Want to catch a glimpse of the face of God? Or at least feel what it is like to know Him? Take stroll and climb the stairway to Heaven with T.S. Eliot and Russell Kirk on Ash Wednesday. Being Downriver Darrin and the distiller of the great books that I’ve had the good fortune to [...]
T.S. Eliot’s “Ash-Wednesday,” a monumental work—the Purgatorio between the Inferno of “The Waste-land” and the Paradiso of the “Four Quartets”—has always been, as long as I can remember in my adult life, a comfort and a mystery to me. I assume it remained as such even to the Great Bard of the Twentieth Century himself. [...]
Ash Wednesday Receive this cross of ash upon your brow, Brought from the burning of Palm Sunday’s cross. The forests of the world are burning now And you make late repentance for the loss. But all the trees of God would clap their hands The very stones themselves would shout and sing If you could [...]
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 aged eagle stretch its wings?) Why should I mourn The vanished power of the usual [...]
T.S. Eliot’s “Ash-Wednesday” helps us to consider our earthly transience, just as Ash Wednesday reminds us of this same fact that our time on earth is passing. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita . . . There is something telling about man’s tendency to view his life as a journey, for journeys convey the [...]
In “Ash Wednesday,” T.S. Eliot repudiated his ironic style along with his despairing and nihilistic view of the world. When he wrote it, he was turning from the hell of the wasteland of unbelief to receive his ashes and begin his long Lent. T.S. Eliot’s secret baptism in 1927 marked one of the most remarkable [...]
In re-reading T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday on Ash Wednesday, a friend asks what many have wondered: “Excuse me, but what on earth does ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree’ mean?” Is it such a mystery? With a little bit of detective work we can see through the illusion, connect the allusion, pick up [...]
For those of us blessed enough to have visited Russell Kirk’s Piety Hill, we already know what charms have settled over the place, become one with the surrounding woods, the architecture, and the very home itself. Annette Kirk, that uncontainable force of nature, is, of course, the perfect hostess. And, who would not be enthralled [...]
I have a small and secret desire, well-hid. Secret from whom, you ask? Secret from me, I suspect, Or maybe I am a suspect, secretly, Quietly desiring. This is the week to bring a secret forth Not by telling, no "big reveal" But quietly, like the secret itself Into the ashes of Wednesday morning. Ashes [...]