[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

There’s a BarBQ place a mile and a half from our house that my children like to ride their bikes to, get an order of fries, and spend an afternoon downing soda and reading books. Monday, I hopped in the car for a quick trip to the store and came up on my youngest cycling, about halfway to the restaurant, and pulled over to ask if he wanted me to pick up anything while I was out. He told me I wasn’t the first person to pull over and talk to him that afternoon. Some persnickety woman rolled down her window a block or so from our house to “Make sure everything was all right.” She told him it wasn’t safe to be out biking.

The kid is thirteen. When did it become an oddity that one of his tribe might be outside by themselves? We hope she does it again. Next time my kid is going to point at her and start screaming “Stranger Danger!” at the top of his lungs.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Go outside and have some fun. Make it an honest to God POETS Day. Skip out of work and be as free and independent as a kid on a bike.

***

East Coker is a real place. Barely. It’s a tiny village in Summerset set as inland as can be, sandwiched between the Bristol and English Channels, on the north and south respectively, somewhere between Southampton and Plymouth on that southernmost extension of Great Britain the Pilgrims watched sink below the horizon. Wikipedia counts the population as 1667 souls as of the last edit and pictures tell me it’s the kind of quaint English village ripe for a festival-related trio of murders only a clergyman or spinster can solve, to the embarrassment of the local constabulary.

The hamlet is famous as a vehicle for T.S. Eliot’s contemplation in the eponymous poem “East Coker,” the second of the works in his Four Quartets. It was, or is, the ancestral home of the Eliot line. The family left for the American Colonies in the early 1600s and a return by T.S. as a representative of the American diaspored is the occasion for reflections and assertions of the cyclical nature of being, continuity, decay, and rejuvenation.

Eliot returns to his beginning, the place where family lore begins. This place is also his personal end; having left America for England; it, the nation if not one of its smaller postal codes, is his destination, the place he’s made a home. He’s completed a circuit, all the better that it’s a personal end with a cross-generational beginning, as it concerns a man but also mankind.

In “Burnt Norton,” the first poem of the Four Quartets, Eliot plays at time. He opens,

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

All is in circular motion, he tells us. “Desire itself is movement,” he writes. Time and change mean satisfaction is impossible. Only “Love itself is unmoving.” In the center of all the turning of time and want is a still point of perfection. It’s an ecstasy he glimpses in a mote filled beam of sunlight, “Caught in the form of limitation / Between un-being and being.” He leaves us there, contemplating the divine still point we can’t see but for a glimpse, warned off as Moses that to see directly is too terrible.

“In my beginning is my end,” begins “East Coker,” and we are right back in circular motion. I’ve chosen only the first part of the poem for this week’s post. The whole is a bit long, but it’s freely available online should you want to read. As with “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker” is divided into five parts. As I wrote here over a year ago,

“Eliot wrote extensively on Elizabethan drama and its five act structure is certainly being mirrored, but Wilson points out that Eliot was a devout man and this is a religious work so we see in the five parts the structure of mystical prayer.”

The parts are, per the Wilson mentioned above (the poet James Matthew Wilson whose four part lecture on the Four Quartets is well, well worth your time), setting, discovery, contemplation, purgation, and repentance, so we are concerned with the setting.

He introduces a present perfect world. This was and is and will be a place where things rise and fall and participate in the next iteration. Where in “Burnt Norton” we had a cracked concrete pool that remained a pool though it could no longer hold water, here we have indentured matter that in all its permutations remains of the place.

Part I, from East Coker
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

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.

Eliot obviously raises Ecclesiastes with the last few lines, mimicking King Kohelet’s passed wisdom. Man, nature, and man’s creation are interwoven, each a part of each in turn recalling his “Burnt Norton” opening, “time future contained in time past.”

Having established flux, in the next stanza he fixes his moment, where in the cycle he stands as he speaks to the reader. He gives definites about the place as it exists, not necessarily at a specific moment, but over a day. This is East Coker as he encounters it at this stage in his life, so it’s populated with specifics hinting at the time of year but also specifics of a moment as a van passes. We’re out of generations and grand schemes as he gathers himself.

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 his video on “East Coker,” Wilson says that Eliot denies the last line of the second stanza references Hegel’s line, “The owl of Minerva only flies at dusk.” I can’t remember if he shrugs or rolls his eyes after saying so in the video, but Wilson clearly thinks Eliot was, at the very least, influenced by the philosopher’s line. Maybe it was Hegel, maybe it was the same frustration felt through ages that spurred Ronnie’s Lane and Wood to write “Ooh La La” about wishing they knew then what they know now. Whatever wisdom is coming, he trusts in it though it hasn’t yet arrived and hopes it comes sooner as the day is already late.

Eliot was no intellectual slouch. His work is filled with spiraling ideas, philosophy, and theology. He didn’t always write in verse. There are a shelf’s worth of essays where the man exposed in prose eloquently. In his verse a particularly well made phrase can get lost in the midst of high ideas, but he chose to put it in song. Sometimes I have to pull myself away from what he says and remember he was as concerned with how he said a thing.

I’ve said my piece against free verse, reversed myself, and reversed myself again. In all cases, I’ve held that no matter what my verdict, I’m loath to excommunicate the likes of Eliot and Pound, H.D. and Williams. On the one hand, I fear free verse gives cover to pretenders. That’s a fear realized and well borne out. On the other, there is a rhythm that comes unexpectedly and unconventionally from honest practitioners.

I read C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism last weekend and was struck by this passage:

“In childhood sing-song is not a defect. It is simply the first form of rhythmic sensibility; crude itself, but a good symptom not a bad one. This metronomic regularity, this sway of the whole body to the metre simply as metre, is the basis which makes possible all later variations and subtleties. For there are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious. Again, it is possible that those who are now young have met vers libre too early in life. When this is real poetry, its aural effects are of extreme delicacy and demand for their appreciation an ear long trained on metrical poetry. Those who think they can receive vers libre without metrical training are, I submit, deceiving themselves; trying to run before they can walk.”

The nuns weren’t too high on free verse, so it was all sing-song in my elementary education. From seventh grade onward we were fed Dickinson and Whitman. There was Shakespeare, Keats, and Poe along the way, but I’m worried I “met vers libre too early in life.” I wouldn’t be alone. Free verse is everywhere now and has been since the childhoods of my generation on at the very least. Are folks older than me better able to appreciate it? I don’t doubt that I can enjoy free verse as I often do, but am I handicapped? Is there a level of appreciation I don’t know exists. Damn Lewis.

In any case, I was struck by a line that pulled me into music. It’s the second in the next section, which is still a part of the second stanza, though marked by half lines. The editing software throws fits when I try to indent, but after “Wait for the early owl.” the next line below should begin dropped and set a few tabs in, under and after the word “owl.”

“If you do not come too close,” he writes. It’s conspiratorial. We’re drawn in. And then he repeats, “if you do not come too close,” as if telling us we can come closer, maybe a little bit. We’re huddling, about to receive wonder. This whole next section is enchanting. Archaic spellings that probably are but at least recall middle English take us out of our time, a wedding signals continuity, and all a part of old Kohelet’s understanding.

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.

Having taken us out of our moment, he pins us, even from our great vantage point astride generations, binds us in as in time where divinity is without. We cannot partake in infinity as men.

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.

Part II begins in an Indian Summer, a break in the expected cycle and the wisdom of old men, invoked by Ecclesiastes, is called into question. The persona doubts not just his understanding, but his capacity to understand and resolves to be humble and wait.

Around the same time, Eliot sorta wrote Cats.