East Coker

The opening sentence, “In my beginning is my end” (Line 1), is an inversion of the motto of Mary, Queen of Scots: En fa fin est mon commencement (“In my end is my beginning”). Eliot repeats the motto, without inverting it, in the last line of the poem. Mary (1542-87) was queen of Scotland from 1542 to 1567; she was later accused of plotting against Elizabeth I, queen of England, and was executed in 1587.

Each of the Four Quartets emphasizes one of the traditional four elements, and the opening section of “East Coker” emphasizes the element of earth. The theme is the transience of all things; everything eventually returns to the earth. Lines 9-13, which echo a famous passage in Ecclesiastes 3:1-4, state that there is a time for everything.

“In my beginning is my end” is repeated at the beginning of the second stanza of this section (Line 14). This time, the first part of the phrase has a literal meaning as well: Eliot is referring to the village of East Coker in Somerset, England, which was the home of his ancestor, Andrew Eliot. Andrew left the village in the late 17th century for colonial America, settling in Salem and then Beverly, Massachusetts. Eliot visited East Coker in 1937, and this verse paragraph suggests a memory from that time of walking along a very narrow lane to reach the village and observing an open field.

His imaginative presentation of a past age in which the country folk dance around the bonfire is drawn from the work of another ancestor, Sir Thomas Elyot, whose The Boke Named the Governour was published in 1531. Eliot’s archaic spelling reveals the source and time period as he quotes from this passage in Elyot’s book: “And for as moche as by the association of a man and a woman in daunsinge may be signified matrimonie, I coulde in declarynge the dignitie and commoditie of that sacrament make intiere volumes” (Elyot, Sir Thomas. The Boke Named the Governour, Book 1, Section xx. J. M. Dent & Co, 1531). In this happy, rustic scene of life lived in harmony with nature and the passage of the seasons, Eliot is reaching back for his origins, his “beginning” (Line 1), that will place him within the stream of time and the coming and going of many generations.

The last four lines of Section II return to the present day in or near the village. After the hot afternoon and the evocation of a summer midnight in the previous stanzas, dawn comes, in preparation for another hot day. The speaker states that he is “here / Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning” (Lines 50-51), thus again emphasizing the long reach of time in which he has in some way been involved.

Section II

This section begins with a contrast to the previous section, which presented a rustic scene from long ago in which humankind and nature were in harmony. In this section, the condition of human society is presented by means of analogies drawn from nature. It seems that all is not well. Now, the seasons are turned inside out. Late November is behaving like spring or summer, with hollyhocks blooming as well as snowdrops (the first flowers of spring), and “late roses are mixed with early snow” (Line 58). There is also chaos and war in the cosmos, which is presented as a whirling “vortex” (Line 66) that is leading to the destruction of the present age on earth and the dawn of an ice age.

In the next stanza, the speaker first comments on what he has just written, questioning the worth of it. He declares the previous 17 lines to be “[a] periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion” (Line 70). “Periphrastic” means wordy and convoluted. Eliot once commented in a letter that he had intended this passage to be a parody of the early poetry of W. B. Yeats (1865-1939). The speaker is not satisfied with it, and he resolves to start again, using more direct language, even though he acknowledges that the writing of poetry is an “intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings” (Lines 71-72), an idea that the speaker will return to at the beginning of Section V.

In the remainder of this stanza, he expresses his dissatisfaction with what has been handed down to the present by the past, in terms of the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom. In this respect, society has failed. The “quiet-voiced elders” (Line 77) may claim to have created a peaceful society, but the promised “serenity” (Line 75) is only a disguised form of “hebetude” (Line 79), meaning lethargy or dullness. Society has relied too much on accumulated tradition, presented as “knowledge derived from experience” (Line 84), which the speaker declares to be unsatisfactory because it imposes a false pattern on things, derived from the past, whereas life in the present “is new in every moment” (Line 86).

The present moment in history reveals how badly this tradition has failed the current generation. Those who have led society have left it ill-equipped to deal with the array of hazards that now confront it, and people wander

[i]n 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 (Lines 90-94).

The dark wood is an allusion to Dante’s Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy, which begins, “Midway this way of life we’re bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood” (Dante. Inferno. Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, Penguin, 1977, p. 71). Eliot took the word “grimpen” from the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, where it refers to a fictional place. In “East Coker,” “grimpen” likely means a marshy area or bog.

The speaker also presents this unstable, unsatisfactory situation as occurring at the individual as well as the collective level. His complaint is that the “long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity / And the wisdom of age” (Line 75-76) have not happened. As far as the speaker is concerned, they are a myth. He sees only the foolishness of “old men” (Line 95), not their wisdom. They are fearful and defensive, scared of losing control; they are not in charge of themselves but are riddled with insecurities: “Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession / Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God” (Lines 96-97). Finally in this section, the speaker states that what is required for wisdom is humility, which is “endless” (Line 99).

The section ends with a return to the theme of transience and impermanence that featured so prominently in Section I: “The houses are all gone under the sea. / The dancers are all gone under the hill” (Lines 100-01).

Section III

This section continues the critique of the leaders of society, but it also marks a turning point in the poem because it offers a spiritual solution to the problem of how to live in a deeper, more authentic way. The section begins by taking up the imagery of darkness that was first mentioned in the “dark wood” (Line 91) of the previous section. The leaders of society, including industrialists, bankers, statesmen, government officials, and civil servants, as well as “eminent men of letters” (Line 104) and “patrons of art” (Line 105), all “go into the dark” (Line 107), and everyone else just follows them; society is lifeless and directionless, and it is as if it is one large funeral. 

Line 113 marks a radical change in theme. It pivots on the word “dark,” which is given a new, spiritual meaning: “I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you / Which shall be the darkness of God” (Lines 113-14). This is an allusion to the mystical philosophy of St. John of the Cross (1542-91), in which the “dark night of the soul” refers to a process of spiritual growth (See: Background). Contemplative individuals who seek God turn inward, away from the senses, desire, and the mind. Through this process of emptying out or negating the self, the individual soul comes closer to God, eventually attaining union with him.

The speaker uses three extended similes to explain this process: First, a theater goes dark as the scenery is being changed; second, a train on the Underground stops for too long between stations, with conversations fading away and people’s minds going blank, with “nothing to think about” (Line 122). Finally, the dark is compared to a patient under ether, who remains conscious “but conscious of nothing” (Line 123).

Once in this state of divine darkness, the soul must just be still and wait. There must be no mental activity and no expectation of anything. The soul must wait “without thought” (Line 128). Once these conditions are attained, a paradox emerges: The “darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing” (Line 129). Such in summary is the contemplative path described in great detail in the works of St. John of the Cross. It is sometimes called the “negative way”—a way of knowing by unknowing.

In the final stanza of this section, the speaker makes a series of paradoxical statements to illustrate this process, such as, “In order to arrive at what you do not know / You must go by a way that is the way of ignorance” (Lines 140-41). The speaker has thus proposed a method by which people in a directionless, floundering society might be regenerated—they must adopt a spiritual practice that will allow them to directly experience the divine.

Section IV

Section III outlined a spiritual approach to individual and societal problems, and Section IV continues in a religious vein but with a different emphasis: Christian doctrine as the means of salvation for suffering humanity. The “wounded surgeon” (Line 149) is Christ who heals the sick or “distempered” (Line 150) element of each person, resolving the “enigma of the fever chart” (Line 153)—the chronic instability of the patient’s condition, which otherwise cannot be cured.

The second stanza begins with a paradox reminiscent of those in Section III: “Our only health is the disease” (Line 154). This is because the worse the disease gets, the more likely it is that the person will recognize it for what it is—a spiritual sickness that humankind inherited from Adam after the fall. This is “Adam’s curse” (Line 157), and the task of the church (“the dying nurse” [Line 155]) is to remind people of their fallen condition so that they will seek the redemption offered by God through the sacraments of the church.

Stanza 3 elaborates on this theme. The entire earth, following the fall, is like a hospital for damaged souls; the “ruined millionaire” (Line 160) is Adam, who squandered his spiritual wealth in the Garden of Eden. It was Adam’s fall that established the world as a hospital; he “endowed” (Line 160) it because humankind inherited its sinful nature from him. This was Adam’s legacy for disobeying God and eating the forbidden fruit. However, there is hope for humankind: “If we do well, we will die” (Line 161)—in the sense of dying to the self as part of our recovery from sickness—thanks to the “paternal care” (Line 162) of God who goes before us in order to protect and guide (this is the archaic meaning of the word “prevents” [Line 163] that is used here).

Stanza 4 shows this to be a process of dying into life. The stanza includes imagery of hot and cold as different ways of looking at the same internal transformation. “The chill” (Line 164) that rises from the feet to the knees is that of death, understood again as a process of dying to self, while the literal meaning—the fact that all humans are born to die—is also present. At this point, the person’s thinking is still disordered (“the fever sings in mental wires” [Line 165]), but there is also a warming process going on, which is an immersion in the “frigid purgatorial fires” (Line 167) that offer both divine love and further obstacles as the journey continues: “[T]he flame is roses, and the smoke is briars” (Line 168).

The final stanza in this section describes the Eucharist, a Christian sacrament that commemorates the Last Supper. The sacrament consecrates the bread and wine, which, according to some interpretations of Christian doctrine, become the actual body and blood of Christ. The bread and wine are then shared with the congregation. This holy communion (as it is called) is “our only drink” (Line 169) and “our only food” (Line 170) because it offers a vital, living connection to God. It refutes the notion that the human being, understood simply as a flesh-and-blood creature, is a self-sufficient, independent thing. Humans need spiritual as well as corporeal sustenance.

The stanza concludes with an allusion to Good Friday, with the speaker saying, “[W]e call this Friday good” (Line 173), because although it refers to the day of Jesus’s crucifixion, that day was part of God’s plan for the salvation of humanity. Thus, in keeping with the theme of the poem, Good Friday is an end that is also a beginning, as also is human death, whether literal or symbolic.

Section V

The speaker begins this section by returning to the criticism of his own poetry that he expressed in Section II. This critique is more thoroughgoing than the earlier one. The tone is one of frustration and even despair, and it seems to have been building for a long time. He says that he has “largely wasted” (Line 175) the 20 years between the two World Wars as far as writing poetry is concerned. He refers to language as if it were an adversary—to be successful, he must “get the better of words” (Line 178)—but he is no longer able to move beyond what he has accomplished in the past; what he wants to express in poetry, and how he wants to express it, leaps ahead of his ability to achieve it.

The speaker thus identifies in his chosen sphere of activity the same lack of progress and failure that he noted in society in Sections II and III. He is part of the general malaise, and he is merciless in his assessment of the process of writing poetry as he has been experiencing 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 (Lines180-84).

He also feels the weight of the past, in terms of literary history and the great masters who have preceded him, whom he “cannot hope / To emulate” (Lines 186-87). In Section I, the speaker emphasized the long stretch of time and how all things rise and fall, and the same is now seen to be true of poetry, over the course of many generations and eras. Greatness has been achieved and “lost / And found and lost again and again” (Lines 188-89). The situation is particularly difficult now “under conditions / That seem unpropitious” (Lines 189-90). This is a reference to the early days of World War II when Britain faced an existential threat from Nazi Germany (See: Background).

In the second stanza, the speaker draws the poem to its conclusion, completing its five-part structure. In this concluding section, the speaker provides something of a solution to the problem that he presented in previous sections of the inadequacies of a tradition-bound society, the lack of wisdom, and the challenge of growing older. For the individual, he says, life becomes more complicated with the accumulation of experience because there is “a lifetime burning in every moment” (Line 196), not only one lifetime but also those from the past, the “old stones that cannot be deciphered” (Line 198).

He then returns to a theme he first mentioned in Section I: There is a time for all things, the “evening under starlight” (Line 199) for youth and the “evening under lamplight / The evening with the photograph album” (Lines 200-01) appropriate for old age. A gnomic statement about love follows as a seemingly independent thought: “Love is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter” (Lines 202-03). This hints at the experience of an eternal, divine love—the perfect love—which makes insignificant all trials and difficulties in the present.

A prescription for living during old age follows. In order to transcend the stagnant folly evoked in Section II, the old must disregard the familiar and forge ahead into the unknown: “Old men ought to be explorers” (Line 204), regardless of place or circumstance (“Here or there does not matter” [Line 205]). The speaker echoes the sentiment from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” in which the old Ulysses is bored at home on Ithaca and expresses his desire for more adventure and exploration on the seas with his fellow mariners. For Eliot’s speaker, exploration involves spiritual development as well as action in the world. He hints at the spiritual paradox enunciated in Section III: “We must be still and still moving into another intensity” (Line 206). This is the stillness of a mind that is attuned to God; the action takes place paradoxically while the stillness is maintained.

This action within stillness is at once spiritual—a “deeper communion” (Line 208) with God—as well as constituting a deeper engagement with society and one’s own self. This must take place, however difficult it may be, “through the dark cold and the empty desolation” (Line 209) of the world as we find it. The result is a new sense of purpose and divine-centered wisdom. It marks a new start: “In my end is my beginning” (Line 211).