Dear Papa …
Young Tom Eliot’s Letter from Gloucester (1895)
TSE and Father on Pickford's Boat (cited as 1895) Photograph by Henry Ware Eliot, Jr. Courtesy of the T.S. Eliot Estate.
By Chris Munkholm
July 5, 2023 (originally published October 26, 2022)
In September, the Dry Salvages Festival celebrated T. S. Eliot's early years summering in Gloucester, and their influence on his body of poetry. Included in the program was a collection of artifacts, many borrowed from Harvard's Houghton Library and displayed in the Cape Ann Museum Library. Among the documents was the poet’s first preserved correspondence, a letter to his father written in 1895. COSMOS has secured permission from the T. S. Eliot Estate to publish a transcription of the composition, originally written in the formal cursive style of the time.
While the Eliot family had roots in England and New England, they resided in St. Louis, Missouri where Henry Ware Eliot (1843-1919) was a successful businessman and president of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company. In the era before the invention of air conditioning, people with means escaped the insufferable summer heat by heading to distant Northern and Eastern shores. Thus grew the summer destinations of Boston’s North Shore, Rhode Island’s Newport, and Maine’s Bar Harbor and many islands. The Eliot family, which included six children, became summer residents of Gloucester, Massachusetts.
The family summer home on Edgemoor Road in Gloucester.
One can imagine Eliot’s youthful contemplations of the natural world beyond the single window in his room.
While the reproduced letter was posted from Gloucester to his father, we do not have the addressed envelope. But we can presume that the mother, children, and nanny had traveled East before Mr. Eliot, not having the luxury of an entire summer away from his business affairs, could depart from St. Louis. He must have cherished receiving the letter from his youngest child, then seven years old, and placed it into such safe keeping that it survived many years of storage, moves, cleanouts – finally making its way into the permanent archives of his son who became one of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed poets.
The copyrighted letter and photograph (TSE and Father) are reproduced by permission of the T. S. Eliot Estate. We thank Clare Reihill and Nancy Fulford, of the T. S. Eliot Foundation for their assistance. In addition, Trenton Carls, Cape Ann Museum archivist, provided guidance. Read the transcription.
For the reproduced rendition we attempted to duplicate the precise details of the original letter, including punctuation and grammar. One can see signs of Eliot’s future observational nature as he carefully qualified his report on the cool temperature. If poetry had not been his calling, he might have excelled in a scientific field.
But his intellect moved inexorably towards a poetic brilliance capable of eventually writing The Four Quartets, with stanzas such as this beloved section of The Dry Salvages, with its wonderful residue of imagery from Eliot’s Gloucester years:
The Dry Salvages outcropping of rock, off the coast of Gloucester.
The River is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.
Christiane Munkholm is the Founder and Editor of Cape Ann COSMOS: Arts, Science & Entertainment, a natural consequence of her lifelong involvement in art & dance, and a career in bioscience technology innovation, with many patents. Christiane’s formal education includes Parson’s School of Design, Pratt Institute, Cranbrook, Tufts University PhD Chemistry, and countless dance studios. She is the author of Atlas Decrypted, a literary analysis derived from the science of chemistry. Christiane is the Founding Executive Director of Gloucester Marine Genomics Institute (2013-2019) and resides in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts.
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