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How seriously should you take a doormat that reads: “Welcome. Just kidding. Please leave.” or one that says, “Go away”? As an introvert myself, I sympathize with the feeling, but I assume that the homeowners don’t mean their warnings too literally. The truly misanthropic have “No trespassing” signs and battlements.
Welcome mats bearing the legend “difficult” and “allusive” are the ones often placed by critics at the door of T. S. Eliot’s poetry. I don’t think we should take those warnings too seriously, either. Is it fair to call Eliot inhospitable when his cat poems are the basis of a beloved Broadway musical? (Whether Eliot scholars love Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats is a different question.)
In 2022, on the 100th anniversary of Eliot’s The Waste Land, I wrote a number of essays, including one for this magazine, on why the allusions and difficulty of that masterpiece should not get in the way of enjoying it. My task in this essay is much easier: Eliot’s “Marina” is short and not quite so difficult. Its allusions can be explored or ignored, as you please.
Whenever I teach a seminar on Eliot’s work, I spend the first day of class on this haunting poem. (Read it here.) The point of introducing “Marina” before students have read any criticism about Eliot or had any teacherly guidance is to prove to them that the words on the page are sufficient. I am not suggesting that criticism and scholarship are unnecessary, only that Eliot’s reputation for difficulty and allusiveness is so overplayed that I push the pendulum in the other direction to compensate.
Footnotes, exegeses, historical context, biographical data: These all help to deepen and complicate an understanding of a poem. But if poetry is going to work—to live in the hearts of readers, rather than only in the brains of doctoral candidates—then good poems, even the most difficult among them, have to be approachable on some level. Eliot himself believed that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” (“Dante,” 1929). Beneath the welcome mat that reads “Go away” is another one saying, “Seriously: come in.”
Opening with exegesis
I want to mimic my classroom pedagogy in this essay. First, I’ll offer a reading of the poem derived from the words on the page, or what a sensitive reader might pick up without recourse to notes or criticism—or what panicky undergrads, forced into small groups and given 20 minutes, might come up with on the first day of class. Then once this formalist reading is spelled out, I’ll fill in some gaps by explaining the allusions and biographical contexts. Until then, Dear Reader, resist the temptation to open another tab on your browser.
The title, “Marina,” suggests water, small boats, harbor, safekeeping, rest, repair. And Marina is also a woman’s name. Since we learn from the first stanza that the poem involves a daughter, perhaps Marina is her name. (Let’s say you forgot, or didn’t know, that Marina is a woman’s name. That’s OK. A poem is not an algebra problem. Some fuzziness is perfectly fine.) The next element is an epigraph in Latin. Most undergraduates can’t translate Latin at sight, and they’re not allowed to use Google or a translation app, so we’ll skip it for now. The point here is that the poem gives us the basics we need, even when we don’t catch everything the poem is doing.
The first stanza begins:
What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.
In the first two lines, there is plenty of repetition and no verbs. Also, no commas. This suggests mumbling or tired speech, rather than decisive proclamation. From these opening images, we can infer that we’re in a boat, on the sea, near a shore, but we don’t have enough information to know whether the formula “what [X]” is an expression of confusion or of wonder. So, either the speaker is confused about “what” sea he’s in, “what” shore he’s near, or the speaker is marveling at these phenomena (“What seas!”). In either case, the repetitions lull in wave-like rhythms, and the subsequent images richly evoke the shoreline: the sharp tang in the air of pine trees and the lovely birdcall, “the woodthrush singing through the fog.”
Fog can suggest being lost or a lack of clarity. For those on boats near “grey rocks,” fog can be dangerous. The speaker seems to be referring to all these charged images, electric with meaning because he has seen them before—they “return” to him: “What images return/ O my daughter.” The daughter is perhaps the hero of the poem, since she appears by herself in the last line of the stanza. What she has to do with the water/weather/landscape images is unclear at this point.
Jarringly, the next stanza seems thematically and emotionally unrelated to the opening. It presents a new formula, repeated four times: “Those who [X] meaning/ Death.”
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning
Death
Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death
The first stanza had only one verb (“return”), and in this stanza there is no verb connected to “Those.” There are verbs in the stanza, but they all appear in dependent clauses (“who sharpen,” “who glitter”), which makes these four statements rather ambiguous. It is unclear what “Those” are, or what their grammatical relationship is to one another. The phrases do exist in paratactic relation; that is, they are set side by side in similar formulations, which suggests their unity.
So who are “Those”? The pronoun refers not to specific people, but to types of people—those who do [X]. The first category is those who “sharpen the tooth of the dog,” and they are equated with capital-D “Death.” Hmmm…what type of people sharpen dogs’ teeth? It’s not a practice undergraduates are likely to be familiar with, but with some leading questions, they might see the connection between dog teeth and Death. In dog fighting, the owners might cheat, intentionally sharpening their animals’ teeth to give them an advantage. This unfair practice causes pain to one animal and death to another. And the greed and cruelty of “Those” who engage in this practice suggests a more metaphysical kind of Death, a death of the soul.
The remaining three types take some teasing out as well: Those who “glitter with the glory of the hummingbird” are vain in their preening; those who “sit in the sty of contentment” are lazy like pigs; those who “suffer the ecstasy of the animals” are sensual, material, lustful. Whether my undergrads arrive at these exact formulations doesn’t matter. What matters is that the types of people in stanza two are compelled by vices that are death-dealing. These are not people seeking perfection or virtue. Perhaps my undergraduates only get the vague sense that these people are “not nice.” That’s sufficient.
Mediators of grace
It is sufficient because the next stanza begins with the long-delayed verb: Are. The petty, vain, cruel people of the preceding stanza—“Those” people “Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind/ A breath of pine.” Note the less common “unsubstantial” (rather than “insubstantial”), which offers the assonance of “-come / un-.” Somehow, this “grace dissolved in place” has made Death and the not-very-nice people disappear. The place itself (the shore, the islands, the rocks, the pines) has become a mediator of grace, and upon arrival all that is evil or trivial is dispelled. The same rich images from the first stanza “return”: the smell of pine, the birdcall and the fog. But this time, the seven syllables of the “woodthrush singing through the fog” are now compressed into three: “woodsong fog,” singing its own assonance of “song/ fog.”
The fourth stanza begins with the same word as the first stanza: “What is this face,… / The pulse in the arm… / Given or lent?” Upon arrival at the shore, Death has been dispelled, and a beloved has been met with wonder: Who is this? What is this? The speaker seems hardly able to believe his luck, even questioning its reality. This stanza includes a series of paradoxes that students can play with: “less clear and clearer,” “less strong and stronger,” and “more distant than stars and nearer than the eye.” I do not find these paradoxes particularly compelling or evocative. Unfortunately, Eliot’s post-conversion poetry (written after 1927), such as his more famous Four Quartets, is often filled with such padding.
In the fifth stanza, just two lines long, more imagery is offered of grace, comfort and happiness. The first image suggests the pent-up excitement of children: “Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet.” If those images are terrestrial and real, the second line undercuts them, placing them underwater or in the recesses of a dreamland: “Under sleep, where all the waters meet.” Note the ringing assonance of these two lines, the pileup of “ee” sounds: between, leaves, feet, sleep, meet (with “heat” in the next line). The narrative is still foggy here—only some grace-filled reunion at a shore—but the imagery quietly throbs with life and joy. Part of the atmosphere of the poem is that its meanings hover indistinctly, but not unpleasantly, apart from clear definition.
The sixth stanza is the longest, and it does the most narrative work, because the speaker finally tells us about himself and his attitude to his daughter. He starts with a description of the ship on which he arrived: “Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.” The boat is leaking, the rigging has failed, and the sails have disintegrated. It has been a hard journey, and yet he has attained the shore. The referent of the second line is ambiguous: “I made this, I have forgotten/ And remember.” Does “this” refer to the ship or his daughter? Or is the artist referring obliquely to his own made thing, the poem itself?
Here is another paradox: forgetting and remembering. Had he forgotten his daughter, and now the reunion causes him to remember? While the first stanza was most memorable in its repetitions of the determinative “what” (“What seas what shores what grey rocks”), this stanza is notable for the demonstrative “this”: “This form, this face, this life.” Note the commas here: the mumbling, foggy indistinctness of the first line has become decisive speech, the speaker repeating and underlining, his confidence growing—this person has revived him after the long journey. He can live for her, give up his speech, his poems, to match her reserve. He resolves, with another this and that, “let me/ Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken.”
The last line of the stanza is the poem’s most beautiful moment, turning from resolution to emotion: “The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.” Again no verbs, but none are needed. The speaker and the daughter have been “awakened” from their own death; the opened lips suggest speech, a kiss or a startled intake of breath. Hope replaces exhaustion, and new ships signal renewed vigor for the journey. Note all the repeated p’s that mimic the gesture of kissing: speech, unspoken, lips, parted, hope, ships.
Reunited and consoled, what remains to the speaker in the final stanza is to summarize and return, dissolving back into the fog of the opening:
What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.
The stanza repeats, with some variations, the first line of the poem, though now direction is indicated: the shore is towards the timbers of his ship. Normally we think of a ship’s bow as headed toward a destination, but here it is turned around as if the shore and its expected reunion have been directed at the ship, “towards my timbers.” In another telling variation, the bird is no longer “singing,” making music in the indistinct fog, but calling to the speaker, recognizing him. There’s also a missing exclamation. In the first stanza, the speaker had exclaimed: “What images return/ O my daughter.” By deleting the “O” on repetition, it is grammatically unclear if the woodthrush is calling to “my daughter” or if the bird, a metaphor for the daughter, is calling to him.
Filling in the gaps
My undergraduates don’t come up with a reading quite as coherent or detailed as the one I’ve presented here, but with a little prodding, they get pretty close. What matters is that they be proud of finding meaning in a poem that doesn’t have an obvious plot or clear scenario. They will have missed the classical allusions, but that in no way means that they’ve misunderstood the poem. They will have noted the grammatical oddities, marked the repetitions and gaps, and sensed the trajectory of the poem’s movement. Once they’ve figured these basics out, then I can step in. The formalist reading my undergraduates create on the first day of class does not substitute for scholarship. It functions as an appetizer for it. Once they’re hooked, they want to know more.
As promised, here is some context that fills in the gaps left by the purely formalist reading above. The poem’s most important allusions both appear before the poem starts, in the title and in the epigraph. Marina is the daughter of Pericles, in Shakespeare’s play of that name. She was born at sea, and her name, meaning “of the sea,” reflects her watery fate: she is also kidnapped by pirates and believed dead by her father. And at the end of the play, she is returned to him, once again over the sea. Eliot thought the scene in which Marina is restored to her incredulous father one of the most moving recognition scenes in all literature.
The Latin epigraph likewise refers to a recognition scene, though a tragic one. In Seneca’s Hercules Furens, these are the words spoken when Hercules wakes from an episode of madness in which he killed his children: “Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?”; “What place is this, what region, what coast of the world?” (For his opening and closing stanzas, Eliot has copied his repeated “whats” from Seneca.) “Where am I?”—the innocent question comes before the more terrible one of recognition: “What have I done?” Eliot explained to a correspondent that he intended this “crisscross” between the tragic and the blissful: two men waking, one finding his children dead, the other finding his daughter alive.
Why would Eliot have wanted his poem of tender reunion to be inflected with tragedy? Perhaps because the reunion in Eliot’s life could never be fully consummated. The “daughter” of the poem is code for the woman he was still in love with but could not marry, Emily Hale.
In 1930, the year he wrote and published “Marina,” Eliot was nearing the end of his childless, loveless marriage. In 1915, Eliot had married Vivienne High-Wood after knowing her for only a few weeks. Vivacious and artistic, she also had a streak of mental instability. By 1930, she had been diagnosed with uncountable physical and mental illnesses. The various diagnoses were partly a cover for her drug addictions, and her addictions were partly a compensation for her mental and physical pain. Vivienne had spent long spells in sanitariums, and her unhinged behavior while home was becoming impossible for Eliot to manage. Eliot separated from his wife in 1933, providing resources for her care. In 1938, her brother committed her to an asylum. An Anglican convert, Eliot did not believe that divorce was legally or morally permissible.
Meanwhile, Eliot was carrying on a mostly epistolary relationship with an old flame of his back in the United States, Emily Hale. She came to England for extended periods to visit relatives and to renew her acquaintance with Eliot. They had first met in Boston, and Eliot had declared his love for her in 1914, when he was in graduate school. She did not feel the same affection for him, and so Eliot left for England, intending to stay only for a year or two to write his dissertation. But as he described the precipitous events later in life, he decided instead to abandon academic philosophy, “burn his boats” and stay in England. Marrying Vivienne was the irrevocable act that separated him from his family and made possible his life as a writer and artist.
The nature of the love affair between Eliot and Hale has been a source of much speculation among scholars, until 2023, when speculation was no longer necessary. An archive of over 1,000 letters Eliot sent to Hale had been held at Princeton and sequestered at the poet’s insistence for over 60 years. In 2020, the archive was finally opened, and thanks to the generosity of the Eliot Estate, these letters are available free online.
“Marina” was written by a man who was outwardly engaged in his job at a publishing house, editing his literary journal The Criterion, and caring for his damaged wife. But inwardly, his heart was pining for home, the coast of New England, where he spent the summers of his happy childhood and where he had come to know Hale. Eliot identified the landscape of “Marina” as Casco Bay, Maine, a destination he had sailed to in his small boat, Elsa. Eliot wrote to Hale, his “Dearest Lady”: “on a beautiful hot day I think I should like to have a look at Casco Bay or Jonesport Maine from the cockpit of a small sloop, again” (June 23, 1931). As a teenager Eliot was a skilled and adventurous sailor, and his later trips in large liners crossing the Atlantic were connected in his memory to family and Hale. So it is not surprising that he imagines himself in this poem on a long, difficult journey over sea, travelling to a place of reunion.
To argue that “daughter” is a code for Hale does not mean that Eliot was misdirecting the reader when he claimed that the theme of the poem is paternity. Family was much on his mind in 1930, and Hale herself was part of the close, familial network of Boston Unitarians in which the Eliots moved. Eliot had lost his own much-loved mother, who died in September 1929—a few months before he began drafting the poem. So the poem can be read as a love poem for Emily Hale, with whom he reunited regularly before World War II. But it can also be read more straightforwardly as a poem that evokes a terrestrial heaven, envisioned as the ascetic grandeur of Maine’s coast, where a lost child is reunited with a parent.
“Marina” never bothers to explain how the daughter/beloved and father/speaker had become separated, how they had survived in each other’s absence, or what enabled their reunion. Instead, the poem is primarily concerned with evoking the wonder of meeting. Ultimately, the underlying drama—the biographical background—is not so important as the poem that was created from it.
Whether we read Eliot’s concerns into the poem or project our own onto it—the devastating journeys we have suffered, the reunions we have had, or longed for, or missed—the poem itself welcomes us into its frame. The images, sounds and rhythms carry the poem, shaping its emotional content, while the grammar and narrative remain foggy and blurred, but no less haunting for that.
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