Symbol Analysis
At the beginning of "The Dry Salvages," the speaker muses that "the river / Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed, and intractable." A he goes on, he talks about how the river has meant different things to different people over time, first as an obstacle, then as something that allowed boats to carry freight (something to be harnessed), and finally something that humans have learned to ignore altogether by building bridges over it.
Similarly in our lives, we tend to take the natural landscape of the world and bypass it, ignore it, because our goals and routines give us serious tunnel-vision in our lives. The river, though, holds onto "his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder / Of what men choose to forget" (401). In other words, the river is always around to remind us that it can flood and force itself back into our lives. It seems that we only pay attention to nature when something goes wrong, but it's always there, biding its time and refusing to be ignored forever.
The River Timeline
- 393-394: "I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river / Is a strong brown god"
- 408: "The river is within us, the sea is all about us"
- 515: "Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes"
- 890-891: "At the source of the longest river / The voice of the hidden waterfall"