TS Eliot and East Coker, Somerset
The story of Thomas Stearns Eliot and the Somerset village of East Coker has a fascinating circularity to it, just like the poem named for the village that is part of his Four Quartets series.T S Eliot was born in St Louis Missouri, his English ancestor the Reverend Andrew Eliot having emigrated to America in 1669. Andrew Eliot was thought to have been one of the key figures in the Salem witch trials . The English Eliots (and Elyots) lived in East Coker from the 15th century until that emigration, their most distinguished member Sir Thomas Elyot, a diplomat in the time of Henry VIII and also like his descendent a writer (whose friends included Sir Thomas More).
Heavily influenced by Ezra Pound TS Eliot made England his home from 1911 until his death in 1965, thus spending the majority of his life in this country. The book A Sketch of the Eliot Family alerted the poet to his Somerset origins, and in 1937 he visited East Coker to view the village that had been his family home for several centuries.
Today as in 1937 various buildings in this pretty village dotted with thatched cottages many of them in the local ham-stone provide links with the distant past of Sir Thomas Elyot and his ilk. The church of St Michael was built in the 12th century, and would have been the place of worship for the Eliots of the late Middle Ages, the Tudor age and the Stuart era. Coker Court, a 15th century manor house, would likewise have been familiar to TS Eliot’s ancestors; Hymerford House is another venerable building from that period, beautiful, impressive and homely at the same time; and the structure in the village now called Naish Priory (though it may never have been such a religious house) would have been there before the Eliot family arrived.
Eliot’s poem East Coker is not the easiest of reads, nor perhaps should it be of course. It is a philosophical work, exploring the nature of time, order, humanity, and the religious. He criticises our rulers for allowing the descent into the uncivilised, the work written at the height of World War Two .
Opening with one of the poet’s most famous lines: “In my beginning is my end,” and ending with: “In my end is my beginning,” it also paints a picture of the village with broad brush strokes: “Now the light falls Across the open field, leaving the deep lane Shuttered with branches,” and “the deep lane insists on the direction Into the village.” He enlists the flowers seen in and around the village to create the atmosphere and illustrate his narrative: hollyhocks, dahlias, snowdrops, roses.
An excursion in language from the Stuart Age reminds us of his ancestor leaving the village and of his Puritanism (whereas TS Eliot was of the Anglo-Catholic party of the Church of England). When he died on January 4 1965 Eliot’s ashes were put in the Church of St Michael , behind a memorial plaque, in a ceremony on Easter Sunday of that year. That plaque is to this day the focus of literary pilgrimages to East Coker by lovers of Eliot’s poetry.
1 Response to TS Eliot and East Coker
From Joan on 16th March 2013
I enjoyed the review. My grandmother was Lulu TRASK and our TRASK family originated in East Coker with Capt. William TRASK coming to Massachusettes about 1620. He was a founding father of Salem, Massachusetts. I do not know if there are any TRASK's still living in East Coker. I live in Florida, USA.
If you like this, Share it
More Cultural Britain?
Brit Quote: |
|
On this day: |