ABSTRACT
The established association of the Virgin Mary with the sea makes her presence in the background of the Dry Salvages as fitting as the presence of Christ in the background of East Coker, where the theme of the Lord’s suffering in the flesh was appropriate to the dominant concern with the element earth and man’s rootedness in it. It is characteristic of Eliot’s poetic practice that a neat philosophical distinction should be made at the very climax of this deeply emotional lament. The centrality of the temporal present is inevitably represented by spatial imagery. To speak of the ‘philosophy of progress’ is to employ a concept denoting movement in space. Eliot admits the difficulty of trying steadily to ‘face’ the cluster of paradoxes which his doctrine of the centrality of the present comprehends. In the last movement of The Dry Salvages, Eliot turns first to pass judgement on other, and fruitless, ways of seeking for meaning.
