T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”: The Dry Salvages

Dry Salvages is the third poem in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. It is the only poem of the Four Quartets that includes an introductory note to tell us that the Dry Salvages is actually a small group of rocks with a beacon off the northeast coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. This is important to know in order to understand what the key elemental image in the poem is, namely that of water. Burnt Norton, having focused on a transcendent experience in a rose garden, is associated with the elemental image of air. East Coker, having focused on the open field, is associated with the elemental image of earth. And, when we get to Little Gidding, we will find that the elemental image there is that of fire. All four poems thus comprise the basic elements of the world, all pointing to the deeper reality of the “still point,” but all insufficient and falling short. In any case, here in The Dry Salvages, the image is that of water. Therefore, it should be of no surprise to see that Elliot opens the poem with a picture of the Mississippi River, the river near his boyhood home in St. Louis, and then expands on the image of water by contemplating the sea.

Part 1
Eliot begins with a contemplation of the power of the Mississippi River, and yet how easily it is forgotten in the light of the progress of the modern world. We build bridges and go over them, but largely forget about them, and yet the river is always there. It is at this point that Elliot then expands his contemplation to not simply rivers, but the sea as well when he says, “The river is within us, the sea is all about us.” Seas and rivers may be a means of human commerce and business, but at the same time, they sweep away our losses, our trash, as well as bones and dead things.

In that respect, ever since ancient times, rivers are often associated with life (as in the River of Life), while the sea is often associated with death and Sheol (as in the Sea of Chaos). Hence, water—both in rivers and seas—represents both life and death within the human experience. In any case, halfway through Part 1, while contemplating the danger of the sea and the life of men who go to sea, who battle the sea and fog, Elliot focuses on the image of the tolling fog bell that warns ships about the land’s edge. In this respect, we find an echo of Part 4 in Burnt Norton regarding the tolling church bell that signals both the “death” of the day and yet the beginning of a new day.

Here, though, the image of being in a ship at sea in the fog becomes an image for so much of the experience of our lives, where we don’t have our bearings, where the past is gone, and the future is not yet here. As Eliot says, “when the past is all deception/The future futureless, before the morning watch/When time stops and time is never-ending.” Hence, the voice of the bell resembles the echoes in the garden in Burnt Norton, where we can only faintly hear the sound, but are at a loss in the chaotic world. The ground of which the bell warns us about resembles the earth and open field in East Coker, a place of safety from the chaos from the sea, and yet a danger and a place of death itself. The bell both guides us and reminds us of our death.

Part 2
In Part 2, Eliot contemplates the moments in time we experience in our lives and shows that even though we can never “re-live” the past and get back to those moments, the past never really dies. It is part of experience, and those moments are forever reforming into different patterns. This is what he means early on when he says, “There is no end, but addition.” Despite the “calamitous annunciation” of physical death, despite the “clamor of the bell of the last annunciation” of psychological death, and despite the prayer of the “one Annunciation” of spiritual death, there never really is an end. As Eliot says, “It seems, as one becomes older/That the past has another pattern and ceases to be a mere sequence/Or even development.”

What does that mean? It means that the reality is we aren’t “moving toward” something, and for that matter we aren’t ever “moving away” from anything. The notion of time blinds us to the reality of the Still Point. We have transcendent moments of sudden illumination within time, but we are wrong to think they are only points in time that are now past. Rather, they are glimpses of eternity that we experience in different ways and patterns throughout our lives. But most of us don’t realize that. As Eliot says, “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” And it is when we approach the true meaning of those experiences by seeing them in relation to the Still Point, those experiences are restored to us in a different form.

But it isn’t only those transcendent moments, but also the moments of agony as well. For those experiences of agony and pain in our lives serve as reminders of our sin and they serve as a seamark (a fog bell, if you will) that helps us navigate our lives through repentance and daily dying to sin.

Part 3
Beginning with an allusion to Krishna’s comments in the Bhagavad Gita, Eliot proceeds to contemplate the notion of time. Specifically, how the “future” is simply a “past” we have not yet experienced. He then provides the image of time as the boarding of a train. You get on a train in one location, then train travels to another location where you get off. While you are traveling on the train, you are not thinking that the place you left is in the past—it’s still there. And you are not thinking that the place of your destination is in the future—the place is already there. Such is the reality of our experience in time. For that reason, Eliot calls on us to “consider the future/And the past with an equal mind.”

With that realization, Eliot speaks of how the sphere of being upon which the mind of a man may be at the point of his death (and “the time of death is every moment”), that is the moment, the point (the Still Point) that gives meaning to life and the lives of others. And thus, Eliot brings his contemplation back to what Krishna told Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, on the field of battle, and realizes that life—even at the moment of death, is not a “fare well,” but rather a “fare forward.”

Part 4
Part 4 is a lyrical prayer to Mary, who is portrayed as standing on the high point of the land, looking out over the sea and praying for those who are travelling in ships upon the sea. And in that respect, we are all “travelling in ships on the sea.” Eliot asks Mary to pray for those in ships, for those women who have lost their sons or husbands to the sea, and for those who have died at sea, either being swallowed by the sea or lying dead on the land, having crashed onto the rocks. The prayer, as Eliot has contemplated, points to the reality that there really is no end, only addition—only the transcendent moments in life reforming into different patterns.

Part 5
Eliot begins Part 5 by speaking of the various occultic and fortune-telling practices people try to see into the future and says that people have always tried to look into the future—or for that matter, reach into the past to speak with dead relatives. But to insist that reality should be understood solely in terms of a linear past-present-future is to miss the point. Instead, as Eliot says, “But to apprehend/The point of intersection of the timeless/With time, is an occupation for the saint.” Contemplating how the Still Point gives meaning to all the points in our lives in which we experience the timeless within time—that is, as Eliot says, the “occupation for the saint.”

Eliot then launches into an absolutely beautiful section that needs to be read again:

“For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or the music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.”

What does that all mean? It means that most people, even though they experience these transcendent moments in time, “miss the meaning” and fail to see how all these experiences point to a deeper reality and pattern of life. Even our best attempts to contemplate all this are still, nevertheless, “hints and guesses.” And this is the point of the Incarnation of Christ. Even our best attempts to understand it are bound to come up short. But we are called to “work out our salvation” nonetheless, for salvation is a process, part work and part a gift of God—and both are one. For it is in Christ’s incarnation where past and future are both conquered and reconciled, because the Incarnation is the Still Point, where the divine fills the human, where the timeless takes up residence within time.

Eliot ends with a contrast between the hectic, indeed demonic, rush and action characterized by a world enslaved to time, on one hand, and the “right action” that brings freedom from the past and future—that of our seeking of Christ as the Still Point. That being said, Eliot says, “For most of us, this is the aim/Never here to be realized;/Who are only undefeated/Because we have gone on trying.” We will never reach our goal in this life, but the trying in this life to seek Christ will bring us to fulfillment, not “in the future,” but in the Eternal Now. The yew-tree that stands in the church graveyard also is a sign of the resurrection, and a reclamation of the significant soil of Eden, transformed.