‘Four Quartets: East Coker’: Loss and Renewal
A review of ‘East Coker’, by T.S. Eliot; originally published in 1940.
Mary, Queen of Scots ascended to the throne in 1542 when she was six days old. Regents — first James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, then her mother, Mary of Guise—governed Scotland on her behalf. She began to rule at 16 after a promising childhood. Contemporary accounts depict her as vivacious, beautiful, clever, cultivated, competent in a wide range of skills, and statuesque: she was 5 feet 11 inches tall at a time when the average man was 5 feet 7.
She was also known for her fervent Catholicism. This divided the public: Scotland at the time was torn between Catholic and Protestant factions. The Protestant reformer John Knox preached against Mary, attacking her for hearing Mass (as well as dancing and dressing too elaborately). But for Catholics, she was the rightful queen—and not just of Scotland, but of England. In their eyes, Elizabeth I, child of Henry VIII, was illegitimate. When Mary married Francis, the Dauphin of France, his father Henry II proclaimed the couple king and queen of all of Britain.
Contemporary accounts depict her as vivacious, beautiful, clever, cultivated.
Mary’s Catholicism would be her undoing. She was entangled in numerous plots to topple Elizabeth and restore the authority of Rome in England. It was the Babington Plot that did her in in 1586; already she had been forced to abdicate and flee after failing to put down a rebellion. She was arrested. In prison, she embroidered on her cloth of estate words that showed the strength of faith and the eternity of life after death: ‘En ma fin, gît mon commencement.’ (‘In my end is my beginning.’)
So when T.S. Eliot, at the opening of ‘East Coker’, writes ‘In my beginning is my end’, it is Mary he is invoking. He admired her courage, her devotion to her faith. And her motto captures the central theme of Eliot’s poem, which is the inextricable nature of life and death, here and not-here.
In prison, she embroidered on her cloth of estate words that showed the strength of faith.
Each of the poems what makes up Four Quartets corresponds to an element, and the element at the heart of East Coker is earth. The poem opens with a return to roots, literal and metaphorical: the village of East Coker, where Eliot’s ancestors lived. He invoke and idealises an agrarian past, tying the cyclical nature of life to the rhythms of the soil. His theme is transience, and he reminds us that even the most enduring things are subject to decay and will, in time, return to the earth. Seasons change, buildings crumble, and empires fade, yet all of it is part of a pattern:
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Time heals all wounds, but also destroys all things. Time is paradoxical. Eliot suggests that we must accept and indeed embrace the destructive power of time in order to free ourselves from its shackles. To live fully, we must accept that life and death are inextricable. Death is not the opposite of life but its completion. Without death, there is no life, and without embracing death we cannot live. To live well, we must make friends with the reaper. We will die, and perhaps sooner than we think. To pretend otherwise is to fritter away our time, to lose our sense of proportion. We will die with regrets if we fail to see that we do not have an infinite amount of time to become who we are.
Without death, there is no life.
More still, our obsession with progress betrays a basic discomfort with the way things are. Eliot critiques this preoccupation. He depicts many of our pursuits as futile, disconnected from deeper spiritual truths. Our attempts to press forward into the future are hollow:
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
Despair turns to hope. Longing leads to renewal. To see that everything is fleeting is to look into the void, to see ‘the darkness of God’. Our illusions and false certainties are stripped away. We let go of desire, and open ourselves up to something more profound. Our despair clears the way for a deeper faith to emerge. Spring follows winter. And our anguish leads to humility, which is the prerequisite for growth:
‘I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
Wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing;
There is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.’
We let go of desire, and open ourselves up to something more profound.
This invokes the ‘dark night of the soul’ that St. John of the Cross wrote about. It is a stage of final purification, marked by confusion, helplessness, stagnation of the will, a sense of the withdrawal of God’s presence, that is, of order, purpose and meaning. It is a period ‘unselfing’ and a surrender to the hidden purposes of the divine will. It comes before union with the one Reality, God.
For all of its apparent complexity, ‘East Coker’ has a simple message. Change is the basic fact of life. Indeed, it is a synonym for life. We are here and then we are not. Everything that is living is also dying. We must accept this. To accept it is to say that we have no say, in the end, over how things go. And wisdom and peace and joy follow from this understanding, which is an understanding of reality, and which is the key to living in the eternal present. We approach the poem in the spirit in which we approach life: not with a frenzied desire for firm, clear ideas, for satisfaction, but with humility, curiosity, receptivity, a willingness to confront the void. We inhabit ‘East Coker’; we do not consume it. We let it work on us and we let its truths unfold. If we do this, then we may find ourselves with a deeper sense of what it means to be in this world.
