Four Quartets 3: The Dry Salvages Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABCB DEFAAGEDCHICEC ACAGJCJCKAAAALAHDMCD ENOCPDGDEDGQHHAO HAAROG HAASOG HAAROG HAAROG HAAROG HAAROG DAAGCHGGHAHDHAHOATDA HACDCGGAGADAOACCHGA CHDCCHDDCAUVACDGAWDW CAODRHDHDDCGHCGCAGCG AA GOOA V DACHX VAHOG CAXAA V ADDHYAOACAOAVVCDCACG VDCPCHVHACGGGODCCCCH ZAA2CCHCB2VOThe 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 |
T. S. Eliot
(1)
Poem topics: , Print This Poem , Rhyme Scheme
Submit Spanish Translation
Submit German Translation
Submit French Translation
Write your comment about Four Quartets 3: The Dry Salvages poem by T. S. Eliot
Best Poems of T. S. Eliot