Today being Ash Wednesday seems a very good occasion on which to share an article from the Daily Telegraph by Christopher Howse. In it he writes about T.S. Eliot’s set of six poems, written in 1927 and published as “Ash Wednesday” in 1930. It is often seen as Eliot’s “conversion” piece, written when he became an Anglo-Catholic. As the article points out many critics in 1930 missed many of the liturgical allusions in the text, let alone how many would miss them today, which is a depressing commentary on the state of our society.
The text of the poem can be found online, and there are a number of online videos about it.
Howse’s article can be read at Sacred Mysteries: The churchgoers’ secret to T S Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’
For those without Telegraph subscriptions I found a page with a copy of T S Eliot's Ash Wednesday poem:
ReplyDeletehttps://englishverse.com/poems/ash_wednesday
It's rather too enigmatic and baffling for my taste, and I'm ashamed to say I prefer his humorous poem Macavity:
https://englishverse.com/poems/macavity_the_mystery_cat
John (Ramsden) [ jrq@gmx.com ]