East Coker (poem)

East Coker is the second poem of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. It was started as a way for Eliot to get back into writing poetry and was modelled after Burnt Norton. It was finished during early 1940 and printed for the Easter edition of the 1940 New English Weekly. The title refers to a small community that was directly connected to Eliot's ancestry and was home to a church that was later to house Eliot's ashes.

The poem discusses time and disorder within nature that is the result of humanity following only science and not the divine. Leaders are described as materialistic and unable to understand reality. The only way for mankind to find salvation is through pursuing the divine by looking inwards and realizing that humanity is interconnected. Only then can people understand the universe.

In 1939 T.S Eliot thought that he would be unable to continue writing poetry. In an attempt to see if he could still, he started copying aspects of Burnt Norton and substituted another place: East Coker, a place that Eliot visited in 1937 with the St Michael's Church, where his ashes were later kept. The place held a particular importance to Eliot and his family because Andrew Eliott, Eliot's ancestor, left the town to travel to America in 1669. A plaque dedicated to Eliot and his ashes reads "In my beginning is my end. Of your kindness, pray for the soul of Thomas Stearns Eliot, poet. In my end is my beginning."

He managed to complete two sections by February 1940, but finished the rest during that month. John Davy Hayward, Herbert Read and others helped review and edit it. East Coker was published in the March 1940 New English Weekly for its Easter edition. It was later reprinted May and June, and it was published on its own by Faber and Faber in September. With the completion of the poem, Eliot began creating the Four Quartets as a series of four poems based on the same theme with Burnt Norton as the first in the series and East Coker as the second.

East Coker is described as a poem of late summer, earth, and faith. As in the other poems of the Four Quartets, each of the five sections holds a theme that is common to each of the poems: time, experience, purgation, prayer, and wholeness. The time theme is stated in the first section as 'In my beginning is my end' which, given proper attention, might prove to lead into the eternal moment.

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