Visiting this village where his Tudor ancestor once lived (Sir Thomas Elyot served at the court of King Henry VIII), Eliot imagines the simple lives of the peasants who would have lived in the village at that time. Anyone who has been to East Coker in Somerset can vouch for the experience of ‘lean against a bank while a van passes’ (the roads leading into the village are extraordinarily narrow), the ‘electric heat’ and the ‘empty silence’: even now, East Coker is miles from a main road and any busy traffic or built-up area. The earth itself (and earth is the classical element that runs through ‘East Coker’) is composed of the remnants of past living things: flesh, fur, faeces, bone. Houses are built, restored, destroyed, or replaced time marches on the landscape changes with the succeeding generations. The first section of ‘East Coker’ continues, in effect, the theme of flux which Eliot treated in ‘Burnt Norton’. Eliot will quote from Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531) in the first section of ‘East Coker’. It was his ancestral home, where his namesake and distant ancestor Sir Thomas Elyot lived in the sixteenth century. Start with that title: as with the previous poem, ‘Burnt Norton’, the small Somerset village of East Coker is a place that Eliot had visited shortly before writing the poem.
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