[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Welcome once again to POETS Day, where we usher in Henry Ford’s greatest creation – the weekend – a few hours ahead of schedule by embracing the ethos of the day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Life’s too short for work, and nobody’s gonna notice if you hoof it mid-afternoon.

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TS Eliot titled the third of his Four Quartets “The Dry Salvages” after a rock formation off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a fishing village and seaside retreat where the St. Louis based Eliot family spent their summers when the poet was a boy. Dry Salvages derives from an original French name for the formation transformed by time, mishearings, and local accent. Eliot tells us in a parenthetical preceding the poem, “presumably les trois sauvages,” Anglicized over time but, he instructs, “pronounced to rhyme with assuages,” so not as yet a fully English subject.

As with all of the Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages” manages competing images presenting a theme. There’s a great deal going on and a great many ways to spend a thousand words on an aspect without touching on any number of other aspects. In this poem, the opening and recurrent image is that of water. The river is present, flowing, perceptible action. The sea is unknowable depths. Water rises from the sea, rains and forms oceans and back to the sea. The sea is the past and the future. We cannot know which or guess at more than the surface. The river is with us, changing in the moment. It is present. The idea permeates.

This poem deals with transition and our perception of it. “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Quartets, considers the cycle binding past, future, and present, that we are trapped in change, “Desire itself is movement,” a stillness central to the circular cycle of time and motion is the incomprehensible begotten God, and our hoped-for ecstasies or perceptions of the divine. In the second, “East Coker,” Eliot presents generational cycles, shows that as men we are limited to experience what time allows, and concludes that to be near God we must live every moment in concentration, though no revelation is guaranteed. A life of contemplation and worship may be well and good for saints and mystics, but what, asks the speaker in “The Dry Salvages,” about the rest of us? What of a plumber or farmer who makes possible the generational churning? How are they to attain communion?

In answer, Eliot invokes Krishna, Mary, and Jesus.

In the epic Mahabharata, the warrior Arjuna asks Krishna what he must do in battle to be victorious. Russell Elliott Murphy, in his Critical Companion to T.S. Eliot, explains that in the ancient Sanskrit text, Krishna responds “Think of me,” because “the teaching is that one becomes one with ’whatever sphere of being / The mind of man may be intent [on] / At the time of death.’” With that in mind, Eliot plays with Heraclitus’s observation that “No man steps in the same river twice,” to introduce the idea that we are forever lost, or possibly dying moment to moment. With every change we are a different person. What we were ceases to be. I am not the same person I was when I began this thought because now I am a person who has begun this thought.

As with the two poems before, the third section of “The Dry Salvages” takes place in a train or a subway. In this incarnation, the train ride, in a few lines described as an ocean voyage, is the fixed present in a never ending journey from past to future, a transition from what you were to what you will be.

from Part III of The Dry Salvages
TS Eliot (1888-1965)

You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! Not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station.
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think “the past is finished”
Or “the future is before us.”

We were never in the past. We remember it, but we are not the person who was anymore. We will never be in the future. That is for someone who remembers us, but is more. No matter how we struggle, we’re forever of the moment, bracketed by a past and a future that we, as we are, cannot be a part of. We’re reminded of the limitations spelled out in “Burnt Norton,” that we are trapped by time. We’re analogous to generations as spoken to in “East Coker.” We are neither our ancestor nor our progeny. We are here.

Let me be a goofy fan for a moment: “That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here,” is, to me, among his most memorable lines. He uses “that” instead of “the” in the line “You are not the same people who left that station.” It’s a nice touch. There’s a distance implied. A person who just left might say “the station.” “The” connects as it is specific—the one known to the speaker—where “that” suggests a station observed. The person who was there is in the past, the present can only look back. Eliot is in the details.

Another passage that stands out, this one from Part II, laying the ground for the section above:

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the later a partial fallacy,
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.

All the struggles and adaptations, the leaps forward and retreats, the dead ends explored, all of the mechanics of natural selection led to man as we are now and enlivened with niche beasts our populated world. Everyone knows that the process is ongoing but we don’t consider that we’ll one day be primitive. Or if we do, as an “of course” set in a distant and ignorable future. But here we are on the train.

In answer to the main question: The plumber and the farmer must live in the moment. The average person possessed of the same need for meaning and communion as the saint but lacking the drive or pressed with competing priorities should attend to their role in the pattern. Being only in the present, attend to the present; each personal incarnation at a time in its time; do his part to make the past and anticipate the future.

Eliot ends the poem in Part V with,

For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realized;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.

Eliot recalls Part IV of “Burnt Norton” where the speaker asks if man rejects God and sets himself as supreme, will “Fingers of yew be curled / Down on us?” If man is the end all be all, what happens when man is gone? Does the universe cease? Will yew roots—the yew stands as a symbol of the churchyard—grow downward towards your grave? If so, by what power? By what will once yours is gone? How well thought out is your blasphemy?

Here, the yew presages a sort of immortality. Eliot insists there is something greater if we cleave to it. Like Arjuna, we will be victorious. We take part in the cycle as one man in generations and one being in a divine plan. Fixed in the present, our part is forever now.

The primary appeal to Mary comes in Part IV, which is a short prayer for safety for those at sea. The appeal is presaged in Part II in the passage below with the reference to Jesus as “the calamitous annunciation,” the occasion of the eternal in contact with time and our salvation. In the six stanzas leading to the lines including “superficial notions of evolution,” man’s lot is described as “In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,” and “forever bailing.” He is adrift and in a struggle he will not see end.

Here, Eliot shows he is a master of form. Man is part of a pattern, a working greater than himself. He can’t always see that. His life is short and the pattern weaves long. Eliot gives us this plight in these six stanzas set as a modified sestina. Classically, a sestina has six stanzas of six lines each with the final word of each line repeating as the last word of a different line in the next stanza cascading to a set pattern. In Eliot’s sestina, the last words of each first line rhyme rather than repeat, as is so with second lines, third, etc. without cascading. There’s no recognizing a pattern from looking at a single stanza. To do so requires a long view. The form embodies the thematic assertion. It’s poetry.

from Part II of The Dry Salvages

Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable-
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind’s tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.

We have to think of them as forever bailing,
Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
Not as making a trip that will be unpayable
For a haul that will not bear examination.

There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of the one Annunciation.

This is not an Evangelical poem, but it is inescapably Christian as it is an attempt to comprehend great mysteries by one raised in a Christian tradition. Murphy writes “Suffice it to say, for Eliot at least, those values and beliefs, when the inform any work of literature, do so not in order to indoctrinate or proselytize the prospective reader but because they form a part of the author’s actual life experience.” All must be considered from Eliot’s perspective. So death in a moment is not absolution from individual responsibility. That he warned us off with “superficial notions of evolution” as “a means of disowning the past.” Death is a curtain we cannot pass back through, a metaphor for a barrier. In that light, there is clarification. We are not the person we were a moment ago but we are not reborn sinless and pure. We are the creator writ small of both and all past and all coming momentary accumulations of our experiences. We are in need of salvation.

CS Lewis used the Tao as a stand in for a shared morality (let Eastern philosophers, hacky sack mystics, and Lewis scholars unite and mob me for the simplicity.) He was making a point arrived at through Christianity, but one he felt should be shared and could be similarly embraced by those of any faith. As a laurel, he reached outside his faith for a word to show the concept was not exclusive. So does Eliot pull Krishna. In that sense, it may be Evangelical, if at a slant. It is a reasoning process.

For the full text of the poem, click here.