East Coker

“East Coker” is a poem by T. S. Eliot. It was published in the New English Weekly in March 1940 and then by Faber and Faber in September of that year. The poem was popular and quickly sold nearly 12,000 copies. It was modeled on “Burnt Norton,” which Eliot had published in 1936, and it later became the second poem in Eliot’s Four Quartets (1944). East Coker is a village in Somerset, England, from which the Eliot family, T. S. Eliot’s ancestors, sailed to America in 1671. Eliot visited East Coker in 1937, and after he died in 1965, his ashes were placed in St. Michael’s Church there. The poem is a meditation on the transience of all things on earth, the passage of time, the state of society, and the need for spiritual renewal and wisdom.

The edition used in this study guide is from Eliot’s Collected Poems: 1909-1962 (Faber and Faber, 1963, rpr.1974). The text is also available online at PoetryArchive.org.

Poet Biography

Poet, dramatist, literary critic, and editor Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. His family had roots in New England, and after Eliot graduated from Smith Academy in St. Louis, he attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts. He entered Harvard in 1906, receiving a BA in June 1909 and an MA in English literature in 1910. He then studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, before returning to Harvard in 1911. After World War I began in 1914, Eliot took up a scholarship at Merton College at the University of Oxford, studying philosophy.

In June of the following year, his modernist poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published in Poetry magazine. In 1917, it became the title poem in his first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations. At that time, Eliot had begun working for Lloyd’s Bank in London, a position he held until 1925, when he joined the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer. In 1929, when the firm became Faber and Faber, Eliot became a director, a position he held until his death. As editor at Faber, he was responsible for advancing the careers of many young poets.

Eliot’s most famous poem, The Waste Land, was published in 1922. In densely symbolic and allusive verse, it describes the fragmentation of Western culture. In that same year, Eliot founded the influential quarterly journal The Criterion, which he edited until it ceased publication in 1939.

Eliot was also a renowned literary critic. His collections of essays include The Sacred Wood (1920) and Homage to John Dryden (1924). As a critic, Eliot played an influential role as an arbiter of taste and excellence for both poetry of the past and modern poetry. He was known as a champion of the 17th-century English metaphysical poets, whose work had been neglected for over two centuries. His Collected Essays appeared in 1932.

In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen and joined the Anglican Church. “Journey of the Magi” (1927) and Ash Wednesday (1930) were among the first poetic fruits of this conversion. In 1936, Eliot published “Burnt Norton,” followed four years later by “East Coker.” Together with “The Dry Salvages” and “Little Gidding,” these poems comprised Four Quartets (1944), which explored in various ways the intersection of time and eternity.

Eliot was also a dramatist. His best play is considered to be Murder in the Cathedral (1935), about the murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. In 1949, Eliot achieved popular success with The Cocktail Party (1949), which ran for 409 performances on Broadway. Two later plays were The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958). In 1948, Eliot was awarded the Order of Merit by Britain’s King George VI as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Eliot married Vivien Haigh-Wood in 1915. By all accounts, it was not a happy marriage. After 1933, they lived apart but did not divorce. Haigh-Wood died in 1947. In 1957, Eliot married Valerie Fletcher, and they had eight years together before Eliot died of emphysema on January 4, 1965, in London.

Poem Text

Eliot, T. S. “East Coker.” Collected Poems: 1909-1962, Faber and Faber, 1974.

Summary

The poem moves from a rather pessimistic view of life to a guarded affirmation of the possibility of living well. In Section I, the speaker emphasizes that the houses people build eventually fall into ruin. Everything on earth is transient, but there is a time for everything—for building, for living, and for dying. The focus then switches to a field near the village of East Coker on a hot summer afternoon and then to a scene from several hundred years ago: On a summer night in that field, people are dancing around a bonfire. In Section II, the orderliness of nature is upset, and it is as if there is a war in the cosmos as the world moves toward fiery destruction and an ice age.

The speaker then criticizes the poetry of this passage as worthless, and he tries to explain what he meant. He no longer believes that old age produces wisdom. Since the leaders of society are old, this produces a negative effect on society. In the third section, the speaker elaborates on this criticism of the older men who occupy powerful positions in society, such as bankers, statesmen, and corporate leaders; they are unable to provide leadership. The speaker then outlines a contemplative approach to life in which the individual soul seeks union with God. He uses a series of paradoxes to explain what that involves. Section IV emphasizes the salvation offered by Christ.

In the final section, the speaker reiterates the difficulty of writing poetry, but he concludes in a more hopeful vein. He offers a prescription for people regarding how best to live as they age while acknowledging that the way forward will never be easy.