East Coker- Section 2

At the end of the last segment, the poet was reconciled, though reluctantly, to the interminable present. Here, he seems to have domiciled until he leaves the dancing days of summer and enters the natural chaos of November—a month that, in semi-temperate England, anything is possible. Summer creatures still thrive, snowdrops not yet risen from their summer deathbeds, late roses that battle with early snow. It is the verdant version of the eternal all-times the poet sang of in Burnt Norton.

This dance of all seasons is not limited to the earth. The stars turn in their courses, fighting to get one last glimpse of the earth they got to see so briefly. Scorpio, a constellation that bespeaks suffering and malaise is ordered by the Sun, the bringer of all-life, to wind his way thither. The pestilence fights and flees the light. The Sun and the Moon in time eclipse each other, and deprived of their light, comets weep as they cannot find either the sky or the plains. “Whirled in a vortex that shall bring / The world to that destructive fire / Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.” The sun rules the stars but it cannot rule the earth. An earth that is still under death sentence—the whirling dance of the stars brings life, but the passage of time only brings the world closer to the day when it shall pass into dust by ice and flame.

I would be remiss if I did not mention at this point that I have not a clue what I am talking about. And, unlike Cicero, I mean it. I am no Eliot scholar, nor particularly well-read. So, I write my thoughts and speculations firmly in the hope that the reader will forgive my inanities and deepen my expositions.

Now, onward to clueless speculations. The second stanza of the poem is to my mind, inscrutable. The poet seems to be unsatisfied with his own words, “A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, / Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings.” He’s attempted to expound the mysteries of the universe in poetry and he has failed.

He asks, “What was to be the value of the lone looked forward to, / Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity / And the wisdom of the age?” What is the point of the hoped for future? Of the calm days before the death of winter? Is the lie in the voice of the wisdom, or is the wisdom itself utterly deceived? “Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?”

Eliot seems to spend the next few lines waffling between a despair of the value of all old knowledge and a condemnation of his ability to see it. In the phrase, “At best, only a limited value / In the knowledge derived from experience. / The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, / For the pattern is new in every moment.” He makes up his mind, he may not be able to grasp, or even trust, eternal truth, but the dance of life moves too quickly to trust more concrete, experience-won knowledge. He speaks again of deceiving, but only to say that the eternal wisdom only undeceives us of that which wasn’t worth knowing.

Yet, in this maze of deceiving and undeceiving, he steps once more into the wood between the worlds, and in that world “On the edge of the grimpen, where is no secure foothold, / And menaced by monsters, fancy lights, / Risking enchantment.” It is in this wood he finds his answer to the conflicts of many wisdoms. The secret is not lost in time, it is not found in experience or in the accomplishments of all sages. Rather, it is found in their folly, and through their folly, their humility.

Unlike all human strengths and musings, “humility is endless.”

When all the houses have fallen to dust, when all the dancers leave the wood, humility is all that remains.