Summary
The third of the Quartets, “The Dry Salvages”
appeared in 1941.
The word “salvages” in the title should be pronounced, as Eliot
mentions in a note to the poem, to rhyme with “assuages,” with the
emphasis on the penultimate syllable. The Dry Salvages are a group
of small, rocky islands with a lighthouse off the coast of Massachusetts.
Eliot presumably visited them or at least knew of them as a boy.
This quartet departs from the pessimism and human ruins of the other
three to consider humanity as a whole, as an entity with a unified subconscious
and memory that produce mythic structures. Humanity is, thus, placed
on a level with the natural world as something with a history and
with cycles of rebirth and renewal.
The first section of “The Dry Salvages” makes an explicit
comparison between a river and the sea as models for the unknowable.
A river, while it may figure prominently in human mythologies, is
something that can eventually be crossed and conquered, while the
sea represents an endless reserve of depths and mysteries: Man can
live with the ocean but he will never master it. The second section
of the poem seems to signify a reconciliation with the human lot.
The sea will never be either a blank slate or an easily circumscribed
pond; “there is no end of it,” and man must always keep working
in good faith. Time destroys but it also preserves, and just as
there is no mastery there is also no escape. The third section of
the poem ruminates on words attributed to Krishna, advising humanity
not to “fare well” but to “fare forward.” This is an exhortation
to give up aspirations—to stop seeking to do “well”—and to be satisfied
with mere existence. Again Eliot uses a ghostly figure, in this
case a voice from high in a ship’s rigging, to represent a level
of awareness unattainable for the series of travelers he describes
here. The fourth section is a prayer to the Virgin Mary, figured
as a statue watching over the sea, asking her to pray for those
who voyage on the sea and those who wait for them at home. Both
the sailors and their loved ones stand in for all of humanity, faced
with uncertain conditions and a lack of knowledge. The final section
of “The Dry Salvages” at last offers something akin to hope. While man
will always strive in vain to “apprehend / The point of intersection
of the timeless / With time,” everyday existence nevertheless contains
moments of only half-noticed grace—moments at which “you are the
music / While the music lasts.” Moreover, “right action,” while
it will never be entirely successful, is nevertheless almost the
only way available to man to subvert the “daemonic” forces that
drive him.
Form
This quartet returns to some of the same easy music of
“Burnt Norton.” Again, Eliot plays with words (“womb, or tomb”),
and, particularly in the second section, there are moments in which
the gravity of the ideas forces the poetry into a somber, prose-like
mode. In general, though, Eliot uses far less repetition and circular
language in this section, effectively lightening the tone. The poem
also makes use of extended “landscapes”—the river and the sea— that
allow Eliot to engage in flights of descriptive language free from
the philosophical seriousness of the rest of the Quartets. Again,
too, formal structures are borrowed from religious and philosophical
sources, as in the prayer of section four and the Krishna material
in the third section. In a way, Eliot is associating his poetic
efforts with the other struggles for knowledge listed in the final
section—astrology, palm-reading, animal sacrifices—and this leads
him to take himself far less seriously, to look instead for the
moments of hidden beauty in his language.
Commentary
“The Dry Salvages” is interrupted at least twice by the
ringing of a bell. In both cases it is a bell at sea, either on a
ship or on a buoy. The bell is a human intervention that is meant
to illuminate the vastness both of the sea and of mere existence
and to point out the futility of trying to master it with anything
as ineffectual as a bell. In both cases, the bell goes unheard:
In the first mention, it is a bell on a buoy out to sea, which will
be heard most likely only by those about to be wrecked on the rocks
the buoy is supposed to mark. Placed there by man, the bell has
nevertheless come under the control of the sea and has become irrelevant
as a marker of human intention. The second bell is rung for the
dead, for those lost at sea. They are where the sound of the bell
cannot reach them; the bell, therefore, tolls not for them but for
those left behind. This bell is mentioned in the exhortation to
the Virgin Mary to pray for those lost and those still here. Like
prayer, the bell represents an attempt to appeal to a higher power,
to admit one’s own mortal limits. The bell directly refutes poetic endeavor,
too: human-made, a bell’s ring is an attempt to communicate without
words, an admission that words have failed.
Perhaps the most famous part of this poem is its opening,
with the description of the river as “a strong brown god.” These
lines are often coopted and used to describe the Mississippi and
to talk about the mythological importance of rivers. Curiously,
though, Eliot is actually demoting the river to the status of a
false god, by pointing out its inferiority to the sea as an object
for contemplation. Popular culture’s glorification of these lines
indeed illustrates the very inanity of human action that Eliot describes
later in the poem: Dazzled by the lines’ rhetorical force, we tend
to attribute greater meaning to the language than is really there,
while we ignore what is actually being said. In the second section
of the poem, the river becomes a conduit for refuse and unpleasant
memories, a shallow channel rather than a “strong brown god.” Just
as we can neither escape nor romanticize the river, nor can we master
the past.
The final lines of “The Dry Salvages” combine a resigned
pessimism with a suggestion of hope. Couched in the beauty of the
lines is a dark meaning: “our temporal reversion” is death, which
is beneficial only if we can become “significant soil” that might
nourish a tree. By hiding behind such flights of language, Eliot
once again retreats into the refuge of the poet. He may not be able
to master time and experience but he is master of the world that
he writes into being. Futility does not diminish beauty.
