The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 133
IV 9–10 answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still | At the still point of the turning world: Valéry: “et lui rendent lumière pour lumière, et silence pour silence, se donnant et se recevant sans rien emprunter à la matière du monde” [and returned to it light for light and silence for silence, giving and receiving without borrowing anything from the material world], Eupalinos ou l’Architecte (1921) (Stephen Romer, personal communication). TSE: “And the light shone in darkness and | Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled | About the centre of the silent Word”, Ash-Wednesday V 7–9.
V
[Poem I 183 · Textual History II 489–90]
V 4–7 Only by the form, the pattern, | Can words or music reach | The stillness, as a Chinese jar still | Moves perpetually in its stillness: to Sherrie Waites, 10 Aug 1962: “I did not have Keats’ Ode [on a Grecian Urn] in mind. What I attempted to convey about the Chinese jar occurred to me some years ago when there was a Chinese exhibition, I think at the Royal Academy.” (Many of the three thousand exhibits at the International Exhibition of Chinese Art, 1935–36, were vases and jars.) In the first act of The Confidential Clerk, Sir Claude explains his passion for “form and colour” embodied in “china or porcelain”, and his longing for “a world where the form is the reality, | Of which the substantial is only a shadow”. Colby replies: “All the time you’ve been speaking, I’ve been translating | Into terms of music.” Pater in “The School of Giorgione”: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). TSE: “‘All the arts approach the condition of music.’ Yes! but not by being less themselves”, The Borderline of Prose (1917). “This peculiar range of sensibility can be expressed by dramatic poetry, at its moments of greatest intensity. At such moments, we touch the border of those feelings which only music can express”, Poetry and Drama (1951). “Music itself may be conceived as striving towards an unattainable timelessness; and if the other arts may be thought of as yearning for duration, so Music may be thought of as yearning for the stillness of painting or sculpture”, TSE’s Introduction to The Art of Poetry by Paul Valéry (1958). For “that intensity at which language strives to become silence”, see note to East Coker I 13.
V 13–16 Words · · · Decay with imprecision: “Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal imprecisions, | Approximate thoughts and feelings”, Choruses from “The Rock” IX 22–23 (Hayward). “the general mess of imprecision of feeling”, East Coker V 10. “When the language degenerates, the capacity of the people for thinking, feeling, and adapting itself to new conditions also degenerates”, The Writer as Artist (1940).
V 1–22 Words · · · chattering · · · The Word · · · Is most attacked by voices · · · the disconsolate chimera: Donne, on distractions from prayer: “Sometimes I finde that I had forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory of yesterdays pleasures, a feare of to morrows dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine eare, a light in mine eye, an any thing, a nothing, a fancy, a Chimera in my braine, troubles me in my prayer. So certainely is there nothing, nothing in spirituall things, perfect in this world”, Sermon Preached at the funerals of Sir William Cokayne, 12 Dec 1626 (Sermons ed. Logan Pearsall Smith, 4). Quoting this in Lancelot Andrewes (1926), TSE commends the editor for juxtaposing it with the extract that Pearsall Smith calls “I am Not all Here”; see note to East Coker I 49–50. F. P. Harton: “The imagination is constantly at work presenting to the mind thoughts of all kinds · · · It is impossible to prevent wrong suggestions of the imagination, but it is possible to reject them · · · interest in the things of God implies constant rejection of all imaginings which are contrary or dangerous to them, which is mortification, and such mortification must not be confined to the imagination, but extend also to the intellect · · · God asks not only for acute, but also, and chiefly, for consecrated thinking”, The Elements of the Spiritual Life (1932) 177; in his copy (Magdalene), TSE scored the whole paragraph, as also another on the “dangers of prayers recited out of books” (311). For Krishna’s “He whose mind does not wander, and who is engaged in constant meditation”, see note to The Dry Salvages III 33–44.
V 17–19 Shrieking voices · · · in the desert: “shrieking forms in a circular desert”, The Family Reunion II ii (Preston 22).
V 19–20 The Word in the desert · · · voices of temptation: Matthew 4: 1–3: “Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil”. Hayward: “John 1 and Flaubert, La Tentation de Sainte Antoine”, ch. 7. (John 1: 1, 23: “In the beginning was the Word · · · the voice of one crying in the wilderness”.) The Word in the desert: “Phrases such as · · · ‘the word within a word, unable to speak a word’, do not desert us”, Lancelot Andrewes (1926); see note to Gerontion 18, 20.
[Poem I 183–84 · Textual History II 490]
V 19, 22 The Word in the desert · · · chimera: Irving Babbitt on “the quest of the absolute” in Republican France (quoting Edmond Scherer): “It has concentrated upon a chimera all the powers of idealism that formerly found expression in religion. ‘Our generation is pursuing a mirage vainer than that of the desert’”, The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912) 205. Babbitt’s next paragraph twice has “chimeras”. disconsolate chimera: Lemprière “Chimæra”: “a celebrated monster · · · which had three heads, that of a lion, a goat, and a dragon · · · Bellerophon, mounted on the horse Pegasus, overcame it”. And “Pirene”: “Pirene was so disconsolate at the death of her son Cenchrius · · · that she pined away, and was dissolved by her continual weeping into a fountain of the same name · · · the horse Pegasus was then drinking some of its waters, when Bellerophon took it to go and conquer the Chimæra.” OED 3b: “An unreal creature of the imagination · · · an unfounded conception. (The ordinary modern use.)” Knowledge and Experience 128–29 discusses the meaning in this sense of a “real chimera”. disconsolate: St. John of the Cross: “Strive always to prefer, not that which is easiest, but that which is most difficult · · · Not that which is a consolation, but rather that which is disconsolateness”, Ascent of Mount Carmel I XIII 5–6 (see note to Ash-Wednesday I 1–3, 5). chimera: pronounced ky-meera by TSE in his recording of 1946–47, whereas Fowler recommends kim-eera.
V 19, 21, 33 The Word in the desert · · · funeral · · · a shaft of sunlight: “To the death in the desert, the prayer in forgotten places by the broken imperial column”, Murder in the Cathedral closing chorus. “Sunlight on a broken column”, The Hollow Men II 23. See note to V 32–33, below.
V 24 The figure of the ten stairs: to E. M. Stephenson, 19 Aug 1943: “A reference to a passage in The Ascent of Mount Carmel by St. John of the Cross of which I regret I cannot give the exact place.” St. John of the Cross on “the ten steps of the mystic ladder of Divine love”: “The tenth and last step of this secret ladder of love causes the soul to become wholly assimilated to God”, Dark Night of the Soul II XIX–XX (Moody 240; Preston 22). TSE to Hayward, 16 Oct [1942]: “One of the commoner forms of nuisance now · · · is the request from some ‘student’ or schoolchild for elucidation of some line in one of my earlier poems. An easy favourite, up to the moment, is ‘as in the figure of the ten stairs’: Miss Melton [his secretary] can deal with that now without asking me.”
V 25–39] See note on second epigraph to Sweeney Agonistes, for “I’ve tried to express something of my belief at the end of Burnt Norton.”
V 26 Not in itself desirable: Bradley: “In order to have the sum of pleasures, I must have them all now, which is impossible. Thus you can not reach the end, and the effort to reach it is not in itself desirable”, Ethical Studies Essay III.
V 27–28 itself unmoving, | Only the cause and end of movement: Aristotle: “The final cause, then, produces motion as being loved, but all other things move by being moved”, Metaphysics (in Works ed. W. D. Ross, 1928, VIII) 1072a. TSE: “There is a type of religious mysticism which found e
xpression in the twelfth century, and which is taken up into the system of Aquinas. Its origin is in the Metaphysics of Aristotle 1072b and elsewhere”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 99 (Clark Lecture III; see note). Dryden: “that UNIVERSAL HE · · · Unmade, unmov’d; yet making, moving All”, Religio Laici 15–17 (Donoghue 240).
V 32–33 Between un-being and being. | Sudden in a shaft of sunlight: “shaping the still un-shapen: | I have seen these things in a shaft of sunlight”, Murder in the Cathedral opening chorus. “lost in a shaft of sunlight”, The Dry Salvages V 25.
[Poem I 184 · Textual History II 490]
V 35–36 hidden laughter | Of children in the foliage: “unheard music hidden in the shrubbery”, I 27; “The voice of the hidden waterfall | And the children in the apple-tree”, Little Gidding V 34–35 (Hayward). “Whispers and small laughter between leaves”, Marina 20 (see note).
V 37 Quick now, here, now, always: also Little Gidding V 39. “Neither matter nor form in the abstract is sufficient to explain the this-here-now”, Matter and Form in Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” (1915).
V 38–39 Ridiculous the waste sad time | Stretching before and after: Shelley: “We look before and after, | And pine for what is not”, To a Skylark 86–87, included in The Golden Treasury and quoted by TSE in A Note on Richard Crashaw (1928). TSE: “before and after time · · · Time before and time after”, Burnt Norton III 16, 18. “Not the intense moment | Isolated, with no before and after”, East Coker V 21–22 (and see note to V 22–24). “the past is all deception, | The future futureless”, The Dry Salvages I 43–44. “nowhere, no before and after”, Little Gidding V 22.
after V 39] See Textual History for three or four deleted lines not recorded in Composition FQ, which are presumably what TSE meant when he told Mary Hutchinson, 19 Jan 1936, “I can’t get the last four lines right.”
[Poem I 184 · Textual History II 490]
East Coker
1. The Village and the Eliot Connection 2. TSE’s Visits
3. Composition 4. After Publication
Published in NEW 21 Mar 1940. Labelled “Supplement”, the poem occupied the central four pages so as to be readily detachable. Some extra copies of these pages were printed afterwards (Gallup A36a). First US publication in Partisan Review May–June 1940 (although V 1–18 had been quoted from NEW in Poetry (Chicago) May 1940, with no variants). The first printing with its own title page was NEW leaflet (Gallup A36b), which was followed by the Faber pamphlet, 12 Sept 1940 (six impressions to Feb 1942). No separate US publication. Within Four Quartets in US 1943, 1944+. A reading by Robert Speaight was broadcast on 21 July 1941.
1. THE VILLAGE AND THE ELIOT CONNECTION
Hayward: “The poem takes its title from the village of East Coker, near Yeovil in Somersetshire, some twenty miles from the Channel coast. It was from this village, the home of the poet’s ancestors, that Andrew Eliot emigrated in 1667 to found the American branch of the Eliot family from which the poet is directly descended.”
Walter Graeme Eliot, A Sketch of the Eliot Family (1887) 11: “Nestled among the hills and meadows of the heart of Somersetshire, the garden spot of England, is the little hamlet of East Coker, three or four miles S. W. from Yeovil, on the London & Southwestern Railway. Here, almost under the shadows of a fine old parish church, dating back to the fifteenth century, was the home for a century or more of the Eliot family, previous to their departure for America and liberty.” TSE to Hermann Peschmann, 12 Sept 1945: “East Coker may certainly be described as a hamlet. Three miles south-west of Yeovil there are three tiny villages of North, East and West Coker. They are all very small indeed.”
To R. P. de Menasce, 31 May 1940: “The poem is of course serial to Burnt Norton which is also the name of a place. The names have perhaps no ‘figurative’ meaning for the reader, who certainly does not need to know anything more about them than is indicated by the poems. The ‘place’ serves as a concrete localisation of a mood and a train of meditations, that is all. East Coker, however, is a small village in Somerset, whereby my family lived from about the middle of the fifteenth century until 1671 when they went to New England. It serves, accordingly, for the author’s purpose, as a place for a meditation on beginnings and ends.”
[Poem I 185–92 · Textual History II 491–500]
TSE was inconsistent about the date of the emigration, which Helen Gardner gives as “around 1669” (Composition FQ 42). (Walter Graeme Eliot 15: “Andrew Eliott, baptized in East Coker, England, in 1627, was last mentioned there in 1668, and appears next in America, as joining the first church of Beverly [Mass.], 1670.”) To Gilbert H. Phelps of BBC Bristol, 26 Nov 1945: “Some of the verses are intended to be evocative of that village but it must be admitted that they would do equally well for any number of other villages in other parts of England. There is, of course, the personal association which is that my family lived there for something over 200 years before they went to America in 1669 and that they therefore seem to have lived longer there than anywhere else before or since. There is also an allusion, of course, to Sir Thomas Elyot who was a West Country worthy although he died in Cambridgeshire.” But to Neville Braybrooke, 25 Nov 1958: “Andrew Eliot left for America I think in 1667”.
To T. W. Cole, 25 Sept 1941: “Andrew Eliot · · · was descended from Thomas Elyot’s grandfather who was himself a native of East Coker. We may therefore claim Thomas Elyot in a way for East Coker as I presume that his father, Richard Elyot, was born there.” (Sir Thomas Elyot’s association with Sir Thomas More, according to TSE’s More and Tudor Drama (1926), “laid him for a time under suspicion of excessive orthodoxy”.) On Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Governour, see notes to I 13 and I 28–33.
To his brother, 7 Feb 1939: “I could copy out Eliot data in the British Museum Library, which has a copy of the Sketch of the Eliot Family (2nd edition) but you ought to have the copy that father had · · · I think William de Aliot is wholly, or so far as we are concerned, apocryphal; anyway, if he existed, there is a gap of three hundred years”. TSE had no doubt, however, about his own pedigree, claiming, in “The Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling” (1959), to come “from wholly British stock”.
2. TSE’S VISITS
Although Valerie Eliot reported that TSE visited East Coker “for the first and only time in early August 1937, when he was staying with Sir Matthew Nathan at West Coker” (Composition FQ 42), he had visited also in the previous year. To Polly Tandy, 18 June 1936, describing a visit from Yeovil: “By foot to the pretty village of East Coker, the only blemish of which is a memorial stained glass window, the ugliest that I ever saw, Faith Hope & Love with malignant faces, Love a little higher than her villainous sisters by reason of standing upon the family arms incorrectly inscribed, which has been put in only this year by an American cousin.”
Writing to Hayward the following year [31 Mar 1937], TSE signed himself “Your oblgd obt servt | Th. Eliot | of Somerset”, and on 27 July 1937 he wrote to introduce himself to Sir Matthew Nathan (later the author of The Annals of West Coker, 1957): “My friend Dorothy Bussy informs me that you are engaged on a history of the Coker parishes. I am expecting to come to East Coker for the night of August 3rd, as I shall have been staying with the Richmonds at Salisbury, and it would be a great pleasure to me to call on you on that day.” To Lady Richmond, 5 Aug 1937: “I walked from East to West Coker in great heat and saw Sir Matthew Nathan, who struck me as a remarkable man, even in discussing matters of moment no greater than local feuds during the Wars of the Roses.”
Frank Morley: “Eliot visited East Coker with thoughts of the house, in the double sense of that word, started by his ancestor, the Sir Thomas Elyot who was born (some editors estimate) exactly four hundred years before the Thomas Eliot whose birth had come about in 1888 in St Louis. After ‘our’ Eliot, the male line of that house—of his particular branch—was to become extinct. I know that Eliot had feelings that the former Elyot was the beginning of an era of which he was the ending · · · they were the begin
ning and end of the same house”, Literary Britain (1980) 196.
Against a speculation in G. Jones about TSE’s feelings of family reunion on visiting “the family home from which the Eliots had migrated hundreds of years before” (133), TSE wrote: “No house there. Said to have been destroyed by fire.”
[Poem I 185–92 · Textual History II 491–500]
3. COMPOSITION
To James J. Angleton and E. Reed Whittemore, 31 Jan 1939: “I have had to decline all invitations to contribute poetry to periodicals on the one final ground that I have not written any poems. All the verse that I have composed in the last two years forms part of a play which is about to be published” (The Family Reunion).
Stephen Spender recorded TSE’s conversation on 11 Sept 1939: “He said it was very important that one should, at all costs, go on writing now. ‘It doesn’t seem to me to matter very much whether, at the moment, it is or isn’t very good. The important thing is to keep going. Probably it’s impossible to do excellent work while things are so disturbed · · · Just writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running’ · · · Eliot said that he did not care to listen to Beethoven so much as formerly just now · · · I said I was at once attracted by, and sick of, public events being dealt with in a public manner in poetic plays. He agreed that the problem was to write about a smaller theme—perhaps family life—which had all the implications of what is going on in the world outside”, Horizon May 1940. (TSE: “Mostly the individual | Experience is too large, or too small”, A Note on War Poetry 10–11.)