LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

EAST COKER (1940), title of the second quartet, is the name of a Somersetshire village. In the 17th century, Andrew Eliot, the poet's remote ancestor who was living there, left England for the New World. Later in life, T.S. Eliot himself required that, at the time of his death, his body should be cremated, and the ashes buried at East Coker. Which his second wife dutifully accomplished.

With these two points, a beginning and an end, in mind, we shall soon perceive that the main theme, the key line of the poem is ‘In my beginning is my end’, reversed later into ‘In my end is my beginning’. Even if this were to annoy the subtle researchers of  Eliot's philosophical turn of mind in his Quartets, again I can hardly help noticing that East Coker is soothing, rustic and sentimental. Soothing, because no harshness of tone betrays panic. Rustic, because its images are comfortably close to the life of the soil, peasants, plants, animals. Sentimental, because Eliot seems once again to be in love with his own tone, his landscape, his acquired (self imposed) beatitude.

In 1940, when East Coker was written, Eliot may not have necessarily envisaged yet that, twenty-five years later, his ashes would actually be taken back to the native land of his paternal ancestor. The poem mixes death and life. Eliot writes it in a foretelling, blessing hand. The first images are surprisingly coherent and picturesque. Eliot wrote them at another stage than The Waste Land. Implicitly, they were meant to illustrate another season. We are in early autumn, here. Who would have expected of the city-loving Eliot these rich observations of village nature? Certainly, the feeling that cements them like brick upon brick in the secluding wall of the poem does not betray Eliot's already known sensibility. But, this time, we actually see the succession, the explicit connections between one image and another. Houses, an open field, a factory, a by-pass, a field-mouse trotting, and winds breaking in through loosened panes. ‘Houses live and die’, we are told. The images replace one another constantly. It feels as if the ground itself were wheeling over and over, mixing

‘flesh, fur and faeces,

Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf’.

A short moment of ‘empty silence’ arrests this mad succession of life and death. Somebody leans against a bank, while the open field is bathed in a golden light. It happens one unknown afternoon, not far from a pleasantly darkened ‘deep lane / Shuttered with branches’. A van passes toward the village. The warm haze, almost unreal (like a saintly aura) absorbs the sultry light. Evening is drawing near. In a fit of gothic disposition, Eliot advises: ‘Wait for the early owl’.

The night that follows is described by Eliot under the influence of Germelshausen. At least this is what Eliot states in some letter. In the legend of that village, the Pope punished the people of a whole parish: they were neither to live, nor to die. They just sank alive under earth, and only once every hundred years were they allowed to come above and enjoy life for the space of a single day. This undeniably impressive waiting suited Eliot's mood. Utterly devoid of bitterness, it mixes now and after (‘memory and desire’, The Waste Land would have put it):

‘In that open field

If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,

On a summer midnight, you can hear the music

Of the weak pipe and the little drum

And see them dancing around the bonfire’.

A faint thought of Yeats' eternal flames (Byzantium) which ‘cannot singe a sleeve’ may pass across our minds. Only Eliot does not go the same way. No question of forever in this time-ridden poem. They do come to life, these sad living ghosts, but, in good Eliotian tradition, this life cannot help smelling of death:

‘Round and round the fire

Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,

Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter

Lifting heavy feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth

Mirth of those long since under earth

Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,

Keeping the rhythm in their dancing

As in their living in the living seasons

The time of the seasons and the constellations

The time of milking and the time of harvest

The time of the coupling of man and woman

And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.

Eating and drinking. Dung and death’.

A reassuring image of death, though. Death buried in an all-preserving earth. Another dawn, another day. The waters of the sea, wrinkled by wind at the break of day, are as benevolent as the earth. The poet fears no place, no time whatever. He merely whispers:

‘I am here

Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning’.

Soon afterwards, the second part of the quartet lets us know that the houses are all gone under the sea, the dancers under the hill. Winter is upon the land. Snow and the late November wind kill the creatures of the summer heat. Late roses are stifled by snow. Snowdrops writhe under the feet of the passers-by. For a short while, we are back into the mood of The Waste Land: the ‘cruellest month’, the cruelty of all seasons, the cruelty of all ages. The bewilderment of human beings who will never learn how to welcome tomorrow. All through our lives we seem to be

‘... 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’.

There is no such thing as acquired experience, or old age wisdom:

‘The only thing we can hope to acquire

Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless’.

This second part does not sound serene. The ‘Long hoped calm, the autumnal serenity / And the wisdom of age’ are said to be a mere ‘receipt for deceit’ (masterly assonance). The least Eliot is able to do here is to milden his recurring restlessness by acknowledging that:

‘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’.

And he leaves it at that. A death and life struggle with meanings, these Quartets  indeed are. The ‘poetry’ in them does not seem to matter, at first sight. It does matter a lot, at the deeper level of the poet's mood and spirit of innovation.

Following the more abstract third and fourth parts, the fifth resumes the same idea:

‘Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living’.

Complication, then, is Eliot's fear. The fear of not being able to understand, to reach the heart of light. This is, poetically, a fertile uncertainty. The words may stagger, but the poet's hand is firm. He is basically daring and determined:

‘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, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because 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. 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. 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’.

This long quotation reveals what Eliot had in mind when he mentioned the wisdom of ‘humility’. A humility versus the word. Strange humility, that of a poet supported by the self-consciousness that he can master any word he chooses. Humility which is an understatement of poetic magic powers. This is, then, the beginning and the end, the theme of East Coker: Eliot's unshattered and loving belief in the WORD.