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When the river runs dry book5/30/2023 In January 2019, a viral video showed grown men near Menindee weeping as they held dead Murray Cod, decades old, which had perished in yet another environmental disaster. With water rights and security becoming increasingly vital issues for communities, When the River Runs Dry offers hope for a better water future. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.An Australian-made exploration of the rules governing the Murray Darling Basin and how they are destroying the environment, causing extinction-level events, and displacing communities. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. Quite where the poem’s speaker is destined in the final stanza remains tantalisingly unexplained.ĭiscover more classic poetry with our pick of the greatest comic poems, great poems about water, these classic poems about secrets, and these extremely short poems. For more classic poetry, we recommend The Oxford Book of English Verse – perhaps the best poetry anthology on the market (we offer our pick of the best poetry anthologies here, and list the best books for the poetry student here). Yet this is an encounter in a dream (or rather several dreams): the water is purer than in real life, and Raine’s speaker is an ‘expected guest’ at the house by the river’s edge. The English poet Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) wrote this wonderful poem about an encounter ‘down by the riverside’. With one of the most mispronounced titles in all of twentieth-century poetry (as Eliot’s note informs us, the final word should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘assuages’, so ‘Sal-VAY-giz’), ‘The Dry Salvages’, named for the trois sauvages off the New England coast, are the theme of this ‘water poem’, the third of Eliot’s Four Quartets. an afterlife – hence the title of the poem): ‘Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond / But is there anything Beyond?’ This poem, composed in 1913, uses fish in a stream, brook, or pond to comment on human piety, and specifically the reasons mankind offers for a belief in something more than one’s immediate surroundings (e.g. By one of the twentieth century’s greatest American modernist poets.įish say, they have their Stream and Pond This poem about ‘the river that flows nowhere, like a sea’ contains a wonderful use of the word ‘curriculum’ in a poem, summoning the running motion of the river (while also, perhaps, hinting at the curriculum vitae, the life-giving properties of that running river). Wallace Stevens, ‘ The River of Rivers in Connecticut’. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘ Looking-Glass River’.Īs well as writing Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) also wrote the perennially popular A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), a collection of poems for younger readers including this lovely poem about gazing into the reflective waters of the river. Emily Dickinson, ‘ My River Runs to Thee’.Ī short poem, even by Dickinson’s brief, telegrammatic standards, but as with so many of Dickinson’s poems, it carries an arresting opening line, and reminds us that the river and the sea are endlessly linked in one great cycle (as our pick of the best sea poems serves to prove).
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