ABSTRACT
East Coker in Somerset is the village where a distinguished sixteenth-century member of the Eliot family, Sir Thomas Elyot, lived. After contemplating the ‘present’ of his own personal emotional life, the poet again quickly re-plants himself in the ‘present’. Thus once more the poet achieves the immediacy of the writer-reader relationship. Eliot seems to be saying that the conventional picture of the human life-span, in terms of youth, growth, maturity, and age, as matching the seasons of nature, has no valid meaning. Eliot describes the discipline of withdrawal from the deathward march in three images, each charged with suggestive overtones. In the first image contemporary life is a stage show. The paradox that the way to new life is through death is explored in a series of incantatory sentences which echo a passage in The Ascent of Mount Carmel by St John of the Cross.
