This poetry by T.S. Eliot may be just the antidote we need for dealing with the crazy, mixed-up world in which we find ourselves. So many people seem incapable of using the most rudimentary thinking tools to sort out what might be true from what is unlikely. And many professed Christians seem content to ignore the clear directives of scripture to love their fellow human beings, even their enemies.
This poetic snippet may inspire us to become better acquainted with truth discernment and help us see how spirituality may contribute to the effort and may also lead us astray. Eliot exemplifies a person who thinks for himself and whose spirituality is his particular combination of beliefs, not those imposed by any religious institution.
The Dry Salvages (sal-vay’-jiz) is one of Four Quartets, each published separately circa 1940 and as one volume in 1943. Eliot wrote this third of the four in London during the 1940-41 World War II air raids. The following is part V, the final section of the quartet. I have labeled sections and added blank lines not in the original to facilitate references to the parts.
section 1
To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams;
section 2
all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension.
section 3
But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
section 4
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
section 5
These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
section 6
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers.
section 7
And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
section 8
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.
All of Four Quartets is worth meditating upon today when so many people have difficulty discerning what is going on, confronted with so much fog in fake news and conspiracy theories. Eliot was well aware of the sway of propaganda, which the Nazi regime had perfected, to influence otherwise rational people and get them to believe whatever story the powers found convenient. Earlier in Four Quartets and before this last section of The Dry Salvages, Eliot has us think about the relationship between the past, present, and future.
He suggests that the passage of time easily misleads us and messes with our priorities. We can dwell on the past or future, wasting much mental effort when the present is most important. In the half-century since this poem, scientists also suggest that the human sense of time is an illusion. Eliot comes at this from a spiritual perspective, stating that all time is eternally present.
In the first of this latter part of The Dry Salvages, labeled section 1, Eliot lists many ways that people of his time tried to discern reality, especially the future. People had flocked to seánces since the mid-Nineteenth Century, and the fervent desire to get special knowledge continued into the Twentieth. We may face discernment difficulties today, but at least we do not believe in haruspication, a method of divination obtained by examining animal entrails after scapegoat sacrifice.
To scry is to discern a murky situation using special tools such as crystal balls or mirrors. Sortilege foretells the future from a card or other item drawn randomly from a collection. A pentagram is simply a five-pointed star, yet one used as a mystical symbol by many religions, conveying magical abilities to devoted followers. Barbituric acids, a class of sedative drugs and possible “truth serum,” may have, at that time, been considered a way to access subconscious insights.
Eliot discredits all of these “Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press” (section 2). What would he say about today’s fake news and conspiracy peddling? He suggests some extenuating circumstances that might lead a person to any of the vain attempts to gain special knowledge: “distress of nations and perplexity,” as we certainly have on hand today.
In section 3, Eliot turns our attention not to Science, the by now supremely successful arbiter of physical reality, but to a spiritual angle on truth discernment. Such a perspective may be less mathematical but no less experiential. He implies that saintly serenity comes from an unfailing faith in a loving Creator that is behind or infused into all of reality. He has listed many phony ways to seek truth. Yet, no less mysteriously, Eliot implies that fallible humans obtain deeper understanding by surrendering to a creative life force. He ties three things together: the Creator, love, and selflessness.
In section 4, Eliot admits that most of us are incapable of such saintly qualities. Instead, we try merely to get by. We are not geniuses; we are not Mother Teresa. We are not independently wealthy. On the contrary, many of us must work long hours at brainless jobs to be able to put food on the table. Yet, even in those mundane tasks, we may notice sublime things if we push away the distractions and pay attention.
Eliot admits, in section 5, that these thoughts are not certainties, and maybe he does not know any better than the rest of us. Yet, he points to actions that may help us gain a better perspective:
“prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.” These steps are better than submission to mental laziness.
He proceeds directly to his own hunch in section 6. Leading off a convoluted (and perhaps, therefore, particularly poetic) barrage of ideas, Eliot points to “Incarnation” as crucial. If God has limited himself and becomes a physical being on Earth, we should probably pay attention. That is, of course, a big if. Anyone may dismiss it and think no more about it, but if willing to entertain the possibility, such an event would be crucial.
We may have even more to ponder from the fact that Eliot refers to Incarnation without a preceding article. We would understand “The Incarnation” as a reference specifically to God on Earth in Jesus. By leaving off the article, Eliot perhaps broadens the idea: anything spiritual might become something physical due to supernatural intervention.
In this section, Eliot alludes to previous parts of Four Quartets. Spheres of existence, physical and spiritual, become joined and are real if God is incarnate. This person, if anyone, could clear up our illusions about time. As he says in Burnt Norton, the first of the quartets, “Time past and time future Allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.”
About “movement,” Eliot also expands on a passage in Burnt Norton: “Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring…”. He seems to say that any good action must be motivated by love. If not motivated by love, actions can only be driven by “daemonic, chthonic Powers.” Love causes movement without seeking fulfillment. Section 7 concludes that if properly motivated by love, actions give us freedom and independence from time.
This pointing to love as a primary driving force shows that Eliot did not dismiss all mysticism but perhaps believed that people tend to mix too much magic into it. He once wrote approvingly of a particular mysticism, presumably one that was less polluted by wrong thinking. In a 1948 introduction to a novel by his friend, Charles Williams (All Hallows Eve), Eliot describes the mysticism of Williams in a way that sheds light on this part of The Dry Salvages and perhaps on Eliot’s own style:
“…if ‘mysticism’ means a belief in the supernatural, and in its operation in the natural world, then Williams was a mystic: but that is only belief in what adherents of every religion in the world profess to believe. His is a mysticism, not of curiosity, or of the lust for power, but of Love; and Love, in the meaning which it had for Williams—as readers of his study of Dante, called The Figure of Beatrice, will know—is a deity of whom most human beings seldom see more than the shadow. But in his novels he is as much concerned with quite ordinary human beings, with their struggle among the shadows, their weaknesses, and self-deceptions, their occasional moments of understanding, as with the Vision of Love towards which creation strives.”
Finally, in section 8, which ends The Dry Salvages, Eliot again admits that most of us are incapable of sustaining this awareness, both the ability to let love drive our actions and the strength to refuse distractions of everyday mundane life. But he offers the hope that, since most of us are not saints, we may succeed merely by not giving up. If God is Love, maybe his compassion will allow us to be “content at the last.”
But Eliot connects the contentment he offers to obscure poetic allusions. He says, “…content at the last If our temporal reversion nourish (Not too far from the yew-tree) the life of significant soil.” In these last lines, we can only be confident about one thing. The yew tree in Christianity generally represents eternity, as, for many religions, trees represent nature’s cycles of seasons, dormancy, and renewal. Eliot may suggest that we have the chance to live on even though we are earthly and fallible.
In “temporal reversion,” he may place himself and us, ordinary humans, back into our usual imperceptive and unobservant selves, earth-bound and vulnerable. We may be only dust (and back to dust, we may return), but maybe, just maybe, our lives do have meaning, and the soil of our bodies has significance. As elsewhere in Four Quartets, Eliot says we must keep going, even if we are not getting the point.
As a post-script to looking at the poetry, we can glimpse aspects of Eliot’s spirituality. His family background was Unitarian, but he converted to Anglicanism at thirty. As would be true of any thinking person, however, he held personal beliefs and spiritual priorities independent of any particular tradition. Later in his life, Eliot commented that his religious views combined “a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament.”
In his work, Eliot did not shy away from using interesting ideas from any religion or philosophy. For example, in the following quote from After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, 1934, we understand that he can be both critical and appreciative:
“…Furthermore, the essential of any important heresy is not simply that it is wrong: it is that it is partly right. It is characteristic of the more interesting heretics, in the context in which I use the term, that they have an exceptionally acute perception, or profound insight, of some part of the truth; an insight more important often than the inferences of those who are aware of more but less acutely aware of anything. So far as we are able to redress the balance, effect the compensation ourselves, we may find such authors of the greatest value. If we value them as they value themselves we shall go astray. And in the present state of affairs, with the low degree of education to be expected of public and of reviewers, we are more likely to go wrong than right; we must remember, too, that a heresy is apt to have a seductive simplicity, to make a direct and persuasive appeal to intellect and emotions, and to be altogether more plausible than the truth.”
Eliot does not fear that readers will mistake his use of ideas from other religions or philosophies for endorsements. (This seems to cause many of today’s Christians to wear blinders, refusing to read people they consider foreign to themselves.)
We should not imagine ourselves advanced in human development beyond these writers and artists who lived through two horrendous world wars. They witnessed extreme depravity in humankind across many cultures. The same DNA that produced Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini is in each of us today. Knowing the adage, those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it, can only take us so far. But failing to understand such recent history would render our ignorance all the more pitiful.