to the imagery of Burnt Norton: ‘The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy/Not lost’. However, the poet may be showing us here that his theme has developed because it seems that this redemption can only occur through ‘the agony/Of death and rebirth’ which revalues the ‘dung and death’ of Section II and points to the necessity of the Incarnation. This moment of insight is shortlived as the last verse paragraph of this section declines into prosaic verbosity. ‘You say I am repeating/Something I have said’ before. I shall say it again?/Shall I say it again? This is followed by a decline into a further series of paradoxes admonishing ‘you’ in a rather irritating schoolteacher tone only tolerable if we recognise that Eliot is again addressing himself. Or, if we acknowledge that this passage paraphrases the words of St John of the Cross[7], then we could say that the poet is being instructed by the saint. However, the effect is of second-hand mysticism reduced in power.
Section IV is generally recognised to be a Christian allegory. Although he uses a regular form, five rhymed stanzas of five lines, each composed of four tetrameters with a final hexameter, Eliot sticks with the first person, albeit mostly first person plural. The dominant image of the passage is the hospital and we might reflect on how much of his life, Eliot himself was undergoing some kind of medical treatment, whether it was for his teeth or his mental health. Personally, I find this section rather horrible, lurid in the same way as the statues of Christ with electrically lit bleeding hearts found in some Catholic houses. Perhaps the lines have this effect because Eliot, who always seems the most cerebral of writers and who had a known distaste for physicality, is trying here to grapple with the realities of flesh and blood, which have to be accepted if you accept the idea of Christ’s incarnation and passion.
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood –
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
I have read that this quartet was first published on Good Friday; I’m not sure if this is apocryphal, but again we see the poet entering into temporality, the here and now of wartime London in 1941.
Part V, opens with a first person who is clearly Eliot, despite the odour of Dante which persists throughout the work: ‘So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years – / Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres –‘. It is unclear here whether the tone here is of despair or a sort of arch false modesty. As in Burnt Norton and Little Gidding , the poet uses the final section to address the problems of writing.
And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.
Striking in this passage are the military semantic field – ‘raid’, ‘shabby equipment’ , ‘undisciplined squads’ and the horror of emotion. Philosophically, this can be attributed to Eliot’s commitment to classicism, which prioritised reason over emotion; personally, it seems to reflect the introverted and repressed nature of the man. The imagery of battle which continues with ‘conquer’, ‘strength and submission’ and ‘fight’ reminds us that this poem was written in time of war, which the poet refers to with prodigious understatement as ‘conditions/That seem unpropitious’. I am not sure what he means when he talks about the ‘fight to recover what has been lost/ And found and lost again and again”. He may mean the desire to redeem the past and the belief that this can only be only possible through faith. The last verse paragraph from line 190 onwards seem to be more mellow, even more optimistic and when he speaks of a ‘lifetime burning in every moment’ he seems more intent on how life is lived on earth than the pursuit of ‘isolated’ moments of vision. The view of old men is also more positive: they may not have ‘wisdom’ but they ‘ought to be explorers’. The poem ends with a reversal of the opening, obviously a reference to death and the life to come, but also a self referential segue to the next quartet where the key element will be ‘water’:
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
[1] A different though not necessarily contradictory reading can be found in A Gloss on `Daunsinge’: Sir Thomas Elyot and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets by Linda Bradley Salamon
ELH, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Winter, 1973), pp. 584-605. Accessed 16.10.2018 at http://www.academia.edu/642611/A_Gloss_on_Daunsinge_Sir_Thomas_Elyot_and_TS_Eliots_Four_Quartets
[2] See Chapter 22, The Book of the Governor, Sir Thomas Elyot, 1531
[3] The quotation from Baudelaire seems to me to suggest what poets are looking for in a reader: someone who will be completely in tune with them, understanding and appreciating everything they are trying to say. Thus, even for the most extrovert of writers, their first and best audience is themselves.
[4] This suggestion is taken from Salamon, op. cit.
[5] ‘fancy lights’ here means not something really pricy from John Lewis, but lights which are fanciful, or unreal, will-o’-the-wisps, as in Blake’s illustration to ‘The Little Boy Lost’ in Songs of Innocence.
[6] Relevant to this argument is the recent discussion between Richard Norman and Tony Carroll about the possibility of hope, published in the magazine Sofia, no.129, September 2018.
[7] See Helen Gardner, The Art of T.S. Eliot, Chapter 7, p. 168(Faber Paperback, 1949; 1968 this edition)
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