The Political Forum

EAST COKER (Part IV)
T.S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)

This is one of my very favorite passages from T.S. Eliot's work. On one level, it addresses the way I have often felt as I have attempted to ply my trade -- "trying to use words, and every attempt is a wholly new start and a different kind of failure . . . a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling."

As I have grown older and moved back to farm country, to God's country if you will, I have come to appreciate Eliot's thoughts on aging - "The evening with the photograph album . . . when here and now cease to matter . . . when love is most nearly itself" -- and his great message that the end is not man's destruction but his destination, his beginning.

The poem East Coker is the second of what Eliot called the Four Quartets, which were published together as a book in the spring of 1943 (the price tag on the dust cover of my First Edition is $2.50), but written between 1936 and 1942. The name refers to the English village from which Eliot's ancestors immigrated in 1667 to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and where he is buried in the ancient graveyard of the 13^th century Church of St. Michael, among the "old stones that cannot be deciphered."

I am not going to attempt to do a critique of either East Coker or the Four Quartets. This is not the place for it, and even if it were, I am not qualified to do it. I will simply note for those whose familiarity with Eliot's poetry is centered on Prufrock and The Wasteland, that the Four Quartets represent a different period in his work and his life, one in which his poetry does not reflect visions of hell, but of faith and the divine spirit.

I should say here in closing that this poem deserves to be read in its entirety. So, if you like this passage, do yourself a favor and read the entire poem, as well as the other three "quartets." You can find them at www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets.

East Coker (Part IV)

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate-but there is no competition-
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

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