“Where all the waters meet”:
Seas Lakes Rivers in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry
1“All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.” Thus proclaims the ageless wisdom of Qoelet, or the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament [Book of Ecclesiastes I: vii]. The statement is dictated by direct experience and, at the same time, it is also a metaphor of the endless cycle of life, death, and transformation of Nature as well as of mankind. The direction, literally as regards the watercourse and metaphorically as regards the course of human life, is always the same as ordered by Nature from time immemorial: from source to sea, through all the various stages: rill, stream, river, sometimes lake, and finally sea.
2The element water in its various and different embodiments incessantly flows also in T.S. Eliot’s poetry: it is like a subterranean and above all sub-textual karstic stream emerging and pouring out at crucial moments of his oeuvre. From his debut poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) to the last section of his final Quartet “Little Gidding” (1942) water imagery is nearly ubiquitous. But there is a radical difference: unlike the natural ordinary course just recalled (source > sea), throughout the whole parable of Eliot’s poetry the direction is reversed: the liquid element flows upstream, from sea to spring, as it will be shown in this analysis.
3The sources of Eliot’s water images are various and different—as well as their symbolism and significance. Such waters spring from disparate cultures and literary traditions and overlap like the waves of the sea, evidence of the manifold aspects and meanings the element water takes on in his poetry.
41) Real geographical places closely connected to the poet’s biography and memory: the rivers Mississippi-Missouri in St. Louis and the Atlantic Ocean of the coast of Massachusetts (Gloucester) and Maine (Cape Ann) of the young poet’s early years 1 and, later on, the river Thames of his adult life in London (Ackroyd 22–23, 262, 301–2, 328–29; Crawford 28–34, 140–4; Gordon 11–13, 356–60; Hargrove passim).
52) Literary sea- and river-scapes: the Biblical rivers of Babylon of Psalm CXXXVII: 1, rewritten as “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept…” in The Waste Land ( PTSE 62); Shakespearian waters: the river Nile of Anthony and Cleopatra (PTSE 58) and that of Ophelia’s drowning in Hamlet (PTSE 61); then the seas of The Tempest (PTSE 62, 71); the Thames of Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion (PTSE 62); Richard Wagner’s Irish sea of Tristan und Isolde and the Rhine of the Ring des Nibelungen (PTSE 56, 65–6); Joseph Conrad’s river Congo of Heart of Darkness (PTSE 65)2 and the rivers of Dante’s Inferno: the Acheron (PTSE 57), and Purgatorio: the Lethe in The Hollow Men (PTSE 81, 83).
63) Mythical, religious-sacred, and metaphorical waters: the seas of Ulysses’ “nostos” to Ithaca (“East Coker” V, PTSE 191–92); the seas of the Fisher King of the Grail quest (The Waste Land II and V, PTSE 62, 70–71); once again Wagner’s Rhine of the Tetralogy (The Waste Land III, PTSE 65–66); the river Ganges in its connection with Vedic Brihadaranyaka-Upanishads: “Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves/ Waited for rain, while the black clouds/ Gathered far distant, over Himavant.” (The Waste Land V, PTSE 70); the sea voyages and trades as metaphor of human life, in connection to the cult of the Lady of the Good Voyage, worshipped by sea- and fisher-men in her Church at Gloucester, MA (“The Dry Salvages” II and IV, PTSE 194–95, 198–99).
7The symbolism of Eliot’s waters is fundamentally twofold: negative in his early poetry, to then become positive in his last works. The negative aspects appear in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), The Waste Land (1922) and partly The Hollow Men (1925). “Marina” and Ash-Wednesday (both 1930) mark the transition to positivity, which is finally achieved in Four Quartets (1936–1942).
8The main phases of this process are the following ones:
91) Waters of death: the waters of the mythical Sirens; the “sweet Thames” (now polluted) of Edmund Spenser and the “venerable stream […] one of the dark places of the world” of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Wagner’s sea of Tristan und Isolde and the Rhine of Der Ring.
102) Waters of transformation: recognition, renunciation, recovery: the seascapes of “Marina” and of Ash-Wednesday.
113) The river as metaphor of the passing of Time and of the course of human life, and the sea of Life and Death, of wreckage and salvation (“The Dry Salvages” I and III, PTSE 193-94, 197-98); the final upstream journey of the poet-voyager “at the source of the longest river”, the goal of his “exploration” (“Little Gidding” V, PTSE 209).
1 Waters of Death
12In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” the element water is characterized by a sense of temptation but, at the same time, exclusion and inadequacy of the protagonist, a modern anti-hero, a reversal of the mythical Ulysses who, in the finale, is unable to answer the Sirens’ call, and muses alone:
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown. (PTSE 9)
13In the same poem, waters also represent a deep obscure, hidden place of self-concealment: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” (PTSE 7), a process which may be interpreted from a psychoanalytical point of view, a desire of disappearance and self-extinction.
14In The Waste Land the element water in its various manifestations is closely connected to death, a death without rebirth.
15The first appearance of the theme of death associated with water (the Irish sea) appears in the episode of Tristan, the unfortunate hero of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. First in the sailor’s song:
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du? (PTSE 56)
16The sea between Cornwall and Ireland is literally and symbolically a sea of separation, loss, pain, and death: “Oed’ und leer das Meer”.(PTSE 56) reports the shepherd to the dying Tristan, who is waiting in vain for Isolde’s ship.
17The theme of “death by water” (title of the fourth section of The Waste Land) is forewarned by the Tarot of Madame Sosostris, the “famous clairvoyante”:
… Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
[…]
Fear death by water. (PTSE 56)3
18There would be a remote possibility of rebirth and regeneration, not unlike in Shakespeare’s The Tempest I, ii (“Those are pearls that were his eyes”), but the line being in parentheses reveals the impossibility of this positive solution.
19Another form of death, that of the spirit, is emblematized by “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many.” (PTSE 56), shaped after Dante’s Hell, when the poet observes “sì lunga tratta/ di gente, ch’i’ non averei creduto/ che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta.” (Inferno III: 55-57)4
20“Death by water” is also that of Ophelia (from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, IV, v) who drowns herself in a small river, alluded to in her farewell: “Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.” (PTSE 61).5
21With a shift of perspective typical of Eliot’s modernist technique of “montage”, the focus is now on the river Thames. Once the splendid and glorious stream of the Elizabethan golden age and of Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion, it is now dirty and polluted, and the mythical Nymphs have abandoned its waters.
The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
[…]
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. (PTSE 62)
22On its squalid shores a modern demythologized Fisher King (and king Ferdinand from Shakespeare’s The Tempest) is vainly waiting for salvation:
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him. (PTSE 62)
23From the great literature of the past to the repellent reality of the present, and back again, to another double dimension and perspective: that of myth juxtaposed to squalid recentness, the concluding quasi-refrain as the last echo of the complaint-prayer of Wagner’s “Rheintöchter” vainly asking Siegfried to give them back the golden ring, and now parodistically turned into contemporary violated girls:
The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
[…]
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
Elizabeth and Leicester
Beating oars
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
[…]
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
[…]
…By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.
[…]
On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing. (PTSE 65–66)
24The “drowned Phoenician sailor” of Madame Sosostris’ Tarot previously mentioned reappears later as “Phlebas the Phoenician” in the fourth section of the poem, tellingly entitled “Death by Water”:
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool. (PTSE 67)
25But even in his case there is no possibility of rebirth or regeneration.
26The ubiquitous sense of sterility (physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual) of the “waste land” and its inhabitants is reaffirmed in the symbolical arid and barren landscape of the poem’s finale:
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
[…]
If there were water we should stop and drink
[…]
If there were only water amongst the rock
[…]
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
[…]
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
[…]
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water (PTSE 68–69)
2 Waters of Recognition and Transformation, Regret and Recovery
27“Marina” and Ash-Wednesday, respectively the concluding one of the series of the “Ariel Poems” and the second masterpiece of Eliot’s poetic parable6 are evidence of a slow process of painful but successful personal recognition, self-recovery and emotional, psychological, and spiritual re-integration.
28In “Marina” it is the very sea imagery of the New England coast (Maine) deriving both from the poet’s biography and from the memorable recognition scene of Shakespeare’s Pericles (V, i) that paves the way to a positive, not to say happy conclusion – though marked by loss, pain, solitude, bitterness as in Shakespeare’s romance. The first hints of positivity, self-recovery and psychological and spiritual reintegration are revealed by the astonished exclamations of the protagonist of “Marina” – remembering positive images connected to the sea and its secret life, and concluding with the address “O my daughter” (deriving from the story of Shakespeare’s romance Pericles and his daughter Marina, found again at last by her old father):
What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.
[…]
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.
[…]
What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter. (PTSE 107–8)
29Another seascape full of memories (and partially also of regret, a feeling which is however soon overcome) characterizes the finale (VI section) of Ash-Wednesday—thus confirming and reinforcing the positive conclusion of “Marina”:
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
[…]
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth (PTSE 96)
30And, immediately after this still alluring seascape, the voice of the poet-penitent addresses a prayer to a divine or semi-divine spirit (not unlike the Virgin Mary of Christian religion, who will then be addressed in the fourth section of “The Dry Salvages”), a spiritual being closely connected with the element water in its positive and regenerating aspects:
Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated (PTSE 96–97)
3 The Conclusion of the “Upstream” Journey/Voyage
31Eliot’s final masterpiece, Four Quartets, modulates and recapitulates in a positive perspective various symbolical images of water: the river as metaphor of the passing of Time and of the brief course of human life vs the sea as metaphor of a wider form and higher level of Time and beyond Time verging on the dimension of Eternity: “The river is within us, the sea is all about us;” (“The Dry Salvages” I, PTSE 193); the sea voyages as metaphors of Life’s journey, of wreckage and salvation; and the final upstream journey of the poet-voyager (not unlike the pilgrim Dante) “at the source of the longest river” (“The Dry Salvages” III and V, “Little Gidding” V, PTSE 197–98, 200, 208–9).
32It is in Four Quartets, Eliot’s third masterpiece, that the element water in its various embodiments and manifestations evidences its positive meaning (though, sometimes, through troubled and painful processes).
33The first water image, at the end of “East Coker” V, has to do with the theme of the journey in its metaphoric acceptation:
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning. (PTSE 192) 7
34Where echoes also the favourite motto of the poet, “In my end is my beginning”, which is the interpretation key of his whole life and art.
35The following Quartet, “The Dry Salvages” is in the name of river and sea, opening as it does with the image of the river as metaphor of the course of human life, and that of the sea as metaphor of a wider dimension of Time verging on Eternity:
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.
The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.
The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
The distant rote in the granite teeth,
And the wailing warning from the approaching headland
Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
Rounded homewards, and the seagull; (PTSE 193–94)
36In the second section of the same Quartet, the voyages by sea and the hard job of ocean fishing become metaphors of the human life, with its dangers and often deadly wrecks8, its risks, successes and failures:
Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?
[…]
There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
[…]
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
[…]
Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind’s tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.
We have to think of them as forever bailing,
Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
Not as making a trip that will be unpayable
For a haul that will not bear examination.
There is no end of it
[…]
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage, (PTSE 194–95)
37The voyage by sea returns as metaphor not merely of the journey of life, but also of the continuous, incessant change and transformation, and as an exhortation to go on and never to yield (in this sense Eliot echoes the “message” of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”):
‘Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
[…]
Fare forward.
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.
[…]
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers. (PTSE 198)
38It is therefore not surprising that the persona of the poet addresses a prayer to “Our Lady of the good voyage” (partly echoing St. Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin Mary in Dante’s Paradiso XXXIII):
Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,
Pray for all those who are in ships, those
Whose business has to do with fish, and
Those concerned with every lawful traffic
And those who conduct them.
Repeat a prayer also on behalf of
Women who have seen their sons or husbands
Setting forth, and not returning:
Figlia del tuo figlio,
Queen of Heaven.
Also pray for those who were in ships, and
Ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea’s lips
Or in the dark throat which will not reject them
Or wherever cannot reach them the sound of the sea bell’s
Perpetual angelus. (PTSE 198–99)
39After this prayer, and to conclude the long, difficult, troubled, and manifold “phenomenology” (in its slow symbolical transformation from the negative to the positive) of the element water and of its poetic imagery and symbolism, after all the hard risks of the “voyage” and as an apt conclusion to the poet’s own life journey, it is now the moment to return to the “source”, and not only “of the longest river”, confirming the complete realization and fulfilment of the same process of psychological and spiritual reintegration, as mystically conveyed in the final part of “Little Gidding”:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
[…]
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea. (PTSE 208–9)
40It is a moment of suspension, stillness, silence, ecstasy. It marks the return to purity and innocence: the primeval, original purity of water springing from its source and the first original sound (“voice”) of the “waterfall” (equated to the innocence of the children’s voices). From menacing deadly seas and polluted rivers to the crystal clear spring: the backward journey is completed and completely realized, as it is fully realized Eliot’s favourite motto “in my beginning is my end” (the very same words he had engraved on the plaque sealing his ashes in St. Michael’s church at East Coker). What is most remarkable in Eliot’s poetic voyage across rivers, lakes and seas is that it begins by the sea and ends by a spring, thus symbolically reversing the natural flow of water. Such upstream course becomes also a further and final metaphor of Eliot’s biography: his return from America, his birth-nation, to Great Britain, the land of his family ancestors, who left the village of East Coker in the XVII c. to sail to the New World; of his own psychological and spiritual history: from “dejection” to recovery, from skepticism to conversion; his own literary, critical, and poetic parable: from avant-garde and Modernism to “classicism”, from a certain degree of iconoclasm to a complete recovery of literary Tradition and its sources of English and European poetry.
Sources
- Ackroyd, Peter. T.S. Eliot. London: Hamish Hamilton [1984] / Abacus-Sphere Books, 1985.
- The Holy Bible. King James version. Standard Text Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, n.d.
- Crawford, Robert. Young Eliot. From St. Louis to The Waste Land. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
- Duvall Hargrove, Nancy. Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978.
- Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Poems of T.S. Eliot. The Annotated Text. Eds. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press (vol. I Collected and Uncollected Poems), 2015. (Abbreviated PTSE.)
- Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Waste Land. A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Ed. Valerie Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1971.
- Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “Preface” to Edgar Ansel Mowrer This American World, 1928. https://tseliot.com/preoccupations/america [accessed 24 March 2023].
- Gordon, Lyndall. T.S. Eliot. An Imperfect Life. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1998.
4Most telling are the poet’s reminiscences of his boyhood about the river and the sea: “In New England I missed the long dark river, the ailanthus trees, the flaming cardinal birds, the high limestone bluffs where we searched for fossil shell-fish; in Missouri I missed the fir trees, the bay and goldenrod, the song-sparrows, the red granite and the blue sea of Massachusetts”. (Eliot 1928 xiii-xiv).
5Worth stressing, quite remarkable, and most meaningful is the coincidence that also in Conrad’s most famous novel Heart of Darkness, the protagonist’s (Marlow) is an “upstream” journey (London > Brussels > the Atlantic coasts of Africa > the course of the river Congo almost to its sources) not unlike the overall course of Eliot’s poetry. But the ending of the two journeys is completely different: in Conrad’s novel it is Kurtz’s hopeless last cry, expressing the tragic recognition of his spiritual failure and damnation: “The horror! The horror!”, whereas in Eliot’s “Little Gidding” it is the late medieval mystic Julian of Norwich’s spiritual revelation and comforting and reassuring promise: “All shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well.” (PTSE, 207). It goes without saying that it was the very quotation from Conrad’s novel, i.e., the dying Kurtz’s last cry, that Eliot had chosen as epigraph for the first draft of his 1922 masterpiece, the one entitled “He Do the Police in Different Voices” (Eliot 1971).
17However, the Tarot representing “the drowned Phoenician sailor” does not exist in the Tarot deck…
19“And after it there came so long a train/ Of people, that I ne’er would have believed/ That ever Death so many had undone.” (trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
20And, in connection with this form of suicide, one cannot omit the allusion to a historical self-drowning, that of the King of Bavaria Ludwig II Wittelsbach in the Starnbergersee, a lake near Munich, through the reference to that lake in the line: “Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee/ With a shower of rain”; almost at the beginning of the poem (PTSE 55).
27The three masterpieces and highest peaks of Eliot’s poetry being The Waste Land (1922), Ash-Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1943).
33In the first section of this same Quartet the poet had partially anticipated this motto: “Dawn points, and another day/ Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind/ Wrinkles and slides. I am here /Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.” (PTSE 186, emphasis added).
36The theme of death returns also in other passages from “Little Gidding”, such danger being never overcome: “There are other places/ Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,/ Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city […] And any action/ Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat/ Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start” (PTSE 202, 208); but in these examples death is a kind of natural accident, and is not a spiritual death as in The Waste Land.