4. AFTER PUBLICATION
To Frank Morley, 5 Apr 1940, on comments by George Every: “Every says (but not in a damaging way) that the tone is Jansenist rather than Calvinist: which you ought to appreciate, having (it seems) read Pascal’s Thoughts.” (John Calvin, 1509–64. Cornelius Jansen, d. 1638.) TSE: “Jansenism · · · was morally a Puritan movement · · · at least as severe as those of any Puritanism in England or America · · · Calvinists emphasized the degradation of man through Original Sin, and considered mankind so corrupt that the will was of no avail; and thus fell into the doctrine of predestination · · · It was upon the doctrine of grace according to St. Augustine that the Jansenists relied”, The “Pensées of Pascal” (1931).
To Morley, 9 Apr: “your commentary on E. Coker is being digested. You are an old sly boots to bring in Beethoven, to get me so mollified as to agree to every criticism you make. But your comment is of two kinds (1) slight: most of which I violently disagree with; but then if I accepted it at once that would be evidence that I hadnt taken my job seriously (2) serious: which means waiting to see whether there is anything I can do. Your serious criticism could not be acted upon just in a spare hour or more; if you are right (and I think likely you are) it means waiting to make a new leap at the thing, and that cannot be predicted or arranged. I may have the leap in me, or I may be off on something else · · · Gravest criticism that of opening paragraph of Part II. You are probably right. The question is, am I up to doing anything about it?”
To Desmond Hawkins, 7 Mar 1941: “I see no objection to broadcasting East Coker to the Hindus if they want it · · · I should think that if they want to hear short‑wave English poets at all they would rather hear them do a bit of their own stuff than giving thumbnail introductions to Shakespeare.”
[Poem I 185–92 · Textual History II 491–500]
TSE to Anne Ridler, 10 Mar 1941, replying to a letter after publication of The Dry Salvages: “I don’t think the ordinary reader will like it so much as E. Coker—in fact, the success of that poem is a little disconcerting: I find it hard to believe that a poem of mine which sells nearly 12,000 copies can be really good. (I am glad, by the way, that you like part IV [of East Coker], which is in a way the heart of the matter. My intention was to avoid a pastiche of George Herbert or Crashaw—it would be folly to try—and to do something in the style of Cleveland or Benlowes, only better; and I liked the use of this so English XVII [17th-century] form with a content so very un-English—which George Every calls Jansenist. But the poem as a whole—this five part form—is an attempt to weave several quite unrelated strands together in an emotional whole, so that really there isn’t any heart of the matter.)” In his fourth Clark Lecture, TSE had commented: “Cleveland is not very remunerative; Benlowes’ verses, like those of Miss Gertrude Stein, can, for anyone whose taste has already been disciplined elsewhere, provide an extremely valuable exercise for unused parts of the mind”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 137.
Title] To Andrew Gilchrist, 13 May 1944: “I hear indirectly that another periodical, which I don’t know at all, l’Arche, is going to produce East Coker—which will probably become something like ‘la houillère orientale’” (= Eastern coke mine).
I
[Poem I 185 · Textual History II 494]
I 1 In my beginning is my end: in his copy of Charles M. Bakewell’s Source Book in Ancient Philosophy, TSE scored Heraclitus’ frag. 103: “In the circumference of a circle beginning and end coincide.” (For Heraclitus, see epigraph at the head of Burnt Norton.) The motto “En ma fin est mon commencement” was embroidered on the chair-of-state of Mary, Queen of Scots, as TSE knew, perhaps from Maurice Baring’s biography In My End Is My Beginning (1931) (Sweeney 1941). To E. M. Stephenson, 19 Aug 1943: “Yes, this device was of course in my mind, but there was no particular relevance about Mary Stuart except that she had her place in the sixteenth century” (Stephenson 87). To R. J. Schoeck, 27 Jan 1947, on the suggestion that he had in mind de Machaut’s Ma fin est mon commencement: “Guillaume de Machaut has never been more than a name to me and I had certainly never read the poem you quote. The parallel is not only interesting but gratifying as it is always a pleasure to me to find that any idea of my own has been anticipated long ago without my knowledge. It appears to me to give my own statement greater validity.” Charlotte Eliot (in 1890) on Giordano Bruno: “In the beginning seest thou the end, | And in the end a mere beginning still”, scrapbooks in Missouri Historical Society library (Howarth 31). Bradley: “the end lies hid in that which is assumed at the beginning”, Appearance and Reality ch. XXV (see note to Little Gidding V 27–32). Lancelot Andrewes: “a manger for His cradle, poor clouts for His array. This was His beginning. Follow Him farther · · · Is His end any better?” Christmas Sermon 1611 (the paragraph of the Verbum infans; see notes to I 13 and Gerontion 17–19). TSE: “The crudest experience and the abstrusest theory end in identity, and this identity I call the absolute. If you choose to call it nothing, I will not dispute the point. But whichever it is, it is both beginning and end”, Degrees of Reality (1913). “(But our beginnings never know our ends!)” Portrait of a Lady III 14. “the end precedes the beginning, | And the end and the beginning were always there”, Burnt Norton V 10–11. “What we think a beginning is often an end | And to make an end is to make a beginning. | The end is where we start from. For every moment | Is both beginning and end”, Little Gidding V 1–3 verse draft msC [1–4].
Herbert of Cherbury: “O that our love might take no end, | Or never had beginning took!” Ode upon a Question moved, Whether Love should continue for ever? 39–40. In Grierson’s Introduction to Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (1921) xxxvi, TSE scored the sentence that called the poem “the finest thing inspired by Donne’s Ecstasy”. On Shaw’s Back to Methuselah: “Even the author appears to be conscious of the question whether the beginning and the end are not the same · · · The pessimism of the conclusion of his last book · · · is pessimism only because he has not realized that at the end he has only approached a beginning, that his end is only the starting point towards the knowledge of life”, London Letter in Dial Oct 1921. “In ending we must go back to the beginning and remember”, In Memoriam (1936). In Montandon’s tr. of East Coker, “Dans ma principe est ma fin”, TSE underlined “principe” with “!” in succession: Old Deuteronomy 2 (at line-end).
I 2 Houses rise and fall: Poe: “the ‘House of Usher’—an appellation which seemed to include · · · both the family and the family mansion”, The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). Likewise Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851). See Frank Morley quoted in headnote, 2. TSE’S VISITS. The de Courtenays were feudal holders of the East and West Coker manors from the 13th to the 16th centuries and enjoyed mixed fortunes over generations (Marcus Fysh, personal communication). TSE: “forever building, and always decaying, and always being restored”, Choruses from “The Rock” II 26.
I 2–4 Houses rise and fall · · · in their place | Is an open field: Virginia Woolf: “Buildings fall; even the earth perishes. What was yesterday a cornfield is today a bungalow”, Craftsmanship (broadcast 29 Apr 1937, Listener 5 May; see notes to V 18 and Little Gidding V 4–11). Grover Smith 1996 100: “Eliot, in the late 1940s, told me that he did not remember any talk. I think that he may, nevertheless, have read it.” Tennyson, Aylmer’s Field final lines:
Then the great Hall was wholly broken down,
And the broad woodland parcelled into farms · · ·
The slow-worm creeps, and the thin weasel there
Follows the mouse, and all is open field.
(TSE: “field-mouse”, I 12). open field: (as also 15, 23); to Morley, 9 Apr 1940: “‘Playing field’—no. Too heavy an emphasis on the modern. Want something more colourless there. Open field is right, I think.” The open field system of farming was “especially associated with medieval manorial estates”, Blamires 44. by-pass: to Frank Morley, 9 Apr 1940: “Dont understand what you mean by ‘by�
�pass’. Do you mean that the term is not used in U.S.A. or that it jars?” (OED’s first citation is 1922; Choruses from “The Rock” VII 37 has “by-pass way”.) In Montandon’s tr., “Est un champ, ou une fabrique, ou un passage”, TSE underlined “passage” with “?”
I 3 variant replaced · · · place: to Hayward, 27 Feb 1940: “Replaced and place. It was intentional, but Hebert also objects, so I had better do something about it.” For Fr. Hebert see Textual History headnote on ts1b.
I 5 new building: to Herbert Read, 18 Sept 1942: “it’s only possible to do tinkering when one is not possessed with the desire for new building” (see headnote to Little Gidding, 2. COMPOSITION).
[Poem I 185 · Textual History II 494]
I 7–8 flesh, fur and faeces, | Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf: Hopkins: “Flesh and fleece, fur and feather, | Grass and greenworld all together”, The May Magnificat 17–18. (“Hopkins is a fine poet · · · His innovations · · · are easily imitated though not adaptable for many purposes”, After Strange Gods 47. To Wolfgang Clemen, 7 Mar 1949, on Hopkins: “I did not become acquainted with his work until the publication of the second edition of the poems which I think was subsequent to 1925 [1930]. My impression is that my reading of Gerard Hopkins came too late for me to be influenced by him.”)
I 9–11 there is a time for building | And a time for living and for generation | And a time for the wind: Ecclesiastes 3: 1–8: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace” (Hayward). TSE: “And when to prune, and when to bind | And when to cut, and when to move”, A Valedictory 28–29. Ecclesiastes 1: 4: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever” (Kenner 1960 266). Swinburne: “From the winds of the north and the south · · · A time for labour and thought, | A time to serve and to sin”, Atalanta in Calydon 342, 348–49, a chorus quoted by TSE in Swinburne as Poet (1920). The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 23–48 has “time for” and “time to” repeatedly.
I 9–13 Houses live and die · · · field-mouse · · · arras: Byron “on mutability”: “that antique house · · · a mouse, | Whose little nibbling rustle will embarrass | Most people as it plays along the arras”, Don Juan XVI xx.
I 11–13 the wind to break the loosened pane | And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots | And to shake the tattered arras: Tennyson: “The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse | Behind the mouldering wainscot shrieked”, Mariana 63–64 (with “winds · · · wind”, 54, 75). TSE quoted these lines in In Memoriam (1936). Also “the shrieking rush of the wainscot mouse”, Maud I [vi] 260 (both Blamires 43). TSE to Hayward, 27 Feb 1940: “Fieldmice. They did get into our country house in New England, and very pretty little creatures too: we always restored them to the Land, and only slew the housemice. But the particular point here is that the house is supposed to have been long deserted or empty. Do housemice go on living in an unoccupied house? If so, I had better alter this; because I admit that in a tenanted house the fieldmouse is an exception” (Composition FQ 97).
[Poem I 185 · Textual History II 494]
I 12 wainscot · · · field-mouse trots: “Speaking of the Elizabethans, I think of a figure used in one of the Martin Marprelate tracts, which I can never forget; when the author, speaking of his adversary, Bishop Cooper, says that he ‘Has a face like old wainscot, and would lie as fast as a dog would trot.’ As for the bishop’s veracity, there is no doubt something to be said on both sides, but in my memory, that simile sticks to him like wax; he will never be free of it. These are properly, rhetorical images; they emphasise rather than elucidate; and in strict reason, it is meaningless to compare rapidity of lying, even, to rapidity of dog’s trotting. And the image of old wainscot is a variable one: that is to say, it may have effect equally on various minds to which it suggests different things. To me it means an old, weatherbeaten, pitted as if worm-eaten, brown face; and in juxtaposition with the dogtrot, suggests great villainy. This variable margin of suggestion is what I call rhetorical effect. But it is quite different from the well-known figure of Dante when he is trying to make you visualise exactly that dolorous twilight in which moved the form of Brunetto Latini”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 121–22 (Clark Lecture IV), where the Marprelate quotation is corrected (James T. Bratcher, N&Q June 2007). “The wall, the wainscot and the mouse · · · brown baked features”, Little Gidding II 6, 41. wainscot: pronounced wainsk’t in TSE’s recordings of 1946–47. See Textual History. field-mouse trots: Verlaine: “Dame souris trotte”, Impression Fausse 1, 3 (Grover Smith 1996 101).
I 13 tattered arras · · · motto: Pound: “Mantegna painted the wall. | Silk tatters, ‘Nec Spe Nec Metu’”, Cantos III (Harmon 1976a). arras: TSE defended to Hayward the archaic spelling of his typescripts, 27 Feb 1940: “Aresse. This early Tudor spelling is O.K.” To Frank Morley, 5 Apr 1940: “‘Aresse’ you may be sure I had got taped (I know where to get it even if it isn’t in the O.E.D.)” Again, 9 Apr: “‘Aresse’ as I cabled is O.K. Out of The Governour.” After publication in NEW (with “aresse”), TSE emended to “arras” in the NEW 2nd proof he sent to Montgomery Belgion, commenting: “the early Tudor spelling seemed to bother readers”. Recalling a request that the American edition use the later spelling, Morley wrote: “At Harcourt, Brace we had a standing order to follow, exactly, the Faber spelling. The Faber spelling, and therefore the ‘H,B’ spelling (in 1943), was arras”, Tate ed. 111. In fact, the proof for US 1943 was set from NEW and had the antique spelling, until TSE wrote to Morley, 20 Feb 1943, with proof corrections including “Read Arras for Aresse.” See note to I 28–33. silent motto: the family motto Tace et fac, “Be silent and act”, was used by Sir Thomas Elyot and adapted for TSE’s dedication of The Sacred Wood to his recently deceased father: “TACUIT ET FECIT” (see headnote to Prufrock and Other Observations, 4. TITLE, DEDICATION AND EPIGRAPH TO THE VOLUME). Henry Eliot to Henry B. Harvey, 10 Oct 1946: “Asked whether the silent motto (E. Coker) referred to the Eliot motto Tace et Fac, said yes, he had thought of that.” It also appears on TSE’s bookplate, and was written by him against “silent” in a copy of G. Jones, where this line is quoted (211).
The derivation of “motto” from “mot”, aligns “silent motto” with Lancelot Andrewes’s Verbum infans (Christmas Sermon 1611) and the “silent Word” of Ash-Wednesday V 9 (Harmon 1976a). Ricks 247: “silent · · · because any motto woven upon an arras is silent; because in the decaying house there is no one to hear · · · because the motto is not revealed here in the poem, the line itself keeping silent; because, if you do know the motto, it is in a dead language, in Latin, not in our speaking language; and because it is a silent motto, as enjoining silence”. TSE: “that intensity at which language strives to become silence”, The Poetic Drama (1920). “Words, after speech, reach | Into the silence”, Burnt Norton V 3–4.
[Poem I 185 · Textual History II 494–95]
I 15–16 the deep lane | Shuttered with branches: East Coker has many such “holloways” of antiquity. Six photographs of East Coker taken on TSE’s visit in Aug 1937 include three of its lanes; two are captioned by TSE “Road from Yeovil to E. Coker”, the third “E. Coker—W. Coker road” (Houghton). He sent similar photographs to Hayward, 2 June 1940: “I enclose two views of East Coeker which I have discovered: you will note just that touch of artistry which distinguishes my work always from that of the ordinary amateur photographer.” Before turning to his next Quart
et, TSE wrote: “those again for whom the paths of glory are the lanes and the streets of Britain”, Defence of the Islands [18–19].
I 19 Into the village, in the electric heat: to Lady Richmond, 5 Aug 1937: “I walked from East to West Coker in great heat.” electric: to Hayward, 27 Feb 1940: “Electric. I will think about alternatives.”
I 21 refracted: OED: “To break the course of (light or other waves) and turn (it or them) out of the direct line; esp. to deflect at a certain angle at the point of passage from one medium into another of different density” (L. frangere = to break). TSE to H. W. Heckstall-Smith, 8 Sept 1947: “You are perfectly right, and my use of the word ‘refracted’ has puzzled and bothered me for a long time. I was pained by it · · · when I heard a B.B.C. recording of the poem. I think that I must have preferred the vowel sound of ‘refracted’. It is, no doubt, for this same reason that I made the slip of writing ‘hermit crab’ instead of ‘horseshoe crab’. This latter I have corrected. I think I shall have to do something about the line in the next impression.” 17 Sept: “I have thought—I was about to say reflected—further about this verbal difficulty. I now recall the fact that I discarded the verb reflect simply because it suggested the brightness and glare of a mirror, which is not at all the right effect that I had in mind. I therefore used the word refracted, which incidentally had a better vowel sound for my purpose, in the hope that the reader might accept it as intended in its original sense as broken back. Since writing to you I have discussed this point with Professor I. A. Richards who advises me to retain the word refracted. It appears to be a case in which if I discarded this word I should be obliged to renounce any attempt whatever to convey the right effect that I had in mind.” No alteration was made. For “hermit crab” see note to The Dry Salvages I 19.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 134
