MR. ELIOT

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

So begins T. S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday. I have read it many times. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand most of Eliot, but I keep reading it from time to time. I occasionally purchase books to explain Eliot to me. (I just bought two more of them on sale.) I can’t say I understand it any more. A good friend in seminary, Dennis, tried to explain it to me. I’m just too dense to get it. Or maybe the poetry is too dense. I try reading it any way.

My first experience of Elliot was in high school English class where we read The Hollow Men. (Goodness, that was so long ago. Eliot was still alive the first time I read his poem.)

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpieces filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.

I love that image “rats’ feet over broken glass.”  Can you hear the sound?

And then towards the end the absurd verse:

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

And the ending:

For Thine is
For life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Maybe I wouldn’t have continued reading Eliot if I hadn’t run across the beautiful poem Journey of the Magi.

This is its magnificent ending. The Magi who has told the story of going to see the infant Jesus says:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death
But had thought they were quite different; this birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Several times I have read that poem to people, but they respond with a grunt “Huh?”  

Maybe it is that conversion that took place in Eliot from atheist (or maybe agnostic) to and Anglican Christian that intrigues me. Scholars can see the conversion in his poetry.  Maybe what fascinates me is that the same man who wrote such deep poems also wrote the humorous Old ‘Possum’s Book of Practical Cats which became the basis for the musical Cats. Maybe it is that someone who hobnobbed with great thinkers like Bertrand Russell was also a friend of Groucho Marx. Maybe I keep reading what I don’t understand because I believe in the old adage that a man’s reach should surpass his grasp.

Maybe I just have Eliot on the brain lately because Eugene Peterson (see the blog on him) read this quote form Eliot’s poem Little Gidding:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from . . .

May the Lord bless you on your journey and greet you on your arrival which just might turn out to be where you started from.

Wayne





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