The religious sermon and holy text, the ‘liturgy’, would feature watery imagery. Many religions, of course, make use of water, especially the various sects of Christianity which include baptism as a holy ritual or sacrament: whether it’s the baby’s head being wetted by water from the font, or complete immersion into the water, many Christians have been baptised, and water has symbolised the purification of that person’s soul in preparation for a life of religious devotion.īut Larkin’s hypothetical religion would place water even more at the centre of things: people going to his church would regularly come into contact with water, ‘fording’ (wading?) towards special, dry clothes which they would change into, following their weekly baptism or dunking.
Larkin’s reference to ‘any-angled light’ suggests that water unites us all in this respect. This unrhymed poem from Larkin’s 1964 volume The Whitsun Weddings sees the poet declaring that water would make a fitting subject for a religion: after all, we rely on water and our lives revolve around it as we drink it and wash and bathe in it. The river is a ‘god’, but the sea has ‘many gods’ and ‘many voices’: a polytheistic force of nature. But unlike the river, which is within us, the sea is all about us. The ‘strong brown’ river, the Mississippi, which is ‘untamed and intractable’, and has served as a frontier and as a conduit for commerce. The poem begins with a comparison between the river and the sea. The five sections of the poem offer various meditations on water – look out in particular for the tour de force that is Eliot’s take on the sestina form at the beginning of the second section. The third of Eliot’s Four Quartets, ‘The Dry Salvages’ – although it sounds like a most unwatery poem – actually takes its name from les trois sauvages, a group of rocks off Cape Ann in Massachusetts. Is it her own reflection? Or another human being? Or something else? We’ve discussed this ambiguous poem here. The speaker of the poem comes across something in the waters of a pool and wonders what it is. This short five-line poem is, along with ‘Oread’, Hilda Doolittle’s finest achievement as an Imagist poet. The harvest time and Christian redemption are united under the rain falling from heaven. This delicate poem, whose short lines and short stanzas suggest the droplets of falling rain, was first published in 1917, and the casualties of the First World War may be hinted at by Lawrence’s ‘dead / men that are slain’.
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