Four Quartets 3: The Dry Salvages Poem Rhyme Scheme

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T. S. Eliot

Four Quartets 3: The Dry Salvages Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis

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The Dry Salvages presumably les trois sauvages	A
is a small group of rocks with a beacon off the N E	B
coast of Cape Ann Massachusetts Salvages is pronounced	C
to rhyme with assuages Groaner a whistling buoy	B
	-
I	-
	-
I do not know much about gods but I think that the river	D
Is a strong brown god sullen untamed and intractable	E
Patient to some degree at first recognised as a frontier	F
Useful untrustworthy as a conveyor of commerce	A
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges	A
The problem once solved the brown god is almost forgotten	G
By the dwellers in cities ever however implacable	E
Keeping his seasons and rages destroyer reminder	D
Of what men choose to forget Unhonoured unpropitiated	C
By worshippers of the machine but waiting watching and waiting	H
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom	I
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard	C
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table	E
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight	C
	-
The river is within us the sea is all about us	A
The sea is the land's edge also the granite	C
Into which it reaches the beaches where it tosses	A
Its hints of earlier and other creation	G
The starfish the horseshoe crab the whale's backbone	J
The pools where it offers to our curiosity	C
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone	J
It tosses up our losses the torn seine	C
The shattered lobsterpot the broken oar	K
And the gear of foreign dead men The sea has many voices	A
Many gods and many voices	A
The salt is on the briar rose	A
The fog is in the fir trees	A
The sea howl	L
And the sea yelp are different voices	A
Often together heard the whine in the rigging	H
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water	D
The distant rote in the granite teeth	M
And the wailing warning from the approaching headland	C
Are all sea voices and the heaving groaner	D
Rounded homewards and the seagull	E
And under the oppression of the silent fog	N
The tolling bell	O
Measures time not our time rung by the unhurried	C
Ground swell a time	P
Older than the time of chronometers older	D
Than time counted by anxious worried women	G
Lying awake calculating the future	D
Trying to unweave unwind unravel	E
And piece together the past and the future	D
Between midnight and dawn when the past is all deception	G
The future futureless before the morning watch	Q
When time stops and time is never ending	H
And the ground swell that is and was from the beginning	H
Clangs	A
The bell	O
	-
II	-
	-
Where is there an end of it the soundless wailing	H
The silent withering of autumn flowers	A
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless	A
Where is there and end to the drifting wreckage	R
The prayer of the bone on the beach the unprayable	O
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation	G
	-
There is no end but addition the trailing	H
Consequence of further days and hours	A
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless	A
Years of living among the breakage	S
Of what was believed in as the most reliable	O
And therefore the fittest for renunciation	G
	-
There is the final addition the failing	H
Pride or resentment at failing powers	A
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless	A
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage	R
The silent listening to the undeniable	O
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation	G
	-
Where is the end of them the fishermen sailing	H
Into the wind's tail where the fog cowers	A
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless	A
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage	R
Or of a future that is not liable	O
Like the past to have no destination	G
	-
We have to think of them as forever bailing	H
Setting and hauling while the North East lowers	A
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless	A
Or drawing their money drying sails at dockage	R
Not as making a trip that will be unpayable	O
For a haul that will not bear examination	G
	-
There is no end of it the voiceless wailing	H
No end to the withering of withered flowers	A
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless	A
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage	R
The bone's prayer to Death its God Only the hardly barely prayable	O
Prayer of the one Annunciation	G
	-
It seems as one becomes older	D
That the past has another pattern and ceases to be a mere sequence	A
Or even development the latter a partial fallacy	A
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution	G
Which becomes in the popular mind a means of disowning the past	C
The moments of happiness not the sense of well being	H
Fruition fulfilment security or affection	G
Or even a very good dinner but the sudden illumination	G
We had the experience but missed the meaning	H
And approach to the meaning restores the experience	A
In a different form beyond any meaning	H
We can assign to happiness I have said before	D
That the past experience revived in the meaning	H
Is not the experience of one life only	A
But of many generations not forgetting	H
Something that is probably quite ineffable	O
The backward look behind the assurance	A
Of recorded history the backward half look	T
Over the shoulder towards the primitive terror	D
Now we come to discover that the moments of agony	A
Whether or not due to misunderstanding	H
Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things	A
Is not in question are likewise permanent	C
With such permanence as time has We appreciate this better	D
In the agony of others nearly experienced	C
Involving ourselves than in our own	G
For our own past is covered by the currents of action	G
But the torment of others remains an experience	A
Unqualified unworn by subsequent attrition	G
People change and smile but the agony abides	A
Time the destroyer is time the preserver	D
Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes cows and chicken coops	A
The bitter apple and the bite in the apple	O
And the ragged rock in the restless waters	A
Waves wash over it fogs conceal it	C
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument	C
In navigable weather it is always a seamark	H
To lay a course by but in the sombre season	G
Or the sudden fury is what it always was	A
	-
III	-
	-
I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant	C
Among other things or one way of putting the same thing	H
That the future is a faded song a Royal Rose or a lavender spray	D
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret	C
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened	C
And the way up is the way down the way forward is the way back	H
You cannot face it steadily but this thing is sure	D
That time is no healer the patient is no longer here	D
When the train starts and the passengers are settled	C
To fruit periodicals and business letters	A
And those who saw them off have left the platform	U
Their faces relax from grief into relief	V
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours	A
Fare forward travellers not escaping from the past	C
Into different lives or into any future	D
You are not the same people who left that station	G
Or who will arrive at any terminus	A
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you	W
And on the deck of the drumming liner	D
Watching the furrow that widens behind you	W
You shall not think 'the past is finished'	C
Or 'the future is before us'	A
At nightfall in the rigging and the aerial	O
Is a voice descanting though not to the ear	D
The murmuring shell of time and not in any language	R
'Fare forward you who think that you are voyaging	H
You are not those who saw the harbour	D
Receding or those who will disembark	H
Here between the hither and the farther shore	D
While time is withdrawn consider the future	D
And the past with an equal mind	C
At the moment which is not of action or inaction	G
You can receive this on whatever sphere of being	H
The mind of a man may be intent	C
At the time of death that is the one action	G
And the time of death is every moment	C
Which shall fructify in the lives of others	A
And do not think of the fruit of action	G
Fare forward	C
O voyagers O seamen	G
You who came to port and you whose bodies	A
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea	A
Or whatever event this is your real destination '	-
So Krishna as when he admonished Arjuna	G
On the field of battle	O
Not fare well	O
But fare forward voyagers	A
	-
IV	V
	-
Lady whose shrine stands on the promontory	D
Pray for all those who are in ships those	A
Whose business has to do with fish and	C
Those concerned with every lawful traffic	H
And those who conduct them	X
	-
Repeat a prayer also on behalf of	V
Women who have seen their sons or husbands	A
Setting forth and not returning	H
Figlia del tuo figlio	O
Queen of Heaven	G
	-
Also pray for those who were in ships and	C
Ended their voyage on the sand in the sea's lips	A
Or in the dark throat which will not reject them	X
Or wherever cannot reach them the sound of the sea bell's	A
Perpetual angelus	A
	-
V	V
	-
To communicate with Mars converse with spirits	A
To report the behaviour of the sea monster	D
Describe the horoscope haruspicate or scry	D
Observe disease in signatures evoke	H
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm	Y
And tragedy from fingers release omens	A
By sortilege or tea leaves riddle the inevitable	O
With playing cards fiddle with pentagrams	A
Or barbituric acids or dissect	C
The recurrent image into pre conscious terrors	A
To explore the womb or tomb or dreams all these are usual	O
Pastimes and drugs and features of the press	A
And always will be some of them especially	V
When there is distress of nations and perplexity	V
Whether on the shores of Asia or in the Edgware Road	C
Men's curiosity searches past and future	D
And clings to that dimension But to apprehend	C
The point of intersection of the timeless	A
With time is an occupation for the saint	C
No occupation either but something given	G
And taken in a lifetime's death in love	V
Ardour and selflessness and self surrender	D
For most of us there is only the unattended	C
Moment the moment in and out of time	P
The distraction fit lost in a shaft of sunlight	C
The wild thyme unseen or the winter lightning	H
Or the waterfall or music heard so deeply	V
That it is not heard at all but you are the music	H
While the music lasts These are only hints and guesses	A
Hints followed by guesses and the rest	C
Is prayer observance discipline thought and action	G
The hint half guessed the gift half understood is Incarnation	G
Here the impossible union	G
Of spheres of existence is actual	O
Here the past and future	D
Are conquered and reconciled	C
Where action were otherwise movement	C
Of that which is only moved	C
And has in it no source of movement	C
Driven by d monic chthonic	H
Powers And right action is freedom	Z
From past and future also	A
For most of us this is the aim	A2
Never here to be realised	C
Who are only undefeated	C
Because we have gone on trying	H
We content at the last	C
If our temporal reversion nourish	B2
Not too far from the yew tree	V
The life of significant soil	O