In writing water, TS Eliot’s ‘The Dry Salvages’ muses upon the ability to exist outside of human temporality, the possibility of which is modelled through an extended metaphor of the ocean and river. In doing so, Eliot offers a strikingly new materialist vision through his recognition of water’s agency, communicative power and distinct material experience that both transcends human attempts at its control or marginalisation. In five shifting sections, Eliot thematises these watery characteristics in adjacency to conceptualisations of time through a narrative that develops to consider the nexus between the construct of time and water.

The first section considers the divine agency of water in structured free-verse as the bodies of river and sea are deified beyond typical anthropocentric tropology. Whilst the river becomes the monotheistic “strong brown God,” the sea is described in polyphonic plurality as embodying “many gods and many voices”. The contrast is a salient one and perhaps has much to do with the spatiality that these respective bodies reside within. Eliot writes of an ocean that is found, omnipresent, across topographies, symbolically “all about us” along shore lines and rock pools, but also as surrounding various figurations of human. The river rather is constrained collectively “within us”, and although this still lends to it (in a vision of anthropocentrism) a hallowed, integral vitality, it also delineates the river and describes it as a medium innately aligned with the human. However, adjacency, Eliot asserts, does not represent equivalence. Despite his portrayal of river water through the capitalist paradigm as a “conveyor of commerce” or something that is diminutively a “problem” for a “builder of bridges”, human characters remain entirely de-identified. Through the pejorative synecdoche of “worshippers of the machine” and “dwellers in cities,” Eliot chides an arrogant human approach that dismisses water’s distinct power and presence in human society. To illustrate this criticism, the poet embarks on an accumulative illustration of the myriad ways in which water has quietly infiltrated human life, most notably with reference to other inter-connected organic elements such as “the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard / In the smell of grapes of on the autumn table”. Moreover, Eliot observes that water is not just a passive presence in human life but is a constitutive agent (to adopt Barad’s terminology), as alluded to by the images of “shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar/And the gear of foreign dead men”. Through allusion to this destructive potential, Eliot emphasises that water defies attempts to be relegated to utilitarian human purposes but is irrevocably entangled in a collective and transcorporeal materiality.  

However, it is pertinent to recognise that in the poem’s subsequent sections, Eliot’s attention makes salient the ocean, rather than the river. This implementation of the anthropo-logic of hierarchies is foreshadowed in the previously mentioned ascription of a multi-deity persona to the ocean. Arguably intended to symbolise the multifaceted power and qualities of the sea, the conceit returns to a formalised human power-structure, whether physical or metaphysical. Although the possibility of watery-dialects are subsequently denied through Eliot’s negation of the formulation of the river, he does envisage a rich account of an oceanic language. The agency of salt water is lent a distinct voice, to which the human poet adopts a passive tone in contrast, “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”. Here, Eliot explicitly cedes agency to water’s distinct, yet multifarious, voices. In ‘hearing’ water in both human rope rigging as well as the undefinable sound of a wave breaking, Eliot encourages an eco-diegetic recognition of water speaking for itself rather than being heard (or amplified) only in objects of human creation. It is inferred, through the restraint of Eliot’s rhyming sestets in the second part of the poem and his appropriation of the angelus (a Catholic prayer) in the fourth, that there is a certain embodied meditative and spiritual understanding that is reached through an eco-diegetic relation to water. Yet again however, ‘The Dry Salvages’ emphasises the vitality of the ocean over other water bodies and, in returning to the particular connotative resonance of the angelus, appears to align the sea’s natural cycles with human ritual and spirituality.  

The inherent tension that this hierarchy imbues in the poem is strategically aligned with the apparently infinite material contradictions of water itself. After all, it is water, Eliot notes, that places “salt […]on the briar rose” and lays “fog […] in the fir trees”. The movement and impact of water beyond its corporeal form is recognised in ‘The Dry Salvages’ through its capacity to transmute into a receptacle for human misuse. The chiasmus, “we cannot think of a time that is oceanless / Or of an ocean not littered with wastage”, and the personification of the river carrying a “cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,” reflects upon the (amoral) decay carried by waterways. In this sense, Eliot undermines the narrative of destructive water, instead emphasising its communicative capacity to preserve the abuses of its environment and evidence of its underlying (negative) connectedness with human life. It is valuable also to note that the chiasmus previously referenced allies “time” with “wastage”, supporting Eliot’s poetic thesis that attempts to unbind water from the needless formulations of time. The poet defies an anthropocentric interpretation through his alternative labelling of a “ragged rock” – as variously a “monument” or “seamark” before arriving at the conclusion that it simply “is what is always is”. In the digressive formulation of his writing, Eilot achieves a model for ecological thinking that isolates conventional paradigms before subsequently undoing them. Interestingly, in compelling the reader to step outside of time and envisage a new realm of non-time (with neither a future nor a past), Eliot merges the ocean with contradictorily definitive human landmarks in order to define water in a relational dialogue. The passing time on a boat is defined, according to Eliot, by a “furrow that widens behind you,” and yet ‘furrow’ is connotative of the permanence of an earthy trench, and not the fluid temporalities of the water to which he writes. Additionally, the poem concludes with a concession, the volta “we, content at the last/ if our temporal reversion nourish/ […] the life of a significant soil” partially relinquishes the possibility of an a-temporal ideology. The human physicality embodies the hydro-like qualities of amorphous shifting, and yet at death it is relegated to a fixed spatiality.

To this end, the salvages 1 remain dry. Eliot’s acts of eco-mimesis and writing to a new materialist conception of water are provocative, yet partial. Water is partitioned and demarcated at the poem’s conclusion in respect to the primacy of land and soil. The voice of water seems to disappear with the surrender of his dream for an a-temporal conception of life and its systems. However, this catalyses an important meditation on the interconnected nature of ecology beyond how it is defined in ‘The Dry Salvages’. Are watery borders and architectures possible to define? Correspondingly, how might water embody more than its conventional states? Ultimately, in a landscape that Eliot could not disengage from temporality, could water also have a certain innate timeliness to it – could it therefore have memories?

1. This image assumes that Eliot’s poem does in fact derive its name from a group of rocks off the coast of Massachusetts, as the poem’s preface notes.

Read the text online here: www.davidgorman.com/4Quartets/3-salvages.htm