‘The dancers are all gone under the hill’

Two weeks ago, in Somerset I made a visit to East Coker, the village where T.S.Eliot’s ashes are buried, and the title for the second of his Four Quartets. The church has a small display (see photo above) in a corner next to the memorial plaque for the poet and his second wife Valerie. Eliot traced his ancestors back to the village; the family name first appeared in the church register in 1563, and Andrew Eliot emigrated to America sometime between 1660 and 1670. Remarkably, he served on the jury at the Salem witch trials (a decision he later lamented as a ‘heinous crime’).

’East Coker’ is a wartime poem, mostly written in February 1940. It was printed as a magazine supplement in March, then published as a pamphlet in September by Faber and Faber, price one shilling. It sold very well; Eliot wrote in a letter in 1941 ‘the success of that poem is a little disconcerting: I find it hard to believe that a poem of mine which sells nearly 12,000 copies can be really good’.

Helen Gardner, in ‘The Composition of the Four Quartets’ shows that wartime conditions led to the shape of the poem, and to our knowledge of how it was put together. Eliot said in his 1963 Paris Review interview ‘The form of the Quartets fitted in very nicely to the conditions under which I was writing, or could write at all. I could write them in sections and I didn’t have to have quite the same continuity; it didn’t matter if a day or two elapsed when I did not write, as they frequently did, while I did war jobs.’ Eliot was in the habit of discussing drafts with friends, asking for suggestions. There is comparatively little material available about the writing of Burnt Norton in 1935, but with the war Eliot’s friends were dispersed. Conversation was replaced by correspondence, some of which has survived, and so we know a good deal about the ideas and references in the poem.

A section that puzzled me when I first read the poem was the third sequence in part 1, where the poem adopts Tudor spelling:

‘The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—.
A dignified and commodious sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde.’

We know from a letter of May 1940 that the imagery was influenced by a nineteenth century German story ‘Germelhausen’. It involves a village of the long dead under a Papal interdict which means they can neither live nor die; they reappear, just as they were, once every hundred years. Worth noting that this is also the plot of ‘Brigadoon’, which began as a US musical in the late 40s. No influence from ‘East Coker’; the writers got their story from the same source as Eliot.

Visiting the village helped to clarify one or two things in the poem. Part 1 has the lines leading into the village, so to speak:

’In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised.’

There are several sunken lanes around the village just like that. Known as ‘Coker tunnels’ or Holloways, they have deep-set sandy banks overhung with trees, a product of Jurassic limestone meeting Greensand. East Coker sits on the low ridges of South Somerset/North Dorset. To the north are the Somerset levels, historically an area of constant flooding, which adds an extra touch to the line ‘The houses are all gone under the sea’. There were of course plenty of reasons in early 1940 to be imagining whole communities disappearing, to have visions of loss and destruction. Thus ‘The dancers are all gone under the hill’. But here’s another one; on the path to the church is a small stone set in front of a large oak tree above a plague pit where seventy villagers were buried in 1645.

The ‘Four Quartets’ have generated a mountain of commentary, but I want to mention one of the odder references to ‘East Coker’. Tom Fort’s book ‘The A303 – Highway to the Sun’ suggests that ‘It is entirely possible that when Eliot first visited it in 1937, he used the pre-war A303 to get there from London.’ He also references the fourth line about houses being replaced by ‘an open field, or a factory, or a bypass’ (without speculating about which section of the A303 that might be). Actually, I like Tom Fort’s book; it’s a semi-serious history of the growth of car culture, and how post-war drivers’ tourism both offered access to hidden villages and ruined them. It’s rooted in childhood memories. I’ll quote from the introductory paragraph:

‘Many of us have a road that reaches back into our past. It was not the road itself that mattered, but where it led. It took us to another world which, because it offered a vivid and thrilling alternative to our lives at home, had special status. It was the world of our family holidays, where we spent some of the most precious times of our growing up, times experienced with peculiar intensity.’

Which makes me think of Dylan Thomas or Louis MacNeice, but that’s for another time.