"East Coker IV" by T.S. Eliot

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Topics discussed in this episode include:

-"T.S. Eliot: The Illusion of Reaction" by Yvor Winters

-Les poetes maudites Tristan Corbiere et Jules Laforgue

-When Eliot was taken to Pound town

-The objective correlative and its problems

-This is basically what East Coker is

-The "Logic" of Imagery (Crane: "Well, one of us is going to have to change!")

-Nancy Drew And The Curious Case of Why Eliot Thinks He's A Classicist

-The Dissociation of Sensibility 

-"Life is difficult, so like... poetry should be difficult, man!" 

-The fallacy of imitative form

-"Sweet Caroline" just sounds better than "Sweet Jacobean"

-A forbidden fruit a day keeps Dr. Jesus away

-Every rose has its thorn, except Mary's

-From Satan's creature to God's preacher

Text of poem:

East Coker IV

The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part;

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer's art

Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease

If we obey the dying nurse

Whose constant care is not to please

But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,

And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital

Endowed by the ruined millionaire,

Wherein, if we do well, we shall

Die of the absolute paternal care

That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,

The fever sings in mental wires.

If to be warmed, then I must freeze

And quake in frigid purgatorial fires

Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,

The bloody flesh our only food:

In spite of which we like to think

That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—

Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

Transcript

Versecraft 3-4: “East Coker 4” by T.S. Eliot 

            If I’m being honest, T.S. Eliot is not a figure I anticipated having a home for on Versecraft: not only does his writing usually eschew the strictures of verse which it is this show’s prerogative to promote and examine, but he was, alongside his Sith Lord master Ezra Pound, the most influential champion of Modernism in the poetry world, and the figure most responsible for normalizing and codifying abstruse experimentalism, non-metrical lyric, and angst-ridden malaise in this mode of writing. He was a man who, through a combination of eloquence, erudition, sagely confidence, and timely shrewdness verging on con-artistry, was able to convince whole generations of artists and critics that his own confused and confusing neuroses represented the spirit of an entire age. A man who convinced legions of followers that his work, which was unapologetically rooted in the irrational pseudo-mysticism of the French Symbolists, was in fact a reaction against Romanticism rather than an insidious extension of it, and more, that his effete, associative, fragmentary approach actually represented a form of Classicism of all things. A man who convinced the world that it was not necessary to learn meter in order to become a poet. A man who, to top it all, was a forthright misogynist, racial purist, and anti-Semite. 

While it is easy to agree with Eliot that Victorian sentimentality and intellectual crudity had to be done away with, it would be absurd to assume that Eliot’s drastic solution was the only one available, or even a good one: Robinson and Frost for instance provided a far more reasonable alternative. Eliot’s artistic hypocrisy, the bewildering discrepancy and paradox of his viewpoints, and the destructive influence that has ensued from his writings have been well-cataloged by Yvor Winters in his essay, T.S. Eliot: The Illusion of Reaction, which can be found in his collection, In Defense of Reason. I will leave it to Winters to envenom Eliot’s name further. 

So why would I feature an episode on a poem by someone I consider an arch-nemesis? Three reasons. The first is that he’s my Dad’s favorite poet, and my Dad has requested on multiple occasions that I do an Eliot episode, even though he knows my stance. At the moment, he’s up in Alaska doing his outdoorsmen Teddy Roosevelt thing, and since we’re all thinking about him and wishing for his safety, I thought I would do an episode in his honor. The second reason is that I thought it would be illuminating to treat Eliot and Crane one after the other, and thereby show both the similarities and differences in two competing strains of Modernism. Thirdly, the fact of the matter is that even though Eliot’s star has fallen significantly in the last fifty years, neither his historical influence nor his talent can be ignored, and it is worth examining him to get a taste of the value and beauty of which he’s capable. 

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Perhaps more than any other poet I’ve featured so far on this show, Eliot is someone with whom you really have to pick and choose what you talk about. As widely known for his critical stances as for his art, massively influential in the domains of scholarship, poetry, literary criticism, modern culture, and even conservative politics, his summary here demands severe compression and omission. 

Eliot, who lived from 1888 to 1965, was born in St. Louis Missouri to an elite Bostonian family with roots stretching back to the English Middle Ages. The young Eliot began writing poetry at the age of fourteen, inspired, like my friend Dick Davis, by reading Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat. He studied literature at Harvard, where he first gained exposure to the French Symbolist poets who would form the basis of his own work, most notably Jules LaForgue and Tristan Corbiere. It is my own opinion that if these two French poets had been more widely known to the English-speaking public, Eliot’s own youthful efforts would have appeared far less shocking and original than they did. After graduating, he decided he actually wanted to become a philosopher, and studied first at the Sorbonne in Paris and later back at Harvard, where he studied Indian philosophy and the Sanskrit language. Following the outbreak of the first World War, Eliot moved his studies to Oxford. In London, where he spent much of his time, his Harvard friend and noted poet Conrad Aiken introduced him to Ezra Pound, perhaps one of the most consequential meetings in literary history. 

It is no great exaggeration to say that Eliot would probably have been nothing without Ezra Pound. It was through Ezra Pound that Eliot made nearly all of his connections in London; it was through the influence of Ezra Pound that Eliot was able to publish his first major work, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in Poetry Magazine. It was through the influence of Ezra Pound that Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a marriage which admittedly was a catastrophic failure that may or may not have involved an affair with Bertrand Russell. It was through the influence of Ezra Pound that Eliot developed many of the critical views for which he would become known, and of course, it was through the editorial genius of Ezra Pound that Eliot’s most famous lyric, The Wasteland, became anything like a finished work. One could almost say that T.S. Eliot was Ezra Pound’s greatest creation. 

After eventually failing to complete his philosophy degree, Eliot took up work as a schoolteacher, supplementing his income by lecturing and writing literary criticism on the side. It was during this time, in 1915, that Pound got “Prufrock” was published, a work which introduced the world to T.S. Eliot and all the peculiarities of his early style: bleak and surreal urban imagery, emotionally isolated, desperate characters, disconnected passages and images, an abundance of literary quotations and allusions, frequent repetition, and his version of so-called free verse, inspired by the prosody of French Symbolists and Jacobean dramatists, which often resembles a loose and inconsistent iambic pentameter. The poem, unsurprisingly, was panned. 

Shortly thereafter, Eliot left teaching to work as a banker, and published his first book of lyrics, Prufrock and Other Observations, and, three years later, his first collection of critical essays, The Sacred Wood, which includes two of his most famous writings: “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” wherein Eliot offers his view of an artist’s proper relationship to their culture’s past and present, perhaps in a clumsy attempt to justify the glaring discrepancy between the traditionalism he claimed for himself and the radical experimentalism his poetry evinced, and “Hamlet and His Problems,” which gives Eliot’s controversially negative view of Shakespeare’s most celebrated play. This latter essay also introduced the term “objective correlative,” which Eliot stole from Washington Allston, into the critical lexicon, a term which refers to the use of objects or events to indicate or motivate a particular emotional reaction. This concept is still highly regarded, and has trickled down into the contemporary injunction of MFA workshops to “show, don’t tell.” 

For Yvor Winters, who conceived of a poem’s moral value as lying in its ability to calibrate the proper feeling to a given subject matter, this notion that one might do the opposite—fabricate an occasion to support the existence of a premeditated emotion— struck him as one of greatest betrayals of artistic integrity in Eliot’s criticism. For my own part, I sympathize with Winters’ preference for an emotive correlative in the domain of lyric, but I think that conceiving of an objective correlative can be very useful when composing a narrative meant to achieve certain emotional effects, such as in the genres of horror or tragedy. 

In 1922, Eliot established Criterion magazine, where he published his next major work, The Wasteland—a bewilderingly experimental five-part lyric which swiftly came to be identified with the crushing existential trauma of modern life in the aftermath of the Great War. Truth be told, World War I did wonders for T.S. Eliot: the public was now in a broken-spirited enough mood to accept Eliot’s despairing, fragmentary vision of life—inspired more by his failing marriage and mental health than anything else— as an appropriate emblem of the times. Once derided as a shock-artist, Eliot now began to be seen as a kind of prophet, a mouthpiece for the zeitgeist. His timing was impeccable. 

In 1925, Eliot left his dead-end banking job to work as a publisher at Faber and Gwyer, later Faber and Faber, a position he would hold for the rest of his career. In this year he also followed up The Wasteland with an even bleaker poem, “The Hollow Men,” famous for its phrase: “This is the way the world ends/ not with a bang, but a whimper.” In 1927 however, Eliot made a spiritual about-face, exchanging his posture of decadent nihilist malaise for Anglo-Catholicism, a move which shocked many of his fans and supporters. A new long poem published in 1930, “Ash-Wednesday,” described the experience of his conversion, and introduced what one might call Eliot’s late style: still perplexingly associative and allusive at times, but also more plainspoken, meditative, and philosophical, with less of the fragmentary jaggedness and woebegone world-weariness which characterized his earlier work. It is at this point in his career that I begin to find Eliot’s work readable. 

In the 1930s, Eliot largely turned his attention from poetry to plays and criticism. The major exception, which Eliot wrote in 1935 based on cuts he made from his verse drama Murder in the Cathedral, was a long lyric based on the penta-partite structure of The Wasteland entitled Burnt Norton, a rumination on the nature of time, salvation, and unity with God that reads half like a lost Pre-Socratic text and half like a guided meditation at a yoga studio. Shortly thereafter, Eliot suffered a crisis of writer’s block, and wrote his way out of it by composing another lyric built on the same structure and themes as Burnt Norton, entitled East Coker, in 1940. Eliot now envisioned a series of four interconnected poems, which, despite each being five parts long, he called Four Quartets, a musical reference to suggest the recurring themes and variations which wove in and out from one poem to the next. The last two poems, The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding, were completed in 1941 and 1942, respectively. Written during the German air-raids on London, they sublimate the experience and anxieties of war into the series of religious meditations on mortality, time, and eternity, lending the whole an additional complexity. Many, including myself, consider The Four Quartets to be the finest lyric writing that Eliot ever produced. 

Curiously, Eliot wrote almost no lyrics of note in the remaining 20 years of his life, preferring to concentrate on playwriting, criticism, and publishing. In 1965, at the age of 76, Eliot perished of emphysema, and his ashes were interred in St. Michael’s Church in the village of East Coker, home of his pre-colonial ancestors. On the church wall, a plaque commemorates the legendary writer with a quote from the lyric East Coker: “In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.” We will return to this lyric in a bit. 

Those who are curious about Eliot’s ideas, and why he wrote the way he did, will find ample material to grapple with in his multitudinous essays, to say nothing of the essays of Pound. Here, I’d like to focus on two concepts that I believe get to the essence of his artistic philosophy—namely, the idea of the logic of imagery, and the idea of a unified sensibility. 

For those who listened to last week’s episode, this first idea should already ring a bell: “the logic of imagery” sounds an awful lot like Hart Crane’s “logic of metaphor,” and this is no coincidence: despite being aesthetic rivals, Eliot and Crane both derived much of their poetic philosophy from the French Symbolists. Speaking of his translation of the Caribbean-French Symbolist poet Saint John-Perse’s work Anabase, Eliot wrote: 

“Any obscurity of the poem, on first readings, is due to the suppression of ‘links in the chain,’ of explanatory and connecting matter, and not to incoherence, or to the love of cryptogram. The justification of such abbreviation of method is that the sequence of images coincides and concentrates into one intense impression of barbaric civilization. The reader has to allow the images to fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that, at the end, a total effect is produced. Such selection of a sequence of images and ideas has nothing chaotic about it. There is a logic of the imagination as well as a logic of concepts.”

As many have noticed, this describes Eliot’s own practice quite well. Eliot scholar George Williamson wrote: “His logic of imagery does not mean incoherence but connection by a common principle or a series of probable associations; that is, associations which involve inference of some kind or belong to a pattern of experience. It means connecting by analogy, implicit relations, or a frame of allusion.” 

As Yvor Winters has observed, this practice of composing based on the association of ideas rather than a logical train of thought is a Romantic inheritance which goes back all the way to the Empiricist psychology of John Locke and subsequent 18th century philosophers. I already spoke last week about the main issues I have with this method of composition, which not only often fails to communicate anything significant, but in prioritizing emotion, instinct, and subjective impressions over the clear and reasoned communication of ideas, contributes to the decline rather than the advancement of mental culture, and thereby to the destabilization of civilized discourse. Whether or not it is fair to actually call Eliot or Crane or John-Perse incoherent is a complex issue which must be resolved on a case by case basis, but I believe that for a good poet that is doing their job, the question should not ever even arise. 

We will observe however that while Eliot and Crane both often flirt with incoherence, and both rely on the reader to intuitively grasp their meaning, their practices are distinctly different. Whereas Crane relies on the reader to intuitively grasp his bizarre images and extravagant wordplay, but leaves his connective elements more or less intact, Eliot is apt to write lines that are more or less intelligible, but then juxtapose them with lines which seem to have nothing to do with what came before, relying on the reader to intuitively grasp the stream-of-consciousness leap from one to the other. Furthermore, whereas Crane sought, like a traditional Romantic, to use associational methods to allow his readers to grasp lofty emotions too refined for regular speech, Eliot used associational methods to attempt to achieve a sophisticated and subtle mélange of thought and feeling which he thought was the only adequate reflection of the complexity of modern life. But while Crane thought Eliot morbid, and Eliot thought Crane naïve, it should be clear that they were more alike than they seem. 

So if Eliot’s poetics were clearly Romantic, and this is true for more reasons than I have gotten into here, why did he claim to be a Classicist, and why did people believe him? The main reason, I believe, is because it was a convenient term to indicate both his reverence for the European poetic tradition and his hostility to the traditional Romantics of the 18th and 19th centuries, whose influence he sought to eradicate from modern English letters. If there was one way in which Eliot was authentically Classical in the Apollonian sense of the term, it was his emphasis on the impersonality of great art. In his essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” he wrote: “the struggle—which alone constitutes life for a poet— is to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal.” This is surely a sentiment that Aristotle, Samuel Johnson, and even Yvor Winters could get behind. 

            Yet Eliot did not disparage the Romantics merely because they were too enraptured by the “egotistical sublime,” as Keats would put it. Eliot’s principal grievance is best articulated in what I think is his most fascinating essay, “The Metaphysical Poets.” Speaking of the difference in sensibility between the 17th century poet Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the 19th century poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, Eliot writes, and I quote selectively: 

            “The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes…. In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never fully recovered…. The language went on and in some respects improved…. but while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude…. the sentimental age began in the early 18th century, and continued. The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, imbalanced; they reflected.”

            It is of course one of the many hypocrisies of Eliot that he would condemn Romantics for revolting against the ratiocinative, when he himself felt the need to justify illogical, nigh-incoherent poetry by appealing to a “logic of imagery.” His theory however that a divide between thought and feeling, a sense of rivalry between logic and emotion, a dissociation of sensibility, developed from the late 17th century onward is one that has compelled me for many years, and is the idea I find most valuable in Eliot’s entire body of criticism. For Eliot, the 17th century metaphysical poets, and John Donne in particular, represent the ideal poetic mind: a mind that feels ideas, and cogitates emotions; a mind that operates holistically and consumes information omnivorously, and can synthesize disparate materials together to create new and insightful concepts and comparisons, as in a metaphysical conceit, or, as often in Eliot’s own case, a heavily allusive collage of fragments. Dr. Johnson would no doubt describe both of these methods as “heterogenous ideas yoked by violence together,” but according to Eliot, such a poet is possessed of a unified sensibility. 

            By contrast, a poet like Tennyson, again according to Eliot, could only be reflective. He felt first, and thought about his feelings later, or vice versa. As such, he could not, in Eliot’s words, “find verbal equivalents for states of mind and feeling,” but only take experiences and “meditate on them poetically.”

            Eliot sought to reunite thought and feeling in modern poetry, and find a modern equivalent for the Metaphysical method. In what is as close to a mission statement as he ever gave, he says later in the essay:

            “It appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”

            Eliot’s assumption that complex and difficult subject matter requires difficult and complex poetry is a large and quite crude logical leap— what Winters called the fallacy of imitative form. Eliot does not seem to consider the possibility that complex and difficult subjects may in fact be all the more in need of simple and lucid presentation, and that poetic excellence inheres in the ability to produce such a presentation. As Winters points out, the complex spiritual and moral issues particular to modernity, as well as its particular sense of malaise, were well explored and catalogued by Baudelaire in perfectly understandable, formally traditional and rigorous French verse, and we may look to Robinson for a comparable accomplishment in English. Eliot’s particular zeal for indirect allusiveness, kitchen-sink collage, and the logic of imagery were his own affair, his own idiosyncratic blend of Donne and LaForgue and Pound, and yet he somehow convinced the world that this kookiness was not merely his own preference, but a historical inevitability. His critique of the Romantics was genius—his viral response to the Romantic problem was bizarre and unfortunate. 

            Today’s poem, the fourth section of East Coker, is an interesting and atypical specimen of Eliot’s work, because it is not only inspired by metaphysical poetry but is in fact a direct pastiche of metaphysical poetry—as such, it is one of the few works of Eliot’s maturity that is entirely in meter and rhyme. Eliot makes clear in his letters that this poem is not meant to be an imitation of Jacobean poets like Donne or Herbert, figures whose talents he felt were inimitable, but lesser Metaphysical poets of the Caroline period, John Cleveland and Edward Benlowes, who took the metaphysical idiom to extravagant, melodramatic lengths. To an extent then, this poem is a deliberate exercise in bad taste. At the same time however, it is a gravely serious exposition of Eliot’s orthodox views on sin and salvation, and is often considered the ideological heart of East Coker, the solution Eliot arrives upon after treating the disillusionment of aging, the inevitability and horror of death, and the desire for transcendence in the previous sections. The poem goes like this: 

East Coker IV

The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part;

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer's art

Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease

If we obey the dying nurse

Whose constant care is not to please

But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,

And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital

Endowed by the ruined millionaire,

Wherein, if we do well, we shall

Die of the absolute paternal care

That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,

The fever sings in mental wires.

If to be warmed, then I must freeze

And quake in frigid purgatorial fires

Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,

The bloody flesh our only food:

In spite of which we like to think

That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—

Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

            Like the Hart Crane poem from last time, we have five stanzas of five lines each. We very noticeably do not have five feet per line however: instead, in each stanza we have, in addition to a rhyme scheme of ABABB, a mixed metrical scheme as well: three lines of tetrameter, followed by a line of pentameter, followed by a line of hexameter, otherwise known as an alexandrine. Mixed meters were in vogue in the mid-17th century, and Eliot’s verse reflects this. 

            Overall, the meter is very regular, more rigorous in fact than many actual metaphysical poems. Eliot’s primary way to create rhythmic interest is through his punctuation, especially commas which split his metrical feet in half. In line 15 for instance, the caesura after “us” creates the effect of an amphibrach followed by trochees, even though the line consists exclusively of iambs: “That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.” A similar effect is achieved in line 20. 

            In line 19, we have a fantastic example of how elision can affect the rhythm of a line. Both the words “purgatorial” and “fires” could be read with a vowel sound elided, and it is this old school reading which gives us a perfect iambic line: “and quake in frigid purgatoryal faihrs.” If, on the other hand, we read the line with all the syllables intact—“and quake in frigid purgatorial fires”— we end the line on a feminine anapest, otherwise known as a tertius paeon, a rare four syllable foot of weak-weak-strong-weak: ri-al-FI-ers. 

            Let’s now go back and read the first two stanzas again: 

The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part;

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer's art

Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease

If we obey the dying nurse

Whose constant care is not to please

But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,

And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

In typical Metaphysical fashion, Eliot leaps right into an extended religious metaphor riddled with witty paradox: the wounded surgeon is Christ, a figure who despite—indeed because of—being mutilated and broken on the cross, is himself the healer of human souls. This reading is soon confirmed by the mention of the “bleeding hands,” a reference to the nails which pierced Jesus’s palms. In this analogy, the physician who cuts into a diseased area of the body in order to heal a patient is compared to the painful way in which Christ questions and challenges the soul in order to free it from sin. This is tough love, “sharp compassion,” but the end result is that the “enigma of the fever chart,” the mystery behind the illness and unhappiness of our souls, is revealed and purged. 

In the second stanza we begin with the apparent paradox, “our only health is the disease.” Meaning, that it is only by our deepening awareness of our sinfulness, and our ability to suffer through the guilt of this realization, that we can regain our spiritual health. In line two, the dying nurse almost certainly refers to the Catholic Church— within Catholicism, the church is often referred to as the bride of Christ, and this tracks with the analogy of the nurse as the assistant to Dr. Jesus Christ M.D., Messiah Deus. That she is described as “dying” likely refers to the decline of the Church’s influence in modern times, a fact which caused Eliot no end of anxiety. 

We may however be giving Eliot too much credit here: when asked by one of his translators whether the nurse represented the Church or Christ, Eliot replied: “On this subject I can throw no light myself, but we will have to think of some justification for the phrase.” Whether being coy or honest, I find this attitude both disturbing and obnoxious, and an indication of Eliot’s fundamental un-seriousness as an artist. Think of all those poor graduate students slaving away to try to understand every syllable of the Wasteland! I suspect that Eliot would be smirking in his grave. 

In any case, let’s assume that the nurse is the church, as I think is reasonable. Eliot demands obedience to the church, whose goal is not please us, but to remind us of our sins and the original sin of Adam, and guide us on the path to salvation through the difficult process of moral reformation and absolution. Just as a fever must reach a point of maximal intensity before it breaks, so too must the sinner work through their sinfulness in order to be redeemed. 

Let’s now begin the poem again, this time, all the way through:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part;

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer's art

Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease

If we obey the dying nurse

Whose constant care is not to please

But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,

And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital

Endowed by the ruined millionaire,

Wherein, if we do well, we shall

Die of the absolute paternal care

That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,

The fever sings in mental wires.

If to be warmed, then I must freeze

And quake in frigid purgatorial fires

Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,

The bloody flesh our only food:

In spite of which we like to think

That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—

Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

In the third stanza, Eliot expands his conceit to encompass the whole world, likening it to a hospital. Morbid as this may seem, this metaphor has an established Christian pedigree: we find it in Bach’s 25 cantata, in the essays of Thomas Browne, in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, and other texts. The “ruined millionaire” is Adam, who was initially given the rule of paradise, and with his fall, caused the entire world to fall, thus necessitating the need for it to become a hospital for fallen souls. Interestingly, this metaphor makes Adam come off as downright philanthropic. In Eliot’s characteristically bleak vision, the best thing we can do in this hospital is die, and death will be a blessing from God the Father. Eliot says that God “will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.” This may sound strange, but Eliot is using the word “prevents” in an archaic sense, found in the Book of Common Prayer, meaning to aid and guide. However, we of course must consider the negative sense as well: that God thwarts us in what we try to do. In the original version of this poem, Eliot had written: “that will not leave us, but torments us everywhere,” presenting God in a hellish and even sadistic light. Here we see Eliot’s Calvinist roots coming through. 

In the fourth stanza, Eliot returns to the image of the fever, which follows us from mortal life into Purgatory, the intermediary realm between Heaven and Hell where good but imperfect souls are tormented until they are pure enough to ascend into heaven.  In describing the chill ascending through the body, Eliot echoes the description of Falstaff’s death from the second act of Henry V. The paradox of warming through freezing, another iteration of becoming healthy through disease, recalls the entire Petrarchan tradition, though Eliot noted specifically that he took the image of freezing from Edward Benlowes. The flames of Purgatory are likened to roses, thereby associating the flames with both love and the blood of Christ—it is God’s love, exemplified by Christ’s crucifixion, that tortures the sinner into righteousness. The smoke, what the fire is burning away, is the soul’s sin, or, in the floral metaphor, briars. The virgin Mary is sometimes called “the rose without thorns,” an allusion to the fact that she, like her son Jesus, was born without original sin—with this in mind, to say the smoke is briars is effectively to say that the smoke is sin. 

In the final stanza, Eliot concludes by emphasizing the soul’s entire dependence on communion with Christ: his flesh and blood are the only sustenance which can truly nourish. Even when we know of our dependence on God, Eliot says, we still are often deceived into thinking that our own flesh and blood— that is, the material world, our egos and desires— are what matter, are what is real. In our hearts, we are more secular than we would like to think. And yet in spite of our secret loyalty to the material world, we still live our religious lives as if we were entirely faithful— Good Friday, despite being the day when Christ was crucified, is good because it was what enabled Christ to redeem humankind. To call that Friday “good” is to effectively say that one believes in the redemptive power of the crucifixion. Eliot’s point however is that many people call that Friday “good” without actually believing in its significance. 

East Coker was published the day before Good Friday, and Eliot likely intended this section of the lyric in particular, which sizzles with fire and brimstone, as a call to his readers to assume a renewed and authentic faith. Eliot never stopped believing that modern life is a wasteland—but eventually he came to believe that, with Christ’s blood, that land might quicken into life again. This poem doesn’t tell us anything that we couldn’t hear spouted from thousands of pulpits all over the world, but it is interesting for other reasons: It is interesting because of its place in an otherwise experimental and often despairing piece of writing; it is interesting because of its place in an otherwise experimental and often despairing career. It is a formal, deeply old-fashioned poem written in the 20th century by a man who did more than almost anyone to destroy metrical norms and encourage the development of new artistic techniques and philosophies. It is the cry of a desperate man who seeks to renew traditional values amidst a modern world that he himself helped to create. It is as self-contradictory, polarizing, and singular as the man himself, and is a poem that only T.S. Eliot could have written. 

With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s encounter this poem one last time, as an old friend: 

East Coker IV

The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part;

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer's art

Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease

If we obey the dying nurse

Whose constant care is not to please

But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,

And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital

Endowed by the ruined millionaire,

Wherein, if we do well, we shall

Die of the absolute paternal care

That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,

The fever sings in mental wires.

If to be warmed, then I must freeze

And quake in frigid purgatorial fires

Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,

The bloody flesh our only food:

In spite of which we like to think

That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—

Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.