Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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108 | APRIL 2015 nshoremag.com completing his undergraduate degree and for the rest of his life would be affiliated with "London Letters." By 1927, Eliot became a member of the Church of England and a British citizen. How does Cape Ann figure into the mix? The poet's father, Henry Ware Eliot, Sr., a successful brick manu- facturer in the Gateway City, built a summer home for the family in 1896 in Gloucester's Eastern Point. Renowned Eliot biographer Lyn- dall Gordon recalls how, in a talk entitled The Influence of Landscape upon the Poet, "Eliot called himself a New England poet because he had been so deeply affected when he came East as a child. He was always happy near the sea and would remember with joy his boyhood summers at Gloucester, Cape Ann." Indeed, this landscape would figure largely in Eliot's work. Aside from the 13-line minor poem "Cape Ann," in which Eliot catalogues a sundry of the birds he loved to identify by the age of 10, the third part of his opus Four Quartets was named after a group of rocks off the Gloucester coast: "The Dry Salvag- es." Although the piece begins with a reference to the Mississippi River of his youth, Eliot quickly trans- ports us to the Atlantic shore where the young beachcomber found The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men. Evidence indeed of the sea's "Many gods and many voices." "The Dry Salvages" is replete with theologi- cal themes and nautical imagery. Sometimes the two become one, as in the fourth part, wherein Eliot alludes to the Ave Maria: Pray for all those who are in ships, those Whose business has to do with fish… in-depth FACES Also pray for those who were in ships, and Ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea's lips Or in the dark throat which will not reject them Or wherever cannot reach them the sound of the sea bell's Perpetual angelus. For the past 15 years, Dana Hawkes and her late husband, Jerry Weist, owned the home. On Eliot's birthday last September, Hawkes ap- peared on National Public Radio talk- ing about the Eliot summerhouse and how her husband, who was working on a novel at the time, claimed "that Top and left, The interiors are in the classic Colonial Revival style; Above, T. S. Eliot photographs by Gretchen Parker (top and left) courtesy of the T. S. Eliot Estate (portrait)