The Art of Poetry: T. S. Eliot's “The Dry Salvages"

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(See below for the full text of the poem, and click here to hear T. S. Eliot reading “The Dry Salvages”.)

I wrote the following for the edX course I’m currently taking, “The Art of Poetry”. Although I have been terribly busy and having a bit of trouble keeping up with the assignments, the course is providing some of what I had intended when deciding to create Another Fine Day In The Scriptorium: an opportunity to slow down and immerse myself in the calm depths of the written word.

Getting up early this morning, I brought out my copy of The Four Quartets and, while pacing the room, repeatedly read aloud the third quartet (which, oddly, has five sections, not four), “The Dry Salvages”. I am grateful to the authors of the course for inspiring me to return to this wonderful poem and sink into it. I will have to make many returns, like the tide, to imbibe it all.

Essay: The most difficult poem I've read that compelled my interest is “The Dry Salvages” from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Part of the difficulty is the length: ten pages. Part is the language and slipperiness of Eliot’s thinking processes.  When I read it I can grasp the concrete images he offers—the river as a brown god, the shattered lobsterpot, the salt on the briar rose—but like the river something is moving underneath the words, underneath my conscious understanding of them, so that when I reach the end of the first section I am drenched in unexpected sadness and a sense of the immense sweep of existence. I look back asking, why sadness? Is it the ignorance of humans who wrestle the river without trying to understand it? Is it the nature and naturalness and omnipresence of the river itself? Is it the worried women, of whom I am one, “Lying awake, calculating the future, Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel...” I think it is all of this and more.

Suddenly I realize I am describing not only the difficulty but the pleasure. Both grow from the sublety and complexity of his words, so that to flow to the poem’s end I have to toss myself onto its waters and not try to cling to any solid thing, and that is both frightening and liberating.

Part of the pleasure, too, is simply his timing, and the weight and texture of his words—“sullen, untamed, and intractable”—that offer the concepts in such a physical way. At the end of section one, when I have moved with the river for two pages and then stopped with the worried women, the river and the women are gathered together in an expression of time itself, and how it wears on and in us. The beats of the stanza pull that expression into me by unfurling long, breathless line after long, breathless line and ending with two short taps:

“Clangs

The bell.”

Reading on, the sense grows of a great compassion and even pity in the narrator as he hands to us, line upon line, the vision of ourselves as fishers on a vast ocean, not pilots of our own fate so much as creatures of our vast, destinationless surroundings and mortal lives, creatures that might cling to this belief or that, but must in the end let them go.

It is difficult because it tackles the greatest difficulties of life, expanding from the intimate to the cosmic and back to the intimate again—the individual placed in the wholeness but not made small.

Read aloud, the lines of the poem rock back and forth like waves, and with all the talk of death and renunciation, there is something soothing in their very rhythm. This is not a hopeless poem, or a hopeful poem, but a poem of that which is, and it is deeply moving, and deeply beautiful. This is a poem I can continue to feed from for the rest of my life.

THE DRY SALVAGES
(No. 3 of Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot)

(The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages. Groaner: a whistling buoy.)

I

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;