The third of Eliot’s Four Quartets, ‘The Dry Salvages’ – although it sounds like a most unwatery poem – actually takes its name from les trois sauvages, a group of rocks off Cape Ann in Massachusetts. Is it her own reflection? Or another human being? Or something else? We’ve discussed this ambiguous poem here. The speaker of the poem comes across something in the waters of a pool and wonders what it is. This short five-line poem is, along with ‘Oread’, Hilda Doolittle’s finest achievement as an Imagist poet. The harvest time and Christian redemption are united under the rain falling from heaven. This delicate poem, whose short lines and short stanzas suggest the droplets of falling rain, was first published in 1917, and the casualties of the First World War may be hinted at by Lawrence’s ‘dead / men that are slain’.
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