East Coker

Ash Wednesday by T. S. Eliot (1930)

When Eliot became a member of the Church of England in 1927, he found a meaning in life that had previously eluded him. Ash Wednesday is one of the first fruits of this religious conversion and thus marks a radical development from his earlier work, such as The Waste Land. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker is dissatisfied with life and needs to construct a new way of being in the world. As the poem develops, he learns to accept religious faith, honor the value of prayer, seek divine mercy, and hope for salvation. In its Christian worldview and the hope it expresses for a sound basis on which to live, the poem resembles “East Coker.”

“Burnt Norton” by T. S. Eliot (1936)

This is the first of the Four Quartets, in which Eliot created the five-part structure that he would follow in the other poems. Burnt Norton is a manor house and garden in Gloucestershire, England, which Eliot visited with a friend in the summer of 1934. The first section of the poem likely recalls some of the pleasant impressions that the house, and especially the garden, made on him at the time.