Poem and Puzzle: Eliot's "East Coker"

It's a T. S. Eliot kind of day, all in-between:

• Grey, just above freezing, the deck not iced but frosty enough that squirrels shied from the peanut feeder on the slippery bannister;
• Lent starts tomorrow, but I'm fasting now (liquids only; colonoscopy).
• It's break time, but I've no place to break to.
• And Psalm 39 appointed for today expresses something between resignation -- "I am but a sojourner with you, / a wayfarer, as all my forebears were" -- and hope that "I may be glad again / before I go my way and am no more."

The commentary in Forward Day by Day suggested that we read T. S. Eliot's "East Coker" for his meditation on the themes of the psalm. Having time on my hands, I've done just that.

Eliot makes us fight for what we get in his lines. As we do with crossword puzzles in the Sunday New York Times, we look for themes, we haul out the dictionary, and, when we see intersections of words and meanings, the struggle can turn even a commonplace thought into an exciting discovery. No fun if you look up the answers in the back.

So I'm writing before I take a look at any helpful website commentary. In the same way, I got a lot out of "Little Gidding," another of the Four Quartets. See my blogpost "Just a Closer Walk with T. S. Eliot" (05/2014).

I. I sketched a picture of what I think is going on. A wayfarer walks a lane just wide enough for him to squeeze up against the embankment to let a van pass by on its way to the village. Sunrise light casts shadows across the lane. There's an open field where once there may have been houses or a factory.

There's warmth in the air, and the poet slips into archaic language when he tells us that, at midnight in midsummer, "you can hear the music" of "daunsing" and "matrimonie" of villagers in centuries past.

The moment is enveloped in a thought we've heard before, and will hear again: "In my end is the beginning." He elaborates in lines reminiscent of Ecclesiastes: "there is a time for building / ...And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane." Alliteration or rhyme brackets some beginnings and ends, as the ground contains "bone of man and beast," "fur and faecies," "dung and death"; "country mirth... long since under earth."

"Dawn points," he writes, "and another day / Prepares for heat and silence." Are we on the coast? "Out at sea the dawn wind / Wrinkles and slides." I like that one.

II. While the scene seems to be summery, this part begins with a question, "What is the late November doing / With the disturbance of the spring...?" A list of "disturbances" expands quickly from "creatures of the summer heat" to roses to constellations to cosmic cataclysm in fire, and, eventually in ice. Pretty grim. My feeling is, "late November" isn't the time of the year, but the poet's time of life.

After a space, the poet seems to comment on the poetry of the previous stanza. "That was a way of putting it -- not very satisfactory." He "starts again," reflecting that age has not brought the "autumnal serenity" he had expected, and there's

At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment...

That's a wise observation, not an uncommon one, but elegantly expressed.

This little meditation on age slips into another weird midsummer-night's-dream fantasy, like the country dances of Part I, this one about "a dark wood...menaced by monsters, fancy lights, / Risking enchantment." Instead of wisdom, old men's "folly" is "fear" of fear itself and of "belonging to another, or to others, or to God."

Ok, what is God doing here? I guess He's been hovering all along, above that vision of the end of the universe and the allusions to Ecclesiastes. Now that God's involved, the aging poet makes an observation that might fit into a Psalm: "The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."

III. Suddenly we're not on a country lane anymore as the poet writes a psalm for modern times. "They all go into the dark," not only "vacant interstellar spaces" but also "the vacant into the vacant," by which he means all those titans of modern life, "The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, / The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers..." and even the "Stock Exchange Gazette." They're all vacuous entities, Eliot says, echoing Ecclesiastes' "vanity of vanities."

Updating Psalm 102, the poet imagines a theatre, lights dimmed between scenes, with "a hollow rumble in the wings" as "the hills and the trees, the distant panorama / And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away."

"Or," he continues, there's that awkward pause in conversation on the London tube "And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen / Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about."

A thought about "when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing" becomes a sort of prayer: "I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing" and also without love "for the wrong thing," while "there is yet faith / But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting." It feels like we've reached a low point in the trajectory of the poem, and that the poet is receptive to some kind of insight. He pauses to consider his own writing again: "You say I am repeating / Something I have said before."

When he adds, "I shall say it again. Shall I say it again?" I wonder if he's doing some self-parody. There follow the most Eliotic lines of all, paradoxes that kind of make sense but don't do much for me, including, "In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which you are not," which seems to be the unremarkable observation that on a journey you're neither still at point A nor yet at point B. "And what you own is what you do not own" is true in the sense that ownership isn't forever. When we get to "where you are is where you are not," I think of a parody by Broadway writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green (11/2006), who imagined how the author of The Cocktail Party might write a Burlesque sketch, with lines like, "The pants that you are wearing are not the pants that you are wearing."

IV. We're on an operating table under "the steel" scalpel of a "wounded surgeon" probing "the distempered part," which rhymes neatly with the "healer's art" and the "fever chart." There's a nurse, too,

Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

Was all this foreshadowed by the "ether" in the previous section? "The whole earth is our hospital" the next stanza tells us as the rhymes continue to click into place, until a stanza about "dripping blood our only drink" and "bloody flesh our only food" brings to mind Christ's eucharistic prayer just as we reach a surprise rhyme for "blood": "we call this Friday good."

It's Good Friday? We're reading a poem for Holy Week? Are we thinking of Christ's crucifixion? Is there an Easter dawning ahead of us? And why does he call the surgeon "wounded" and the nurse "dying?" By Christ's wounds we are healed, says Scripture, but the analogy doesn't fit, especially when we include the nurse.

V. "So here I am," we read, a poet in middle age between two wars, still learning how to write. Eliot describes so well what agonizes a writer: "every attempt / Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure." The things one knows how to say are things "one no longer has to say." Picking up on the war reference, the poet has some fun, telling us that every new piece is "a raid on the inarticulate" with "shabby equipment" in the "general mess" of "[u]ndisciplined squads of emotion." It's all been said before anyway, "by men whom one cannot hope / To emulate." I get this stanza more than any other in the poem.

But what happened to Good Friday? The prayer of waiting for hope, love, and faith?

The poet is drawing threads from the whole poem for a conclusion. The final stanza brings us back to the home remembered in Part I, the "pattern" and "burning" of Part II, and the meditation on age from Part III. "As we grow older / The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated / Of dead and living." With memory, not just of one's own life, but of generations, there's "a lifetime burning in every moment." "Love is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter." I like that. Do we have an object for this "love," here? A partner? Self? Humanity? God?

It feels like we're heading to a synthesis, and we are. "Old men ought to be explorers," he muses. "We must be still and still moving" --Ah, one of his trademark incidental paradoxes-- "[i]nto another intensity... a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and the empty desolation." Yes, we all go into the dark. But now it's in a good way.

I did roll my eyes at the so predictable last line. I guess it was inevitable for a poem that begins, "In my beginning is my end."

Checking my Answers From The Poetry Foundation I learn that Eliot's family traced its background to the village of East Coker, so the memories of "matrimonie" centuries before and references to names on stone are connecting him to that place in time. He wrote the poem in 1940. I also read that Eliot did have sonata-allegro form in mind when he composed his The Four Quartets, each poem opening with a meditation on the theme of time, with statement and counter-statement; each poem following a roughly similar arc through its movements as a sonata is supposed to do.

Lisa Ampelman in America: A Jesuit Review adds that the four quartets are suggested not only by four places of importance to Eliot, but also four seasons and four elements. I'm guessing "East Coker" is summer and fire.

The village of East Coker is also where Eliot's buried. In his beginning is his end, indeed.