Talk:The Dry Salvages

The Dry Salvages has been listed as one of the Language and literature good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

The Dry Salvages is part of the Four Quartets series, a good topic. This is identified as among the best series of articles produced by the Wikipedia community. If you can update or improve it, please do so.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
August 10, 2009	Good article nominee	Listed
September 28, 2009	Good topic candidate	Promoted

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on April 29, 2009.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that T. S. Eliot's Paradiso-like poems of the Four Quartets (Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding) are modeled on the structure of his Inferno-like poem The Waste Land?

Current status: Good article

The Meaning of the River

I am disappointed to read this on the current page:

The narrator compares rivers to a "strong brown god" that humanity tames especially in city life, while the sea is powerful, mysterious, and filled with many discordant "voices" that embody both creative and destructive forces of time and nature beyond human control

After all, Eliot suggests that the river, forgotten by mankind, remains dangerous. In which case it is a metaphor for mankind's belief that life is controllable. Here is the exact passage:

"ever, however, implacable. Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting."

I hesitated making a change because I have no literary authority — am merely an intellectual who has read this poem deeply — especially seeing the river as that thing mankind invents process, bureaucracy, procedure, and mythology thinking we can control.

In this case, the sea is a fully different type of uncertainty — yet both are encountered by humanity. Dsgarnett (talk) 23:16, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]