East Coker

In a letter written in May 1940, Eliot described the village of East Coker as the ideal place for “a meditation on beginnings and ends” (“In Eliot’s Own Words: Four Quartets.” T. S. Eliot), and this motif permeates the poem. “In my beginning is my end” (Line 1) is the very first sentence, which is followed by examples, such as houses, of things that are built but eventually come down. Ends are always contained within beginnings. The segue to the imagined country scene in the village invokes how things that were once used or living are now “under the sea” (Line 100), like the houses and the dancers who have gone “under the hill” (Line 101).

The beginnings and ends motif also occurs in the notion of the spiritual path, in which through contemplative prayer, the individual self reaches its “end”—that is, the person learns how to go beyond desire and thought to experience a union with God. As a result, a new beginning emerges for that individual. The same is true for the sacrament of the Eucharist, as Section IV shows. 

The speaker also describes his tortuous attempts to write poetry as “a new beginning” (Line 181), with previous works the equivalent of “ends”—poetry that he has no desire to repeat in