A Quick Visit to East Coker.
The ashes of the poet T.S. Eliot are kept in St Michael’s a church in the small Somerset village of East Coker. The village gave its name to one of Eliot’s Four Quartets. Unfortunately, the day that I went there in 2012, the church was locked and there was nobody to let me in so I had to make do with a photograph at the doorway to celebrate my pilgrimage in honour of Eliot.
The village itself is small and you have to travel down some narrow country lanes to get to it. It was ten years ago when I visited East Coker and many of the towns and villages around England, and to a lesser extent Scotland, were putting out the bunting for the Royal Jubilee that was to be celebrated during the June Bank Holiday weekend. I imagine the bunting will be coming back out again soon as another decade has passed and even a hardened republican like me can see something grand in the spectacle.
East Coker the Poem by Eliot
East Coker is one of my favourite of Eliot’s poems. It was written in 1940 and in its lines, you can feel the effects of the war. During the blitz, later that year and into 1941, Eliot served as a fire watcher, sitting on the roof of a building in Bloomsbury to look out for the bombers and direct emergency services to where buildings were burning. The opening lines of East Coker are about changes in the landscape – buildings being destroyed but also new buildings rising.
I had read the poem many years before I went to East Coker but it was in a subsequent reading that I could visualise what Eliot was writing about when he referred to the ‘deep lane, Shuttered with branches’ and ‘Where you lean against a bank when a van passes’.
There is also a deeply religious sense within the poem that is established with the opening line of ‘In my beginning is my end’ that comes full circle, in a spirit of rebirth, or perhaps resurrection with the closing line ‘in my end is my beginning’. In the despair of the darkest hours of the war, there is the hope of a new life emerging.
Getting the Better of Words
I’ve found the fifth stanza of East Coker most interesting, particularly as I have become older. Eliot almost expresses a view that there is a sense of futility in writing and talks about how, after twenty years and in the time between two world wars, all he has done is to have ‘learnt to get the better of words’. Eliot was a master of language and one of the finest poets of the twentieth century and yet, here, in East Coker, one of his finest poems, he almost dismisses the art, or at least his artistry.
Ultimately, the poem is about something greater than poetry and is about finding some form of spiritual unity and the struggle to do so. He says that, in the end, ‘Old men ought to be explorers’ moving into another intensity that is also reminiscent of Dylan Thomas’ ‘Do Not Go Gentle’. Thomas was another poet profoundly effected by the events of the early war years in London.
Read Some Eliot
If you haven’t read any Eliot, I recommend that you delve into the Four Quartets at least but also Ash Wednesday (another favourite) and the Wastelands. Abbeys bookshop have copies of the Four Quartets, amongst some other works by Eliot and have a great mail order service for online shoppers.
The poem below was inspired by my trip to East Coker and was written nearly ten years ago.
St Michael’s Church – East Coker – May 2012
Dry stonewall lined lanes lead here, drawing down from Yeovil to the village
on roads not built for passing cars or fast escapes.
An early summer beckons Jubilee, the beams of dappled light between the
trees, shadowed on the grey stone walls of cottages and, in the meadows,
cattle graze.
And in the churchyard, headstones stand or fall – weathered faded dates and names unreadable,
names that have conquered names and now remain forever nameless,
time has conquered time and here remains without a time, but not eternal.
Fading, crumbling – names and dates beyond remembrance disappear
into the quiet earth of Somerset.
That I have come here is enough for me,
this country strange, all green
and walled small acres.
Grey stone walls absorbing light
as I absorb the grey stone walls,
the soundless sounds that echo.
Down the decades, wasted to the architecture of the wasted words,
the English essays picked out on the clattering Remington,
the cluttered words and cluttered thoughts – half forgotten, meaningless,
a mind map stretched and warped of jumbled towns and counties.
Names recalling names recalling meaning in the names,
that rise and fall and rise again forever distant. Recalling tumbled orange spines
of Penguins in the study, speaking of this land, this pleasant land.
The fog has lifted – it is silent.
A dog barks in the distance,
I hear but cannot see a tractor somewhere.
A gentle breeze is fluttering the flag upon the bell tower.
The heavy wooden door is bolted, barred.
One of four, this village is the second, ageing now and unredeemed,
In timelessness its name begets a name, recalling names, recalling time,
That was not my time, lived but not remembered by me.
Learned time, learned names, learned places – buildings fall.
But this church stands, its stones are mortared by the ashes and the words
And by the silence in between the words,
A resting place, a journey’s pause in time and space, a pause between the words.