Summary
This, the second of the Quartets, appeared
in 1940.
It takes its name from the village in Somerset, England, that was
the home of Eliot’s first forebear to leave for America in the 17th
century. This poem is most concerned with the place of man in the
natural order and with the idea of renewal. The most explicitly
Christian of the quartets, this is also the one that addresses the
War most directly, particularly in its pessimism and visions of
destruction. In addition, Eliot here engages in what is perhaps
his most extended and direct meditation on his poetic career.
The first section of “East Coker” describes the cycle
of renewal and decay as Eliot sees it. Houses and other signs of
human habitation become empty fields or freeway overpasses. In the
fields on summer nights, if one listens carefully enough, one can
hear the sounds of the simple rural life of the past. The language
of this section is reminiscent of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes,
with its emphasis on natural cycles and harmony. Time here, however,
is less cyclical than it is linear: “In my beginning is my end.”
The second section of the poem opens with a lyric on the disturbance
of the seasons. Suddenly, the poem reverses itself, and Eliot attacks
his own poetic work as “not very satisfactory: / ...worn-out poetical
fashion.” Eliot rejects “the knowledge derived from experience”
as having “only a limited value,” and he identifies humility as
the only wisdom possible for humans. The section ends with a reminder
that the houses and the dancers of the first section have all disappeared.
The third section provides a continuation of the string of disappearances,
as Eliot catalogues those who have passed into the darkness of death.
This recalls the first section of The Waste Land (“I
had not thought death had undone so many”), except that it is, of
course, much more pessimistic: Here, there are not even the ghosts
of former friends with whom to converse. The meditative portion
of this section combines an Eastern nihilism and rhetorical structure
with a more Christian message, as the poet tells himself to wait patiently
and to expect a difficult route to awareness. The fourth section
of “East Coker” provides the most explicit reminder of the war.
It describes a hospital staffed by a “wounded surgeon” and a “dying
nurse” where patients are not healed but are led through painful
illness to death and a tenuous salvation. The section ends with
a reference to Good Friday, the day of Christ’s crucifixion—a reminder
that anything worthy must come through suffering, forbearance, and
deferral to a higher authority. The final section of the poem again focuses
on Eliot’s failure as a poet. He has wasted his youth and has only
learned how to articulate ideas that are no longer useful. His life
is a struggle to “recover what has been lost.” Finally, he settles
for an unsatisfying earthly existence followed by the promise of
darkness and death, in which he will finally find that “[i]n my end
is my beginning.”
Form
In this Quartet, Eliot continues to reject
previous poetic forms in favor of an experiment with language. Terms
like “end” and “beginning” take on multiple meanings and shadings
as they are reused and juxtaposed. Eliot here displays a certain
cleverness with words (the “receipt for deceit” that our forebears
leave us, for example) that suggests frustration with trying to
communicate via his normal tone of high seriousness. The fourth
section of “East Coker” is written in perfect ababb rhyme
and is one of the few works in which Eliot uses a sustained formal
structure. Perhaps in this submission to the authority of tradition,
Eliot mirrors his thematic submission to the authority of God in
this section, which ends with the reference to Good Friday. Perhaps
Eliot resorts to a more formal structure in the feeling that many
of his previous poetic efforts seem futile. Either way, “East Coker”
represents a continued shift away from the highly fragmented style
that characterizes The Waste Land and the other
early works.
Commentary
In “East Coker,” Eliot continues to work with a set of
images that have appeared in his poetry since The Waste Land. Encounters
with “shades,” or ghosts, come to represent the poet’s own mortality.
They also come to represent a level of understanding that is always
within sight, yet forever unattainable. In this quartet, the children
in the garden from “Burnt Norton” and the shades on London Bridge
from The Waste Land have been replaced by villagers
on the green, dancing in celebration of a wedding. The poem even
shifts into archaic English at this point, as if to assert that
the apparitions are momentarily speaking through the poet. The villagers
reappear at other moments in the poem, often just when Eliot remarks
that they have disappeared, and are supplemented by the shades of
section three, who represent literally the citizens of London descending into
subway tunnels to escape World War II air raids but who also seem
to denote the masses of humanity who have lived and died without
making a mark on the world. Everything cycles endlessly but without meaning:
What could it possibly mean to be a part of something the whole
of which no one will ever have sufficient perspective to see?
Even Eliot’s take on Christianity is colored by despair.
The rebirth he describes as resulting from Christ’s crucifixion
is no rebirth at all but a terrifying stay at a hospital staffed
by corpses. The best we can hope for is to “die of the absolute
paternal care.” Eliot emphasizes not Easter Sunday—the day of the
Resurrection—but instead Good Friday: the day of Christ’s death,
for which humans bear responsibility. The hospital imagery and the
emphasis on human malignity are obvious references to the European
war raging while Eliot was writing. They also, though, represent
his realization that human folly and the inability to see the larger designs
behind history doom any human endeavors to failure.
Particularly doomed to failure are Eliot’s own attempts
at poetry. This is by far the poet at his most pessimistic. The
beautiful, if confusing and despairing, lyric that opens the second
section is erased by the harsh assessment of poetry that follows
it. Here words not only fail to signify completely but indeed actively
falsify, for they fail to appreciate the pattern rendered anew “in
every moment” for what it truly is: “a new and shocking valuation
of all we have been.” This is the same assessment of time and perspective
that Eliot had made in his earlier essay “Tradition and the Individual
Talent,” except that here, the destruction and renovation brought
about by time does not enable poetry or enrich the cultural tradition—rather,
it is merely crippling. The contemporary world in this poem is made
up not of the fragments of past glories that were featured in The
Waste Land, but of disconnected, entirely new and culturally
blank features: overpasses and subway tunnels. Thus, “East Coker”
offers little hope for either humanity or poetry.
