The Conversion of T.S. Eliot - Lord Harries of Pentregarth

first of all just to remind you very briefly of some basic facts about Eliot as background to what I'm saying the main theme he lived from 1888 to 1965 was born in st. Louis in the Midwest but his roots were in fact in Boston where his family were leading Unitarians he studied at Harvard the Sabon an Oxford before joining Lloyds Bank in 1917 he founded the criterion and placed it at the cutting edge of European literature he published the wasteland in 1922 which made a bigger impact than any other 20th century piece of literature it was seen as the voice of a disillusioned generation but no less expressed the pain and distress of Eliot's own first marriage Eliot was the most discerning critic of his time the great arbiter of taste who shaped people's evaluation of poetry and poets for a generation to come and this was further reinforced when he became a director of Faber and Faber in 1927 he was baptized and adopted a disciplined life as an Anglo Catholic Christians this was reflected in his poetry and culminated in the four quartets the major Christian poem of this century Eliot attempted to revive poetic drama and murder in the cathedral is still staged but his West End plays suffered in comparison with a very different kind of play being performed after World War two after the death of his first wife he found happiness in a Meritage with Vivian Fletcher who guarded his legacy and meticulously edited his correspondence now in his foreword to for Lancelot Andrews published in 1928 Eliot announced to a startled world that his general point of view could be described as classicist in literature Royalists in politics and anglo-catholic in religion the previous year on June the 29th 1927 he been baptized behind locked doors in the little Church fenced off near Oxford later interestingly the Church of Barbara PIM and the following morning he was confirmed at constant by the Bishop of Oxford Thomas strong his friend WT stead was sworn to secrecy I hate spectacular conversions wrote Elliot to him very firmly now I approach that conversion with three interlink questions in mind from what was he converted why did he convert and what was the immediate effect of that conversion and the seven volumes of Elliot's letters published in recent years are a very helpful way into some of these answers and I'll in by considering how his newfound faith is reflected in some of the poems he wrote at the time so first from what was he converting Elliot was brought up in the heart of New England unitarianism his mother's father-in-law Walter Greenleaf Eliot was a leading light in the movement and was a great hero and family role model and the whole family held a prominent position in the church indeed latest Eliot later described them as The Borgias of the papacy though anything less like the Borgias in moral character would be hard to imagine for this Unitarianism was characterized by a strong sense of moral duty high mindedness and the importance of education so from an early age he had instilled in him the ideals of unselfishness and public service not least through the Unitarian Church the family attended on Sundays this exacting demand pressed heavily on him throughout his life but emotionally and spiritually this former religion had no appeal to young Tom and when he went as a student to offer at Harvard he was indifferent to the church even as a boy Elliot had read an eye for the Buddha and at Harvard read widely in Eastern philosophy and mysticism and learnt Sanskrit and Pali and his latest biography sets out in some detail the extensive range of those courses and this interest was not just theoretical for about this time of the time of his graduation ceremony from Harvard he had the first of a few experiences the memory of which was to haunt him all his life as Lindell Gordon put it while walking one day in Boston he saw the street suddenly shrink and divided his everyday preoccupations his past all the claims of the future fell away and he was in folded in a great silence he had another one of those experiences later in Paris and they are reflected in least in one line in his great poem The Waste Land looking into the heart of light the silence some years later in the first of the four quartets his major Christian poem Eliot's poetry reflects a visit he paid with Emily Hale to a Cotswolds manor house burnt not Norton and in particular the moment when they stood by the empty swimming pool an experience that previously had interpreted in very in general terms he had by then incorporated into a Christian framework dry the pool dry concrete Brown edged and the pool was filled with water out of sunlight and the Lotus Rose quietly quietly the surface glittered out of heart of light another thread in the background for Eliot's conversion was the fact that he had a Roman Catholic nanny to whom he was devoted she used to take him on occasions to the colourful Church of the Immaculate Conception which he said I liked very much also he said later he remembered a theological argument about God as first calls being put to me at the age of six by a devoutly Catholic Irish nursemaid and the attraction towards Roman Catholicism reemerged much later in intellectual form when he was reflecting on the nature of tradition as is well known Eliot came to think that you could only be truly modern if you were deeply steeped in a tradition otherwise you were simply in danger of repeating the past by sweet being swept up in the fans of the present indeed he said that anyone wanted to continue as a per beyond the age of 30 had to write with the whole sweep of European literature from Oh Homer onwards in their bones he was not a member of any Church and he mocked what he called the true Church in his poem the he Potter paper Potamus but he used to visit anglo-catholic city churches in his lunch hour and he was conscious of Catholicism as the only church that can even pretend to maintain a philosophy of its own there is another aspect of this emphasis on tradition to delivering some extra mural lectures on French literature in Ilkley of all places in order to earn some money he stressed the need for form and restraint in writing in contrast to romanticism a classicist in art and literature will therefore be likely to adhere to a monarchical form of government and to the Catholic Church he wrote and this is because at the bottom of man's heart there is always the Beast and therefore man requires an SKS that is strict spiritual self-discipline now another element in the movement of his mind at this time was his reading of Lancelot Andrews Don and Don and Herbert from 1918 onwards as part of his consideration of the sermon as perhaps what he called the most difficult form of art and in the same way that CS Lewis found himself hugely attracted to Christian authors sometime before human self converted to Christianity Eliot was being drawn in the same way there's one further consideration about Eliot's pre-conversion out dog his skepticism Eliot always had a questioning critical mind it's one of the aspects of his character that fed into his great sense of mischievous humor which he retained even in his darkest hours then when he was studying at Oxford he became particularly interested in any in skeptical attitudes which called any dogmatic point of view into question this then was the background from which Elliott was converted first from his Unitarian upbringing he retained a strong sense of duty but reacted against it dry over optimistic view of life as he put it unitarianism is a bad preparation for brass tacks like birth copulation death hell heaven and in his sanity secondly there was his developing interest in Eastern religions and mysticism together with some powerful experience of heightened awareness which at the time he did not interpret in religious terms and thirdly his reaction against individualism and romanticism leading him not just to see the importance of tradition in literature but the strength of Catholic Christianity and it the Christianity with its realistic understanding of the seed of evil in the human heart and the consequent need for us cases of self-discipline and fourthly there was a skeptical side to him by nature which was reinforced by his philosophical studies and as we shall see this remained part of him even after his conversion Elliott announced his new belief in 1928 in a sudden peremptory manner but of course the various elements just mentioned were fermenting and mixing along the way in 1910 he wrote some blasphemous poems which is indicative because he regarded blasphemy as stemming from a partial belief of a mind in a particular an unusual state of spiritual sickness and might even be he said a way of affirming belief then in 1914 he was the write some visionary lines that over the years that developed into the wasteland finished finally in 1921 this poem was later dismissed by Eliot as a personal grouse against life but as I've mentioned was seen by others as the voice of that generation and though it is Sanskrit in some of its wording and Buddhists in some of its imagery it is a poem that on not only contains Christian themes but has a strong sense of Christian perative in it to lead an exemplary right life then in 1926 to the surprises of his brother and sister-in-law who are with him on a visit to Rome Eliot suddenly fell on his knees before Michelangelo's pietà about the same time he was struck by the number of people kneeling in the city churches he visited an aunt of his had written to a friend who joined the Episcopal Church in America do you kneel down in church and call yourself a miserable sinner neither I nor my family will ever do that but that gesture of a basement and worship was increasingly what Eliot did want to do and which he did the following year when he was baptized he wanted to kneel and this was followed some months later by his first confession Eliot wrote to WT stead who had helped him on his way to baptism that he had a sense of extraordinary sense of surrender and gain as if he had crossed a very wide deep river never to return so why the second question we countries then why did Eliot convert and the clue is given in the very stark and definitive way in which he describes his new commitment as classicist monarchist and Catholic he wanted more than a vague mysticism and more than a self-sufficient moralism he wanted something with a clear structure and discipline to it now classicism might be defined in a number of ways but one thing is certain is that it is opposed to what Eliot called the undisciplined squads of emotion which drive so many of our words now again royalism can be variously interpreted but at the least did indicate structure and degree and as toyless as shakespeare put it in Troilus and Cressida take but degree away untuned that string and hark what discord follows each thing meets in mayor pugna n-- see a very thoroughly researched book by barry spur shows the influence on TS Eliot are very definite Anglo Catholic beliefs and practices and he argues that it is impossible to engage in Eliot's poetry without a knowledge of the very particular religious Miglia which Eliot found his spiritual home as it existed from the 1920s to about 1955 and in his book he described it for those unfamiliar with it today indeed it is part of spurs thesis that this particular angular Catholic world no longer exists and needs explanation as much as any other past period of history now the immediate background of the conversion why the need for a definite structure and discipline was so urgent was the fact that Eliot's life personal life was a desperately unhappy mess the anguished hellish marriage for both Tom and his wife Vivian together with trying to do his job at the bank and later at Faber's keeping up his serious literary work and earn enough money to pay for the why very very heavy medical expenses for his wife was in taking an increasingly heavy toll on him he was barely coping indeed he was always on the edge of a breakdown he'd needed something to hold his life together and similarly it was if their desire to find something more solid than the individualism relativism an emotional ISM that he thought was rotting Western civilization he was looking for secure political order that could be sustained by an objective moral realm he was later to write the Christian scheme seemed the only possible scheme which found a place for values which I must maintain or perish and belief comes first and practice second the belief for instance in holy living and holy dying in sanctity chastity humility austerity and it was for this reason that he much regret the intellectual breakup of Europe and the rise of Protestantism and why he said he preferred the outlook of the 13th century to that of the 17th century now another factor in his move to the Christian faith was the thinness of Bertrand Russell's arguments some of you will remember that the leading atheist best-known atheist at that time was Bertrand Russell the Floss philosopher Bertrand Russell was a very very old friend of Eliot but Eliot wrote him about Russell's pamphlet on Christianity to say that it was a piece of childish folly and that the arguments in it had been familiar to him at the age of six or eight he took serious atheism very seriously and said that atheism should always be encouraged for the sake of the faith but about Bertrand Russell and indeed to Russell himself he wrote what I dislike is the smell of the corpse of Protestantism passing down the river as you will have gathered Elliot had a very pessimistic view of human nature his own and other people's all human relationships he thought turned out to be a delusion and a cheat however he said the love of God takes the place of the cynicism which otherwise is inevitable in every rational person on the basis of this love of God then every human love is enhanced and can be celebrating now the reference to cynicism is from a very important letter to Jeffrey faux Faber who accused him of being to a steer in which Elliot scents out the right relationship between the love of God and the most material of pleasures now a particular interest in all these letters that have been published over this last decade is volume 6 in connection with some correspondence he had with the poet Stephen spender in 1930 in over his 1932 broadcast in which Elliott discusses how his mind has moved towards faith and has already mentioned he said he needed to hold a van without which he would perish but in his view values depended on religions and those values would be expressed in highly disciplined Christian living he had nothing but scorn for the average product of the English public school system which sought he believed to turn out gentlemen rather than Christians the two being totally antithetical he also argues that the real choice to be made is between Christianity and communism though he certainly didn't want to be in line with the usual anti-communism he said he loathed both communism and the society in which he was then living and he reserved particular scorn for the Conservative Party of the time which he saw as nothing more than an unsavory alliance of liberalism and lazy fair economics he looked for an eternity of Christian way of ordering society an idea which took form book form some seven years later that book of his called the idea of a Christian society for now he needed a structure and a discipline to hold his own life together and the angular catholicism of the 1920s provided just that the Puritan element from his New England upbringing could find an outlet in the rigors of self-examination and confession his mystical yearning could find its true goal and fulfilment in the adoration of the God who became incarnate and who was present to us in the Blessed Sacrament the defining difference for him between his new Creed and his Unitarian background an embankment this in hang the chasm this sacrament mental form bought with a sense a mystery and awe in which his desire to worship could find proper expression and his belief in the importance of tradition found its home in his sense of belonging to the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church there is of course the question which might really well - occurred - why didn't you become an Anglican rather than the Roman Catholic it would have been very natural for him to become a Roman Catholic be given what big what we know of his term istic philosophy of life and because of his wide not and deep sympathy for European culture as a whole but he valued the greater freedom of thought provided the church by the Church of England and the more moderate Via Media it provided to religious successes when he'd first started to read sermons in nineteen eighty eighteen read them for their literary form he'd first been excited by John Donne later however it was the sober approach of people like Lancelin Angelou's with their settled resolute will to holiness drew him then there was george herbert of course as well they're not least was his consciousness of his english family forebears and fitting naturally into their continuing life as an english christian and not just as a European intellectual and this leads on to the third question what was the immediate fate of this conversion the answer again is quite clear a new discipline of life as mentioned he made his confess first confession and that discipline continued indeed he sought a new confessor one who would be much more severe with him he became a nearly daily communicant and he agreed to be a church warden that since stevens gloucester rolled a roll he held for 25 years and there's a telling anecdote by herbert read the art historian who was staying with elliott in the spare bedroom when he said he was woken up in the morning by a slight noise he saw hands sliding through the door to reach first an umbrella and then a bowler hat before the door slit shut again it was eliot going off to weekday early-morning communion and it was the first indication he had that elliott had become a christian now some lines from the Four Quartets sunk succinctly sum up his approach to life Eliot refers to those moments in life when we're taken out of ourselves for example by music but as he writes these are only hints followed by guesses what matters are the basic disciplines of the Christian life prayer observance thought and action let me just read that those few lines for most of us there is only the unattended moment the moment in and out of time the distraction fit lost in a shaft of sunlight the wild time unseen or the one winter lightning or the waterfall or music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all but you are the music while the music lasts these are only hints and guesses hints followed by guesses and the rest is prayer observance discipline thought and action the hint half guessed the gift half understood his incarnation there is a revealing letter about this time to his American scholar friend Paul Moore in which Eliot refers to people who seemed to have no need of religion he wrote they may be very good or very happy they simply seemed to miss nothing to being unconscious of any void the void I find in the middle of all human happiness and all human relationships and which there is only went one thing which will fill it I am one whom this sense of void tends to drive towards asceticism or sensuality and only Christianity helps to reconcile me to life which is otherwise disgusting but the people I have in mind the good ones are much more puzzling than the bad have an easy and innocent acceptance of life that I simply can't understand it's more bewilderingly evil now some people when they convert become narrow and intolerant in defense of their new faith almost the opposite happened Elliot he became if anything even more open intellectually to a range of truth he continued to select a commission articles for the criterion on the same grounds as before nearly all the people he knew was shocked and appalled by the new turn in Elliott's life but he remained remarkably unfazed by their attacks on him and he continued to have good relationships even with people would sharply and for the wrong reasons savaged his new faith he remained friends with people who had very different views of life to his own which was nearly all the people he knew continuing to offer objective literary judgments about their literary worth of their writing there was no insecure defensiveness about him and this was because he had first faced in himself all the worst things that anyone else might say Conrad Aiken for example had criticized for Lance at Andrews as showing quotes a thin and vinegar ish hostility to the modern world a complete abdication of intelligence etc to which Elliott replied you may be right most of these criticisms I had anticipated or made myself thrice armed is he who knows what a humbug he is my progress if I ever make any will be purging myself of a large number of impure motives more widely he welcomed the new hostile situation in which Christians now found themselves for it released the Christian faith from what had burned it since the 18th century namely being a badge of respectability for the English middle classes now we get a idea of the kind of intellectual culture in which Elliott moved in a letter he wrote to Paul Elmer more distinguished American scholar who followed much the same path as Elliott himself Elliott wrote I might almost say that I never met any Christians until after I had made up mind to become one he knew that his conversion would expose him to ridicule but this didn't deter him as he said anyone who has been moving in intellectual circles and comes to the church may experience odd rather exhilarating feeling of isolation his new faith was a definite one in the sense that it fully adopted the creed and outlook of the young Anglicanism of the day and was hostile to any liberalizing tendencies and we find this at its most startling in his attitude to Paul Elmer's views on hell he liked and deeply respected more as a person in a scholar but found his view of Hell too liberal is your God Santa Claus he asked and continued to be damned for the glory of God his sense not paradox and throughout the letters of the period there are the same strong lucid opinions on a whole range of subjects literary political and religious Stern and uncompromising in tone yet also self-mocking and caring of the recipient they indicate the kind of difference becoming a Christian in particular Catholic Anglican made to his life he wrote I know just enough and no more of the peace of God to know that it is an extraordinarily painful blessing and again he wrote faith is not a substitute for anything it does not give things that life is refused but something else and in the ordinary sense it does not make one happier I mentioned Elliot sceptical cast to mind this did not change with his conversion he continued to be highly critical of Western culture and religion and of course of course but neither did allow the fundamental questions about faith to go away rather he believed that in one sense they became intensified and one of the reasons that Elliot was drawn to Pascal was that he said he quotes faced unflinchingly the demon of doubt which is inseparable from the spirit of belief again he wrote every man who thinks and lives by thought must have his own skepticism that which stops at the question that which ends in denial or that which leads to faith and which is somehow integrated into the faith which transcends it and he also wrote the more conscious becomes the belief so the more conscious becomes the unbelief indifference doubt and skepticism appear a higher religion imposes a conflict a division torment and struggle within the individual as Elliott brought out in a important letter to Jerry favor which I haven't quoted he did in fact relish the ordinary pleasures of life and found them enhanced by his religion them extraordinary details in this these letters for example that that he knew fifty different kinds of cheese and could evaluate them all in terms of the quality of their of their taste one of theirs absurd even so despite all this darkness you know he he did manage to find some pleasures in life later on in life with his second marriage he was to discover an unexpected happiness in love but for this period of his life what he discovered through his faith was something much tougher as he put it to me religion has bought at least the perception of something above morals and therefore extremely terrifying it has brought me not happiness but the sense of something above happiness and therefore more terrifying than ordinary pain and misery the very not dark night and the desert now in 1927 the year of his conversion Eliot wrote his poem the journey of the may guy he wrote it quickly between church and lunch one Sunday with the aid of half a bottle of gin much of it is based on Lancelot Andrew Andrews Christmas sermon of 16 at 62 which describes a long hard journey to Bethlehem some of the imagery clearly draws on the New Testament some of the imagery though highly evocative seems obscure let me just read a little bit of that that will be familiar to many of you I think because it tends to be a poem which is a read quite a lot around the the Christmas period if you remember it begins with lines from a sermon of Lancelot in Andrews a cold coming we had of it just the worst time of the year for a journey and such a long journey the ways deep and the weather sharp the very dead of winter and the camels gold saw forty drew factory lying down in the melting snow there were times we regretted the summer palaces on slopes the terraces and the single silken girls bringing sherbert etc etc and then all this was a long time ago I remember and I would do it again but sent down this set down this where we led all the way for birth or death it was birth certainly we had evidence and no doubt I had seen in birth and death but had thought they were different this birth was hard and bitter agony for us like death our death we returned to our places these kingdoms no longer at ease here in the old dispensation with an alien people clutching their gods I should be glad of another death so that permits a whole clearly reflects Elliott's own journey to faith and the long journey that lay ahead of him as a Christian as he put it to his friend Paul Elma more most critics appear to think that my Catholicism is Mary an escape-and-evasion one was supposed to have settled oneself in an easy-chair when one has only just begun a long journey on foot he already knows that this journey though it involves the recognition of a birth means for him a personal death a displacement of the self oppressor prising a way of the selfs attachments are so much he'd valued before afterwards the make I leave the Christ jar to returned home but no longer at ease here in the old dispensation with an alien people touching their gods so as Elliott put it elsewhere we are certainly a minority even in what are called Christian countries we find the minds of the people about us growing more and more alien so that on vital matters we often find we have no common assumptions the next home he wrote was a song for Simeon based upon the story in the news Testament of which we get the nunc dimittis which is said as that evening prayer then after that in 1929 he wrote any mullah not quite so well as another's but the key poem for life it sheds on what his conversion meant to Elliot emotionally and spiritually is Ash Wednesday although published in its present form in 1930 the four sections were all completed by 1928 some of them published separately and the themes had obviously been in his mind before that key date of 1927 when he announced his new faith to the world he did not disliked it being called a religious let alone a devotional poem rather he said it marked a stage in a person's life to put it in very prosaic terms it is a poem of renunciation a resolve not to turn back to what the world values a determination not to look back with longing regrets or nostalgia it is a poem in which all hope is given up because in the words of John of the Cross which he used later in burned north of Norton one of the sections of Four Quartets hope would be hoped for the wrong thing so as Wednesday begins with the hope that he would not have to again 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 toward such things why should the age at Eagle stretch its wings why should I mourn the vanished power of the usual rain because I do not hope to know again the infirmary of the positive are because I do not think because I know I shall not know the one veritable transitory power because I cannot drink there where trees flower and Springs though for there is nothing again now the key opening because I do not hope to turn again comes from a Italian perch from the thirteenth century who me much admired called Cavalcanti and pound also had much admired it / Cayo non sparrow did turn our gia my and the line loads itself in ill its mind and he could not rest until he'd used it and the poem is full of other borrowings borrowing rather than allusion being Eliot's method borings from the psalms and other parts of scripture the liturgy prayers of the church and these references are often clear in themselves but people complained in and continued to do so about the poems obscurity early believed that a poem should be obscured like life he said or any living thing it needs to be appreciated for the mystery of itself in itself it is not a conundrum to be solved some of the imagery he admitted like the yew tree in the Vale sister even came from his recurrent dreams and they give the perimeter loosen Ettore film like effect and this combined with its incantatory tone in dowser with a haunting quality now that said Ehlert is quite clear what the poem is fundamentally about for he said it was a deliberate nova of dante in that book dontist site of beatrice Kindle said love and that love leads him to the Virgin Mary and onward up to the mountain of purgatory Elliot seems to have had his own Beatrice in Emily Hale an American friend with whom he corresponded over the years Eliot once discussed with his friend WT stead how Dante's love for Beatrice had passed over into the love of God in the via Turner / I've had that experience said Elliot eagerly and rather shyly and laps then lapsed into silence it was Emily Hale who went with Elliot to burn Norton in September 1934 a visit which inspired not only the title of the poem but a mystical moment by the empty pool which I described earlier and before that in the poem there are lines about pars which were not followed the persona of the poem is in the desert Ezekiel's valley of dry bones everywhere is desolation disillusion the air is dry and all is dead but a lady appears who points to Mary who leads him out of the desert as Elliot wrote I found my own love for a woman enhanced purified and intensified by meditation on the virgin but it was in the desert that he found the secret of peace again from Dante this time Paradiso three Ella sue Evelyn Tata in Astra patchy our peace in his will so the poem has a number of sections with some very memorable imagery lady three white leopards sat under a juniper tree in the cool of day having fed to satiety on my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained in the hollow round of my skull and God said shall these bones live shall these bones live and that which had been contained in the bones which were already dry said chirping because of the goodness of this lady and because of her loveliness and because she honours the Virgin in vegetation we shine with brightness then there's a wonderful imagery of the spiral staircase going up in the first turning the second stair I turn and saw below the same shape twisted on the banister under the vapor in the fetid air struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears the deceitful face of hope and despair so he goes up the stairways and he meets towards the end the what he one he calls the veiled sister so just to end on on the end of that that that Ash Wednesday where it comes to some lines which rarely sum up what he really found through his Christianity blessed sister holy mother spirit at the fountains spirit of the garden suffer us not to mark ourselves with falsehood teach us to care and not to care teach us to sit still even among these rocks our peace in his will and even among these rocks sister mother and spirit of the Living River spirit of the sea suffer me not to be separated and let my cry come unto thee now some of you will immediately recognize some of those phrases of course but straight from the literary liturgy of a very familiar fret suffer me not to be separated and let my cry come unto to thee it's not always an easy poem that Ash Wednesday but it is it is a very a very wonderful one and then finally for the poems there is marina published in 1930 it is I have to admit a poem that a rather passed me by until Rowan Williams and I shared a day speaking on Eliot not long ago and he remarked that it so moved him he was not an able to read it aloud in public so maybe think what on earth of I'm being missing all these years and it's also noteworthy and I found this in this corresponds that Eliot said it was his favorite poem the dominant image is based on the recognition of shakespeare's pericles of his supposedly lost daughter marina but there is an implied contrast with Senecas hercules fury ins in which hercules comes to and finds his killed his children for it is addressed oh my daughter the boat on which the poet set sail is an old one much repaired and the poem is full of the imagery of Maine which meant so much to Eliot which comes to full flower later in the dry salvages in the four Cortes but here the imagery is not for the coast itself but for a reconnection with something in himself set off by Emily Hale already mentioned in my discussion of Ash Wednesday Emily Hale his Beatrice not only channeled his love towards God but acted as a muse in releasing his poetry hers is a faith through which grace comes and that grace that face dissolves in place and that place is the coastlands and the Seas of Maine which he loves so much as a boy and on this voyage he made this unknowing half consciously unknown my own living in time beyond time with the awakened lips parted the hope the new ships so let's just have a brief look at Maryna begins again it's not together and easy and so on but in the background after part of the remedies is that the Elliott as a boy loved sailing and was a very good sailor and used to sail quite a way out on the Maine coast off the main co-co-co of the Maine coast what sees what Shaw's what gray rocks and what islands what water lapping the bow and sent a pine in the would rouse singing through the fog what images return oh my daughter then it goes on towards the end I made this I have forgotten and remember the wait rigging week and the canvas rotten between 1 June and another September made this unknowing half-conscious unknown my own the GAR board straight leaks the seams need caulking this form this face this life living to live in a world of time beyond me let me resign my life of this life my speech for that unspoken the awakened lips parted the hope the new ships what sees what Shaw's what granite islands toward my timbers and woodrugh scouring through the fog my daughter it's interesting that Ellie admitted that his desire for progeny had once been very acute so like Pericles Shakespeare's play which Elliott much admired the poem is about recognition Elliott recognized that his pent-up desire to love could be channeled towards God by his newly awakened feeling for Emily as symbolized in his childhood memories of the Maine coast and I mentioned Maine was the scene of Elliott Smith an ambitious sailing ventures as Lindell Gordon who I think is still the best biographer area puts it it is there in imagination that his Voyager is awakened as the longed-for call comes through the fog and suppressed emotion for the long-lost yet familiar woman breaks out in a cry of recognition this was the intense new life that Lily Elliott lived behind the carapace of successful publisher man of letters and austere celibate Christian it was a life out of hell into the peace of his will I think we're coming towards the end on Ravana which tonight would you like me just to read the LA where I deliberately haven't dealt with Four Quartets because that's a whole new you need a whole lecture to deal with the four Cortes and I was just dealing ready with with a turning point in his life long before he wrote the four quartet but would you like me just end with the last few lines of the Four Quartets because they are they are wonderful they bring together his great love and influence of Dante and the images from from Dante we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time through the unknown remembered gate when the last of Earth left to discover is that which was the beginning at the source of the longest river the voice of the hidden waterfall and the children in the apple tree not known because not looked for but heard half heard in the stillness between two waves in the sea quick now here now always a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything and also be well and all manner of things shall be well when the tongues of flame are in folded into the crown not of fire and the fire and the rows are one that last line brings together imagery which runs through the Four Quartets the fire which is the fire of the Holy Spirit which purchased us and brings self-knowledge and the Rose which comes from Dante which is the communion of saints so in that final image the fire of God's love and the Rose which is the communion of saints are welded together the crown fire and the fire and the rose are one but you'll recognize some of you'll recognize those very famous words from the 14th century dude mystic Julian of Norwich and all should be well and all manner of things shall be well wonderful wonderful words gives one hope in the darkest situations [Applause] you [Applause]

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Published: Mon Jun 18 2018