from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”
If any poem is to have meaning for the reader, it is necessary to realize the importance of each word and detail which the author has used. This point cannot be overemphasized, for many a poet has been called obscure, when a careful analysis of only a few lines of his poetry would have given a fuller understanding of his purpose. In T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Dry Salvages,” two short lines give a very tangible clue to the central theme of his poem.
“The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees…”
Here he expresses the penetrating powers of the sea and its effect on beauty. He has placed nature against nature, but in an unnatural contrast. He has picked two common phenomena of the sea and placed them among two common land plants, making a very unusual image. He wanted to show how the sea, (a symbol of time past and of death), penetrates everything and adds to the complexity of the earth by imposing constant reminders of what has gone on before. He continues and expands his meaning, by saying,
“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 an end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?”
Here he presents the image of death as ever-present: silent, motionless. There seems to be a contradiction in two words, drifting and motionless, but it is the dead that are motionless, and death that is drifting and leaving wreckage. The word bone has a hollow sound: it is an intoned word which has more the sound of the emptiness of death than has the word death itself. The use of the word prayer as futile action is extremely interesting, and he attributes the power of prayer to an inanimate object, a bone, thus referring to time past, when not the bone, but that which the bone was a part of, was living and able to pray.
Later in the poem there is a counterpart to this verse,
“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 verse enforces the selection of details which Eliot made at first, and helps in analyzing the reasons for his choices. It is an answer to the first verse.
Now the sea is still wailing, but it is not only soundless, it is voiceless, a further degree of paradox. Now he speaks of autumn flowers, even when withering, as already withered, saying that death is present even in life. The dropping of petals is now the movement of pain that is painless, and the prayer of the bone is to Death. This adds much to the meaning. Rather than fearing the calamity of death, the dead bone seeks a complete death. Yet he says that there is no end to it, no complete death, so although the prayer is necessary and natural, it is still futile. Neither prayer for life nor prayer for death can end what is endless.
Here Eliot has presented as perfectly as can be found in any poem, the infinite quality of death, ever-present. He has answered what every poet at some time seeks to answer: What is the natural of life and death? Our language has no words to express the qualities of the realm of death, so the selection of words to explain death is extremely difficult. Eliot has done an excellent job. He has answered the question in terms of the world as we know it, the sea, the flowers, the bones, the prayers are all about us. They are objects and actions which we can visualize and understand. Yet when he gives these objects inhuman or unnatural attributes, that is, unrealistic to us as to the world we know, then he expresses perfectly that death too is inhuman and unrealistic; death is always resent in the things which we know and see, but it is present in a way that we do not know, and cannot see until we too are in that state. In this way, his selection of details to present his thought is both subtle and forceful. He has chosen things which we can understand, thereby lifting them beyond the realm of our experience and at the same time linking them with it.
This piece appeared in the Spring 1947 issue of the student magazine Dimensions.