![]() It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men. 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. 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. Unhonoured, unpropitiated By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting. Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget. The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten By the dwellers in cities-ever, however, implacable. (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.) I I do not know much about gods but 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. ![]()
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