Somerset and its neighbouring shire Dorset make good territory for literary pilgrims, as well as providing some of the most pleasant scenery in rural England. There is of course, Kellynch-hall, the seat (until he lost it) of Persuasion’s “foolish, spendthrift baronet” Sir Walter Elliot. And Dorset’s Lyme Regis is the spot where foolish Louisa Musgrove jumped from the high part of the Cobb “and was taken up lifeless”, with quite splendid results for everyone. A couple of decades later it is where John Fowles’s Charles Smithson fell for “the French Lieutenant’s Woman”.
To the northeast there is Dorchester and the Hardy Country, all more than one is likely to see in a weekend. The pretty town of Nether Stowey, in the west Somerset hills known as the Quantocks, did, however, seem worth a trip to visit the house where Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived in 1797 and 1798 and where he wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, This Lime Tree Bower My Prison and part of Christabel. Sadly, Coleridge’s house, in Lime Street, does not open to the public in January and the pub opposite, The Ancient Mariner ‑ what else?, looked uninviting, as did, to a slightly lesser extent, the Rose and Crown down the street. So, over the lovely hills to Taunton and Pizza Express. Coleridge made the same eleven-mile journey by foot, not for a pizza padana however but to lead divine service at the Unitarian chapel in Mary Street while the minister, his friend Joshua Toulmin, was grieving his drowned daughter.
Also in Somerset is the very small and very fine village of East Coker (to call it picturesque would actually be to do it a disservice), from which Andrew Eliot emigrated to America about 1660 and in which the ashes of his descendant, Thomas Stearns Eliot, now lie immured in the wall of the parish church of St Michael. The memorial plaque reads “In my beginning is my end” / OF YOUR CHARITY / PRAY FOR THE REPOSE / OF THE SOUL OF / THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT / POET / 26th. SEPTEMBER 1888 – 4th. JANUARY 1965 / “In my end is my beginning”.
The quotations, from East Coker, the second of the Four Quartets, certainly make for an appropriate Christian grave inscription. And as Stefan Collini has remarked “at times, [particularly when preaching social philosophy to secularists] it pleased Eliot to present himself as a kind of Gastarbeiter in this world”.
St Michael’s church lies in the lap of a hill on top of which sits the manor house, Coker Court, now divided into several properties. At its foot lies the very comfortable Helyar Arms pub. One likes to think that Eliot’s shade occasionally feels unburdened enough to slip down for a quiet pint of Butcombe bitter late of an evening to relieve the monotony of eternity.
The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don’t want children?
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot –
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, goodnight, goodnight.