To an expatriate it was also soil, roots, something to which, however much he ignored it, he should dutifully return. The village was to Eliot rather an idea, a metaphor to put to poetic use, an idyll of England at the start of the second world war. In the late-1930s he cycled over when staying with friends nearby and on his last visit in 1939 took some photographs, but did not return before his death in 1965. The family eventually migrated to Missouri, where Eliot himself was born in St Louis. He discovered that his Elyot ancestors went from here to America in the 1660s and one served on the jury at the Salem witch trials. What did the village do to him, that he should use it to evoke such nihilism?Įliot's ashes are buried in East Coker. Were Eliot not a devout Anglican we might think him the bleakest of atheists on the strength of this poem. But why East Coker? The answer is that it was here that TS Eliot chose to evoke, in the second of his Four Quartets, not just the gloom of the Good Friday season but his vision of mystical misery for all humankind. The day may be immaterial to a non-believer, but to any lover of English churches Holy Week has drenched their architecture in terror and faith down the centuries, depicted in roods, screens, sepulchres and sanctuaries.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |