T. S. Eliot
Four Quartets
 
From “East Coker”

I
 
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
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth 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.
 
    Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

____________________________
 
 
This month, we’re continuing our exploration of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
 
Four years intervened between “Burnt Norton” (the first part of Four Quartets, which we looked at last month) and “East Coker”: four very eventful years. “East Coker” appeared at Easter of 1940, not long after England entered World War II.
 
“East Coker,” like the manor house Burnt Norton, was a place of special significance to Eliot. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, but his heritage was English—his people had emigrated from the village of East Coker to Boston in 1660. When Eliot was 25, he moved to England, and never left.
 
The first part of this poem describes Eliot’s visit to the village of East Coker on a hot summer day. “In my beginning is my end,” he writes: this place where his ancestors started from is his beginning, and it is also his end—his destination.
 
The part of the poem Lisa read gives us Eliot at his most fanciful. Standing on this ancestral ground—almost tiptoeing across this ancestral ground on a summer midnight—he looks for hints of the past, and he finds them. “If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,” he says, “you can hear the music… and see them dancing.” The music is faint – “the weak pipe and the little drum” – but the vision gets more vivid as the poem continues. He imagines people dancing around a bonfire on this very spot, sometime in the distant past—country people, men and women, sometimes solemn, sometimes laughing. The dance is more than a dance: it is an image of marriage, of the birth of new generations. Notice how earthy these people are: “Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes, / Earth feet, loam feet.” They are of the earth, dancing on the earth, and yet as they keep time with the music, their dance reflects the movement of things much bigger than they are: the rhythm of the seasons, the stars, the harvests, the rhythm of life and death itself.
 
You will have noticed the antiquated language in the poem—“daunsinge, signifying matrimonie— / A dignified and commodiois sacrament…. Whiche betokeneth concorde.” These words are actually quoted from a book by Eliot’s ancestor and namesake, Sir Thomas Elyot, who was a diplomat under Henry VIII and had his portrait painted by Holbein! He was the author of The Book of the Governour, which is essentially a teaching manual about how to educate young gentlemen. Sir Thomas Elyot puts great emphasis on dancing as part of a young man’s upbringing – and T. S. Eliot quotes him here, even as the image of the dance leads him somewhere quite different. For him, the dance is more than an emblem of matrimony. It is an image of life and death in endless cycle: “living in the living seasons…dung and death.”
 
At the end of the selection Lisa read, dawn comes, and the poet finds and loses himself: “I am here / Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.” This place of his origins has been an encounter with time and mortality.
 
When T. S. Eliot died in 1965, Westminster Abbey offered a place for his burial. Instead, in keeping with his wishes, Eliot was buried in the Church of St. Michael and All Angels in East Coker. On the plaque marking the place where his ashes are laid are the first and last lines of “East Coker” – “In my beginning is my end” and “In my end is my beginning.” This is the Christian paradox Eliot captures so well in Four Quartets: life ends in death, yes; but in the Christian mystery, death leads to a new kind of life—a new beginning.

Corinna Laughlin