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The Dry Salvages—Topography as Symbol—I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

John D. Boyd S.J.
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Cape Ann in Massachusetts is one of the more plentifully documented areas of the country in tourist literature and in books of local colour and history. Details of historical and literary interest are carefully noted in brochures and guide maps. Kipling’s Captains Courageous and James B. Connolly’s Gloucestermen are rightly remembered. Summer visits of minor New England literary figures are duly recorded, and reference is ubiquitous to the Reef of Norman’s Woe off the Magnolia side of Gloucester Harbour, immortalizing Longfellow’s ‘Wreck of the Hesperus’. Yet one looks in vain for any notice of Cape Ann’s most distinguished literary event, T. S. Eliot’s The Dry Salvages, despite his explicit note preceding the poem: ‘(The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages. Groaner: a whistling buoy.)’ I found a recent visit to the museum of the Cape Ann Scientific, Literary and Historical Association in Gloucester no more rewarding. Apart from a few of his published books, the Sawyer Free Library in the same town has only a small collection of photos of Eliot and a drawing by his sister. Even the detailed and very readable Saga of Cape Ann of Melvin Copeland and Elliott Rogers (1960) passes the poem over in silence, though it does speak of the danger to navigation offered by the rocks from which Eliot named the third of his Four Quartets.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 51 , Issue 599 , April 1970 , pp. 184 - 193
Copyright
Copyright © 1970 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

page 184 note 1 This article is reprinted, with certain minor corrections, from Renascence, Vol. XX, No. 3, Spring, 1968, by kind permission of the editor of that journal.

page 184 note 2 Eliot, T. S.,collected Poems 1909‐1962 (New York, 1963), p.191Google Scholar. All references to Eliot's poetry are quoted from this edition by permission of Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc.I am especially indebted to Mrs Henry Ware Eliot, Jr., the poet's sister‐in‐law for information about several details of his life, shared in a gracious interview with Fr J. Robert Barth,s.j. I must also thank Fr Barth who very obligingly helped me in several ways, Mr W. H. Bond of the Houghton Library at Harvard, for permiasion. to from the Henry Ware Eliot, Jr.Collection and Mr Wallace A. Bruder of the United Statesd Department of Commerce for some valuable geodetic and naval information.Finally I wish to thank the following for certain incidental information and suggestions: Mrs Margaret Ferrini, Dr Walter J. Bate, Jr., Frs Vincent Blehl, s.j., Edwin Cuffe, s.J., Jammes Finley, s.J., William Power, S. J., and Robert Tobin, S. J.

page 185 note 1 Howarth, Herbert,Notes on Some Figures Behind T. S. Eliot (Boston, 1964), pp.113‐121Google Scholar;Morison, Samuel Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages and the Thatcher Shipwreck, in The Americian Neptune, XXV (1965), 233‐247Google Scholar. I originally completed most of my research independently of these two studies, but have since found them valuable, especially Morison's careful search into the origin of the name of the Dry Salvages. In the course of the paper, however, I shall have reason to differ on some minor details with both of them.

page 186 note 1 Quoted from an interview reported by Kristian Smidt, Pochy and Belicf in the Work of T. S. Elwt (London, 1961), p. 4.

page 186 note 2 From an interview with M. C. Childs in the St Louis Globe Demomat (1930), by permission of the Harvard College Library.

page 186 note 3 Eliot, T. S.. Ihe Use of Poetry und the Use of Criticism [London, 1933)Google Scholar. DD. 78‐79. The strong impact ‐of memory” uponimagination ii stated in more general ie in this same context: ‘There is so much memory in imagination that if you are to distinguish between imagination and fancy in Coleridge's way, you must define the difference between memory in imagination and memory in fancy.’

page 186 note 4 I am following Mrs Henry Ware Eliot, Jr., on these dates; see note 2 above. Professor Howarth says Eliot first came to Gloucester in 1895, and that he lived at the Hawthorne IM until the Edgemoor house wae built in 1897, p. 113.

page 187 note 1 Melvin Copeland and Elliott Rogers, The Saga of Cops Ann (Freeport, Me., 1960), pp. 132‐133. Straitpmouth and Thachers (Thatcher, Thatcher's) are islands due south of the Salvages, with important beacons on them. Thacher is unique in the country for having twin lighthouses. Only one of them is now in use, however. The beacon on the Dry Salvages of which Eliot speaks in his prenote, though there while he was a resident and when he wrote the poem, is no longer there. It was removed through Notice to Marinera 26 of 1945. There is, however, a lighted bellbuoy about a thousand yards north‐east of the rocks, established through Notice to Mariners 44 of 1935. I am grateful to Mr Bruder for ‐ this information.

page 187 note 2 Copeland and Rogers, p. 69. Morison places the Groaner east of Thacher Island, ‘and the “wailing warnina” of the diauhone on Thacher's itself.’ I prefer to think of both of these at th; voyage‐end, round&g Eastern Point, partly for ihe sweep of the terrain involved, mentioned earlier, and its consequent inclusion of the entire voy e and because Eliot speaks of the ‘wail’ warning h m the approaching ha’, WE Thaer is an island. Morison, 234‐235.

page 191 note 1 Musurillo, Herbert S.J., Symbolism ond ths Chrisrian ZmagiMtia (Baltimore, 1962), pp. 133‐134Google Scholar. The hymn Aw Moris Stella occurs in Vespers common to the feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Brsvimium Romanum.

page 192 note 1 Howarth, p. 117; Connolly, James B., Fbhennen ofthe Bunks (London, 1928), pp. vii‐viiiGoogle Scholar. Howarth also speaks of a widow's walk on the Edgemoor house, which at present, at least, is no longer there, p. 114.