East Coker is the second poem in T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece, Four Quartets. East Coker is the actual village in Somersetshire, England from which Eliot’s ancestor, Andrew Eliot, set out for America in the 17th century. The poem East Coker, though, is a contemplation of the passage of time, felt primarily by an individual who is halfway through life. In other words, it reflects the thoughts of someone in middle age who looks at the seemingly meaningless and repetitiveness of life and asks, “What does it all mean?”
Part 1
In Part 1 of Burnt Norton, the geographical focus was on a rose garden and empty pool within the rose garden. Here in East Coker, the geographical focus is on an open field. It opens with a haunting line: “In my beginning is my end,” which is repeated again later on in Part 1. The open field in the first two stanzas reveals images of change and decay, and thus the line, “In my beginning is my end” carries with it a kind of despair that realizes that we are truly “dust to dust.” As soon as we “begin” and are born, we are already on a journey to our death.
In the third stanza, Eliot describes the human condition by means of giving us a vision of essentially an ancient village’s wedding celebration of a newly married couple—one of celebration, music, and dancing around a bonfire. The ironies abound: They are all made of the dirt of the field, they will all one day die and become the dirt of that very field upon which they are now celebrating a marriage. They are dancing around a light from a fire in the middle of the darkness—a timeless moment of ecstasy and celebration in the midst of a dark world in which all things decay.
The last four lines though observe something else—that once the night is over, there is always a dawn that points to a new day. Just as night signals both the ending of the day and the beginning of a new day, so to does death signal both the ending of life and the rebirth of a new life. This realization that there is a new beginning after an end signals for Eliot a new way of knowing. This realization that, even though “in my beginning is my end,” that that end still signals a new beginning helps us realize that those redeemed moments in time point to a timelessness reality that is able to infuse those specific moments in time with a new kind of understanding—that of unique and infinite surprise and wonder.
Part 2
Part 2 begins with a stanza that equates that unique occurrence sometimes in late autumn (i.e. November) in which there is a warming trend for a few days, as if spring has completely bypassed the coming winter. Eliot describes such a disorder of the seasons with an apocalyptic image of the disordering of the universe at the end of the world.
But then in the second stanza, and all the way through Part 2, Eliot then focuses on the ultimate limitedness of poetry and language and the ultimate inadequacy of wisdom. All knowledge and wisdom seek to give us a certain lens through which we can look and make sense of the world; they try to look for connections within the randomness of our lives and then impose a certain grid or pattern that seeks to explain things—and we call deciphering that pattern “knowledge” or “wisdom.” The problem is that since every moment in time is new, the reality is that every pattern we impose upon reality ultimately falsifies that reality. Thus, knowledge and the wisdom gained from life’s experiences only has a limited value. As Eliot says, “The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies/For the pattern is new in every moment/And every moment is a new and shocking/Valuation of all we have been.”
In other words, as Eliot echoes the beginning of Dante’s Inferno, we find ourselves “in the middle of the way/But all the way, in a dark wood.” That is why, near the end of the stanza, Eliot says that he does not want to “hear of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly.” For when we realize that even the wisest of men have had their share of follies and fears, that points us to “the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.” In other words, all the wisdom of the world is ultimately fleeting and is of limited value—that which is constant and endless is the kind of wisdom that teaches you to be humble. And why is that important? Because everyone will one day be forgotten (The houses are all gone under the sea) and everyone will die (The dancers are all gone under the hill).
Part 3
Being the center section of the poem, Part 3 points us, once again, to the still point. The first stanza begins with the acknowledgement that all of us go into that darkness of death and the “silent funeral.” And yet, faced with that reality of death, Eliot writes, “I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you/Which shall be the darkness of God.” We arrive at the still point by means of death…and yet death is not so much a final end, as it is akin to when, in the theater, at the closing of a scene, “the lights are extinguished” and the stage is dark for a time, so that the scenery can be changed. Using that theater analogy, Eliot emphasizes that death is a necessary stage in the soul’s progress towards purification.
Eliot then gives a second analogy, that of travelling in the subway. You enter into the subway car and the car travels through dark tunnels, while everyone tends to silently look out the window into the darkness for a time, and eventually come out of the dark tunnel, back to the light, to a new location. Such is the necessary journey of the dark night of the soul. In order to reclaim or re-experience in a new way that ecstasy and “laughter in the garden” (from Burnt Norton), we must go through the way of agony of death and birth. We must be still, and wait without hope, without love, without thought, but only in faith—for it is only through the darkness that the new light comes, and it is only through the still point that the dance continues in new ways.
The last stanza in Part 3 is an echo of St. John of the Cross’s “Dark Night of the Soul.” It all points to the idea that the only way to new life and resurrection is the way of death, stillness, and darkness.
Part 4
Part 4 is a lyrical section that focuses on the realities of Good Friday and of Christ’s atoning death as celebrated in the Eucharist. The wounded surgeon in the first stanza is Christ, through whose blood enacts the healer’s art of salvation. The dying nurse in the second stanza is the Church, whose sole job is to remind us of our, and Adam’s curse. The Church itself is full of sinful people who fail and die, but it is in the bearing witness to our sin and to Christ’s atoning death that the Church serves as the nurse to Christ the wounded surgeon.
The ruined millionaire in the third stanza is Adam, with the earth being our hospital in which, if we are to experience new life in Christ, we must first die. The fourth stanza is filled with the paradox of what necessitates salvation. If we are to be warmed in the light of Christ, we must freeze in death and then be purified in frigid purgatorial fires. The final stanza focuses on the Eucharist itself and emphasizes something we often fail to truly contemplate: the way of salvation comes through death—both the death of Christ, as well as our own deaths as we put our faith in him—and that is why ultimately, we commemorate the day of Christ’s crucifixion with the title Good Friday.
Part 5
Part 5 sums up what Eliot has been contemplating in East Coker. He is halfway through his life, realizing that his words and poetry signify both failure to express reality and new patterns and starts to reality. He realizes that despite the limitations of words and poetry to ever adequately recover past experiences, “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” The “wisdom in humility” calls us to always try to find patterns and meaning in the moments of our lives, knowing we will ultimately fail to do it adequately, but knowing at the same time that in the remembrance of those timeless moments in time, we discover ever-new patterns that reflect the deeper reality of the still point.
Those ecstatic moments within time point to the still point, which can then be diffused into all moments—but only if one realizes the unity of all—of past, present, and future, and of both human suffering and human striving. Those moments, that ecstasy, that unity is one of divine love. As Eliot says, “Love is most nearly itself/When here and now cease to matter.”
And so, the last six lines summarize all of this: We must be still—still our minds from the distractions of the world and eventually accept the stillness of death; We must be still moving—for that is the spiritual path to achieving that resurrection life—another intensity, a further union, and a deeper communion with God. New life and divine love come by the way of darkness and desolation.
And so, even though at the beginning of East Coker, Eliot sees that “In my beginning is my end,” he now realizes, “In my end is my beginning.”
***Here is my reading of East Coker. Apologies for the opening slide–for some reason I typed in “Burnt Norton”!
