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.That there isent with us, [c]lang[ing] / The bell. here no old-style punning as if, for example, he isreally just being cute, as he might have been backPart IIin his youth, by really only asking where somethingAs the second part of The Dry Salvages opens,as vast as the sea might end is made quite clearthe reader has been put by the first part of the poeminstantly.Images of soundless wailing, silentinto an entirely different frame of reference from thewithering, drifting wreckage, follow in quickone that city dwellers know on a daily basis.Based,succession, ending on the note of a calamitoustoo, on the patterns that have been emerging in theannunciation, which itself puts the reader in mindoverall poem in Burnt Norton and East Coker, simultaneously of the life and passion of the Christ;the reader has become used to expecting the secondthe suffering of his mother Mary, whose heartsection to be a lyrical turn, one that seems to distillwould be pierced by grief like a sword; and the lastthe quality of meaning of the first but that thenword that is spoken of all mere mortals that hemay be followed itself by an almost prosaic com-or she has died.In answer to his own question, thementary that undercuts both the lyrical passage andspeaker observes that [t]here is no end, but addi-its insights and that laments the limits of poetry,tion, until one is ready for what is, in the end, theindeed, of speech itself.One should have noticedonly choice: renunciation. by now as well, however, that what is actually beingShortly, in the third part, the speaker will bechallenged in such commentaries is the value thatexperience has for an ego-constructed self.Put sim- speaking of the Hindu warrior hero Arjuna andthe advice that Krishna gives him as he preparesply, experience from a limited point of view, whichfor battle.In the passage, Eliot may better clarifyis what the experience of any one human being is, iswhat precisely he means by so unabashedly bold aof very limited value.Because it is so inherently unknowable, how- directive.For now, however, the poetry continueswith a resigned but not bitter litany of acceptanceever, the sea ironically enough offers the poet, andexpressed in what is essentially a modified sestina,the reader, the opportunity of far less limited focus 212 Four Quartetswherein six six-line stanzas rhyme not on six end it passes ends with one s missing the meaning alto-words that are randomly mixed, the standard pat- gether, while approach to the meaning restorestern for a sestina, but on a fixed pattern of six clos- the experience, but beyond any meaning / Weing rhymes: -ailing, -owers, -tionless, -age, -able, can assign to happiness. and -nation.The idea is less complicated than it might appearat first glance: Experience remembered is coloredAgain, the reader should not be cloyed.Eliotby one s idea of what a particular experience oughtintroduces this complex rhyme scheme not to showoff his skills as a poet, but to reaffirm the musi- to be, and so never can be, in the recollecting ofcal idea, expressed throughout the Four Quar- what it actually, singularly was. For our own past, as the speaker explains it, is covered by the cur-tets, that it is only through measured pattern thatrents of action, and these are, as it were, fictionsworthwhile meaning comes.From the beginning,that are made up by each individual out of a pas-in Burnt Norton, the poet has spoken of patterns.tiche of the experiences of others but the agonyNow he begins to create them himself out of theabides. formless chaos of the sea s mindless movement andThe speaker concludes the second part of Theceaseless moment.The drifting boat with a slowDry Salvages, then, with a rehearsal of the open-leakage, fisherman sailing /.where the foging stanza and its reflections on the great inlandcowers, forever bailing, and the withering ofriver and on the sea off Cape Ann that the speaker/withered flowers are all literal tokens of a universepoet had known as a boy.Here is the ragged rockof decay and defeat, as well as figurative emblemsin the restless water, the Dry Salvages
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