Dry_Salvages

Kyli Mouser Understanding Poetry Dr. Snow 11/20/2009 Up, Down, Forward, Back' “The way up is the way down and the way forward is the way back”. (Eliot, 40,129). Time is all around us but what does it really mean and how should it really be defined' Can time be defined at all' I feel that these are questions that T.S. Eliot must have been toying with while he was writing The Four Quartets. Eliot was quoted to be a classicist meaning that he viewed poetry as portraying a common heritage to people and not an over flow of powerful emotions. Eliot believed that; “A poet should write, ‘not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (Bodlsen, 23). I feel that this is very telling when you examine Eliot’s poetry because there is a certain connection that he makes with old English and he uses words that were used commonly in the past such as aussuages. This is interesting because this word was primarily used in the 1500’s and he uses it as a reference to rhyme salvages with, in the quartet The Dry Salvages. In specific the third movement of The Dry Salvages is all about the sense of definition and how we use time to structure ourselves. The Dry Salvages is the third poem in the Four Quartets. All of the quartets are intertwined with underlying themes in all the poems. All of them are theorized to have a season, an element, and a location important to Eliot himself for which The Dry Salvages’ season is winter, its element is water, and the location is Cape Ann. (Bodlsen) Although there is no real mention of a season in The Dry Salvages section one mentions the sea being grey and sullen. This gives the impression of winter because the sea is dark, grey, and said to be unforgiving in the winter. Obviously The Dry Salvages’ element is water because it is focused on the sea and the river. Finally Cape Ann is the location which is a place where Eliot spent a lot of his time as a young man. All of the quartets also focused on hope and time. Time was a major element in The Dry Salvages Eliot used the ocean/sea and the river to symbolize time in this poem. In The Dry Salvages there are three kinds of time that are represented. There is amorphous time, such as is said to exist before the creation of the cosmos, it is a time of great chaos. This time is symbolized by the ocean. Then there is human time, such as is defined by the past, present, and future. This kind of time may make more sense backwards. This kind of time is depicted by the river. Finally there is Gods time, or divine time. This time is also depicted by the ocean. Section three of The Dry Salvages focuses mainly on human time; although there are some illusions to Gods time, I feel that Eliot is portraying the fact that the past ultimately defines our future since ‘the way forward is the way back’. Before delving into the meaning of time and definition of the human life as it is affixed to time the third movement of The Dry Salvages there is an important story to mention. It is the story of Kirshna and Arjuna which is a Hindi story closely relating to that of the Christian faiths story of God and Lucifer. This story tells us that in heaven there was to be a great battle. Before the battle occurred Arjuna asked Kirshna what he should think about when he was fighting. Being the head God Kirshna responded that Arjuna should think of him when he was fighting. When the battle was upon them Arjuna hesitated in a moment of inaction. This did not set too well with Kirshna so he banished Arjuna to live out his immortal life on earth where he would have to watch all the corruption. It is said that all the corruption is due to his moment of inaction. This is important because later in the poem it talks about Arjuna's moment of inaction and how as humans we should not have these moments because we will regret them when we die. Also these moments are viewed as weakness and are therefore something that should be viewed as something we should be ashamed of. This story is important to grasp because Eliot makes mention of Kirshna in the very beginning of the third section and mention of Arjuna’s inaction towards the end of the third section and again at the very end which is the most telling mentioning when he says, “Or whatever event, this is your real destination.’/So Kirshna, as when he admonished Arjuna/on the field of battle. (Eliot, 42,166-168). These lines specifically deal with the idea of human definition as defined by human time. Human time, as I stated before, is depicted by the river which this part of the poem is taking place on. This is why T.S. Eliot says “fare forward voyagers” (Eliot, 42,169) many times in this section. I feel that this is significant because he is saying that you do not to say good bye to who you were and think on the past but instead to live in the moment and move forward in life. This is significant because I feel that when he says later in this section that; “on whatever sphere of being The mind of a man may be intent At the time of death” –that is the one action (And the time of death is every moment)(Eliot, 42,156-159). Here Eliot is saying that we move forward in life every moment, but in every moment we must redefine ourselves because we define ourselves by our deaths and every moment is a death since every moment that we live turns from the present into the past. This is not to say that the past is death but that the past is behind us and to move on with who we really are we must redefine ourselves with every new moment. I feel that Eliot is saying this because if we define ourselves like this then we are never the same people we were before. Which is what I feel he is trying to say when he writes, “You are not the same people who left that station/Or who will arrive at any terminus,” (Eliot, 41,139-140). Yet, Eliot contradicts this logic when he says, “And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back” (Eliot, 41,129). If we use this logic then the way to get to our future is to look at our past; to build upon who we were not just a mere redefinition of who we are moment to moment but redefining ourselves from a lifetime to a new moment that becomes part of our lifetime, taking into consideration our whole past. I feel that this is what Eliot is trying to convey since he was himself a classicist and he believed in building upon what other generations had left. God’s time was mentioned slightly in section three of The Dry Salvages since there is an illusion to a seashell against ones ear that speaks no language to people. This is an alluding to God’s time I feel because God’s time is symbolized by the ocean/sea in this quartet. I feel that this could be the voice of God lost in translation today because everyone is too busy to listen. Possibly in T.S. Eliot’s time no one had faith enough to hear the divine word but instead found the chaos of amorphous time speaking to them since amorphous time is also symbolized by the ocean/sea. It is hard to glean the meaning here because I feel as though it is both times as one. I feel that it symbolizes Gods voice trying to speak to the world because that gives hope which is a main theme in The Dry Salvages. It is a hopeful image because this poem was written during World War Two and the image of holding a seashell to your ear and being able to have that immediate connection with God is very soothing. On the other hand I feel it is also amorphous time because since World War Two was taking place at the time all anyone was hearing was the chaos of the cosmos. I also feel that it could be amorphous time as well because earlier in the section Eliot writes, “Fare forward, travelers! not escaping from the past/Into different lives, or into any future;”( Eliot, 41, 37-38). This I feel is vey telling about the time that he lived in because the people that lived at this time could not escape what was happening day to day, which is the past in the sense that every moment is death, and they will not find different lives in their future; they will only find themselves as different people however they define themselves in that moment. This is the mystery of time and what it will do to people. This third section or movement of The Dry Salvages is all about time and how we use it to define ourselves as people, but in the journey that is life how important is it really to be defined' Definitions are for text books and things that are black and white, in other words clear cut. Life is hardly black and white; life is all shades of smudgy grays smattered across the cosmic canvass. In short: life is messy, hardly definable, and that is what makes it worth living. “And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.”(Eliot, 41,129). All time is coexistent. Bibliography Bodelsen, C.A. _T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: A Commentary_. N.p.: Copenhagen University Publications, 1958. Eliot, T.S. _Four Quartets_. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc, 1943.