What distinguishes the five stanzas that comprise T. S. Eliot’s East Coker IV is their elliptical narrative of a patient being treated by a ‘wounded surgeon’, attended to by a ‘dying nurse’, in a hospital ‘Endowed by [a] ruined millionaire’. 1 What besets the patient is fever, twice mentioned in ‘the enigma of the fever chart’ (line154), and ‘The fever sings in mental wires’ (line 166). While commentators have noticed the heavily allegorical Christian cast of characters here, or a symbolic rendering of ‘life’s fitful fever’, 2 the poet is keen to suggest that this is no ordinary fever. The ‘enigma’ of the clinical chart is that the fever not only resists...