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The Dry Salvages‐Topography as Symbol‐II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

John D. Boyd S.J.
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Extract

To stop, then, at the mere recital of topography would be like having ‘had the experience but missed the meaning’. Yet the meaning of the symbols which rise out of the topography enjoy a peculiar character precisely because, as Miss Gardner has already been quoted as saying: ‘The landscape of The Dry Salvages is a landscape remembered.’ I suggest that this symbolism, especially of the sea and the rocks and of the plight of the fishermen, has a peculiarly realistic quality. I use the word ‘realistic’ largely in an epistemological context, with, however, psychological and anthropological overtones. This quality refers to structure, theme and tone. Further, transforming and intensifying this realism is a structure best seen as deriving from a Christian imagination—an ‘approach to the meaning restores the experience/In a different form’.

It is commonplace to say that Eliot’s poetry is deeply indebted to the French Symboliste tradition. It is also commonplace to say that this tradition, as its theory and practice developed from Baudelaire through Rimbaud and Valéry, became more and more self-enclosed and private in tone and meaning.The strong idealist tendencies of its epistemology and its premises of the poet’s isolation from society are well known.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 51 , Issue 600 , May 1970 , pp. 242 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © 1970 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Wimsatt, William Jr., and Brooks, Cleanth,Literacy Criticism:A Short History(New York,1957), pp.590Google Scholar ff.

1 Louis Bouyer, of the Oratory,Dictionary of Theology, transl. Quinn, Rev.C.U. (New York, 1965), p.311Google Scholar.The Athanasian Creed occurs on Sunday at Prime in the Breviarium Romanum.

1 Bodelsen, C. A.,T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets: A Commmentary (Copenhagen, 1958), p. 91Google Scholar.Another reading which seems to miss this structure of Incarnation and paradox in the symbolism of the rocks, turning the poem to a mystical and pantheistic mood it does not profess, is that of Krishna Sinha, On the Four Quartets of T. S. Eliot, (Devon, n.d.),.pp.71‐72. ‘The rocks have their own symbolism: Christ, moments of agony, the periodicity and pknanence of Nature. Nature itself is God.’

1 Ross, Malcolm, ‘The Writer as Christian’, in The New Orphans:Essays Towards a Christian Poetic, ed.Scott, Nathan A. Jr., (New York,1964), pp.91‐92Google Scholar.

1 ‘The paradoxical middle ground of faith sought by Christian realism between gnosticism and the praeternatural, described by Eliot in East Coker as ‘So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing’, has an interesting analogue to this last passage of lh Dty Salvages in G. K. Chesterton's lh Ballad of the whirc Horse. The archetypal symbolism of light and darkness and of the sea finds interesting echoes in Eliot, in the beginning: ‘The men of the East may spell the stars.’ The Blessed Virgin is s p e w to Alfred.