The Dry Salvages
T. S. Eliot
(The
Dry
Salvages-presumably
les trois sauvages-is
a small group of
rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts.
Salvages
is pronounced to rhyme with
assuages. Groaner:
a whistling
buoy. The Gloucester fishing fleet of schooners, manned by Yankees, Irish
or Portuguese, has been superseded by motor trawlers.)
I.
I do not know much about gods; hut I think that the river
Is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities-ever, however, implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forge,t. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, hut waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom!
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.
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 hermit 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 tom seine,
The shattered lohsterpot, the broken oar
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