On Turning and Not-Turning: Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems and A Song for Simeon
Abstract: Ash-Wednesday places special burdens on the reader, developing strategies begun in earlier poems and moving toward fulfillment of efforts and effects, requiring mindfulness of the poems’ disparate voices and their falsehoods. Rather than turn from the world, Eliot dramatizes the Christian call to turn toward the “Lady of silences,” thence the world: the world redeemed via the Incarnation entails God’s working in, through, and by means that include falsehoods and evil. To Ash-Wednesday, the Ariel poem A Song for Simeon (1928) stands as counterpoint, being for the aged Jew who speaks the poem and in whom the effects of the Incarnation are dramatized. Eliot turns an apparent spiritual autobiography into a dramatic mirror in which Simeon may see himself.
Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian. New York. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137444462.0006.
I “Sovegna vos”: voices and the reader
To a degree largely unrecognized, Eliot seeks in Ash-Wednesday to bring his reader into the poems, have him or her participate actively in its articulation of meaning and significance. The poems represent no “clinical” effort, no distanced or objective or impersonal effort; the goal is, in every sense, to affect—as the Magus has been affected in the first Ariel poem by the Incarnation. This effort involves, and in fact begins with, the reader’s having, in the first editions of Ash-Wednesday, to turn page after page after page before encountering, and in order to encounter, the verses themselves: front free endpaper, a blank page, another blank, the half-title, the title page, the dedication “To My Wife,” and the half-title again. The effort brings the reader in while both hinting at the necessity of physical effort and material necessity and, at the same time, alerting us to the matter of turning, which is essential to the titular day in the Christian calendar, perhaps a token of the poems’ being as a “conversion” piece (Eliot’s first long poem after joining the Church of England and formally embracing “anglo-catholicism”), and at the beginning, end, and heart of Ash-Wednesday’s poetic and thematic interests. The reader is called upon to do much more, of course, and that includes essentially replicating the poems’ own motional efforts by attending to (different) voices, facing difficulty, encountering falsehood and being disabused of it, discovering the presence and operations of essential pattern. “Sovegna vos,” Ash-Wednesday says at one point, speaking in Provencal and evidently addressing the reader directly and with concern and care: Be mindful.1
Ash-Wednesday begins in a sort of stuttering voice, the “I” present but not exactly accounted for. We do not know, at this point, whether the “I” is to be identified with the poet, as in Romantic poems, or with a dramatic figure like J. Alfred Prufrock. The “I” fades in importance to the words, the twice-stated “turn,” the thrice-stated “hope” and “Because,” a conjunction though not a coordinate conjunction. The words gain in importance when we arrive at the sixth and last of the poems and discover a beginning that rhymes with the first verses, identical to them, in fact, except for that pesky conjunction, which becomes “Although.” The reader is thus alerted to the play of similarity and difference and is therefore being engaged in acts of distinguishing and comparing. The differences in conjunction are subtle but significant: “Although” suggests an understanding absent in the facticity present in the first “speech.” The question of who is speaking remains unanswered, although words themselves have asserted their prominence.
“Sovegna vos.”
The first three verse paragraphs in the opening poem, originally published separately and then titled in Provencal “Perch’io Non Spero” (from the ballata of Guido Cavalcanti, another of friend Pound’s favorites), begin with the conjunction “Because,” as does the fifth paragraph. The voice soon sounds resigned to this lack of hope, no longer “Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope.” Thus “he” says [I will henceforth, for sake of convenience only, so refer to the “speaker”], “I no longer strive to strive towards such things.” And, he adds, there is no reason, really, to “mourn / The vanished power of the usual reign.” In other words, no longer turning, he has become his own still point. And he seems increasingly proud that things are, indeed, as they are.
The second verse paragraph shows an accentuation of the voice’s condition, “turning” having modulated into questions of “knowing”: “Because I do not hope to know again.” He will not, he says resignedly, “know again / The infirm glory of the positive hour.” Indeed, he says he does not now “think,” and knows, further, that he “shall not know / The one veritable transitory power.” What that is, is not identified. In the last verses of the paragraph, further modulation occurs as “thinks” turns into the rhyming “drink”: “Because I cannot drink / There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again.” This last assertion contrasts with “positive hour,” further adding to our suspicions regarding the speaker. If, as many readers have (falsely) reckoned, the speaker is somehow growing into an asceticism allegedly required of the Christian religion to which the poet recently turned, the resignation here represented as demoralizing and debilitating regret can hardly be welcomed by the reader though embraced by the speaker.
The third verse paragraph cinches the case. It begins with the speaker declaring that he knows that “there is always time,” furthermore that “place is always and only place” and, still more, that “what is actual is actual only for one time / And only for one place.” In truth, this is a daring, as well as false, statement, at least according to Christian reckoning. Whether a reader—even a Christian reader—would be alert to the falsehood is, I think, open to question at this point. A reader who knows the later Four Quartets would, however, know better, and should readily see the speaker’s falsehood. The Incarnation means that every moment, every place, is attended—just as each person is intersected, represented, for example, in the “familiar compound ghost” of “Little Gidding.”2 Another time “attends” every moment, another place every place: “the intersection of the timeless moment / Is England and nowhere. Never and always.” Despite, then, the confident (if resigned) assertion of the first speaker in Ash-Wednesday, there is time and, place and.
The speaker in Ash-Wednesday claims that this anti-Incarnational condition is fine; in fact, he says, “I rejoice that things are as they are.” And why not? It is so much easier not to have to sort through complications and untie knots, in going straight through, without having to worry about intersections, at which you have to stop—and think, and drink—as well as often to yield, certainly to exercise judgment and make decisions. Renouncing, though, “the blessed face” (identified later in the poems with the Virgin) and “the voice” (perhaps that of the “Lady,” who resembles Mary), the speaker goes on to say that he rejoices precisely as a consequence of not hoping “to turn again.” He rejoices, he finally acknowledges, because of “having to construct something / Upon which to rejoice.” As we suspected earlier, the speaker is now in the business of engendering, spider-like, the bases of his understanding solely out of himself, with no outside help wanted or needed.3 He is, in the final analysis, the antithesis, as it were, to the poems’ thesis.
Will Eliot’s reader—whether or not Christian—be able to see through the speaker and his falsehoods? He or she may not know at this early point in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, linked but in so many ways not an identity; the reader may, then, not be expecting to turn from the speaker. It may well be that that capacity comes only at the end—not the end of the poems, at that, but the end of Eliot’s poetic writing, in Four Quartets. As he says there, in “Little Gidding”: “And what you thought you came for / Is only a shell, a husk of meaning / From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled / If at all” (italics added). Eliot’s poetry may, thus, follow the pattern he seeks precisely to describe.
End-ing does indeed become an and-ing.
But the voice early on in Ash-Wednesday by no means lacks insight and understanding, even though it is partial (perhaps only “half”-right). In fact, he then proceeds to “pray to God” for mercy “upon us.” (Interestingly, nowhere else in Ash-Wednesday is prayer addressed directly to God, but rather through the mediation and intercessions of the Virgin Mary.) The speaker immediately, and suspiciously, turns from the plural to the singular, now praying to “forget / These matters that with myself I too much discuss / Too much explain,” complicating his earlier statement that he does not “know.” He next repeats his opening refrain and adds, “Let these words answer / For what is done, not to be done again / May the judgement not be too heavy upon us,” returning to the plural. I find no acknowledgment, or even hint, of remorse or repentance, only the apparent desire not to do again whatever ill and wrong he has before committed. Moreover, the speaker signals that it is by his “words” alone that he expects to be judged, that may, in fact, serve to justify him: his “words” will “answer” for both past and future, will perhaps atone for them.
And yet—this unreliable speaker, whose turns can be dizzying despite his claim not to turn at all, then utters what is apparently another prayer, one that will figure prominently at poems’ end as a signal thematic and doctrinal statement: “Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still.” In a very real sense, the speaker sits still, occupying a still point, or at least he thinks he does. It is, in any case, whatever it is, one he has had “to construct.” At poems’ end, we encounter these same words again, being asked thereby to compare as well as to be mindful; we will then see them in a new and quite different light, a light not at all of our construction.
The second poem in Ash-Wednesday is a turning from the first in appearance, poetic texture, and sound of voice. The voice-meaning-speaker may be the same as in the first poem, but the discourse is very different (even different from “itself,” since the long second verse paragraph, of which each line is made of but two feet, contrasts vividly with the earlier address to the “Lady” with its account of “three white leopards” that have “dissembled” the voice’s body). Possibly, though, the separations dramatized here are a consequence of the speaking voice’s various renunciations in the first poem, his turn from turning; in that case, he might be said to have misunderstood what was asked of him in “turning.” Things have seemed to turn away from him. In due course, we will return to the scene of the “dissembled” body and the following, extended description, not of the “Lady,” but of the “Lady of silences” as “impossible union” of apparent opposites.
The “I” of the first poem may or may not appear in the third poem, which is more like the first, in any case, than it is the second. Here the “I” is represented as being on a turning stair, on which he observes “The same shape”—whatever that is—twisting, turning, struggling with “the devil of the stairs who wears / The deceitful face of hope and despair.” The scene on the stairs is horrible in appearance, in marked contrast with the pastoral scene labeled as “distraction” that opens to the sight of the “I” “At the first turning of the third stair.” Perhaps because the “I” is attracted, he repeats, “Lord, I am not worthy,” a promising occurrence. It is very nearly vitiated, however, by the ensuing request, “but speak the word only.” Especially in the context of these poems, that request lacks humility, seems rather to be importuning, as it seeks—desires and needs—that words be spoken. In Ash-Wednesday, though, “the Word within / The world and for the world” speaks “without a word.” The speaking voice does not understand, subscribing to or being a victim of one falsehood after another. Still, the turning that he observes, both of the figures locked in combat and of the place and situation in which they find themselves, is a joining that helps to give the lie to the speaker’s “way” of renunciation and self-construction apparent in the opening poem.
The “I” that we have been observing, as he observed, now virtually disappears. The fourth poem, in an altogether different register (one more or less followed in the remaining poems), is a joining together of a Lancelot Andrewes-inspired theology of the Word, followed by a pathetic and bathetic lyrical attempt lamenting the pervasive noise that makes hearing “the word” nearly impossible. This poem moves on to query whether “the veiled sister” (i.e., the Blessed Virgin) will Herself pray for all of us so much in need of outside help. Described in the second poem in no uncertain terms (as an “and-ing”), She now emerges as our “necessarye” between, intervening on our behalf who are pointedly represented as ourselves being variously “between.”
The sixth and final poem brings Ash-Wednesday not so much to a close as to a beginning. It returns to the first poem, but with a difference, in replacing “Because” of the opening three verses with “Although.” With its last line—“And let my cry come unto Thee”—it emphasizes the combinatory, participatory, and continuing texture of the whole effort while embodying a voice’s (now-different) prayer that his prayer somehow “come unto Thee.” Humility thus replaces demand, and recognition of the need for mediation replaces self-reliance, self-construction, and a desire for the direct and the immediate. The matter of “turning” comes to a head in this poem (which has caused so many readers to fall into the same trap of falsehood that grips the speaker in the first poem).
The matter is bigger, and other, than a single voice, personage, or character. Consistently, and purposefully, Ash-Wednesday has turned away from the speaker and his falsehood, in the second three poems, to the Virgin, the Word, and now “the world.” The matter concerns one’s relation to the world, especially if committed to the Word. The world bears the power to distract, as we have seen, but, in the final poem, we find both its attractions and the indisputable fact that things of this world are “lost.” The pull is in two contrary directions at once—the stairs go both up and down. The poem thus directly figures the human condition as tensional.
The picture painted here by a voice invisible is almost universally said to be one of the most beautiful and appealing in all of Eliot’s verse. This “is the time of tension between dying and birth,” the poem says (not an “I” says it, note) after the following account. In addition to a rhyming return to “The Hollow Men,” the recurrence and prominence of the preposition “between” achieves importance as does the coordinate conjunction opening three lines of the passage, at which we looked in the previous chapter. The fourth verse here carries special poignancy and power: beginning with a request of an intermediary (“Bless me father”) and proceeding to capture the contrary and simultaneous pull that may be, in effect, a turning and a not-turning: I do not wish to wish these worldly things, which are themselves “lost,” as I am, but yet I do so. “Gerontion” had made the point, that is, the proper response, perfectly: “How should I use them for your closer contact?”
The world and the Word, which is within and for the world.
Rather than turn from the world, as has so often been many supposed, Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems turns us back toward the world and at the same time shows us the pattern or still point within the world that is the Word from outside it now intersecting with it since the Incarnation; the moment now “attended” as a consequence of the Word taking on human flesh in the Person of Christ Jesus, the Son of God and of the Virgin Mary, our “Blessed sister” and “holy mother.”
The dramatized and embodied necessity is that prayed for at poems’ end: both the prayer “not to be separated” and that to learn to “care and not to care.” That they are one and the same helps to make and to cement the point.
The conjunction means that we do both, whether or not at the same time: care and not care. But that leaves matters still open and unclear. In fact, at least three distinct readings appear possible. Of course, it could be simply that Eliot has in mind the necessity to “be mindful” about what one chooses, caring about this, not-caring about that. On the Incarnational model, it may be that caring and not-caring should occur in the same moment, rather than be separated. A third possibility is that caring and not-caring should both be present regarding a “thing,” although not necessarily occurring in the same moment; strangely enough, in that case, emphasis would, in Incarnational fashion, fall on the present, now, not-caring figuring as following caring and future-directed. I rather suspect, after squeezing and squeezing Eliot’s words and meditating long and hard on them, that not-caring should, in his understanding, intersect with caring, perhaps even purifying it (but certainly not purging it).
Let us return, a last time, to the possibility of caring and not-caring at the same time. At first blush, it seems impossible to care and not to care at once. And yet . . . Unless, of course, Eliot means some sort of Hegelian synthesizing, such that thesis and antithesis combine to produce a third, medium-like, which transcends the two blended “figures.” But, contrary to Heraclitus, the way up is not the way down. And God does not remain, or become again, a merely transcendent figure in taking on human flesh. In Christ Jesus, God is fully divine and fully human, at the same time.
So, then, how to care and not to care, at once? “Little Gidding” says that memory’s use is “For liberation—not less of love but expanding / Of love beyond desire, and so liberation / From the future as well as the past.” This expanding of love “beyond desire” is clearly related to, and perhaps clarifies, the matter of caring and not-caring.
As noted, the untrustworthy speaker in the first poem of Ash-Wednesday prays, “Teach us to care and not to care.” Under the influence of some sort of Eastern asceticism, he cannot be expected to mean by the identical wording what we read at the end of the sixth and final poem. A sticking-point may well be that copula, the coordinate conjunction. From the vantage-point of Four Quartets, we understand the significance of the “necessarye coniunction” and of the Incarnational pattern suggested by it. That pattern, though, while a matter of universal, rational structure, (yet) requires, for apprehension, says “The Dry Salvages,” the efforts of “a saint”: “something given / And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love, / Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.” The mystery of caring and not-caring participates in the larger mystery that is the Incarnation—Eliot does not recur to it in Four Quartets. It may well be that such mysteries lie beyond the capacity of language to represent. And, thinking of Eliot’s account of the “dissociation” of thinking and feeling that, he says, set in the seventeenth century and continues, I suggest that we may be able to feel the possibility, even the need, of caring and not-caring at the same time—if that is, indeed, what the conjunction “and” conveys. There is no doubt that, trying to put Eliot’s words in other words, trying to clarify and elucidate, we find our words inevitably slipping and sliding and carrying our thinking off the mark—a humbling recognition, if nothing more.
But we keep on trying (as Eliot knew we would). One thing is certain: meditational or devotional reading is required, understood as that engagement of the whole person that Eliot once described as “the most difficult” of all ways of approaching texts. That entails staying longer with the words than is usual, even in close reading; you do not, then, jump (too quickly) to meaning, or leave the words behind. Such reading incarnates, it is surely safe to say, caring.
Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems begins, as noted, with “Because” and ends with the milder, humbler “Although,” which signals such complication as the reader is called upon to negotiate, the poems speaking through him or her (too) but only if, like Bishop Andrewes in Eliot’s formulation of him writing-as-reading, he or she opens up completely to the poems, “absorbed” in them and (still) responding.
II Further consequences of the “New Dispensation”: A Song for Simeon and “Nunc Dimittis”
The second of Eliot’s Ariel poems, A Song for Simeon, was published on September 14, 1928. Simeon is a devout Jew, age 80, who lived in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’s birth. We read of him in Luke 2:29–32, where we learn that Simeon had been told by the Holy Ghost that he would not meet with death before he had seen Christ Jesus. The Holy Ghost then guides Simeon to the Temple, where the Infant Jesus is being presented. With the Infant in his arms, Simeon sings what is, in Latin, the “Nunc dimittis.” Simeon then declares that he has seen God’s salvation.
Simeon’s song is one of the three great Canticles of the New Testament, another being the Magnificat, that is, the Canticle of Mary. In the Book of Common Prayer, the Magnificat and the “Nunc dimittis” are sung at Evening Prayer, a (necessary) pair. Eliot’s “song” for Simeon stands as counterpoint to Ash-Wednesday and, in a related but different way, Journey of the Magi.
And as in Journey of the Magi, so in A Song for Simeon, the speaker is not a lyric voice but a dramatic one, whose words must be carefully read. Neither poem is quite a dramatic monologue, like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: there is neither an external auditor, nor a specific occasion for the speaking. Moreover, there stands, enigmatically, the preposition “for” where we normally expect “of.” In what sense this “song” is for Simeon, rather than “of” (that is, “by” him), continues to challenge me. I keep on interrogating the poem (which might be part of Old Possum’s purpose).
In T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems, John H. Timmerman surmises that the preposition “for” in the title of the poem marks “the poet, the singer, enter[ing] a history from his own cultural position, participating in that song but adapting it to his particular history.”4 The point is suggestive. There can be little doubt that Eliot’s choice of “for” matters: as Timmerman puts it, “By the twist of a word, Eliot makes us aware of narrative and historical distances.”5 There can be little doubt, either, that Old Possum is up to something different from a medium-like, or catalyst’s, mere reenactment of a song. Perhaps the larger question concerns how to read the voice that speaks here, that 80-year-old respected Jewish figure, encountering and beginning to struggle, like the Magi, with the “new dispensation.” He seems, at once, Job-like and reminiscent of the Prodigal Son.
Simeon’s first word—“Lord”—may be an address to the Word—the last in the first line is “and”—but it might be an interjection, not so much bearing a profane tinge as being a familiar, informal expression that may be taking the Lord’s name in vain.6 That may, however, be over-reaching. Simeon’s last word is “salvation,” the adjective preceding it “thy,” although “my” might have been expected. Between the first word and last lies a minefield of defensiveness, lament, fear, prediction, and so much more. The “salvation” he claims to have seen, in fact, is precisely not one for him, or so he imagines; it is “thy salvation,” the one promised by the Word with all its difficulties, impending pain, and foreseen suffering. The Magi saw in the Birth in the manger “Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.” Simeon says—his last words—that he has “seen thy salvation.” Together, Journey of the Magi and A Song for Simeon probe and explore the meaning and effects of the Infant’s birth, focusing on salvation and its relation to Death. Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems dramatizes the affected penitent’s progress toward assent—and ascent—to and acceptance of the indirect Way by Which the new Word is to be approached and understood.
At this point, the reader—or at least I do—returns to the tiny preposition “for” in the title, never far from the exegete’s mind. I think about Eliot’s growing awareness of the necessity of critical voice—unavailable to Prufrock, present to Eliot himself in the early days through his friend Pound, as acknowledged in his (later) dedication of The Waste Land, and a major theme of “The Hollow Men”: there, figures remain “Sightless, unless” outside help intervenes. I then begin to appreciate the subtle but effective way Eliot is working via his title A Song for Simeon.7 His “character” sings his song, to be sure, but with even less self-consciousness and awareness than does Prufrock. By substituting “for” for the expected “of,” Eliot turns an exercise in spiritual autobiography into a poem more resembling Browning’s dramatic monologues, in which a speaker reveals—to the reader—far more and other than he intended.8 In Simeon’s case, the mirror is being held up to himself for him to see himself as he did not—or could not—in speaking his words.
The song Eliot has written for Simeon, the speaker for these verses that both reveal him in dramatic fashion and serve to honor or celebrate him in ironic (if not satirical) fashion, begins, not at all unusually for Eliot, with a seasonal setting that complicates things. There is no intersection of time and timelessness here or hinted at, no anticipation of another dimension such as “Little Gidding” represents as “maytime” (in pointed contrast with “May”). Rather, the “Roman hyacinths” are blooming but indoors, for winter snow lies on the hills outside: “The stubborn season has made stand.” The line seems especially charged: the “stubborn season” is winter, but the spring awaited and anticipated—as the Jews did their Saviour—turns out to be contrary to expectation (like “for” instead “of”). It is “Hard and bitter agony.” Meanwhile, the aged Simeon merely awaits, not spring, but death, his life, he says, in a modified triticism, “light,” like a feather on the hand, “waiting for the death wind,” the wind “that chills towards the dead land.”
Simeon opens the next two verse paragraphs with a request, presumably of the “Lord” addressed in the poem’s first word, to “Grant us thy peace.” In Lancelot Andrewes’s Easter sermon of 1609 the word “peace” essentially means “joining.” In context, Simeon’s words raise questions: the peace, it is implied, comes from God but (only) by means of human request, the opposite of the “Pax vobis” that Bishop Andrewes explicates. At the same time, there seems implied here a sense that that granted peace will relieve us of the necessity—as Ash-Wednesday puts it—to understand that “Our peace [resides] in His will.”
The remainder of the second paragraph in A Song for Simeon seems to confirm our suspicions. For the aged Jew now engages in a series of reflections cum lamentation, stressing his moral and social rectitude and raising a further question about his motives for those upright actions. “I have,” he says, “walked many years in this city, / Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor, / Have given and taken honour and ease,” with the result that no one was ever “rejected [and sent] from my door.” Indeed, Simeon’s focus now turns to what will apparently be the consequence and the result of his right-doing. A question regarding justice is thereby broached, although Simeon does not frame his concern so baldly or boldly. No reader, I surmise, can feel anything but sympathy for Simeon, and for his progeny: who will “remember my house,” where will my children live, “When the time of sorrow is come?” His conclusion clutches at the heart: “They will take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s house, / Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.” This is what—all—that a lifetime’s effort in service and self-denial earns, not just for oneself but for others, presumably innocent, who are his heirs? This is what comes in the “new dispensation”? Of course, Simeon is seeing but half the truth, for he has made no commitment to the Lord.
Accordingly, then, he continues in the same vein, lamenting the impending future, with its desolation, pain, and suffering, and petitioning for “the Infant” to grant “consolation” (italics added): “the still unspeaking and unspoken Word.” The tone in which Simeon utters this description is hard to decipher; I infer impatience, along with a careful sneer: “Before the time of cords and lamentation / Grant us thy peace.” Following two more examples of imminent doom, Simeon says this, indulging melodrama, “Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word, / Grant Israel’s consolation / To one who has eighty years and no-tomorrow.” There is no life after death for him, and the (new) time is but one of “decease,” that word itself powerful and final with its accentuation of ceasing to exist: there will, literally, be nothing left, after all one’s efforts.
“According to thy word” is Simeon’s next statement. He may be referring to a promised consolation, but it may just as likely be that he, intentionally or not, is revealing that “thy word” promises desolation and “deceasing”—although, again, Simeon would then be seeing but half the truth.
In this longish final verse paragraph, Simeon—unconsciously—points to the “and-ing” of the new times, of which he apprehends but “half”: “They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation, / With glory and derision” (italics added). He proceeds with an account that amounts to his acknowledgment of separation from the new time and the new truth. He repeats, importantly, “Not for me.”
Those who “praise” and “suffer,” earning both “glory” and “derision,” Simeon says, will rise to “Light upon light, mounting the saints’ stair.” They are the (new) saints, among whom he will never count (there may be his own note of derision here, an interpretation bolstered by the words following: there will be for me, he says, no “martyrdom,” no “ecstasy of thought and prayer,” nor “the ultimate vision”). He prays, next, that he receive “thy peace,” and in a parenthesis reflective of the apparent gratuitousness, he says that the Lord Himself will get but a sword through the heart for His service, sacrifice, and denial. It is a highly charged irony. Beside the Lord thus giving His life, Simeon’s immediately following words are especially revealing: not merely is he thinking of his own death and no more the deaths of others but of “those after me,” generally considered, about whom he shows little compassion. His words contrast explicitly with the Messiah’s sacrifice, His Ultimate Concern and that of His Father in Heaven.
Simeon’s words indeed reveal him. Consider these: “I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me. / I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.” The repetition but for one word at the end of each of these points to the joining of the two, different words: one “lives,” the other the apparent opposite “deaths.” At the beginning of those two verses, something similar yet significantly different transpires: here, the words are similar, emphasis again falling on “life” and its apparent opposite. In addition, the prepositions differ—“with” in the first sentence, “in” in the second. More important, the first has “tired with my own life,” the second “dying in my own death” (italics added). Simeon thus says that he is tired of his life, tired (with) living. At the same time, “dying in my own death” evidently means that he is dying while (supposedly) living, in part perhaps because he is so consumed with death that he is (only) dying; moreover, “dying in my own death” may also mean that dying and living are, nevertheless, separated for him: he shows, that is, no capacity for understanding that and how living and death might (productively) be joined. Four Quartets says, in the fifth section of “Burnt Norton,” while discussing pattern, words, and meaning that “that which is only living / Can only die.” It thus offers the alternative to Simeon’s point of view, correcting the “falsehood” that rules and consumes him.
Simeon is not a bad man, neither in his song nor in Eliot’s dramatic revelation of and to him, in neither his own understanding of himself, nor in the mirror that the poem holds up to his song. He is mistaken, to be sure, only partially understanding the Word in its complexity, paradoxical nature, and “impossible union” of the apparent opposites that continue to plague Simeon and the old dispensation. He worries too much about death, his death, that is, but that is a consequence of his half-understanding. The poem holds up, neither to him nor to us, any real moral complicity or ill done to others.
When, at poem’s very end, Simeon asks, “Let thy servant depart, / Having seen thy salvation,” his word “depart” links up with the root meaning of “decease,” accentuating the acknowledgment that he has seen the “salvation” promised by and in the Lord and that it will not be his: departing, he will separate from this world and from any possibility of continuing to “exist” in another dimension. Simeon evidently finds a sense of “consolation,” however strange it may appear, in that departing; if he will not know “thy salvation,” he will avoid “the time of sorrow” and of “cords and scourges and lamentation” as well as “the stations of the mountain of desolation.” He may not know glory, but he will also not know suffering.
1 T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems (New York: Putnam, 1930).
2 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).
3 The reference is to Jonathan Swift’s depiction of Ancients and Moderns in The Battle of the Books (1704).
4 John H. Timmerman, T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1994), 117.
5 Ibid.
6 T.S. Eliot, A Song for Simeon (London: Faber and Faber, 1928).
7 T.S. Eliot, Poems 1909–1925 (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1925).
8 See the classic study by Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957).