East Coker: “Mixing Memory and Desire”: Lyrical Response and the Fear “Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God”
Abstract: The second poem of Four Quartets, “East Coker” features in its first section a dramatized scene, somewhat like that of the garden in “Burnt Norton.” This scene involves Elizabethan rustics dancing, represented in charged language (e.g., “necessarye coniunction”). We are warned against coming too close, for if you “squeeze” the words, you begin to sense problems: the point of view embodied needs refinement. From this experience we move to the lyrical fourth section, often thought to represent, in straightforward terms, Eliot’s own position, but it too turns out to be problematical. “East Coker” thus teaches us to “be mindful” of voice and tone, as well as to consider the incomplete character of points of view heard earlier in the poem.
Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot and the Fulfillment of Christian Poetics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137466259.0005.
The unidentifiable and disembodied voices speaking in “Burnt Norton” struggle with words, meanings, and ideas, sometimes hitting the mark, at others missing it. I cannot recall one instance of their getting it all right or all wrong. This is not simply an interpretive or critical judgment, rendered by the reader (or, rather, a reader). It is, rather, the poet’s complex and demanding (and difficult) strategy. In keeping with Incarnational (Christian) understanding, the verses, throughout and all along, are intersected with insight.
“East Coker” first appeared separately in Orage’s New English Weekly Easter Number in 1940, four years after “Burnt Norton.” The original complete issue of the periodical “had been exhausted” by that point.1 A second edition was published some three weeks later. The third edition appeared three months after that, in “book” form (that is, as a pamphlet) from Faber and Faber. (“Burnt Norton” then followed, in the same pamphlet form, from the same publishers, some five months later.)
“Home is where one starts from,” we read in the fifth section of “East Coker.”2 East Coker, in Oxfordshire, is not only Eliot’s ancestral home, including that of Sir Thomas Elyot, author of The Boke named the Governour (1531), but also the site of the poet’s burial. “In my beginning is my end,” Old Possum writes, opening the second poem of Four Quartets. In the last words of this poem, he says: “In my end is my beginning.”
(Re)turning to East Coker, Eliot also (re)turns to the time period that he found critical in English—and Western—cultural history, the Elizabethan, about which he so often wrote. It saw the birth of Lancelot Andrewes, which almost coincided with the Ascendancy. In “East Coker,” which bears the name of the little village that figures at best titularly and allusively, Eliot signals this time period, and a certain importance, via the orthography he employs in the first section, with its depiction of rustics dancing around a bonfire on a summer midnight.
I have considered the passage above, and need to return to it here only briefly, therefore. In a sense, given the poet’s own biography, ancestry, and intellectual, emotional, and spiritual yearnings, he is going home (again), and “home” figures obviously and importantly in “East Coker.” Another, related idea emerges alongside it, that of community—in similarity but also difference. A secular texture attends the poem, not at all a sense of “communion.”
The representation of the Elizabethan rustics engaged in joyful and satisfying dance is thoroughly and carefully introduced. A longish opening paragraph places the scene in “the Preacher’s” context (that is, from Ecclesiastes) via the immediate mention that “In succession / Houses rise and fall.” “In an open field,” Eliot goes on, first using the phrase twice repeated as we inch closer and closer to the scene of dancing, we are privy to the truth of “the Preacher’s” solid point, offered with that “necessarye coniunction” again on prominent display expressing that declared point: “there is a time for building / And a time for living and for generation / And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane / And to shake the wainscot ... / And to shake the tattered arras. ... ” Then, “In that open field,” opening a realized scene that rhymes with that in the rose-garden at the beginning of “Burnt Norton”—this is, though, the historical past, if, nevertheless, a work of the imagination—is followed by “If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close.” We must heed the warning.
I have said before that this seductive picture has to be carefully considered. If you come too close, you will see something in addition to the positive and the promising. The positive appears in the dancing itself, with its rhymes with the end of “Burnt Norton” but also with the nouns that stand out: “association,” “matrimonie,” “sacrament,” “coniunction,” “concorde.” That “matrimonie,” though, is only “signif[ied].” Whether the “dignified and commodious sacrament” refers to “matrimonie” or this “association” is, I think, unclear. “Association” and “concorde,” moreover, are rather curious words, hardly romantic, certainly suggesting prior difference. What is signified occupies center-stage; in fact, this is patently a representation and a dramatization of the abstract point: a conception within a realized scene.
Furthermore, the depiction is at the same time romanticized: rustic, rural, older, the dancers carefree and joyful, “Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes, / Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth”—a scene not alien to Wordsworth. These dancers also deserve praise in “Keeping time, / Keeping the rhythm in their dancing / As in their living in the living seasons,” an antithesis, then, to the wastelanders. Ecclesiastes is again echoed (“The time of ... ,” “The time of ... ,” “The time of ...”), followed by a return at the end to the beginning cyclical declarations (“Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, / Are removed, destroyed, restored ...”): “Feet rising and falling. / Eating and drinking. Dung and death.” The cyclical and the Biblical thus reside side by side, while the reference to “Dung,” at least, de-romanticizes the whole. There may be a pretty picture here, but closer examination reveals warts and all. Things are indeed impure, and mixed (like the Elizabethan time-period).
Section IV is where I often began in trying to teach “East Coker.” The reason is simple: it is easy to understand. Or so I imagined.
This lyric, consisting of five five-verse stanzas, seems a good place to enter the poem (or even Four Quartets) because its allegory is straightforward, simple, clear: “the wounded surgeon” with “the bleeding hands” is Jesus Christ, who reveals “The sharp compassion of the healer’s art” in “Resolving the enigma of the fever chart,” which is our condition (now). “Sharp compassion” catches, nicely, the paradox central to Christian, Incarnational understanding. So far, so good.
The second stanza opens with “Our only health is the disease / If we obey the dying nurse / Whose constant care is not to please.” That unwavering “care” serves (but) “to remind [us] of our, and Adam’s curse, / And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.” Complications begin to pile atop one another. The “dying nurse” is, commentators agree, the Church, although “dying” either perplexes or signifies a difficult truth. “Adam’s curse” is, without doubt, Original Sin. But other words return us to a wariness of the “thoroughgoing” that Eliot has demonstrated in Four Quartets and that he roundly criticizes in his prose.3 In a critical mode, we look again at the opening phrasing: “The wounded surgeon plies the steel / That questions the distempered part.” The first metaphor is trite, the second, involving “the distempered,” is precise, as long as we do not recall that “distemper” is associated with canines. That “fever chart” is, in any case, flaccid.
The second stanza would, evidently, echo doctrinally the important point made in “Burnt Norton” that “Only through time time is conquered.” But “Our only health is the disease” is structurally different and doctrinally reductive: the disease is not “Our only health,” although it may be, like time, the means in and through which disease is conquered. And so the subsequent claim that “to be restored, our sickness must grow worse”? The words appear to echo the point of view that I have ascribed to the poet in The Waste Land.4 But what the wastelanders need, contrary to their desire (of rain), is purifying fire. This specific rhyme alerts us to the falsehood in the later, parallel declaration that “If to be warmed, then I must freeze / And quake in frigid purgatorial fires.” The last three words attempt a paradox that they cannot fulfill, and the idea of purgatory flies in the face of the Christian understanding of purification, being a pagan idea better associated with Eliot’s friend Pound.
The last stanza of the lyric is simply gruesome and gory. It begins with a falsehood and moves along with unsuccessful attempts to rhyme, thence to a conclusion that I can only describe as bathetic:
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.
(Which Friday?)
Lest I be accused of the same reductiveness that I am ascribing to the lyric writer here, I acknowledge the considerable promise nevertheless latent in these stanzas. That potential circles about the notion of paradox, variously broached, as well as such statements as that that comes close to a definition of God: “if we do well, we shall / Die of the absolute paternal care / That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.” Still, you must not come too close, for if you attend carefully to these words, that promise is very nearly swallowed up in the untenable statement that, doing well, “we shall / Die of the absolute paternal care.” Surely, we will not die of that; we may, however, come to understand a positive relation existing between caring and not-caring, just what the speaker prays for at the end of Ash-Wednesday.
From this mixed, and therefore distempered, lyrical display, we move to the final section, which, like that in “Burnt Norton,” takes up issues concerning writing. It begins with what may be the speaker’s acknowledgment of authorship of the preceding stanzas, however woeful. Clearly the opening verses of Part V comment on what has just come before, the poet of Four Quartets himself perhaps engaging in direct autobiographical reference (and so, in a way, continuing the lyrical register of “East Coker”); there is a rhyme here with the verses we have already considered from the second section (“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. ...”): “So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years— / Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres— / Trying to learn to use words. ... ” The reference is to the years before, roughly, 1917 and 1939, but whether the speaker is Eliot himself or another remains unclear. I tend, though, to think it is Eliot, in part because the “middle way” is that that he himself embraced, describing it in his essay on John Bramhall, included in For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, as “the most difficult way of all.”5 Repeated in “East Coker” is the idea that, in essaying “to use words,” there can be, to revert to Ash-Wednesday once more, “the ancient rhyme” conveyed “in a new verse,” “and every attempt / Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure,” the reason being that “one has only learnt to get the better of words / For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which / One is no longer disposed to say it.” I hear the voice of Eliot embodying the point on which the second section of “East Coker” ended: “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”
The remainder of the verse paragraph builds upon this foundation, connecting a “logic of concepts” with that of the imagination, which has dramatized the just-preceding lines as a critical and necessary response to the beguiling lyric.6 Self-aware and clear-sighted, these lines constitute an important analysis of writing, as well as evince a marked refinement of earlier treatments of words and writing, accompanied by essential humility borne out of recognition that, as Hilaire Belloc for one insisted, the writer does not create. The prominence of “and” too cannot be missed. “And so each venture,” the passage begins, meta-textually, “Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.” These words may represent a “new beginning.” They are uttered, in any case, “With shabby equipment always deteriorating / In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, / Undisciplined squads of emotion.” The texture here clearly differs from the pontifical claims we have heard before in Four Quartets; there is no sense now that Eliot exempts himself. Moreover, there is no sense, either, that words alone constitute the problem and the peril; that resides, rather, in the writer’s imprecise feelings and “Undisciplined squads of emotion,” a powerful indictment. The rest of the paragraph continues in this vein, with the humility that comes with power truly realized, enacting that “strength and submission” that is being invoked. The words rhyme forward to “Little Gidding”:
And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. (Italics added)
“Faring forward,” in other words (and looking toward “The Dry Salvages”), we keep on essaying.
So much depends on what the meaning of “is” is. The question is real, “is” embodying more than one meaning: for example, “in my beginning is my end” and “the way up is the way down.” And what about the meaning of the former, with which “East Coker” begins, and “In my end is my beginning,” with which the poem ends?
The second and last paragraph of “East Coker” opens with a critical term and works its way, via meditation (not—Romantic, or essayistic—reflection) toward insights some of which represent refinement, if not fulfillment, of points previously considered: “Home is where one starts from.” “Starting from” is not the same thing as “beginning”; it signifies a setting-out, thus a journey undertaken. “Home” may, of course, refer to a birthplace, a figurative “home-place,” as well as intellectual or spiritual locus of origin, however defined.
“As we grow older,” the passage continues, “The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated / Of dead and living.” The point is not that the world and the pattern change, but, rather, that with age we come to see them differently. To put “dead” before “living” may be unexpected, but, in time, we realize, it is right. Among our new understandings is the critical recognition that “Not the intense moment / Isolated, with no before and after,” defines time; instead, anti-epiphantically, there is “a lifetime burning in every moment / And not the lifetime of one man only / But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.” This is a powerful, haunting surmise that does not, per se, await fulfillment but embodies a notion fulfilled. Moments are not isolated nor separated out from one another but part of an ongoing continuum: a community of moments and time. The end is there, in the beginning, waiting in time; not in the same way, then, the beginning is already in the end, not in time alone but other-dimensionally.
Eliot moves toward the ending of “East Coker” with verses that at once burn with rhymes with Ecclesiastes, tell forward to “Little Gidding,” and represent another take on points made earlier in this poem: “There is a time for the evening under starlight, / A time for the evening under lamplight / (The evening with the photograph album).” These three lines are deceptively complicated: to begin with, the emphasis lies, not with the different times, but with the use of those times, a reminder, therefore, of our choice. Further, the parenthesis is a quiet elaboration representing a (re)turn to the past. More is going on than meets the eye.
And so with the remaining ten verses, some of them short. They form, as it were, part of a mosaic, a series of thoughts moving forward, connections left unstated, the “logic of concepts” clearly replaced by a “logic of the imagination.” The first two verses here—“Love is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter”—may be a response to memory invoked in turning to a photograph album under the lamplight, but they certainly rhyme forward to the statement in “Little Gidding” concerning “the use of memory: / For liberation—not less of love but expanding / Of love beyond desire, and so liberation / From the future as well as the past.” In “East Coker,” however, liberation is from present desire, therefore an expanding of love (possibly prompted by that turn to the photograph album, where the past may harbor the capacity to burn through to the present).
The immediately following verses convey simple truth: “Old men ought to be explorers / Here and there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity.” The lines connect, of course, with the just preceding declaration that “here and there cease to matter,” denoting the change that comes with age. “Still and still moving” is an effective paradox, rhyming with the best of Ash-Wednesday while refining the testimony in “Burnt Norton” concerning movement and the “still point.” At the end of “East Coker,” opposites meet, coming together, connected by the “necessarye coniunction.” In truth, Eliot is now stating his points directly, fulfillment present, here and now, rather than waiting in the future, awaiting time. To be sure, “dimension” will represent a refinement of “intensity,” but the words following, which I did not quote above, can hardly be surpassed or need supplement: “For a further union, a deeper communion.” Thus an effective response to, and clarification of, the verses on the Elizabethan rustics, where another sacrament, that of “matrimonie,” was set “signifying.” Signifying is fulfilled at the end of “East Coker.”
We have not, however, exhausted the poem, nor even reached its actual end, for three verses remain that at least initially appear enigmatic: “Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, / The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters / Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.” Old Possum may be up to his old tricks here, for the punctuation, or rather lack of punctuation, links this passage with the preceding. Thus, we read of old men necessarily exploring, moving, indeed, into another “intensity,” for the purpose of a “further union” and a “deeper communion” in, “through,” and by means of such difficulty as the wastelanders would avoid and deny. Of course, here, the poet has returned to imaginative language, the way to union and communion, it is suggested, lying in, through, and by means of its promise.
The last three verses of “East Coker” therefore return us to the poem’s beginning, effecting structurally not a cycle but a circle, connecting end and beginning: e.g., “Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, / Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth / Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, / Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.” Connections—and “coniunctions”—reign.
The passage in the second section to which the speaker responds critically earns such judgment, a lyrical set of verses that he calls a “periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion.” If there is an opening rhyme with The Waste Land, the speaker does not exploit, or even recognize, it: “What is the late November doing / With the disturbance of the spring[?].” The following three lines all begin with the signifying connection “And,” but that too is essentially wasted. That the end-rhymes do not succeed—for example, the inept “Thunder rolled by the rolling stars / Simulates triumphal cars / Deployed in constellated wars”—points to the large(r) separation of these words from analogies and “attend-ance” of intersecting ideas. The last part of this lyric is, merely, filled with prophecy and doom: “Whirled in a vortex that shall bring / The world to that destructive fire / Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.” That the poet who speaks in the following paragraph recognizes the “not very satisfactory” nature of the lyric reflects promise.
“It was,” he says then, “a way of putting it.” The theme of “way” now emerges, and is exploited in this verse paragraph. The recognition of exactly where he, and we, are, is sure and important: “In the middle, not only in the middle of the way / 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.”
This attention to “way” leads on to the large(r) treatment at the end of the third section. “Way” then becomes the means of combining so as to offset separation: for example, “In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which you are not.” With its intensity of attention on “way”—the word itself appears five times in thirteen-and-a-half lines—the passage approaches the verbalism of, for instance, the excursus on word and the Word in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems. That the “way” is indirect is well established, in the process offering an alternative to and effective critique of the direct and immediate display of emotion in the lyric with which the second section of “East Coker” opens.
The “logic of the imagination” as a way of proceeding can be satisfactory and effective. But dangers lurk, that way “menaced by monsters, fancy lights, / Risking enchantment.” “Sovegna vos,” urged Ash-Wednesday: Be mindful.
We are likely to imagine that time brings wisdom, experience the great if painful teacher. “Old men” are, accordingly, afforded a privilege, said to represent knowledge unavailable to the young that comes only with age. Time, though, may bring only a “worn-out” way of doing things, periphrasis not at all identical to necessary indirectness.
Immediately following the critical account of older “poetical fashion,” the speaker begins a substantial analysis—in “a new verse”—of age and the wisdom it is said to promise and to fulfill. That this passage stands as another “go” at the “rhyme” unsuccessful in the preceding lyric brings that response into general question and is established by the reference to “autumnal serenity,” an altogether better way of putting it than the preceding direct way: “the late November.” Indeed, the speaker now says, “It was not (to start) again. ...” This “new verse” eschews the lyrical for the analytical, the reflective for the ratiocinative—precisely what Eliot himself had embraced in distinguishing “metaphysical” poetry from Romantic (and Victorian) some twenty years before.
The texture of this paragraph is not at all dogmatic; rather, it is marked by the interrogative. But that does not translate as tentativeness, neither un-knowing nor uncertainty, but instead “the wisdom of humility.” We had expected, the analysis begins, something else, had long looked forward to the “calm, the autumnal serenity / And the wisdom of age.” None of that desire and longing fulfilled, we have to ask whether “the quiet-voiced elders”—perhaps including Matthew Arnold and his critique of his own time, in, for example, “The Scholar Gypsy” and “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”—had “deceived us, / Or deceived themselves.” The “serenity” that did appear was “only a deliberate hebetude,” and the “wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets / Useless in the darkness into which they peered / Or from which they turned their eyes.” This is the past, the recent past, sincerely represented.
From that which has brought us to the present moment, the speaker now turns, modestly, humbly, offering a refinement of perspective: from disillusionment, in other words, to alternative surmise. “There is, it seems to us,” he begins, “At best, only a limited value / In the knowledge derived from experience.” That includes, of course, experience of the missteps of the recent past. We are thus implicated in the criticism, for we, anti-Victorian, imagine ourselves as (newly) enlightened. The words thus turn back upon this presumed progress, offering a burning “valuation” of it. The reasoning is based in a refinement of the idea of pattern, that with which “Burnt Norton” was so keen on establishing and maintaining. “The knowledge imposes a pattern,” the speaker says in “East Coker,” “and falsifies / For the pattern is new in every moment / And every moment is a new and shocking / Valuation of all we have been.” Experiential knowledge imposes a way of knowing that the Incarnation with its different (and differential) pattern deconstructs.
The remainder of the verse paragraph, and thus of the second section of “East Coker,” concentrates on the matter of “way.” That return is initiated by a statement that feels earned: “We are only undeceived / Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.” The complexity here stated mirrors what is being represented dramatically. There is no apparent deception here, and so the verses continue with the representation of being “all the way,” on a “grimpen,” lacking security, in tension. This is our condition—in his prose, Eliot specifically embraces “tension” and pursues its necessity in, for example, matters of Church and state.
Before ending the paragraph with the couplet I have referred to already regarding the only wisdom we can hope for, which is that of humility, the speaker offers these words, returning us to the issues of age and experience and expanding to a new note concerning “belonging,” itself another name for such “coniunction” as Incarnation names, that overcoming of separation that Eliot has long been exploring: “Do not let me hear,” the speaker says in a rare instance of impatience, if not pique, “Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly, / Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession, / Of belonging to another, or others, or to God.” The short list is inclusive.
We do not come upon Incarnation, not so stated at any rate, until the final section of the next poem, “The Dry Salvages.” It has, of course, been implicit, all along, unstated—just as Incarnation is universal and timeless, the Incarnation that event in time and place that fulfilled (the promise of) Incarnational pattern. We do not know that at this point, however. You will not fully understand until the end. That is the Christian way.
Lest we, in any case, begin to think that an unmixed, purely positive insight or revelation is forthcoming or awaits us, Eliot ends the second section of “East Coker” with two, matching sentences, set off from the preceding as well as from each other, thus separated, for all their closeness: “The houses are all gone under the sea” and “The dancers are all gone under the sea.” No “autumnal serenity” here, “late November” proving dark, indeed.
Dark is the texture of the following section, which begins with precisely its invocation: “O dark dark dark.” The change in the speaker—if we can indeed speak of but one voice in “East Coker”—has been quiet but definite. It is clearer and more functional in this section. “They all go into the dark,” says he, proceeding to an extensive list, beginning with “captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters.” But it is not just they who “go into the dark.”
A change now appears in the voice we hear. It is the first time we have heard “I” uttered in “East Coker” since the isolated and rhetorically understated (although thematically relevant) annunciation at the end of the first section (“I am here / Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning”). The third section of the poem, in which we hear the latest instance of “I,” proceeds with repeated self-reference, which did not emerge even in the second section with the critical remarks on the preceding verses and their “way.” Here, the “I” achieves the status, not of character or personage, but of point of view—a position to be read, analyzed, and compared: “And we all go with them, into the silent funeral, / Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury” (italics added). Being names the issue.
More is revealed about the speaking voice as it proceeds. There is no apparent “wrestle / With words and meanings,” nor are they charged; instead, they are merely descriptive, though not given in a “worn-out poetical fashion.” The resort is, again, to the figurative: “As, in a theatre ... ,” “Or as, when an underground train ... ,” “Or when, under ether.” The words rhyme forward with Krishna’s at this same point in “The Dry Salvages.”
This “I” is insightful in recognizing self-division, but not (yet) possessed of the inner eye—that eye of the Other—necessary for satisfactory self-criticism. Thus the speaker says that he spoke to “my soul,” and what he said was, “be still, and let the dark come upon you / Which shall be the darkness of God.” The “way” to be taken, though, involves something different. You cannot command your soul to be still. And “the darkness of God”? God is not merely “dark.” Nevertheless, the speaker tried, he says, to direct his soul, willing it, to stillness and acceptance: wait, he urges, for hope would be for the wrong thing, as would love, likewise with faith, even thought. The end is sound, but the “way” is unsatisfactory. As the following makes clear, the problem lies in identifying, and reducing, rather than connecting, uniting, and reconciling and thus expanding: “So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” The verse paragraph that immediately follows, at which we have already looked, supports the interpretation, for it pointedly does not identify the way of knowing and ignorance or that of possession and dispossession. Instead, the way is identified as the issue: in, through, and by means of which you proceed (“You must go through the way in which you are not” [italics added]).
What begins to dawn is recognition of the difficulties, and often the failures, of the voice (or voices) in “East Coker” to say it satisfactorily, Incarnational pattern the standard of measurement, yet to be fully revealed or fulfilled.
A valuable hint, or glimpse, resides in the remark I have quoted before, which begins with that nearly ubiquitous “coniunction”: “And where you are is where you are not.” Eliot means, it appears, that you are, that is, have being, where you are not. The difficulty in saying it satisfactorily, in getting it right, may lie in the fact and the presence of the “I.”
I return to the fifth section of “East Coker,” specifically, the beginning, where the speaker acknowledges his attempts over the years to “say it right,” his consequent struggles, and his plaguing lack of success. Like the urgency to return to the place “where we started” and know it for the first time (the ending of “Little Gidding”), these important verses enact the major thematic point. We (can) know them for the first time.
After apparently autobiographical references, the poet, you recall, says he has “largely wasted” twenty years “Trying to learn to use words.” Each and every attempt, he continues, without lament, “Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure.” You can “get the better of words,” he goes on, accepting the fact, “For the one thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which / One is no longer disposed to say it” (italics added). There is what you want, and need, to say, and that is related to but not identical with nor reducible to the way you are now “disposed to say it.” The poet finds himself, willy-nilly, “With shabby equipment always deteriorating / In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, / Undisciplined squads of emotion.” His problems thus mirror those of Everyman, trying to get on with living—only more keenly felt and so exacerbated.
The passage itself has the texture of the keenly felt and honestly and sincerely stated, rendered, indeed, with clarity, precision, perception, and acute analysis. The “I” is simply different now from earlier, not at all lacking desire, yet not enslaved to it or driven by it, either. Returning to a couple of those passages that I have labeled as problematic, I find the following contrived and programmatic, in addition to, that is, adopting the pagan, and anti-Incarnational, notion of purgation: “If to be warmed, then I must freeze / And quake in frigid purgatorial fires.” Similarly with “I said to my soul. ... ” although this statement does not feel contrived or necessarily programmatic in its lack of sophistication; it is, however, blithe in its assumption that what it says, be possible, let alone desirable. In the fifth section, the “I” appears only at the beginning, the switch quick to “one” and “we.” There is no pretension, and with its essential invisibility now, the voice appears liberated from desire.
It is important to remind ourselves that the humility of which we speak is as earthy as the Elizabethan rustics with their “Earth feet, loam feet.” Earth is the element associated with “East Coker.” The word “humility” derives, after all, from humus, which means “earth.”
Humility emerges as the most satisfactory way of responding to the situation that attends writing, with its “intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings.” While you perhaps inevitably strive for control and mastery, they inevitably elude you. “And what there is to conquer” can only be attempted with “strength and submission” (italics added). Besides, it has all been done and said before, “Once or twice, or several times,” and “by men whom one cannot hope / To emulate.” The only fight—for “there is no competition”—is one of recovery of what has been lost and found and lost again and again. What remains further humbles: “there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
“East Coker” is about, we might conclude, the humility that accompanies the recognition, and the acknowledgment, of the difficulty of understanding. We may conclude that Four Quartets as a whole dramatizes a journey—not that of a character or a personage, to be sure—from self-involvement to self-criticism. The great poem is also about writing and reading and their ultimate inseparability. In some ways, Four Quartets is about its own writing, and thus of the way that we (are to) read its words.
The light shines in darkness.
1 Donald Gallup, T.S. Eliot: A Bibliography. Rev. and extended edn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969), 68.
2 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).
3 See, for example, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), 28–29; The Idea of a Christian Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), 56, 95; and Notes towards the Definition of Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 31–32, 58–59, and 68–69.
4 See T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), and my T.S. Eliot and the Failure to Connect: Satire on Modern Misunderstandings (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
5 T.S. Eliot, “John Bramhall,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 359.
6 T.S. Eliot, preface, Anabasis, by St.-John Perse, trans. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), 10.