Poetry Tuesday: T. S. Eliot (6)Marina — Recognition, Loss, and the Gift of Life

Recognition, Loss, and the Gift of Life

There are moments in T. S. Eliot when the poet seems to be standing in the fog—not quite knowing what he is seeing, but knowing that something is there.

Marina is one of those poems.

Published in 1930 as one of Eliot's Ariel Poems, it is perhaps his most intimate poem of recognition. Eliot himself said plainly that its theme was paternity. The poem draws upon Shakespeare's Pericles, in which Pericles is reunited with his daughter Marina, whom he had believed lost.

But Eliot complicates Shakespeare's story by placing it beside another awakening: Seneca's Hercules, who comes out of madness and discovers that he has killed his own children.

One awakening discovers death.

The other discovers life.

And Eliot begins with a question:

“What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands”

The questions come before recognition.

• Where am I?

• What am I seeing?

• What has returned?

And then, almost as though the answer has emerged from the fog:

“O my daughter.”

That is the astonishing center of Marina.

The poem is not really about explaining what has happened. It is about the experience of suddenly seeing again what had been lost.

The Fog of Memory

Eliot surrounds the poem with water, islands, pine, birdsong, fog and the broken remains of a ship.

The world is not presented with photographic clarity. It comes to us in fragments.

• A face is “less clear and clearer.”

• A pulse is “less strong and stronger.”

• Something is both distant and near.

This is the strange territory of memory, where what has been lost can sometimes become more vividly present than what is physically before us.

Eliot's images move between the remembered and the immediate. The past has not simply disappeared. It is waiting somewhere beneath the surface of consciousness.

And recognition is not instantaneous.

It comes gradually.

What Has Been Lost

Then Eliot turns toward death.

The things that once seemed powerful, beautiful or satisfying are suddenly exposed as temporary. The proud, the comfortable, the sensual—all are placed beneath the same word:

“Death”

The poem does not sentimentalize mortality.

• Everything human is fragile.

• The ship is damaged.

• The rigging is weak.

• The canvas is rotten.

• The vessel that once carried the speaker has been battered by time.

And then comes one of Eliot's most remarkable movements:

“I made this, I have forgotten / And remember.”

• Forgotten—and remembered.

• Lost—and recovered.

• Broken—and somehow still capable of carrying something.

That tension is everywhere in Marina.

A Father Sees His Daughter

The poem finally moves away from the broken ship and toward the living person.

• The father sees the face.

• He hears the small sounds.

• He senses the presence of life.

• And what had seemed impossible becomes possible.

Eliot's own explanation is helpful here. He said that the poem's theme was paternity and that he intended a “crisscross” between Shakespeare's Pericles and Seneca's Hercules Furens. Pericles awakens to find his child alive; Hercules awakens to discover that his children are dead.

That contrast gives the poem its extraordinary emotional charge.

• The same word—awakening—can lead to horror or joy.

• One man wakes into the knowledge of what he has destroyed.

• Another wakes into the knowledge of what has been restored.

• 
  

“The Hope, the New Ships”

Near the end, Eliot's broken maritime imagery begins to change.

• The ship is no longer simply an image of wreckage.

• There is movement again.

• There is possibility.

• There are “new ships.”

And then the poem arrives at its final recognition:

“My daughter.”

It is almost startlingly simple.

After all the fog, all the questions, all the broken images and memories, the poem does not end with an argument.

It ends with recognition. The gift of life.

My daughter.

The lost one is found.

Eliot and the Mystery of Recognition

This is one reason Marina deserves to be read slowly.

It is not a poem that hands us its meaning.

It makes us experience something before we can explain it.

• The fog lifts.

• The face becomes recognizable.

• The pulse is felt.

• The forgotten becomes remembered.

• The broken vessel discovers another voyage.

And Eliot leaves us standing with the father at the edge of that discovery.

In his own comments on the poem, Eliot said that he considered the recognition scene in Shakespeare's Pericles among Shakespeare's finest achievements. He was interested in those extraordinary moments when human beings seem to be seen “in a light other than that of day.”

That is exactly what happens in Marina.

We see ordinary things—water, rocks, fog, a face, a pulse—and suddenly they are charged with wonder.

A Poem About More Than Loss, the Gift of Life

It would be easy to read Marina simply as a poem about a father recovering a daughter.

It is that.

But it is also a poem about what happens when something thought to be dead is discovered to be alive.

That is why its final movement has such power.

The poem begins with uncertainty:

• What seas? What shores? What islands?

• It moves through death, memory, wreckage and uncertainty.

• And it arrives at recognition.

• My daughter.

Eliot does not tell us what to feel.

He lets the recognition itself do the work.

That is part of what makes Marina poetry rather than exposition.

The poem does not explain hope.

It makes us feel the moment when hope suddenly becomes real.

T. S. Eliot's Marina

Marina belongs to Eliot's Ariel Poems, the remarkable group of poems that includes Journey of the Magi, A Song for Simeon, Animula, and The Cultivation of Christmas Trees. The official Eliot site notes that the Ariel Poems became part of the creative stream that led directly to Ash-Wednesday.

Eliot resisted simply labeling these poems “religious” or “devotional.” He described them instead as part of the progress of one person—a movement that might be in the direction of religion, but that poetry itself had to discover.

That seems especially appropriate for Marina.

It is a poem about a man who does not begin with certainty.

He begins in fog.

He asks questions.

For those who want to read the entire poem, here is a link: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/tseliot-marina-lyrics.html

****************************Turn your eyes upon Jesus,

Look full in His wonderful face,

And the things of earth will go strangely dim,

In the light of His glory and grace.

--Helen Howarth Lemmel, 1863-1961

****************************

The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo

(Maidens’ song from St. Winefred’s Well)

The Leaden Echo

How to keep–is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere

known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch

or catch or key to keep

Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing

away?

Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankèd wrinkles deep,

Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still

messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?

No there’s none, there’s none, O no there’s none,

Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,

Do what you may do, what, do what you may,

And wisdom is early to despair:

Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done

To keep at bay

Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,

Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding

sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;

So be beginning, be beginning to despair.

O there’s none; no no no there’s none:

Be beginning to despair, to despair,

Despair, despair, despair, despair.

The Golden Echo

There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!);

Only not within seeing of the sun,

Not within the singeing of the strong sun,

Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air.

Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,

Óne. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,

Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that’s

fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and

swiftly away with, done away with, undone,

Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and

dangerously sweet

Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,

The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,

Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth

To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an ever-

lastingness of, O it is an all youth!

Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear,

gallantry and gaiety and grace,

Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks,

loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant,

girlgrace–

Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them

with breath,

And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver

Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before

death

Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s

self and beauty’s giver.

See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair

Is, hair of the head, numbered.

Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould

Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind

what while we slept,

This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold

What while we, while we slumbered.

O then, weary then whý should we tread? O why are we so

haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged,

so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,

When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,

Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept

Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder

A care kept. Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.–

Yonder.–What high as that! We follow, now we follow.–

Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,

Yonder.

by Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1885