This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.
--From Eliot's "Ash-Wednesday"
Eliot's magnificent poem, "Ash-Wednesday," shows us that Ash Wednesday is about remembering that we are living between the yew trees (after our first death to sin and before our physical death and also between out birth and death) and that this means we must not hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. Eliot's meditation in Ash-Wednesday is one of detachment.
1 comment:
Wow! Interesting reading of the "Yew trees."
My _Complete Poems and Plays_ is buried somewhere, and I don't know which computer has the paper, but I did a paper in graduate school on Eliot's self-reference. There is a short poem, I think in the second collection, that also refers to voices shaken from a yew tree.
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