The Dry Salvages

The Dry Salvages is the third poem of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and marks the beginning of when the series was consciously being formed as a set of four poems. It was written and published in 1941 during the air-raids on Great Britain, an event that threatened him while giving lectures in the area. The title comes from the name of a rock formation near a town he spent time at as a child, which reflects Eliot's references to his own past throughout the poem.

The poem discusses the nature of time and what humanity's place is within time. Life is described metaphorically as travelling in a boat and humanity's fixation on science and future gain keeping the travellers from reaching their destination. Within the poem, Eliot invokes the image of Krishna to emphasise the need to follow the divine will instead of seeking personal gain.

Eliot began working on The Dry Salvages during World War II at a time when London was experiencing air-raids near the end of 1940. During the time, he moved around often and spent his time writing mostly lectures or tiny poems. However, he was able to find time to work on the third poem that would become part of the Four Quartets: Eliot envisioned that Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and a fourth, yet uncreated poem would be united in a set. Eliot wrote the poem quickly and sent the first draft off on 1 January 1941 to John Hayward. After Hayward received the draft, the two began corresponding about corrections and alterations to the poem. Geoffrey Faber joined in and then the poem was soon finished. It was published in the February 1941 issue of the New English Weekly.

According to a note by Eliot under the title, "The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the north east coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages." The location is a place that Eliot knew, and the poem links the image of Cape Ann to Eliot's boyhood sailing at Gloucester Harbor. The Dry Salvages also invokes images of the Mississippi River and Eliot's childhood in St Louis. These images and the other personal references were originally intended to be discussed in an autobiographical work that was to collect a series of essays about Eliot's childhood.

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