Four Quartets

This quartet is rife with abrupt tone shifts communicating the emotional turmoil accompanying the speaker’s growing awareness of old age as war is underway. In each of the five sections of “East Coker,” paradoxical images accompany the speaker’s many reversals of rational thought, echoing the notions expressed by the Epigraph about the nature of wisdom and knowledge. A sense of panic weaves between the speaker’s gentle reminders to both the reader and to his own aging self to embrace stillness while staying aware of the present moment.

At many points in the second quartet, images of death are positioned next to images of rebirth and survival. In the first section of the poem, the ashes of a scorched house are absorbed by the earth to nourish new life while the wintry warring constellations visible in cold night skies cause fires later extinguished by melting ice caps. As nature’s processes cycle through time, the only relevant knowledge is the wisdom that comes with an awareness of these cycles and the inevitability of succumbing to the natural passage of time. The images of the house, the earth, and the sky combine to enhance the central message of true wisdom manifesting in humility and acceptance.

The imagery of the rose garden from the first quartet expands into a broader notion of nature’s expansiveness as humans take a more central role in the second quartet. Humans often appear beside symbols of nature or in natural surroundings; they primarily appear in groups so individual members can distract themselves with social interactions. As the bird in the first quartet believes, humans are not able to cope with the passage of time so they distract themselves to avoid thoughts of death and mortality. The images of wind, open fields, flowers, and stone represent forces of nature that can withstand the passage of time—unlike mortal humans who must eventually face death.

In the first section of “East Coker,” the bonfire-lit dance in the field beneath the constellations is at once chaotic and ordered; the repetition of words like “feet” (Lines 215-16) and “time” (Lines 221-23) ground the reader while the leaping and circular movements of the dancers around the bonfire imply frantic disorder. In this scene, the people are contrasted with nature to demonstrate human anxiety when confronted with lack of control over life. Images of flowers in snow symbolize the ability of spring—the season of rebirth—to overpower winter as the season of death. The snowy roses preface a description of the constellations in the winter sky warring with one another. Both the roses in the snow and the starlit war represent human instinct to fight against death.

“East Coker” contains several deeply personal ruminations on language and the business of writing poetry, which seem to be in dialogue with one another. The openness of free verse enables Eliot to present his ideas in a conversational manner.

In one scene, Eliot—the poet and the speaker of the poem—claims the act of wrestling with words is a futile exercise, expressing his doubt in his life’s work. Later in the poem, Eliot the speaker discusses poetry as a series of repetitions, or regurgitations of ideas already discussed, implying true originality cannot exist. At the end of the quartet, Eliot the speaker dissects the manner in which he spent the 20 years between WWI and WWII; his implication is that while men are fighting each other and dying at war, he is fighting with language and with himself, struggling to express his emotions by writing and enacting “a raid on the inarticulate” (Line 359). Eliot’s clarity of vision in these lines indicate that at this point in the poem and in his life, he is unable to glamorize or celebrate his work as a poet. Poetry is the work and the fight he knows best, and his eventual acceptance of himself as a poet takes place alongside his awareness that old age is a time of reflection and taking stock of one’s life and decisions.