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.

East Coker -- II

II

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

That was a way of putting it - not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us,
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge inposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
but all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rahter of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

East Coker I -- text

I

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.

In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

East Coker I -- Marriage and the Mystery

At the end of Burnt Norton, Eliot binds past, present, and future into one glorious Present. Yet, in the beginning of East Coker, he seems to reach a spiritual crisis—in sum, as he reconciles himself to a beginning he sees it as a death sentence. “In my beginning is my end” is the poet’s first cry, and from there he dissects the entire material world into their unbeautiful base elements.

It is a dismal picture—houses, homes, even in their genesis are reduced to dust. Old stone bows to the recycling of time and become earth, and all is reduced to “flesh, fur, and faeces.” He ends the first stanza in a depressed recitation of Ecclesiastes:

Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And a time to shake the wainscot where the field mouse trots
And the shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto

It’s not pretty.

Yet, in the midst of this dim reflection on the ultimate death of all things the author has not given up hope. He faces this specter of death and works methodically towards the jobs and joys of this doomed moment. First, by breaking himself loose from the present vision he allows himself to once more hear the music of the spheres. “If you do not come to close, / On a summer midnight, you can hear the music / Of the weak pipe and the little drum.”

This music leads him to one of the most, arguably the most important human duty to the present life, “dancing around the bonfire, / The association of man and woman / in dausinge, signifying matrimonie-- / a dignified and commodious sacrament.” It is interesting to note that Eliot chose to refer to the ancient rite of marriage through the words of Edmund Spenser...a poet who in his Faerie Queen made it a point to ally the human dance of man and wife with the heavenly dance of Christ and Church. In “this two and two, necessarye coniunction,” Eliot sees both the hope for the present and the point of the future. United in earth, we live to be united with Christ. We unite in earth to show us how to unite in Christ.

This concord is born of the greatest of all celestial delights, yet is spun of the lowliest of earthly joys. Rustic joys: clumsy dancing and good earth, keeping the time and tasks of the seasons. Only here, does the author acquire the proper Ecclesiastical spirit where there is “the time of the seasons and the constellations / the time of milking and the time of harvest.”

In the single day of existence, he realizes there is always the hope of the new dawn. There is a preparation for the end, but even as he faces wrinkles and old age, Eliot says, “I am here / Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.”

Burnt Norton, Section V

Perhaps it is a mistake to try and unravel the magic of Eliot in stages. He is complex, he is abstract, and one must believe that the imagery is consistent, but it is difficult to maintain that consistency when one is analyzing in long-separated sequences. However, we try.

Throughout this segment of the poem, Eliot has been working with the divided cohesion of time. All time, past, present and future, are all gathered together in one picture, one glimpse, in the now. This last segment continues that thread.
“Words move, music moves/Only in time.” With the abstract nature of the examples, he identifies objects that possess an odd immortality, yet the epitome of a temporal life form. Words and music live only as long as the breath that summons them. Only in print can they live beyond, and even that is dependent on the book that holds them and the eyes that read them. They live, like humans, but they can live beyond, much like an antiquity, such as a Chinese jar.

Does this analysis have a point? Good question. I’d love to hear the answer. Yet, with words and music and antiquity, “Only by the form, the pattern,/Can words or music reach the stillness” dare I say? Of eternity? Yet, how does one grasp those living words that stretch into eternity. Not the “still of the violin, while the note lasts” but the stillness of a co-existence that ties the present to eternity. Words, and lives, without this binding to eternity break, crack, and crumble unto the burden of finding and upholding meaning.

Yet, like any works of art, words of import cannot be fully at rest. They are active, and as they are active, they are strained—the more important the word, the greater the strain. “Shrieking voices/Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,/Always assail them. The Word in the desert/Is most attacked by voices of temptation”

In the last two stanzas, Eliot once more binds himself to the overarching theme of the dances of time—a dance that encompasses the beautiful, the terrible, and the ever changing, the “disconsolate chimera.”

This dance of time is solved and made in the manner of the movement. It isn’t the pattern, it is the steps. I do not have an understanding of the ten steps. It is the perfect number, perhaps the Ten Commandments, perhaps the ten steps to heaven of Jacob’s Ladder. Desire makes a pattern but it does not define the pattern, love cannot move, it must be acted on within the will, and the motive of the will is what dictates its movement in the dance. In the words of Eliot: ends do not justify the means, ends determine the value of the means.

The pattern of the movement, left to itself, is dead, it is limited by its entrapment in a single dimension. It is unbeing and being, and therefore stuck. One must see the forward and backward movement of time, but one cannot treat it like an ancient vase trapped in the present in a museum case that will stolidly be sent forward in time. The movement of time is not a still picture of academic interest. No, rather to live, it is like a “Sudden shaft of sunlight/Even while the dust moves/There rises the hidden laughter.” It is a lively, intricate, joyful and beautiful dance that we enter as children. Left as an academic exercise it is “Ridiculous the waste sad time/Stretching before and after.” But, it has the trademark of "hidden laughter/of children in the foliage."

Where is Eliot going and what was he doing? In Burnt Norton, Eliot stripped away the reader's unimaginative acceptance of the mere present. He challenges them to see the present as a rich continuation of the past, and both binding the future. In short, everything one does echoes all of the past and all of the future. No pressure. He furthers the challenge. Do not be burdened by this and be like the cowardly servant that was given a talent and then buried it. Rather approach this mysterious, powerful, and utterly beautiful whirligig of time like a dance, like a note on a violin, like dust motes in the a beam of light. Knowing this, is successfully reaching childhood.

The paradox, all we do has eternal weight, yet we cannot know all of what we do. As to the Eliot's own continuation? That waits for East Coker.

Burnt Norton, Section III, and IV

Long overdue they are, but here be the analysis of Burnt Norton Sections III and IV.  Good news, we are almost to East Coker.

A recurring theme of the work seems to be “time present and time past” the contemplation of the past accompanied, or inspired by, the swift-flowing insolvency of the present. While the present is vivid, it is moving too swiftly to provide rest or answers. The past, is captured in staccato images—images that mix the beatific with the mundane, “garlic and sapphires in the mud.” Artistically, there is nothing to capture the poet in the past or the present; he must chase the future. Here, “is a place of disaffection…neither daylight / investing form with lucid stillness / nor darkness to purify the soul.” The scene is reminiscent of Dante’s Paradise for Pagans. There is a loveliness to it, but the scene is haunted by an incompleteness, a sense that so much more beauty would be possible, if you could only see the Sun. But, there is hope, this poet can and will strive for the Son. In an almost Siddharthic cleansing, the empty whirl of time and image are “emptying the sensual with deprivation / cleansing affection from the temporal / neither plenitude nor vacancy.”

Also, as in Limbo, the poet is not alone. In the congestion of nothing he is accompanied by people—or is it memories?—all filled with the same yearning, yet chasing it in different directions. “Distracted from distraction by distraction” like an over-caffeinated student writing a paper in the early morning, they get distracted from the bunny trails to chase the bunny trails, all the while forgetting that they were supposed to be hunting bear. They are reduced to “Men and bits of paper, whirled by a cold wind / that blows before and time after.” They yearn for the future, they can’t escape the past, but they so frantically chase the present that they drive themselves into the echoing dark. The wind of the present sweeps through London, consequently through all the world. Yet still, it is not an entirely unfriendly wind, or an empty darkness, “this twittering world” is still alive.

As the wind leaves London, so the poet leaves the present, physical world. He leaves the crowd, leaves the light, and descends from Limbo to the world that isn’t even a world—one might even say hell—the place of no light, no substance, no senses, no company, no spirit, not even an imagination—truly hell for the poet. The hell is not like Dante’s, not one of an excess of sensitivity, but an absence of all things. By an absolute stillness “while the world moves / in appetency, on its metalled ways / of time past and time future.”

But while the poet descends to the depths, where is “the twittering world”? It continues on, by custom and the natural order, where “time and the bell have buried the day.” This nightfall of sunfall will not follow the poet into the Stygian depths. The sunflower does not worship the ground, and the clematis clings only to the tallest trees. Yew, the ever-faithful wood, even it refuses to follow. Yet one thing of the natural world remains….the light still remains.

Burnt Norton, Section III, and IV

Analysis to follow, by the Grace of God.

III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.



IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?

Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

Burnt Norton, Part 2

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
And reconciles forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear below the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Ehrebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.

Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.