[Poem I 191 · Textual History II 499]
V 11–18 what there is to conquer · · · has already been discovered · · · There is only the fight to recover what has been lost · · · under conditions | That seem unpropitious · · · trying: “poetry · · · must be constantly exploring ‘the frontiers of the spirit.’ But these frontiers are not · · · conquered once and for all and settled · · · Our effort is as much to regain, under very different conditions, what was known to men writing at remote times and in alien languages · · · emotions themselves are constantly being lost; they can never be merely preserved, but must be always re-discovered”, That Poetry is Made with Words (1939). (See note to V 26–31, and for the poet’s “duty to arouse feelings which hadn’t been discovered before”, see note to Little Gidding II 74.) “You are attempting the same thing in conditions still more difficult”, A Message from T. S. Eliot (1949). Clark Lecture VII: “If you cease to be able to express feelings you cease to be able to have them, and sensibility is replaced by sentiment”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 200. To I. A. Richards, 20 Feb 1944, on Basic English: “If Basic is too efficient will English disappear? Will humanity perhaps be only too glad to be excused from the sort of thoughts and feelings which can only be expressed in English, or some other complete language of a natural growth?” (Clark Lecture I: “Not that I suggest that the history of human emotion has been a steady accumulation · · · Many feelings have to be abandoned, many are mislaid, many are corrupted, some seem to have disappeared”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 52.) “The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all”, Tradition and the Individual Talent II (1919); in his copy of the American first edition of Selected Essays, TSE scored the last phrase, with “?” For “some emotions have been purified away”, see quotation from The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse (1937) in headnote to Marina. lost | And found and lost again: on the Jacobean–Caroline period: “On all sides, it was an age of lost causes, and unpopular names, and forsaken beliefs, and impossible loyalties, as Matthew Arnold would have said; the beauty of life and the shadow of martyrdom are the background · · · I sometimes wonder whether the generation succeeding my own may not be also a generation which has lost faith in lost causes”, The Minor Metaphysicals (1930). (For Arnold on Oxford as “Home of lost causes”, see note to Little Gidding III 36–45.) Of Arnold: “if he were our exact contemporary, he would find all his labour to perform again”, The Sacred Wood (1920), Introduction. “It is not to say that Arnold’s work was vain if we say that it is to be done again; for we must know in advance, if we are prepared for that conflict, that the combat may have truces but never a peace. If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph”, Francis Herbert Bradley (1927). “We cannot revive old factions”, Little Gidding III 36. under conditions | That seem unpropitious · · · trying: to J. H. Woods, 23 Mar 1917: “I will send you a copy of an article I wrote for the Monist—I fear not a very good one, done under trying conditions—on Leibniz and Aristotle.”
V 12 By strength and submission: J. W. N. Sullivan: “Beethoven is one of the very few musicians who can really be compared with a great and profound poet · · · an expression of the reconciliation of Freedom and Necessity, or of Assertion and Submission”, Beethoven: His Spiritual Development (1927; 1936) 124–26. Sullivan 170 quotes Beethoven’s journal 1812–13: “Submission, absolute submission to your fate, only this can give you the sacrifice … to the servitude—O, hard struggle!” (Howarth 288). See note to V 31. discovered: to Geoffrey Faber, 25 Mar 1941, on “modern poetry”: “I am always inclined to think of the development of an art analogously to that of an experimental science · · · To ‘discover’ has always been the word for me, rather than to ‘invent’; to reveal or release something which is in a sense already ‘there’; and to do something new, however small, not for the sake of novelty, but because the other things have already been done perfectly and there is no point in repetition.”
[Poem I 191 · Textual History II 499]
V 13–14 men whom one cannot hope | To emulate: “in the verse of George Herbert this simplicity is carried as far as it can go—a simplicity emulated without success by numerous modern poets”, The Metaphysical Poets (1921); in his American first ed. of Selected Essays, TSE scored this sentence and the next. On Yeats: “Development to this extent is not merely genius, it is character; and it sets a standard which his juniors should seek to emulate, without hoping to equal”, A Commentary in Criterion July 1935. “The path of poetry through the ages is strewn with wreckage of attempts to emulate great masters by imitating them”, Royal Academy Speech (1960). To Anne Ridler, 19 June 1942: “thank you for your news and your charming letter which I cannot attempt to emulate”. To Rev. J. W. Welch, 25 May 1944, declining to write a dramatisation: “One cannot hope to emulate the poetry of the Prophets, nor indeed would there by any point in doing so.”
V 15–16 only the fight to recover what has been lost | And found and lost again and again: Fire and Gas in World War in Popular Mechanics July 1915: “in some places the trenches are less than 30 yd. apart · · · in the process of continual attack and counter attack.” New York Herald 11 Sept 1918: “Huns fail to recover ground but will still fight.”
V 17 neither gain nor loss: “the one thing that time is ever sure to bring about is the loss: gain or compensation is almost always conceivable but never certain”, Notes towards the Definition of Culture 25. “between the profit and the loss”, Ash-Wednesday VI 4. “And the profit and loss”, The Waste Land [IV] 314 (see note).
V 18 The rest is not our business: Valéry: “Mas ces naufrages, après tout, n’étaient pas notre affaire” [But these shipwrecks, after all, are not our business], La Crise de l’esprit (for which see A Note on “The Tower” (1963), quoted in headnote to Sweeney Agonistes, 11. BRITISH PERFORMANCES). TSE: “It is our business, as Christians, as well as readers of literature, to know what we ought to like”, Religion and Literature (1930). “I do not want to let my words be twisted to suggest that we should take no concern with the lives of future generations. It is very much our business · · · we must affirm the eternal against the transient; the eternal which has been realized in the past, can be realized in the present; and it is our business to try to bring about a future in which the obstacles to this realization will be less”, Literature and the Modern World (1935). To Meg Nason, 29 Sept 1939: “You are very right, I think, in what you say about thinking about the present, or eternity, but not about the middle distance. Thinking about our immediate tasks, and about eternity, are what make the difference to what we do and are; the rest is not our business.” Virginia Woolf: “In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a whole new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the old English language as it is”, Craftsmanship (1937; see note to I 2–4). MacNeice: “But that, we thought to ourselves, is not our business”, Autumn Journal (1938) vi. The rest is: “The rest is merely shifting scenes”, Mandarins 1 15 (see note).
V 19–20 As we grow older · · · the pattern more complicated: “a recognition of the truth that not our feelings, but the pattern which we may make of our feelings, is the centre of value”, A Brief Introduction to the Method of Paul Valéry (1924); for “feelings which are not in actual emotions at all”, see note to V 11–18. “we perceive a pattern behind the pattern into which the characters deliberately involve themselves; the kind of pattern which we perceive in our own lives only at rare moments of inattention and detachment, drowsing in sunlig
ht. It is the pattern drawn by what the ancient world called Fate”, John Marston (1934), on Sophonisba. “as one becomes older · · · the past has another pattern”, The Dry Salvages II 37–38.
[Poem I 191 · Textual History II 499]
V 20–25 the pattern more complicated | Of dead and living · · · not the lifetime of one man only | But of: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead”, Tradition and the Individual Talent I (1919). “the creation of any form cannot be the work of one man or of one generation of men working together, but has to evolve”, The Need for Poetic Drama (1936). “The Church · · · consists not only of the living but of the dead”, The Church as Action (1936). “not the experience of one life only | But of many generations”, The Dry Salvages II 50–51. “a provincialism, not of space, but of time · · · one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares”, What is a Classic? 30.
TSE: “C’est l’aperçu d’Auguste Comte · · · que nous devons admettre la solidarité entre les morts, les vivants, et ceux qui vivront après nous” [It is the insight of Auguste Comte · · · that we must grant the solidarity of the dead, the living, and those who will live after us], Autour d’une Traduction d’Euripide (1916).
V 20–21, 34 pattern · · · intense · · · another intensity: “I have in mind · · · Imagination as capacity for experience · · · in which ‘experience’ is spiritual experience, and as capacity for experiencing not merely the immediate but the immediate with its relations—so that the highest imagination will combine the maximum intensity of immediacy with the maximum implication of pattern”, Letter to Dr. Oldham from T. S. Eliot (1941), a paper for The Moot.
V 21 Of dead and living. Not the intense moment: Bradley: “It would be so even if the pleasures did not die; but in addition the past pleasures have died · · · the assertion that happiness is completed in one intense moment, or the confession that happiness is impossible”, Ethical Studies Essay III.
V 21–23 Not the intense moment | Isolated, with no before and after, | But a lifetime burning in every moment: to Henry Eliot, 18 Feb [1924]: “not merely a question of the moment but of the whole future, as it is a result not of the moment only but of the whole past” (Mark Thompson, personal communication). “The experience of a poem is the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime”, Dante (1929) I. Not the intense moment | Isolated, with no before and after: Karl Barth, tr. Edwyn C. Hoskyns: “We have done no more than make room for the ‘Moment’ which has no before and no after”, The Epistle to the Romans (1933) 137 (Ben de la Mare, personal communication). Barth was a contributor to Revelation (1937), which had an introductory essay by TSE. For “every moment” see note to II 33–37.
V 21–24 dead and living · · · lifetime · · · lifetime: Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 6 Sept 1789: “I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it”; to John W. Eppes, 24 June 1813: “The earth belongs to the living”. Pound took the second as epigraph to his pamphlet Social Credit in 1935, and quoted it in Canto LXXVII (The Pisan Cantos, 1949). He cited both in his Italian broadcast of 27 Apr 1943.
V 22–24 before and after · · · lifetime of one man: Hamlet IV iv: “What is a man · · · his time · · · Looking before and after.” See note to Burnt Norton V 38–39.
V 22–28 before and after · · · The evening with the photograph album: to his mother, 30 Dec 1917: “It gives one a strange feeling that Time is not before and after, but all at once, present and future and all the periods of the past, an album like this.” For “your album of souvenirs”, see Inoubliable France in note to The Dry Salvages II 56–66, III 3–15.
[Poem I 191 · Textual History II 499]
V 23–24 a lifetime burning in every moment | And not the lifetime of one man only: to George Barker, 24 Jan 1938: “Poetry is either a matter of a brief outburst, or it is a matter of a lifetime’s work” (see headnote to Four Quartets, 4. “NOT MERELY MORE OF THE SAME”).
V 25 old stones: a note by TSE alongside the line in his copy of G. Jones (136) reads “churchyard at E. Coker”, and another alongside its quotation again (218) reads “Thinking of E. Coker churchyard”. Hayward: “There is a particular allusion in this line to the village churchyard at East Coker, where the old gravestones are now indecipherable”. TSE: “an illegible stone”, Little Gidding V 14.
V 26–31 There is a time for · · · to be explorers: “the craving for continual novelty of diction and metric is as unwholesome as an obstinate adherence to the idiom of our grandfathers. There are times for exploration and times for the development of the territory acquired”, The Music of Poetry (1942).
V 30, 32 here and now · · · Here or there: Edward Marsh’s Rupert Brooke: A Memoir (1918) printed: “She is not here, or now— | She is here, and now, yet nowhere—” (see note to Little Gidding I 53). here and now: “To believe in the supernatural is · · · to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now”, The Modern Dilemma (1933). Here or there: Hermann Peschmann pointed out the erroneous reading “and” for “or” (in all collected printings of Four Quartets from US 1943 until finally corrected in 1974; TSE’s two recordings of 1946–47 also have “and”). TSE replied, 7 Mar 1950: “How very odd. Thanks for calling my attention to it. What I prefer is Here or there does not matter (Here-or-there—i.e. an abbreviation of ‘whether here or there’) is the subject of the singular does” (Composition FQ 113). OED “here” adv. 12: “neither here nor there: Of no account either one way or the other”. FitzGerald: “‘Fools! your Reward is neither Here nor There’”, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám xxv.
V 31 Old men ought to be explorers: Sullivan 229 on Beethoven’s last quartets: “The middle three quartets are the greatest of the five and it is here that Beethoven the explorer is most clearly revealed”, (Howarth 288). TSE: “the end of all our exploring | Will be to arrive where we started”, Little Gidding V 27–28 (see note).
V 36 desolation: pronounced dezolation in TSE’s recordings.
V 36 variant Aranyaka, the forest: Sanskrit holy books of which the Upanishads are part. Composition FQ 113: “sacred books whose name can be interpreted as meaning either that they were written in the forests by forest hermits, or that they were written for those who, after a life of action, had retired to the forests.”
V 36–38 Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, | The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters | Of the petrel: the Battle of the Atlantic began on 3 Sept 1939 with the sinking of the British S.S. Athenia and continued throughout the war. Alexander Wilson et al.: “The stormy petrel · · · is found over the whole Atlantic Ocean, from Europe to North America, at all distances from land, and in all weathers”, American Ornithology (1831). cry · · · cry · · · end: Psalms 61: 1, 102: 1: “From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee”, “let my cry come unto thee” (Mark Thompson, personal communication).
V 37 the wind cry, the vast waters: Virgil, tr. Joseph Warton: “Whither vast waters drive before the wind”, Georgics IV 496. TSE had underlined the conclusion of Smart’s translation of Horace’s Ode I vii, “to-morrow we will re-visit the vast ocean”, adding the Latin: “Cras ingens iterabimus aequor”.
[Poem I 191–92 · Textual History II 499–500]
V 38 petrel: OED quotes from the Voyages (1703) of the explorer William Dampier: “they pat the Water alternately with their Feet, as if they walkt upon it; tho’ still upon the Wing. And from hence the Seamen give them the name of Petrels, in allusion to St. Peter’s walking upon the Lake of Gennesareth”. Dampier, the first person to circumnavigate the world three times, is commemorated in the church of the parish where he was born in 1651, East Coker. porpoise: to Ian Cox, 14 Oct 1938
, declining to take place in a broadcast of Moby-Dick: “It is true that my great-grandfather was an owner of whaling ships in New Bedford · · · that is as near as I come to a connexion with Nantucket · · · it is so long since I have even heard my own North Shore speech, that I should be in danger of confusing even that with the speech to the Eastward of Cape Porpoise” (in Maine, sixty miles north of the Dry Salvages).
[Poem I 192 · Textual History II 500]
The Dry Salvages
1. The Dry Salvages: Geography and History 2. “The river is within us, the sea is all about us” 3. Composition 4. After Publication
Published in NEW 27 Feb 1941. Although not labelled “Supplement”, the poem occupied the central four pages so as to be readily detachable. First US publication in Partisan Review May–June 1941. Separately as a Faber pamphlet, 4 Sept 1941 (four impressions to Feb 1944). No separate US publication. Within Four Quartets in US 1943, 1944+.
BBC memo from George Barnes to the Director of Talks, 12 Mar 1942: “I saw Eliot last night and spoke to him [about] The Dry Salvages. He is very anxious that the first public reading of the poem should be done by Robert Speaight” (BBC Written Archives). Speaight broadcast the poem on 21 Apr 1942.
The cover of Partisan Review lists “The Dry Salvages | a long poem by | T. S. Eliot”. In the copy he presented to Geoffrey and Enid Faber, TSE underlined “long” (Rick Gekoski, personal communication).
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 139