The rustic English village where Mr. T.S. Eliot is buried is under threat - East Coker. It is synonymous with one-quarter of one of the greatest poems in English. Poet Simon Pomery is part of the campaign. However, there is an irony in this, as the poem in question seemed a little Zen in its acceptance of change, as well as prescient:
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
There does SEEM to be an acceptance of change in the poem, just as there seems to be a blank resignation about many other things. "Here and now cease to matter", "Here or there does not matter", "The poetry does not matter." But the last is a clue. It is impossible to suppose that in the middle of writing the Quartets, TSE felt that poetry did not matter. It mattered to him profoundly, and formed a large part of his war effort. So the not-mattering must be by contrast with something else, which, as the poem concludes, is the need to be "still and still moving / Into another intensity". That is, earthly things do not matter when compared to the eternal, which for TSE meant the discipline of Christianity. The final line of the poem returns us to the beginning, as though asking us to read it again; and when I re-read it I find not resignation or surrender, but an emphasis on both frailty and resilence. The "here and now" of East Coker, Burnt Norton, the Dry Salvages and Little Gidding clearly mattered enormously to TSE -- as places to find himself both in and out of time. They matter to many of us because of what he wrote.
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