the sea is all about us


From The Dry Salvages 
by T.S. Eliot (published in 1941)

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.

----------------

I just read this at the beginning of the Afterword by Jeffrey S. Levinton in the 1989 edition of Rachel Carson's, The Sea Around Us. It is a section of a much longer poem, that itself is part of a set, Four Quartets, that were largely written during World War II. The Dry Salvages was written during the air-raids in Britain, and it is very sad.

I'm not vouching for the whole thing, but this section really resonated with the work I'm doing today, and how I'm feeling as the fires continue to burn here in Australia. With how we can make sense of the questions and possibilities we're left with. A dead, white guy's poem is not the place I thought to find that feeling, but there you go - perhaps it's something about making sense of the scale of human-wrought destruction, such as war, and raging fires, on the world and the forms of life, the ecosystems and cultures, that it hosts.

For what it's worth, here is Alec Guinness reading the Four Quartets, with The Dry Salvages starting at 24.20 (His rolling rrrs are worth it alone):



The poem is named after a rock formation of the coast of Massachusetts in the USA.

the dry salvages

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