It was while flipping through a biography of T.S. Eliot, that I noticed a photograph of him as a child, leaning against a sea-weathered clapboard wall. The caption read it was at Eastern Point, Gloucester. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, a wealthy businessman from St. Louis whose family was from Massachussetts, had purchased land on Eastern Point, and built a comfortable house with a verandah in 1896. High on a hill, the view was of Gloucester Harbor and the tree-dense shore from which Hammond Castle peeked. On the other side could be seen the Dog Bar Breakwater, and Eastern Point lighthouse. At the turn of the century, the harbor had been filled with an all-sail fishing fleet.
In a preface to one of his favorite childhood books, Out of Gloucester, by local James Connolly, Eliot noted how Gloucester Harbor was one of the most beautiful in New England. As a child, Eliot wrote letters to his father from Gloucester. One letter dated June 23-24, 1898, relates how he and his older sister Charlotte “hunt for birds.” Later, in a minor poem entitled “Cape Ann,” Eliot celebrated the plethora of birds and their varied cries, including the everpresent seagull.
In another letter, dated June 27, 1917, mailed to his mother from England, where Eliot had married and settled, he confided: “I love to think of you as being in Gloucester. I imagine how everything looks and think of the summer when I was at Gloucester before you and saw you and father coming across the path with your luggage, and climbing in over the stone wall where it is broken down: and going to meet you.”
As a boy, Eliot had sailing lessons under the supervision of his mother and his sisters, who worried that he would get too tired or wet or that the double hernia he had been born with, could rupture. Eliot liked to sail on the family boat, a catboat named Elsa.
In another letter, dated December 30, 1917, Eliot referred to Elsa as a “member of the family.”
Eliot’s poetry does attest to how deep his attraction to the sea was. Even the memory of the tide pools he gazed in as a child, still enchanted him. In the Four Quartets, the section entitled “The Dry Salvages” is preceded by a note that describes them as a “small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachussetts. “It is infused with a rhythm that imitates the relentless tide of the sea.
Like Olson, Eliot had a high regard for the fishermen whom he saw on Main Street, and their daily deeds are mythologized in the Four Quartets:
Where is the end of them, the fishermen
sailing
Into the wind’s tail,
where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.
We have to think of them forever bailing,
Setting and hauling, while the North East
lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and
erosionless
Or drawing their money, drying
sails at dockage;
“The Dry Salvages”
Eliot also wrote about the statue of the Lady of Good Voyage, patroness of fishermen, on the church on Prospect Street. It is a guide post for the sailors, and a national landmark. The statue of the Virgin Mary, cradling in one arm the infant Jesus, and in the other, a sailing vessel.
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