The Vision of Death in the Dry Salvages of T. S. Eliot

THE VISION OF DEATH IN THE DRY SALVAGES OF
T. S. ELIOT

The dominant images of The Dry Salvages are the river and the sea. Eliot associates water, more than he does any other element, with death. ‘Death by water’ moves into ‘The Dry Salvages.’ A sense of death flows through The Dry Salvages. The poem may be said to be a moving image of death. The opening passage presents an image of the river.

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, un propitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

The personal pronoun in the opening line seems to have misled the critics into believing that Eliot is here making a personal statement and that the expressions ‘I do not know much’ and ‘I think’ reveal the tentativeness of the statements. But the personal pronoun here is no more personal than in Prufrock, The Waste Land or The Hollow Men. It is not impersonal either as in the opening line of East Coker (“In my beginning is my end”) where the pronoun although it has a personal touch transcends it and attains impersonality. It suggests a tone of irony. It refers to man’s profession of ignorance of Gods. But there is one God man cannot ignore. And he is Death.

Though you forget the way to the Temple,
There is one who remembers the way to your door,
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
(Choruses from ‘The Rock’)

Thus the opening line of the poem is not a personal statement, but an ironical reference to the attitude of indifference to gods. Indeed the passage tells us as much about the various attitudes to the river–to deify! to defy and to forget–as about the river itself.

The river is “destroyer, reminder / of what men choose to forget.” The god is “unhonoured, unpropitiated / by worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.” The god that the poet is referring to in these lines, and in the rest of the poem, is Death. (“The bone’s prayer to Death its God.”) The apparently docile “conveyor of commerce” contains a terrible meaning revealed in “the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops”, an awful revelation of the strength of the “strong brown god.” And in the lines immediately flowing out of these, the last four lines of the opening passage, we have the same river with its rhythm present in life.

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 rhythm of the river in these lines is the rhythm of life. The image of the river has moved from death to life. The process of death flowing into life, and life flowing towards death is effectively communicated by this moving image of the river. Such a moving image touching and irradiating centres of meaning as it moves along reflects the principle of continuity and the sameness under lying the apparently unrelated and opposing things. The image in Eliot is an instance of the integral vision and of the unified sensibility. The order of the images in the passage is death issuing in life. And the order suggested by the use of the past tense (“His rhythm was present...”) is life moving into death. Thus the opening passage of the poem is an imagist restatement of the lines of East Coker, “In my beginning is my end” and “In my end is my beginning.” The poet here does not allow the sensuousness of the image to be submerged under its meaning. He does this by mixing expressions which are purely literal and expressions which are purely suggestive. “Useful”, “a problem confronting the builder of bridges” are purely literal and resist any suggestion of death. “Unhonoured”, “unpropitiated” apply literally to death. Sometimes the literalness of the image comes to the surface, sometimes its symbolic meaning. Here and there the two merge as in “sullen”, “untamed”, “frontier,” “reminder of what men choose to forget.” There are also expressions which have a terrible meaning in store. The full meaning of “conveyor of commerce” is revealed in “...the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops.” This is a silent and all the more awful revelation of the terrible river in flood, of the strength of the “Strong brown god.”

And yet we cannot fix the meaning of the river in this passage as death for that would prevent us from appreciating the comple­xity of the vision of death. The poet is visualizing death as the movement of time, “keeping his seasons and rages.” This movement of time perceived in seasons is more explicit in the last four lines of the first passage. This image of the seasons of life is a movement of time too and hence is an aspect of death. Thus the whole passage is an image of the complexity of death, a sensuous apprehension of the essential sameness of life, time and death. The image of the seasons appeals to the auditory (the rhythm), the olfactory (the smell of grapes, rank ailanthus) and the visual (the evening circle in the winter gaslight) senses. Of Eliot it could truly be said, as of Keats, that he writes with all the five senses alive. The Dry Salvages is in fact a sensuous apprehension of the omnipresence of death. (“And the time of death is every moment.”) Eliot is a visionary of death. This is as true of the Eliot of Four Quartets as of the Waste Land. No doubt he has seen the “shaft of sunlight.” But this light has only clarified his vision of death. And this vision of death has lent added significance to life.

The pervading image of the poem, however, is the sea and not the river. (The river recurs only once in 1.116.) The river of the opening passage flows into the sea.

“The river is within us, the sea is all about us.”

The sea is where the river flows into, a deposit of time, a record of death.

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.

We have here an image of man’s defeat and death. “The many gods” are not exactly death but the knowledge of death, anguish and pain of life. We hear the “many voices” of the sea in the next passage. The “sea howl,” the “sea yelp,” “the whine in the rigging,” “the distant rote in the granite teeth” and “the wailing warning” from the headland are all different cries of pain and anguish. Helen Gardner almost fixed the meaning of the sea image in the poem as “the time we become aware of through our imagination, stretching behind us, beyond the record of the historian, and continuing after we have gone.” But the sea too is a moving image in the poem. The sea in the line “the sea is all about us” may be time outside us. But the howling, wailing sea is an image of the restless life with all its futile fury, fretfulness and cries of pain. It is this image of the sea as a restless life that recurs in the line “...the ragged rock in the restless waters.” The sea here is not death or time but life. The restless tossing of waves are contrasted with the “unhurried groundswell”, a contrast between the pitiful cries of personal agony and the calm, inexorable, grand sweep of the non-human time. It is the image of the same sea with a contrasting significance.

Eliot’s use of imagery in this poem is indeed a mode of revealing continuity in contrast. The second section of the poem opens with a contrast with the silent wailing of the sea as against the howling, yelping, whining sea in the previous section.

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?

The “soundless wailing” in these lines is in sharp contrast to the voices of the sea in the previous section. But the way of exclamation clearly suggests (“where is there an end of it”) that “it” is the same wailing, voiced or voiceless. Eliot is describing “the movement of pain”, or the evolution of agony. Starting from the “nursery bedroom” the pain moves into the youth symbolized by the restless sea and finally it attains the silent painless pain of the emotionless old age. The whole of the first movement of the second section–six stanzas with their corresponding lines femininely rhyming in relaxation–is an expression of the unending agony and the final futility of life’s activity. “There is no end, but addiction; the trailing/consequence of further days and hours.” And “we cannot think of a time that is oceanless.” We cannot think of a time that is oceanless and life’s activity, however futile and agonising, is unending. There is no end of “the fishermen sailing” but “we have to think of them as forever bailing, / setting and hauling” and “not as making a trip that will be unpayable / For a haul that will not bear examination.” Life must be carried on forgetting the futility of it all. The second movement of this section is about the permanence of agony. “People change, and smile; but the agony abides.” The image of the river as the movement of time recurs.

“Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
The bitter apple and the bite in the apple.”

The life-giving river is also the vehicle of death and devastation. The knowledge (“the bitter apple”) that sustains is also the knowledge that is death. The title image, the image of the Dry Salvages off the sea coast of cape Ann, Massachusetts, follows:

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. (195)

Much has been written on the meaning of the “rock” in these lines. It has been suggested that it represents the permanence of the Fall of Man, the Eternal Stability, Christ, the Church and so on. Many critics did not even notice the rock. And yet nothing is more natural than this image. If critics did not “see” this simple image it is only because they were armed with big sticks and fixed meanings. “The ragged rock” is the tombstone, the “monument.” The “rock”, although singular, refers to the Dry Salvages, a group of rocks and suggests a crop of tombstones, a cemetery. The “restless waters” is not a symbol of abstract time–time unborn and dead–but is a vivid symbol of lift with the agonising cries we heard in the previous movement. The rest and repose of the rock are a contrast to the restless waters. We have here two images, or rather three–the image of the Dry Salvages in the sea, and the image of a cemetery superimposed on the image of the restless sea of humanity, “fishermen sailing,” “bailing, setting and hauling,” or any other men about their business. The rock, the tombstone, is the only hope of the restless humanity. But the poet does not soften the fact of death. The rock is “ragged” for “waves wash over it” but cannot soften it. That is to say “people change, and smile: but the agony abides”. The “sombre season” and the “sudden fury” bring out the gloom and the terror of death. The terse final “is what it always was” is suggestive of the inviolable finality of its touch.

The image of the rock occurs in the Waste Land too: Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(come is under the shadow of this red rock)
…………………….
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
(The Burial of the Dead)

In the Waste Land “where the sun beats / And the dead tree gives no shelter,” the rock alone gives shelter. And the rock gives us also the terrifying vision of “a handful of dust”. Opposing aspects of death are unified in this image of the rock, the terror and the hope. In the Dry Salvages the terror is transformed into agony and the rock is a symbol both of the only hope of rest and repose and of the agony, “the menace and caress.” The image conveys the full conciousness of the complexity of the fact of death.

An image issues a meaning which is usually apprehended in abstraction. But the image of the ragged rock issues not an abstract meaning but another image, the tombstone, which is its meaning. The image of the restless sea of humanity is again superimposed on this image of tombstones. These images of the rock in the restless waters, and of the crop of tombstones, and of the sea and the sea of humanity coming at the same time, one on the other, are an instance of a kind of double exposure.

The third section of the poem introduces the image of journey by train and by liner. The image of the journey signifies man’s hope of the future.

When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fur it, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.

The parenthesis in this passage is a poignant image of parental love. Parents desire to see their children settled comfortably in the train of life before they leave the platform. But the children after the initial grief of loss relax into relief and attempt to escape from the past and from the fact of death into some future of hope. But “we cannot think of a future that is not liable/like the past, to have no destination.” The aim of the journey of life is not to arrive at a destination but merely to move on. Action “which shall fructify in the lives of others” is its own fruit. And the journey is its own destination, This is “one way of putting” “what Krishna meant / Among other things,” Eliot is not repeating the words of the Gita, nor is he renewing them. He transforms the message of disinterested action of the Gita with his vision of the omnipresence of death, the abiding agony and the permanence of pain. The parenthetical comment he makes on the line from the Bhagavadgita he incorporates in this poem makes this obvious,

On whatever sphere of being
the mind of a man may be intent
At the time of death...
(And the time of death is every moment)

After Eliot’s lifting, the Gita line can no longer mean the same. It acquires a new significance. The last lines of the section present the essence of the tragic vision that transforms the message of the Gita.

“Not farewell/But fare forward, voyagers,” Man must move on unceasingly but with no hope of achievement and with the full burden of the knowledge of death, “Not farewell “, for there is no end to the movement of pain.

Section, four reveals the need for grace equally of all those “who are in ships” of “women who have seen their sons or husbands / setting forth, and not returning” and of those “who were in ships, and / ended their voyage on the sand” of the dead and the not yet dead (meaning the living). The appeal for grace only intensifies the shadow of death on life.

The final section of the poem shows the futility of man’s attempts to forget time with the help of “pastimes and drugs”, or to cling to time. The poem emphasizes that death should. Not be attempted to be deified, or defied, or forgotten for it is in-escapable. It should be realized and redeemed through “a life-time’s death in love.” Right action is the only freedom from past and future, the moving time, the death. We are to be “Content at the last, if our temporal reversion nourish / (Not to far from the Yew-tree.) / The life of significant soil.” Our reversion to the earth shall fructify the significant soil. But this nourishment of life is never too far away from the shadow of the Yew-tree.

The Dry Salvages opens with image of the river, death the destroyer and preserver. At the centre of the poem there is the image of the rock, death offering rest and repose in the restless life. At the close of the poem there is the Yew-tree, an image of mourning but offering shade too. The hope and the agony are both real. And both are simultaneously realized in the poem although not with equal intensity for agony is easier and in tenser in the poem than is hope.