‘Four Quartets: The Dry Salvages’: A Meditation on Time and Eternity
A review of ‘The Dry Salvages’, by T.S. Eliot; Faber and Faber, 1941.
‘Burnt Norton’ deals with air, ‘East Coker’ with earth. The third of Eliot’s Four Quartets deals with water. It takes its name from a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the northeast coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. These rocks were both help and hindrance to sailors, who could use them to navigate but risked shipwreck if they came upon them. In ‘The Dry Salvages’, Eliot casts us as the sailors, travelling by boat across the uncertain seas of human life, yet unable to reach our destination if we fixate on the future.
The poem, for that reason, begins with water. Images of rivers and ocean abound throughout:
The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
These rocks were both help and hindrance to sailors.
Here is the ceaseless flow of time, both personal and cosmic, shaped by unseen currents. The river is tied to the self, static yet changing, while the sea is the world, vast and indifferent, a reminder of our smallness. Yet in this relentless flux is the eternal, claims Eliot: past, present, and future are not so separate as we might think. Time loops back on itself, folding the transient into the permanent. Just as we are one and many, so is time: separable into moments yet one unbroken flow. There is ‘clock time’ and ‘real time’; there is then-and-now and there is: always.
Faith, and the doubt that is bound up with faith—what Graham Greene called ‘the heart of the matter’—resound throughout the poem. Eliot uses the Hindu god Krishna to express the divine will. His language is spare but rich. He evokes Christian mysticism. The Dry Salvages are steadfast, immovable, and enduring, contrasting with the shifting, chaotic nature of the sea. They are what never changes, the order in the chaos of the world:
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.
Yet Eliot wrestles with uncertainty. The Dry Salvages, written as bombs fell on London, is full of questions, not all of which are answered: How do we live in the shadow of death? What does salvation, evoked by those eponymous rocks, look like in an age of ruin? There are no simple comforts. Instead, he points towards surrender — not to despair, but to something greater than oneself. This is faith.
What does salvation, evoked by those eponymous rocks, look like in an age of ruin?
His tone in ‘The Dry Salvages’ is less conversational than in his earlier work. He seems reflective, measured, sombre, at times bordering on melancholy. He speaks almost to himself, and so we have the sense of sharing in his thoughts. But then the tone changes, and he speaks to us directly:
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’.
Thus his tone ebbs and flows like water, shifting and changing, dragging us under then pulling us up. The poem is one of motion and stillness, despair and hope, time and eternity. To endure the turbulent waters of the world, which cannot in the end be avoided, we must have faith that the journey counts, that it has meaning. Through faith, we can bear the onslaught of the waves, as the rocks do. But still we shall change, as they do: for to live, which is to reconcile past, present and future, life and death, is to transform.
