THE DRY SALVAGES*
(No. 3 of ‘Four Quartets’)

by T.S. Eliot

I

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

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.
The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.
The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
The distant rote in the granite teeth,
And the wailing warning from the approaching headland
Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
Rounded homewards, and the seagull:
And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.

II

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?

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.

*The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts.

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A comment by a friend expressed a note of terror, and a ground tone of despair that the nation may well be subjected to four more years of governance by a man who is at the mercy of his id.  This was my friend’s assessment at conclusion of the debate.  Many of us feel anxiety at that prospect.  I have no idea of how my neighbors will vote, or if they will vote at all.  Many do not vote, stupefied and confused by media, they are disenchanted with the process, … as we all descend into hell.

Yet, as I have thought about the matter, the circumstances that permitted Trump to be elected at all, have precursors linked to the founding of our country.  Many of the founders, the framers of our constitution were slave holders.  Whether they had misgivings or not, the atrocity remains an atrocity.  The War Between the States did not result in the remediation of slavery.  The exploitation of others changed in form from sharecropping during Jim Crow to the employment at minimum wage compensation today.  The wound that our society bears is enduring, and deep.  As of yet there’s no apparent ground swell of public sentiment to take substantive steps to treat the patient, in a reasonable hope of restoring health.  That is, there’s not yet enough support to make structural changes in the way we treat one another, to make a difference.  The body-politic is in critical condition by any analysis.

I find comfort and perspective in the Dry Salvages poem by T. S. Eliot.  I discover myself in an attitude of prayer, of supplication to the “gods” for an undeserved rescue from a calamity, which cannot rationally be expected.  Many of us are praying an unprayable prayer.

I know this post has been too long.  Life is short and death is long.

I and many others have liked this Rock tune by Billy Joel.