Tuesday, March 26, 2013

News at Eleven: They begin with Journey of the Magi,

A Song for Simeon, Animula, then the six poems that together make up Ash-Wednesday, and--my favourite poem of [T.S.] Eliot's--Marina. These poems are devotional, for want of a better word, but they are not versified religion; they exemplify the sensuousness of belief, the ecstasy of it, as much as its exactions, as in Journey of the Magi--"And the silken girls bringing sherbet"--and in Ash-Wednesday : "Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,/Lilac and brown hair", as well as the Lady "withdrawn/In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown". He had put The Waste Land behind him as being "a little out of date, even with respect to my own composition".

from The Irish Times: The Letters of TS Eliot, Volume 4: 1928-1929

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