Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, April 18th, 2025.

It is Good Friday, the world over.

And today's poem is the obligatory Good Friday poem, which is to say East Coker, section

four from T.S. Eliot's the four quartets. But there's a perfectly good reason this poetic

selection gets trotted out every year around this time, and it's because it's so darn good. It presumes

that man exists in a kind of miserable condition and is in need of a great hospital in which he can

be healed, but that healing, the verse will contend, must come in the form of a sharp compassion.

But a compassion it is all the same.

One, because that hospital is staffed by a wounded surgeon and dying nurses,

Elliot says, figures that share in the vulnerable condition of man and can fully

sympathize with our suffering. And two, that the cures for the deepest ills are often

violent cures. This poem often makes me think of Boethius, the great sixth century philosopher.

In his most famous work, The Consolation of Philosophy, in which a fictionalized version of the author

suffers from a spiritual ailment, and the personification of wisdom, Lady Philosophy, appears to him to cure him.

But before she can apply her cure, she has to strengthen him. She has to prepare him to receive

the violence of the treatment, like the syringe full of anesthetic that precedes the deeper cuts of the scalpel.

And while this section of Eliot's poem does not look past that traumatic encounter,

it does offer it up with the strong implication of optimism about what lays on the other side.

Here is part four of East Coker from the four quartets.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel that questions the distempered part.

Beneath the bleeding hands, we feel the sharp

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